Turning Kanye West into Robert Plant (Detroit visit, Part 1)

It’s been a while since I visited my blogpad to write about something at leisure, except some instant posts about some geeky stuff in the “Tech” section. Frankly, I’ve had lot of fun this semester and I still haven’t written about Dandiya and Diwali. Maybe I’ll summarize it all in an end-of-year post or something. But more recent things first.

I finally decided to make the most of the Thanksgiving break, go out of the Greater Washington D.C. area and visit my friends in Detroit I haven’t met in a long time. It might be surprising, but I really hadn’t traveled farther than Baltimore (at New Year’s) in the past one year here in the U.S. The only places I had been to were Maryland (where I stay), D.C. (where we party – sometimes) and Virginia (where the Dulles airport is, so that’s where I landed when I flew from India in 2004). So when I realized that I was getting plane tickets from Independence Air for under $140 round trip to Detroit, albeit for a very short trip and a very restrictive schedule, I jumped at it!

So I bought the tickets online, booked the SuperShuttle for Thursday morning, packed my bag, started 9 am from home and reached IAD with plenty time. Check-in was automated and easy and I spent the remaining 2 hrs eating, drinking (coffee, not booze), and reading my first issue of Maxim, calling-up people and wishing them “Happy Thanksgiving”. The only thing I hated was the security check – taking off the shoes, putting all the acessories in the tray and all – but I guess that’s a necessary pain these days for our own safety (although I wouldn’t really mind having an adventurous trip ).

The flight was pretty cool, right from the start with our hostess intimating us about Detorit’s weather – “if you think this is cold, wait ’til we get there in Detroit”, eliciting ambivalence of fear and laughter from all, including my fellow passenger, who claimed to not have brought a thick-enough coat, and who spent the majority of the 1hr 20 minutes of the flight putting on and adjusting her make-up (of which, inasmuch as I claim to have seen and known it all thanks to being so observant of TV and magazine ads, I could not identify all the stuff she was putting on). The best part was the safety announcement, which was recorded (as against “live”) and the funniest I’ve ever heard. No wonder these FlyI guys rank among the top 2 in customer satisfaction.

I am usually not much of a talker in a flight anyways (or didn’t feel like that particular day), so I spent most of the time sipping Diet Pepsi, and reading Maxim, and listening to music on my Sony CD Walkman (’cause my Creative Muvo N200 MP3 player just died a few days back) – which brings me to two interesting questions:

• “How can you flick more FM channels than you do in your average trip to school in your roommate’s car?”
• “How do you crossfade Kanye West’s Gold Digger into some Robert Plant song without lifting a finger?”

So I realized that it is possible to listen to FM using your radio even on the plane (I’m not sure about the technicalities behind this yet), and you’ll obviously be able to tune into more stations than when you were driving down within the same town. I remember hearing the words Pitssburgh, Lansing, and Detroit in the station names at different times on the flight and couldn’t keep my fingers off the tuning buttons like a 12-year old with a toy in his hand. And when the plane hovered and circled around the airport waiting for clearance from the ATC (the Air Traffic Control folks, not the electronic-music band you dumbo!), while I was listening to Kanye West on some Hip-Hop channel, hardly a minute into the song, it transformed into the last minute of Robert Plant song, and then I realized that there were perhaps two stations at same (or very close) frequencies. But it was fun!

It was also cool to see the snow on the houses and farms and the frozen waters, while flying low. Yes, whenever possible, I always pick the window seat – this time it was even easier, as Independence Air lets you pick your seat son after you buy the ticket online.

After circling the area for a while, we finally landed at Detroit Metro Airport (DTW), late by about 20 minutes. As I stepped out the plane and onto the stairs, I felt the “nice and cold” (as I described it then) weather out there. The airport wasn’t half as cool or shiny as IAD, but who cares. I then walked to the baggage area to meet my pal Anuj (aka Veenu)who was there to pick me with his roommate Gurvinder (aka Garry), and off we drove to Veenu’s crib in Garry’s red Ford Mustang.

I’m on Slashdot – no, really!

I understand you are wondering what I mean by saying that I’m on Slashdot – I mean, I actually am “on” Slashdot checking new posts every now and then whenever I’m online, anyway. Well, I actually managed to get a post accepted to be published on Slashdot – and it also made it to the front page.

I know it’s not half as cool as having your website, blog or article being written about by someone on Slashdot and hence being “slashdotted“, but having your post accepted is defintely exciting after you have had some rejects in the past.

Also, not all “Ask Slashdot” posts are published on the front page; which makes me even happied since mine was. I didn’t quite find any radically new answers though.

OK, so I cut to the chase and explain what it is about. The post was a question about “Dealing with Digital Music and Vendor Lock-In?” (sic) as published, or as I had orginally posted it “Digital Music Best Practices”. Here’s a link to the post on Slashdot

Feel free to share your thoughts here or on Slashot.

Why I love XML

“Simplicity, extensibility, interoperability, …” – these were mere terms which I probably never really fully appreciated until just now. One of the biggest strengths of XML is being well-structured and both human and computer-readable. This strength saved me a lot of reinventing the wheel today.

We use a home-grown tool ViPER here at LAMP for video ground-truthing. When quickly annotating boxes, vehicles and people to meet a deadline, I made a mistake and marked-up the positions of three different boxes into one. My first option was to remove some annotations, define new boxes, and then redo the stuff for the boxes incorrectly marked. But thanks to XML, I was able to cut-and-paste framespans and location data from one object to another without messing up anything. Worked like a charm!

Now I’m really ready to get myself a “I Love XML” t-shirt.

The Post B’day Post

As promised, here’s the update on how I spent the rest of the day on my birthday. Nothing special really, except calsses and a lot of work. More phone calls – from dear Manasi, who woke me up just in time to get ready for class (before I snoozed off again) and from my bro Aritra – and wishes from people I met in person.

I guess the coolest wish was from Chitra (on behalf of PrankstersInc^TM) – a play of words on the popular Happy B’day song, but nothing like I’ve ever heard before. Later, I even convinced her to record the song in her own beautiful voice and send it across. Here’s the song:

Dearest RAj,

Happy B’day to You

We miss you tons, Dude!

Happy Birthday, Have a blast today,

Happy Birthday to You!

Many A-Grades to you

And many girl friends too!

May good luck go with you!

And tons of fun too

Happy Birthday to you

We miss you, we really do

Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU!!

From
All@Pranksters

Awesome isn’t it? Now wait ’til you check out the actual audio (~750kB). Is that kool or what!!

Went out to Bombay Masala for dinner later that evening with my roommates and enjoyed some yum chicken and lamb curries and chicken lollipop. And the best part was that I finally got to taste what all the hype about Haywards 5000 was – well, let’s just say it wasn’t hype at all. Haywards 5000 sure rocks (it’s got to – after all, it’s ~ 7% alcohol).

Couldn’t make it to the temple, but luckily Raee went there so she conveyed my hello to the Gods and got back some prasad.

BTW, also wishing me a happy b’day were MSN and Birla Sun Life. It’s nice how these companies use your DOB data to wish you. MSN actually places a special new theme on your My MSN desktop on your b’day.

Silver’s Silver Jubilee

Welcome to my brand-new, sparkling-silver (well, except for the standard sky blue color from the default template, which I hope to be able to change to silver as soon as I try to acquaintize myself with image-editing tools like the GIMP – so far I’ve been not even half as comfortable with that part of the “web”-world, if you will, as the other part, i.e. scripting) blog – the blog with a new name, a new layout, and for those who care, a new blogging engine (WordPress – my previous blogs were powered by Blogger).

“Why a new blog?”, did you ask? Well, I have actually been planning to have a better integrated, categorized blog, like the DasBlog-powered intranet blog I created just before I left my job at Intel (which was precisely why that blog was so short-lived), than the random templates I’ve been using ever since I started blogging in the year 2003. Add to that the fact that although I have designed, redesigned and/or maintained at least two websites in the last year, I never got enough time to set-up a cool website for myself that would satisfy the perfectionist in me. The final nail in the coffin (how inappropriate a phrase on this day) was that I thought that I did deserve at least a new blog on my 25th birthday.

If you care to know, one of the reasons for choosing WordPress was its ease of set-up, as demonstrated perfectly when my friend from IITR, Sumit (now at Univ. of AZ), set-up his blog in the less than the claimed “5-minute” install. Another, reason was the fact that something like SquareSpace would have little ease of use and maintenace compared to the cost (~ $7/mo) . So, WordPress it is, at least for now.

OK, enough of geek-speak already (as if I care – I’m proud to be a self-proclaimed geek!). Now let me talk a little about my birthday celebrations so far. After a long and tiring day at work, I returned home, quickly had dinner, and then worked with D-Jiggy on some preparations for the upcoming SCI Dandiya event, until almost midnight.

At midnight, I got back downstairs, to be wished by Nilesh a minute too early . At sharp midnight, after the usual birthday hugs and handshakes from my roommates, Bandy started setting up the table with cake (which I had expected) and drinks. And then, out came a bottle of my favorite drink, or shall I say the only whiskey I can ever drink without feeling pukish, the one and only Jack Daniels (which by the way, has earned me my nick-name JD), which had been tucked away into Bandy’s room.

The coolest part, I guess, was the cake – candles are for kids, smokers use cigarrettes on their cakes (too bad we didn’t take a pic of that). It was good phun!

But that wasn’t the only cake – Raee and Jeeves (and Jiggy from upstairs) came in just-in-time, with another cake, two cards (couldn’t figure why), a balloon and a wrapped something. Don’t think I got away just with mutual cake stuffing between me and everyone else – and everyone happily enjoying their drinks – midway through a phonecall, my face and hair were covered with cake (yeah, they took a pic with that). And all this while, there were calls from home, uncles and aunts, friends, and dear Poorva (like a kid sister, but only better I know what you are saying – “How would you know?”).

A day that started with a veggie-food-only (just for a change) was almost going to turn very non-veg when I took a sip from my glass of Jack & Coke after it was lying there for a while, without looking – I almost sipped Jack and Cockroach. (If you ever plan to launch a product by that name, ensure that you pay trademark royalties to Mr. Amrit Bandyopadhyay for coming up with that.)

Finally, there were e-cards waiting in e-mail – nice, flashy “Flash” animations and stuff.

Cards, booze, cakes, wishes, e-cards, phone-calls, hugs and wishes a Terrapin t-shirt to wear, and above all, friends – not a bad to start the b’day celebrations so far, huhn? Hey! You guys ROCK!!!

Woah! What a long post! Well, I think it was well-deserved (did you notice the accidental three W’s of the World-Wide-Web – I did, as I typed this). After all, it’s not every day that I one completes almost the first third of his life, and begins another. In case you are wondering how I came up with “third”, well, I plan to live till about the age of 75 (give or take a few years) after seeing, hopefully, India becoming a superpower, Kashmir issue resolved with Pakistan merging back with India as one big India, better environmental conditions, world peace, and on a more selfish level, yours truly achieving most of his dreams (except perhaps being the next Hugh Hefner).

Will add more as it (the birth-day, i.e.) goes – and later, probably some pics too.

In case you didn’t get the title of the post – well, Rajat means “silver”.

[P.S.: A word about my earlier blogs - I have integrated only the QotD blog into this one as of now. Timestamps may not be 100% accurate due to timezone differences and reflect the dates those posts were originally written. Not integrating the Open Diary blogs since they'd be too much effort. They are still there as separate web-pages and can be found under My Older Blogs in the navigation pane.]