Because a Picture Speaks a Thousand Words
Posted: January 25, 2008 Filed under: Cartoons, comics, George Bush, jokes, Jokes / Funny Stuff, Life, Politics, Thoughts | Tags: Cartoons, comics, funny stuff, General ramblings, George W. Bush, jokes, Life, Politics, Thoughts, US 19 Comments »and because I want to make use of the 3GB space that’s been generously provided by WordPress, here are some funny pics:
Review: Taare Zameen Par
Posted: January 13, 2008 Filed under: Bollywood, Cartoons, comics, Entertainment, General ramblings, Movies, Thoughts | Tags: Aamir Khan, Bollywood, calvin and hobbes, Cartoons, comics, Darsheel Zafary, Entertainment, General ramblings, India, Life, Movies, Taare Zameen Par, Thoughts 68 Comments »
Finally, I got done watching the most talked about Bollywood movie of 2007- Taare Zameen Par. Most of the websites and blogs have even finished reviewing it…and mine comes very late. But that’s all right, because not many people will agree with what I’ve got to say next.
When the movie started, I really felt as if I can finally expect something good from a mainstream Bollywood movie. Darsheel Safary, as Ishaan, captivated me right from the first scene, where he’s shown playing with fish in a dirty puddle of water, totally oblivious to his surroundings. I really enjoyed the colorful artwork that was shown during the opening credits. The first half of the movie was amazing. Ishaan’s struggle with the orthodox educational system is given full justice. I was telling myself, ” Aamir Khan as a director, is very good!”. Perhaps I shouldn’t have let that thought enter my mind.
The movie starts going downhill as soon as Aamir Khan enters the classroom, dressed like a clown. What exactly was the point of having that scene in the movie? All I want is a realistic movie. Is that too much from him? Mr. Perfectionist? This scene is followed by a trip to a school for special children. Then comes the title song “Taare Zameen Par”, interspersed with a lot of tear jerking scenes. Between all this, Aamir Khan, the honorary arts teacher, suddenly realizes that he’s almost forgotten about Ishaan. So off he goes to Ishaan’s house to talk to his parents and make them understand that Ishaan is dyslexic.
After managing to do that, he single handedly makes all the other teachers and the principal understand about Ishaan’s problem. Wait! We’re not done yet. Next, he teaches Ishaan how to read and write (Ishaan’s hand writing improves trememdously!). He teaches Ishaan to become “normal” in that the young boy is shown buttoning up his shirt, tying his shoe laces and his tie and combing his hair. Wasn’t Aamir Khan fighting against the set order and the “normal” way of doing things in the first place? What an irony!
A kid whose hand writing is almost indecipherable, somehow, miraculously improves it to an unbelievable extent…all because of the encouragement and the love that he receives from a teacher. Now I understand why people accuse Aamir Khan of being a “scene stealer”. The movie became just about him after he entered the scene. The boy, Darsheel Zafary, is reduced to a toy, who is used to show off Aamir’s greatness.
And let me not even talk about the Arts Show that is organized towards the end. No prizes for guessing who wins it!
If you’re still reading this review, then I’m sure that you must be abusing me by now. I’m not bashing this movie because I hate Aamir Khan or because I hate Bollywood. I really wanted to like this movie and I really did, until Aamir entered the scene and reduced it to a tear jerker. Where is the subtlety?
This movie is worth a watch only because of Darsheel Zafary’s amazing acting and the beautiful artwork in the opening scene. The background score was overdone. Shankar Mahadevan needs to hire someone else to sing some of his songs. He’s becoming really boring and predictable. And Aamir…it’s better if you stay behind the curtains.
Edit: And if you thought that the 3*9=3 scene was an original masterpiece, like I did, then think again. Wanderlust (Please go to her blog for another amazing review) and Ish informed me that the scene was blatantly lifted from Calvin & Hobbes.
Rating: 6.5/10
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Tags: Taare Zameen Par, Aamir Khan, Bollywood, Movies, Entertainment, Darsheel Zafary
…Yes, the Lectures are Optional
Posted: December 16, 2007 Filed under: Cartoons, comics, graduation, Life, school, Thoughts | Tags: Cartoons, comics, General ramblings, graduation, Life, school, Thoughts 32 Comments »…Graduation is also optional.
-Bob Bickford
We graduate from school! 
I’m very pleased to announce that I graduated with a Master’s in Beer Administration yesterday. All those hours of costly sedation were totally worth it.
Heroes Comics
Posted: December 10, 2007 Filed under: Cartoons, comics, Entertainment, Heroes, Life, Science Fiction, Thoughts, TV Sitcoms | Tags: comics, Entertainment, Free stuff, General ramblings, Heroes, Life, NBC, Science Fiction, Thoughts, TV Sitcoms 8 Comments » 
All you Heroes fans out there need to check out the Heroes comics, if you already haven’t, that is. It looks really neat. They are available on the NBC Website.
There are a total of 51 chapters for Season 1 and about 12 chapters for Season 2 (so far). You can also download them from Wikipedia (Season 1 and Season 2).
I really liked the artwork. The only thing is that they are in the PDF format, which makes scrolling a little difficult. Each chapter is also quite big (anywhere between 10 -20 MB). So, you need a fast internet connection. Dial up users will face a lot of problem.
The best thing is that they are all FREE!
Blogging Anonymously
Posted: December 8, 2007 Filed under: Blogging, Cartoons, comics, E-mail, General ramblings, Google, Life, Technology, Thoughts | Tags: Blogging, Cartoons, comics, General ramblings, Google, internet, Life, Technology, Thoughts 15 Comments » 
In the past twelve hours, I’ve read posts by at least two bloggers (Amrita and Broom) who have expressed their anger at people who take pleasure in “outing” the anonymous bloggers. I can perfectly understand their emotions and what they are going through. Many of us write blogs to express personal emotions. The least we can expect from our readers is to keep shut even if they realize who we might be. I don’t understand why some people have such an itch.
I remember changing my nickname quite often between Ruhi and my real name. I was not too sure if it makes sense to use my real name, the reason being that sometimes, I do write crazy stuff in my blog and I don’t want a potential employer tripping on it by any chance. It’s not that we are not to be blamed. If we want to remain completely anonymous, then we need to retain some pieces of information and never mention them on our blogs. This might include things like your birthdate, your current residence, your phone number, address etc.
There are some tools that can be used to remain as anonymous as possible:
1. Run a Google Search for your real name and see what the results are. You might be surprised to see that even though you might have taken a page down, Google still stores it in its cache for a considerable period of time. Anyone who’s smart can simply click on “Cache pages” and retrieve a Saved Screenshot of your page.
2. If most of the searches are professional and don’t reveal stupid things about you, then you’re fine.
3. Run a Google Search for your nickname and see if it connects you to your real self by any means. If it does and there are stuff that you don’t want anyone to see, then you may want to do something. You can delete some information from your previous posts. It might take time for Google’s cache to clean up (like I mentioned before). Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. This is what I don’t like about Google. I’m scared of sharing so much information with this organization. My business is not their business. Of course, they want all this information so that they can better target their advertisements, from where they generate 98% of their revenue. Anyway, I’ll leave my tech rant out of this post.
Many of us have Sitemeter or something similar installed that collects the location, browser and Operating System specification and certain other data from your computer. Apart from this, the comment system itself stores YOUR IP Address! Giving someone your IP address can be quite risky, if you know what I mean. Most of them wouldn’t do anything with it, but there are some smart people out there who can use it for anything.
If you visit ip2location.com and punch in your IP address, it clearly shows your location. So, even though you might have been very cautious on your blog regarding this piece of information, guess what? One visit to your friend’s blog can let him/her know your location.
You can use proxy servers such as http://the-cloak.com to browse your friend’s blogs. Your speed will reduce a bit, pleas be warned.
You can also go to websites such as http://publicproxyservers.com/ that will give you proxy IP addresses that can be used instead of your real IP address to surf the internet. You need to change your Network Setting in Mozilla Firefox (Tools-> Options->Advanced->Network Settings) from “automatic” to “Manual” and put in the proxy server information from the list. You might take some time to find a server that actually works at a decent speed.
If this is too much of trouble, then you can download a software such a Tor or Jap. You need to closely follow the instructions, which vary according to the type of browser that you’re using.
If you need to visit only a certain blog, then I think the-cloak.com should be enough.
Many of you who work in offices might want to use a proxy server if you have strict internet usage policies. Also, as an added precaution, you can “Edit the Timestamp” so that the post gets published a couple of minutes in the future. This way, the internet police of your company might find it difficult to associate your particular blog with the IP address. You might especially want to do this in case you are abusing your company 
Also, you might want to take a look at this page and listen to this person’s advice. Please be safe. You never know who’s watching you.
Even I have come across instances where I know that people look into Sitemeter and other applications to see where you live. People are very curious by nature. There is this other friend of mine who pestered me a number of times to reveal the URL of my private blog. I ended up making that blog private, scared that he or someone else might come across it. There are some parts of us which we don’t want to reveal and I strongly feel that others should respect that. It’s up to you to draw the boundaries and stay safe.
Huit faits aléatoires sur moi
Posted: December 1, 2007 Filed under: Blogroll, Bollywood, Cartoons, Entertainment, General ramblings, Jokes / Funny Stuff, Life, Meme, Thoughts | Tags: Bollywood, Entertainment, Life, Meme, ramblings, Shah Rukh Khan, Thoughts 46 Comments »Shefaly has tagged me. So, here I am, dutifully obeying her command.
Eight Random Facts About Me
1. My brain is like a GPS Navigator. Usually, all I need to know is the direction of a particular place (as in, North, South, East or West) and I manage to get there even though the city might be completely new to me. Also, I never forget a particular road if I’ve ever traveled through it. Years down the line, I can recall any person’s house in details even though I might have been there only once, for a couple of minutes.
2. I have a very large ear-ring collection. People hardly ever see me repeating them. I aspire to have the world’s largest collection of ear-rings
3. I change between being an introvert and an extrovert depending upon the situation. Professionally, I would label myself as an extrovert. I don’t have a problem talking about stuff that are related to my work. But I try my best to avoid parties and other social gatherings, where I wear my introverted cap very often.
4. As a kid, I was brought up to believe that eating meat is is a bad thing to do. Today, I still don’t eat meat, but that’s because of the fact that eating veggies is a healthier choice and helps me remain fit. I can’t bring myself to put a ‘dead’ thing into my mouth. I get weird looks quite often when I ask a server to replace the meat with beans or something like that. And I totally dislike it when people ask me “You don’t even eat fish?” As if fish grow on trees.
5.
When I was seven or eight years old, my mom gave me Rs. 10 to buy a loaf of bread, that used to cost Rs. 5. I ran to the neighborhood store and bought it…but I also bought a bar of chocolate called “Bar One” for Rs. 5 and ate it on my way back home. It was only 7:15 am. Naturally, my mom asked me to give her the change. I made a sober face and said that the shopkeeper never gave me any change.
Mom got really angry thinking that the shopkeeper had cheated me and asked me to go back and get the change. Umm…obviously, I had to tell the truth now. So, I went back to the shop and came back, pretending all the time.
When I finally told my mom the truth, she was really amused and asked me, “But where’s the chocolate?”.
I said, “Woh toh kha liya! 
” (Already ate it).
Mom started laughing and told me that it’s okay to buy a chocolate, but never to lie again. That might be a reason why I can never bring myself to lie.
5. I like eating everything uncooked- Maggi, Dal, Rice…you name it.
6. I used to be an ardent fan of Shah Rukh Khan as a kid and had three life size posters in my room. But that was because my mom was a bigger fan and she bought them for me.
7. I’m still very confused about my career and I don’t know what I’m good at. My ‘specialty’ keeps changing. As a kid, I was very good with drawing, mathematics and playing synthesizer (something that I’m still good at). Then, I discovered my passion for law and felt that I’m meant to be a lawyer. And now, I’m doing Finance and feel that Investment Banking is my real calling. I don’t know what’ll come next.
8.
The first thing that I do every morning is switch on my laptop…even before brushing my teeth.
Five people who get tagged are: Nikhil (as usual), Joey, Prestidigitator, Indisch, and Poonam.
Blogged with Flock
Tags: meme, general ramblings, thoughts, life,
Tech Cartoons
Posted: November 26, 2007 Filed under: Apple, Blogging, Cartoons, comics, General ramblings, Google, Jokes / Funny Stuff, Life, Microsoft, Mozilla Firefox, Technology, Thoughts, Windows Vista | Tags: Apple, Blogging, Cartoons, comics, firefox, General ramblings, jokes/funny stuff, Life, linux, Microsoft, Technology, Thoughts, Windows Vista 33 Comments »Just for fun!
Blogged with Flock
Tags: comics, cartoons, apple, microsoft, linux, blogging, thoughts, life, technology
Social Bookmarks:
I’m a famous Momma Blogger
Posted: October 25, 2007 Filed under: Blogging, Cartoons, comics, General ramblings, Jokes / Funny Stuff, Life, Thoughts | Tags: Blogging, Cartoons, comics, General ramblings, jokes, Life, moms, Thoughts 15 Comments »
Recently, I’ve only been stumbling upon so many of those so-called “mommy blogs”- blogs in which moms talk about their husbands, their kids, husband’s jobs, kid’s schooling, the clothes they bought, what their dog ate, what their neighbors did, what their colleagues, ex-colleagues, ex-schoolmates, ex-college mates, ex-boyfriends are doing. It doesn’t end there. Some of these blogs have many ardent followers, many of whom are only silent readers, who come back every single day, just like vultures hover over a dead cat’s body, to extract and absorb the freshest of juices and meat. The more verbal ones share their husband stories, kids’ stories, shopping stories, cooking stories, neighbor’s stories, bitching stories, so on and so forth. This leads to many intellectually stimulating discussions in the comments section. Satisfied, they go back to their blogs and write similar posts, all of which are carbon copies of each other, as far as the melodrama and emotions are concerned.
What happens when they get married and have kids? Do they lose their individuality? Do their worlds only revolve around their husband and kids? Do they lose their opinions on the current happenings of the world? I prefer opinionated people to non-opinionated ones. What do their newspapers look like? Let me take a guess:
Top Headlines:
Baby fell from the chair and was rushed to Cox’s Medical Center (OMG! All my neighbors and relatives will write me off as a good mom. *sobs*)
Husband had a bad day and needed some bedroom services
The $100 flower vase broke and needs to be replaced with a $200 new vase.
The neighbors got a new Ferrari (Need to tell husband to trade in our BMW for a new Ferrari).
Schoolmate got married and is happy. WHY?! (I’m sure she’s not happy. Let me ring up schoolmate# 2 and get the inside scoop).
Sports:
I have put on weight and need to get up from the couch sometimes to lose some love handles. (Sure!)
Husband will take our dog for a walk.
Entertainment:
The neighbors had a big fight this weekend. (I could actually listen to every single word this time. I feel so happy!)
Husband fought with mom-in-law for my sake. (Finally he realized my importance)
Had enough? Me too. Just add “Life”, “Ramblings”, “Thoughts” or something similar to your “Tag Surfer” at WordPress. You’ll be surprised by the number of posts that’ll pop up. Some people have all the luck. They live through every single minute in their lives twice- once, when they actually experience it; and second, when they blog about it.
Don’t misunderstand me by thinking that I don’t support personal blogging. I do. In fact, I have a personal blog too, but I keep it private. Nobody even knows about it. I don’t pretend like I’m blogging about the most interesting thing in the entire world. If you’ve noticed, most of your melodramatic posts receive lots of hits. Why? Because people like reading about other people’s lives. It makes them feel better. So, the next time you don’t know what to blog about, then make a trip to one of these “mommy blogs”, take a cue, and write your post!
Ten years down the line, I hope I don’t end up like one of them. 
Simpsons Comic Strips
Posted: October 17, 2007 Filed under: Cartoons, comics, Jokes / Funny Stuff, South Park, The Simpsons, Thoughts | Tags: comics, futurama, General ramblings, lisa simpson, simpsons, South Park, Thoughts 28 Comments »
Have any of you ever seen one of these in your Sunday newspaper? This page gives a brief history of the Simpsons Comics Strips. Lisa Simpson is my favorite character. She has an IQ of 156/159 and the best thing about her is that she plays the Saxaphone! Plus, she is cool enough to date guys 
I also like Futurama, which was also created by Matt Groening- the same guy who made The Simpsons. Somehow, I’ve never been able to appreciate South Park very much. It’s too brash and in-the-face for my taste.
Which one is your favorite?
What’s in my Laptop?
Posted: January 29, 2008 | Author: Ruhi | Filed under: Cartoons, comics, CSS, E-books, E-mail, Facebook, General ramblings, GMail, Google, greasemonkey, Life, Microsoft, Mozilla Firefox, Programming, social bookmarking, Social Networking, Software, Technology, Themes, Thoughts, Tumblr, Web 2.0, Web designing, Windows Vista, Wordpress, yahoo | Tags: addons, Blogging, browsers, cocomments, computers, delicious, digg, extensions, firefox, flock, General ramblings, greasemonkey, Instapaper, laptops, Life, mozilla, operating system, reddit, senduit, shareaholic, social bookmarking, stumbleupon, Technology, Thoughts, userscripts, Web 2.0, windows, Wordpress | 27 Comments »Amit Agarwal from Labnol recently posted a link to Gina’s article, where she’s listed all the programs that are currently installed in her computer. I have seen many other bloggers prepare such lists too. I spend so much of my time every day, tinkering around with various applications, but have never given them any credit on my blog. So this post is a tribute to all these lovely creatures who improve my browsing experience every single day. It might help you get some ideas or discover some new tools too.
My primary Laptop: Compaq Presario V2000 with Windows XP Operating System
Secondary Laptop: HP Pavilion dv2000 with Windows Vista Operating System
My desire is to own a tablet PC made by Apple. I’ll buy it as soon as it’s released.
I also fester desires of learning how to install a fully functioning Linux OS someday!
Browsers: The social browser Flock- Amazing browser for people who are avid bloggers and social networkers on sites like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr etc. Check out my review here.
Mozilla Firefox version 3 beta 2- Just downloaded it yesterday and I’m in love with their new location bar feature, that pulls out page titles and addresses in two different lines and colors, from your recent browser history and bookmarks!
Here’s a screen shot from the Official Website:
Add-ons and Extensions:
Shareaholic- An extension that lets you submit a page to countless number of social networking sites such as Digg, Delicious, Stumbleupon, Google Bookmarks, Friendfeed, Facebook etc. You can customize the drop down menu to include only those bookmarking sites that you use. You can also email the page you’re viewing. Here’s a screen shot (notice the green button with a drop down list only):
Screenshot: This Flock extension allows you to save webpages (entire, visible portion, selection) and windows (eg. browser, blog, uploader) as .png or .jpeg images. You can save these images to your file system, the clipboard or even send them straight to the photo uploader.
Cocomments: This extension helps me track every single comment that I’ve left on any sort of web page- Be it a website, blog or a channel like Youtube. I get notifications in my browser (in the shape of a small envelope) if there’s a reply to my comment. I find this to be really helpful because the “My Comments” tab at WP.com is very slow and it only shows a certain number of recent conversations. Plus, there’s no other way that I can track my comments left on non-WP.com blogs. All you’ve got to do is install the extension and it takes care of everything!
Here’s a screen shot:
Greasemonkey: What in the world would I Do without this add on?
This is the best thing about Firefox and Flock. Too bad that Internet Explorer people have to suffer! Currently, I’m using the following scripts:
LookitUp2- Quickly look something up in wikipedia, a dictionary or whatever you like (its easy to add custom sites!). The result is displayed directly on the page.
TextareaBackup- Retains text entered in text areas
WordPress Comment Ninja- Respond to comments directly by post and/or email from inside your WordPress dashboard. For WordPress bloggers.
Comment Pre-fill- Fillout comment form fields with a single keyboard shortcut!
Greased Lightbox (v0.15)- Enhances browsing on websites that link to images such as Google Image Search, Flickr, Wikipedia, Facebook, MySpace, and deviantART
Userscripts.org Rank By Popularity- When browsing scripts on userscripts.org it will change the icon on the left to show how popular a script is. Very useful for focusing on the best scripts.
Mailto 2 Webmail- Open those “mailto:” links in your GMail, Yahoo, AOL etc. email accounts instead of the default Outlook Express.
Yahoo Pipe Cleaner- Removes most of the HTML markup from Yahoo Pipe run output so that it can be cut-and-pasted into WordPress blogs.
Out of these, my absolute favorite is the WordPress Comment Ninja and the Greased Lightbox (when I’m looking at images and want to see the expanded version, all I do is click on the picture and it zooms out. No need to open another link! Cool, isn’t it?
You can also check out this and this, where I’ve prepared a list for other scripts that are very useful.
GoogleDocs Extension: Great stuff for all you Google Fans out there.
From the official website:
Software Applications:
Pidgin- Log into all chat clients and receive new email notifications and lots of other features.
WinRAR- For opening zipped files
DietMP3- compress your MP3 files
TextPad- Works great for CSS/HTML coding etc.
CDisplay- For reading e-comics
Irfanview- Resizes your images and lots of other capabilities
Apart from this, there’s the usual crap that’s worth not mentioning. I prefer to keep the number of applications running at the minimum and have a fetish for keeping my hard disk neat and tidy.
Some other junk that I found over the internet:
Ten Quickfixes to Make Your Windows Computer Run Faster
DownloadmyLink- Free Megashare/Rapidshare file downloader…no need to wait for 60+ minutes or reset your internet connection.
Senduit: Easily share you files- very clean UI
Instapaper: Bookmark those articles that you want to “Read Later” and might not be “Delicious”.