Look back Look forth

That's the title of my friend meghna's last blog post of 2007. Its like a goodbye to 2007 and a welcome to 2008 post. But the best piece I've read in a really long time, bar none! It brought tears to my eyes. As I could relate to a lot of things that were mentioned. But I'm really happy for her and hope the next year is even better to her. Same to all of you too. but to be more specific,

Mickey, I hope you get in and stick to one college till you graduate.

Abhinav, I Wish for you that RTFS2 is way way wayyyy more popular than RTFS. More importantly, I hope that it turns out to be a work of pure genius. Don't disappoint me. ;)

Karthikeyan, I hope that being in singapore, your english got better. And all the best with that GRE

Sujata, I hope that you finally find solace in creative i college. I know your heart was into going to NID, but I hope everyone in your class has or is striving to get to your level, and not the other way round.

Sumit, I just hope you and I talk more than this. I would give anything to be able to go back to the way we were.... chatting endlessly, while I'm on the bus, while I'm in the loo, or even when I'm on the computer.

Abhishek, I hope that for fucks sake you stop loosing weight! Be healthy dude.

Divya, I wish that you stop crying....over little things. The world is a bad place, and there will be many more times when you will feel dejected but you need to be strong, and work through those times rather than just sit and cry.

(yes i did something like this before, in the blog post happy diwali, last year)

Pranav, I wish that you stay healthy and you keep in touch with me more.

Mohini, I wish that you stay safe, stay cool and carry on your cutter-giri.

Pranjali, I hope that you discover other words besides apratim. And yes, don't forget to still keep using 'apratim!' we Love it!

Harsh, I hope that you gain some weight... come ON, its about time! And succeed in all your endeavors.

Rahul, I hope you become a big theater star, because that's where I feel your heart lies.

Suraj, I hope you finally realize everything's ok in moderation. You were more often than not the king of 'overdoing stuff'.

Nikita, I just wish that you remember me once upon a time, now and then.. and maybe try and contact me... huh?

Damn, this is getting long.

Oliver, I hope you get into animation. Of all the people I know, you are the one who deserves it the most.

Taruna, I hope you finally get to go to the sheridan pub again, wish you many drunk wasted nights and hope that you don't get in trouble again.

Mark, I hope that you don't get shitty stupid teachers anymore. Well, really, that's a very selfish wish because I'm in the same class. LOL

Jeremy, I hope you somehow, with a stroke of luck, get a little less irritating, stop getting on people's nerves and stay out of trouble.

Hya, I hope that you.... that you stop being called flea-head. LOL. its cruel.

I'll just stop now i guess... If I missed you, and you really want me to add u to the list, message me.

Happy new year all you guys!

Is this going anywhere?

Last night, while trying to go to bed, I started thinking about when I'll meet my friends again. I went on my fantasy ride thinking I'd have friends over for dinner, maybe I'll cook... What if I want to cook some meat? Taiji probably won't let me do it in her kitchen...Maybe I could go to pranav's house. Could I get bacon in pune? It'll be hard to find. I wonder if everyone's gonna be ok with bacon... And just like that, I wasn't sleepy anymore. I wanted to draw the kitchen of pune. So I turned on the table lamp, and took my sketchbook, and started trying to draw.

But for some reason, it wasn't as easy as I thought it would be. I couldn't get the placement to look right in perspective. Now I haven't really seen the place in almost a year, so I have forgotten a lot of things, but I do have the main plan of the place in my head. I drew that in a corner to kinda help me with the perspective drawing, but now my right arm started hurting really bad. I figured I was spending too much time on the computer yesterday in a kinda uncomfortable posture. That could be the reason. So I put the sketchbook next to me and decided I'm gonna draw when I wake up tomorrow.

This morning, tried it again, but not getting anywhere still. I think I need to look up reference. maybe dig into my pictures from pune. That reminds me, I don't have any pictures of my friends at my place at the dinner party. I remember after, when we were in my room, Pranav was taking pictures....Where was my camera at that time? Why wasn't I taking any pictures? Oh wait, I did take a video of pranav that night, so I HAD my camera... Damn! Why was I so stupid to not take any pictures? You see... its like when u have something you don't realize how or 'how much' u could use it... Now that I don't have the camera, or those friends with me, I feel like I should have enjoyed it to the max when I had that.

Taking my mind off things

Hi, after two days of watching LOTR trilogy and eating and sleeping, I was desperate to get back to drawing. So I put my sketchbook by my bedside last night and when I woke up, I did some drawing so that I have a good start to the day! And I did. But shortly after, I was informed of a news that messed up my day. My uncle is in the hospital. He got a paralysis attack. I was really sad. I decided to call up Pranav and talk to him to kind of take my mind off things.

Then I came upstairs, Abhinav was online, so I talked to him for a bit, then he went offline. I also decided to redo my blog template to mix things up! I had been living for a "really" long time with that blue template of my face in the header. But I didn't really like the fact that its blog field was so narrow that the blogs would run really long, and people had to do a lot of scrolling to read my long entries. And I recently read an article somewhere, (I susect digg.com ) that mentioned that there are so many websites with designs that were meant for the age old monitors that couldn't do more than 800x600 resolution. And if anybody still runs his desktop at that resolution, he has no business being on the internet! I myself have a widescreen desktop, with 1440 pixel width! I could totally eliminate the need to scroll if I optimized the template. well... atleast for some small posts.

So I Decided to use the leopard style banner that I had made in illustrator a while ago. (Yes, I referenced a tutorial.) But the template that I had picked would cut off the banner if the window got too small instead of showing a horizontal slider. I didn't know what to do. I could set a size, but then its not flexible. I wanted it to be able to move the text as the window is being resized but not go below a certain point. So I fidgeted around with a lot of settings before I stumbled upon min-width. It should have been kinda obvious to me I think... but I'm a nut remember?  So that excuses me. Anyways, I hope you guys like the new template, lemme know if you have anything in mind.

Wonderful Family Christmas dinner!

I know its not christmas yet, but today, just happens to be the day we got together for a nice christmas dinner with the Pagel family. (We here includes me, JP and his GF stephanie.) The other two had plans. Yesterday, when we were watching superbad, Sandeep even asked me if I wanted to come. But I said that tomorrow is this big thing that vironica's been preparing for all week long. And I can't disappoint her. I know she's made the indian vegetarian food specially for those two vegetarian guys. I hoped he'd consider this and cancel his plans but he didn't. When I woke up this morning,  both were already gone!

Fuck that! I know I am gonna have a really amazing time with Philip and Brian and Nathan. Ladies, ladies, don't be upset. I do like you, but its just that being guys, we have more in common. Yeah, like porn, cars, gadgets, you know... Vironica had been talking about it... "this 'thing' that philip got from the states, its so cool! You can watch movies on it, listen to songs, surf the internet... and you can turn it sideways, it changes to side view! Oh my god!" And I had a feeling its the iPhone and I'd have loved to see it, but I wasn't gonna explicitly ask him for it.. But when Brian started showing his HTC windows mobile phone, we got talking about the iphone, and Philip said Julia has it. I was SO excited, I was finally gonna get to hold and use the iPhone!

And I have to say, I'm not very impressed! This obviously was a hacked iphone, as it was running on rogers network in Canada. The installer.app was also loaded. And I noticed that it was pretty slow. And not very responsive. I'd go into the installer.app and it would show me that its loading... I got around to playing tap tap revolution and also tried installing mobichat for trying to chat... but nothing! I watched youtube videos, that was pretty fun. But the speaker wasn't nearly loud enough. Its also pretty thick. I liked how slim the ipod touch was... I wish they could make the phone slimmer too! Also, the battery was dying, so everytime I went from standby to the home screen, it showed me a warning that I had to dismiss! That got kinda irritating. The camera, as expected, wasn't nearly as good. All I got were blurred photos. But I was using it indoors in a not very well lit room so I could give it a break on that. But really, not very impressed.

The dinner was WONDERFUL! Turkey, cranberry sauce, stuffing, potatoes, pepper, mushrooms, onions, ah! I LOVED IT! I am STILL so stuffed! I was the last one to finish the dinner and the dessert! Cheesecake! First time I had a cheesecake, and it was delicious! Oh! And there are a lot of leftovers for later! Then everyone started exchanging presents. I was taking a LOT of pictures of everyone! They were so happy giving and getting all those presents! It was beautiful moment. Then I ran upstairs and got my greeting cards. Mumchu even gave me a little greeting card and a small gift. Vironica had a gift for me too! This day was just perfect! I wouldn't have anything differently!

I think I should just end it now. Its a beautiful memory. I don't want to go on and on and make it riddled with silly little details that hardly matter... like brian making philip watch the 2girls1cup video....LOL. But, before I publish this, I just want to type out that I have now realized how stupid i was to post the last 'rant' of a blog post. I got carried away. I have gotten everything I needed from my parents and I just needed to distract myself from the camera topic and I think today was just the thing! 

Merry christmas everyone!

I want a CAMERA!!!

I am so stuffed! I just finished my delicious lunch of chapatti, dal, rajmah and aam ka achaar. Vironica made the rajmah and dal for us today-with my help ofcourse. Hehe. I don't mean to brag, but I didn't even need to look up a recipe for dal and It turned out awesome! But rajmah, even though it didn't look right in the beginning, it turned out awesome! except for the slight overdose of cinnamon. After all this, you'd think food should be all that is on my mind. But its not! I can't get the thought of a new digital SLR camera out of my head!

I shouldn't have stopped at futureshop's camera counter and looked at that Canon 400D! That's what caused this whole thing in the first place! Today I asked parents if I could buy one from ebay (or other websites like henrys ) a second hand camera for about 499 CND. I checked amazon USA and they have new one for 519 USD! Right now, I believe buying a camera in USD will be cheaper for me. But they said no. Making all kinds of stupid excuses and reasons. But I don't get it! I didn't even ask for a gift on my birthday! I wish I could at least get a little gift for christmas!

Ah!! who am I kidding. I am not gonna get them to say yes! I could just look at stores and see if I can pay them in installments. Maybe I could just buy one and return it within 30 days just to kinda tease my desire. That's something I can't do if I buy it at boxing day. Exchange or return it. Boxing day sales are usually final sales. Well... Lets see.

Lightroom managed images crash finder

From digg: Properly written EXIF Data in images are causing Leopard's Finder to lock up.I have lightroom v1.3.1 on my mac running leopard. a.k.a. OS 10.5.1. My whole collection of photos is managed from within lightroom. But because of the awesome integration of iphoto with the rest of the OS that apple advertises, I decide to try and import the same photos in iphoto. However, when I try to import them into iphoto, the process goes on for ever! Even if I try to import only one photo, the import will not complete. To look into it, I went into the photos folder in finder, and there were no thumbnails leading me to believe that the photos had been corrupted. I tried quicklook but finder crashed! I tried opening them with preview.... still didn't work. But these photos are working perfectly fine with adobe photoshop, bridge and lightroom. So its all of apple's lousy products in 10.5.1 that are causing this to happen. Get your act together apple! Fix this ASAP! I feel like I want to downgrade to tiger too!

read more | digg story

I miss you guys.

Whoa! I had two distinct dreams tonight, both of which involved me meeting my best friends. One from my school, and another one from college. I guess this is just because I'm really missing company of friends. Since college ended, I've been all by myself and I can't wait for college to start again!

My first dream, started off with me and pranav driving to the college. Together! Pranav's and mine houses are in two different corners of Pune. So us driving together to college would mean that we now live together... But now I'm thinking why then, were we both riding our own motorcycles? We could have saved money and the environment if we were both on one. hehe.. Maybe we both lived close to each other... and not together...? Anyways... Then we got to college, and spent one amazing day together. I remember I was sitting next to him, discussing things and it was just like being in heaven.

The second dream was definitely a little more scary. Whenever it comes to dreams of my school, you can be sure there's some dreaded aspect involved. And this time, it was tests, bullies, and public ridicule. I got to see the faces of all the people who made fun of me and bullied me in school. I also got to see the teachers who would go on and on! But when I finally spotted my friend, I went and sat next to him. Rahul hartalkar. He was my best buddy in high school. The last time I met him was in Nagpur before new years. It will be a year soon. And as I was sitting there, I became oblivious to the whole world around me. Nothing else mattered. It was so serene. And then I had to wake up to this cold lonely room of mine. BLAH!