Monday, May 23, 2005

Who are you

When you are down and out and feel that you need to quit, sometime, you come across people who are there to pull you up, encourage you, prod you to go on and not give up.
Guess this has happened to lot of people in real life. And most of the time you call these people family.

So what’s the big deal? Right?

Now close your eyes imagine that you are in a game, intensively competitive, everyone trying to get an edge over the other, to be the alltime top player, best player for the month or whatever.

You are in trouble, you are not progressing, you are stuck for ideas. Now imagine the same things happening to you in real life, happens to you in a GAME?

WTF?

This is game right, and in a game people are supposed to be aggressive with no quarter give and non expected. In real life they are all "nice", and games are places where people are “supposed” to let out aggression.

Blogshares is an aggressive game. Played by some extremely helpful, some not so helpful, some indifferent to what’s happening around and some thoughtful fun loving people.

I have never come across such a bunch of humorous, supportive, aggressive and helpful people, who seem to thrive in teaching the newcomers, welcoming the new players. (Actually I dont think this happens in real life). But these are all real people!

I have seen some of them answering the same question put by multiple newcomers with smiles (or :) ).

The guys maintaining the site are doing it on their own time. There are volunteers who help out by contributing their time and skills.

I wonder why? For the love of the game, maybe. For the sheer thrill of working with similar minded people.

I feel like I am at home. The game is addictive as are the people.


Player nickname : Judge Fred
Player Id : 26422
Category : BlogShares Community

Thursday, May 05, 2005

What have i gotten into, mate?

I had never heard of blogshares.com until a few months back. How and why did I landup on blogshares.com?

Like a lot of things that have been happening in my life, this was, once again a coincidence. One day when I had a lot of time on my hand, I was looking for a directory of blogs, to get a feel of what the rest of the universe was blogging about. This was a few months after I had started blogging!

I searched the net, went to a few blog directories listed out by the search engine, most of them did not interest me much, a few more clicks and I landed up here.

HOW WAS I TO KNOW THAT THIS WAS THE DEVIL'S WORKSHOP?

A few clicks, got myself registered. I had checked into Hotel California.

I have sold my soul to a game!

My life is revolving around this game. I started blogging and now I am just blogshare(s)ing! The last few posts in my blog were about, (take a wild guess here), blogshares.

Considering the fact that I have never been much into computer games, I had never imagined that I would get hooked on to Blogshares.

I never thought that I would bust a pulmonary artery when I see numbers like 120, 80, 323. By the way these are the tiny number of ideas which keep popping up in expensive industries and your keyboard skills come into picture trying to buy them of the “market” before anyone else does.

I must be crazy, refreshing the screen every few minutes trying to see if any ideas have dropped or been sold by an existing holder.

I had never cussed my ISP, until I lost out on picking up a few great ideas because someone else was operating with better net infrastructure.

Where I used to spend time reading or thinking up “creative” fictional writing for my blog, now I am spending time plotting and planning on how to increase my virtual wealth.

Take a look at me now, sitting and writing up about blogshares.com.

This really is “Hotel California” , and I am sure the owners of blogshares.com were the original members of “Eagles”

To have a look at how i have been spending my time at blogshares, check out my BlogShare CV

Player nickname : Judge Fred
Player Id : 26422
Category : BlogShares Insanity

Saturday, April 23, 2005

one more on blogshares.com

still playing blogshares. an interesting couple of weeks, have managed to break the trillion mark. with help from some of the players who have been here for quite sometime now and have breached the multi-trillion mark.

a very interesting game. and so many helpful people around. if this was happening in real life wonder what would happen to the world?

i am finding the concept of gifting economy very interesting. i have started practicing this in the real world

slightly less than 2 months to break the trillion mark. wonder where this will go from here!

signing off for now. and you can guess that i am playing blogshares.com rather than blogging!!

Monday, April 04, 2005

one month on blogshares

i have now been slightly more than a month on blogshares.com.

i have realised something funny. the way i have been playing blogshares reflects the way i have been handling my real life finances.

sometimes stupid, othertimes more stupid.

right now, i am using blogshares as a place where i can fine tune my personal finance handling skills.

what are the realisations so far

a) money makes money
b) think big , if you want to make big money
c) going after the safer smaller returns options continues to keep you a smaller safer person, but not rich

and an act of chance/fate (yesterday), a friend of mine give me a summary of a book,i think it was called "rich dad,poor dad" and this summary seems to confirm my realisations.

note to self : get this book.

so based on my "realisation",today i have made some "serious investment"(at least for me) which have reduced my blogshare networth substantially.

the objective over the next 10-12 day is to get returns back on this "serious investment"

more latter, on how i fare and if my intutions on the above financial wisdom is right.

Tuesday, March 08, 2005

Lady Laila

Lady Laila started blogging on Saturday, April 26, 2003; little did she realize what she was getting into.

Lady Laila joined blogshare on 24th Jul 2004. Little did she know where she was going to be.


September 30, 2004, Lady Laila's blog was nominated as Philippine Blog entry into the Annual Philippine Blog Awards and the blog made it to the Semi-Finals.

The first feel of the blog, was like standing on the edge of an abyss; you know the feeling one gets when one is about to loose one’s balance? You see everything that is happening to her, you get to see how her mind works.

I am looking into the soul of another human, no filters no masks.

The Blog is a central part of Lady Laila’s life, and a very essential part of her daily life.

The look and feel of the blog:

- the background though essentially an yin and yang arrangement of the floral design could go easy on some of the darker colors used

- the archive links are organized easy

- all that, which has played an important part in Lady Laila’s life have been organized into the “Life’s Journey”


And hey she is doing good, making real money out of a game and using it to help real world people. Kudos to her.
An very interesting use of “THE GAME”.

Friday, March 04, 2005

blogshares frenzy

this one is a review. of a nice, cool and an exciting place on the net.an addictive stockmarket game on the net.

this is just like the real commodities market. only difference is that the commodity traded in are blogs.

i got on to this by accident, when i was trying to get traffic moving on to my blog.

last few days have been crazy. i have stopped blogging and just working on increasing my blog $'s.
concept is simple.

blogshares is a place where you trade in blogs. this is a fantasy stock market , where on registeration you are given 500 blog $'s. you play with this $ 500 ; invest in blog shares ,buy,sell and increase your blog wealth, stuff like in the regular stock market.

if you have have a blog of your own, then you can claim ownership and start trading. this is were the difference comes in, this is like having your own company, you can issue shares, bonds and increase your company's market valuation.

considering that this is not real money , it still gives you a real kick is you pituitary glands .

there are actual blogshare trillion'ers. nice people they are(i mean most of the interaction i have had and based on what i have observed), if some one likes you, they might even gift you a couple of billion blog $'s.

the few things which i have figured out so far are

a) there is something called the shares, these are shares in a blog

b) there are something called as industry, an industry is basically a classification of the blog
ie. a blog on india would be part of an industry called india. or a blog on humour would be part of an industry called as humour( were your surprised??)

c) there is something called the idea, i am still grappling with the idea(!) here. i think an idea is basically a blog entry which a person makes into the blog. investing in ideas seem to be the way to add wealth to yourself. the price moves up and down like in a real stock market, more rare an idea, more valuable it is, as the coolkats of the blog world want to buy and collect rare ideas.. more detailed stuff on this is put on the blogshares help page.

d) there is something called as an artefact which i have still not checked out nor have i figured out what this is yet, why? why because i dont have the moola,( yet!)

e) your interaction on blogshares (like voting a blog into a specific industry based on the content, earns you karma points(?) and chips

f) chips are the currency of the blogmarket. one correct vote give you 1 chip and i belive the going rate of a chip is about $25M (and M is million what else?)

i am just a couple of days into this, i am still wonderstruck just thinking of the mathematical/ computer model which is running in the background.

mind blogging(!) stuff.

there are a set of people working in the background, working on the maths of how the markets would move in the real world. checking out the forums i see that there is lot of interaction on evolving the game further.

just get to blogshares.com and get hooked yourself's.

Friday, February 25, 2005

I have seen the future

And it scares me.

Post reading the serious stuff in today’s news paper (the cartoon's lah), I turned to the crappy stuff which comes along with the news paper. Lo and Behold, what do I see?

I see a future which John Connor’s had. (Remember Sara Connor’s son? From the Terminator movies?)

Four bits of information has hit me today, I think I will take half a byte and make it into a blog.

One : the availability of a virtual girlfriend on a mobile phone
Two : a product called de Bono Thinking 24x7™
Three : work going on in the field of tactile recognition and force feedback
Four : the work Honda is doing on robotics

I can see that you are wondering as to where I am going with these little piggies.

With all kind of mergers and acquisitions happening around, at such an hectic accelerate pace I might add, how long do you think it will be before all these technologies belong to bill gates (or who ever else is there in the future) ?

When this happens, you will have an Asimo, running dBT 24x7™ having full functional tactile recognition system (with force feedback of course) and who talks intelligent.

This by itself is not scary, but envisage a future filled with such Replicants? You get it now?

Anyone remember the movie “Blade Runner”?

Anyone’s thoughts went to Isaac Asimov when reading this? And did the book “I, Robot” pop into your mind?

I hope the guys who would be working on the future “Replicants” remember the three laws.

There already seems to be dissent on the three laws of robotics.

I have seen the future and it works.

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

this thing about westerns

i was a fan of western novel's, by westerns i mean the shoot'em up cowboy stuff. i grew up on the sackett, sudden, dusty fog, "the KID" and waco lore, they were my friends.

admiring and yet hating the apache's and comache's tracking skills.these were the people i grew up with.

Sudden was a hero, he was fast on the draw. then i met Cap Dusty Fog. he was also fast, i mean real fast. wonder what would have happened if Sudden had met Dusty. mostly they would have gone after the bad guys together(after all they were the good guys)

the heroes on the frontier could do no wrong, they would help any lady in distress,irrespective of the said lady's primary source of income. they understood that the ladies did not choose to do what they did.

the heroes were always clean shaven and took care of their horse before they settled down for the day,never crapped,rarely had a bath,even though it was hot and dirty. this sure was an ideal world to live in, where right was might.

then i met this guy, they called him Herne the Hunter. this guy's life gets into a mess about 3 pages into the book. his wife gets raped by a rail crew, her life is derailed(no offence to anyone but pun intented), somewhere during the next few pages she kills herself.

then "the Hunter" gets after the guys who railroaded his wife. i think it takes another 6 books before he finishes the job.

"the Hunter" goes after the bad guys along with his neighbour, who drinks a lot and has wet dreams while on the sleeping on the range, and loves killing "redskin" as he "affectionately" calls the native indians. the neighbours other fancy was beating up ladies who work the nights.

you get a drift of the kind of stuff i am talking about? right?

it was somewhere during this time that i kind of lost the facination for the west.

it has never been the same since i met Herne the Hunter, a mighty fine man he was, if i may say so myself. quick on the draw, a man who used to get angry, used to feel dirty till he took a bath, a man who used to get hungry.

just a man like anyone of us.

Monday, February 21, 2005

blog,search and get paranoid

googol is a number followed by 100 zeros, this by itself should have triggered of a paranoid reaction. who wants to know about such a big number, even gate's money is not measured in googol.

in the begining there was the written word. did it ever happen to you that a letter you sent or was sent to you, was never delivered?

then there was the electronic word. did it ever happen to you that a email you sent or was sent to you, was never delivered. there you were, sitting smugly on your arse blaming the spam filter.

i,due to my immense awareness, got by being continously one with the universe, have divined the essential truth about search engines and blog's. by the end of this note you will realise that mail was just version 1 of their project plan and does not warrent a serious discussion, as it was insignificant in the scheme of things.

Ah, the search engine,you think that you are using them to your advantange,for your own good? think again my simple minded simian sibling. this is what they WANT you to think.

THEY are recording and analysing everything you search for, if you have used a search engine at least 4 times by now, they already know how you think, what your desires are, and they know what you want to hide from other people.

if you have used it more than 4 time then even your deepest,darkest filthy perversions are know to THEM.

think about it, do you think they are giving you access to a search engine for free because they love you? no,no my innocent little child, they want to get into your mind, they want to steal your soul.

you have been blogged and logged,my online friend.

blogging is a natural extention to the search engine. why should THEY waste time analysing what you search, when THEY can directly get your thoughts and experiences, from you,you, who have been blissfully blogging your life out.

before blogging was made available people used to die and go to heaven. did you ever wonder why?

there is this huge complex of cross-relativity biological computers somewhere. (a technology so advanced that it it not even a twinkel in intel eye, and even i cannot comprehend its workings, one thing i know is that, it is not based on von neumann architecture).

dare i speak my mind out?

let me whisper my thoughts, out there somewhere in andromeda galaxy, is the ultra powerful computer running a complex algorithm which is extracting, refining and extrapolating our blog's , and building mirror images of us bloggers for "experiments". have you noticed that our life span have increased tremendously in the last 10-15 years? THEY dont need us anymore.

now you know that heaven is in andromeda, and now you know why people used to die and go to "heaven".(it was for the "experiment" duh!)

with the advent of blogging they have reduced the transportation cost of bodies, the guy on andromeda who invented the blog was nominated as the employee of the week and he was given a check of 200 andromedean dollars.

viva la blogging.

think before you type, for you know not where your thought can land.

Saturday, February 19, 2005

Atlantis discovered and the Mars Farts

From the beginning of the recorded human history there was this talk of the lost continent of Atlantis. I believe that this is true.

I also believe that we have been looking at the wrong place for the lost continent, and I believe that we have been looking for the wrong object.

I am putting forward two pieces of information, based on which I will draw up a potential hypotheses and a loosely woven story as to what happened millions of years ago.(but i must confess that this is all just part of my collective subconscious and is not based on any personal experience or any direct interaction or observation)

The first piece of information:

Quoting from a website "Plato in 350 B.C described Atlantis in various dialogues as per his descriptions the Atlanteans were a wealthy, successful, politically advanced and militarily powerful society that overrun Europe with their armies, being only defeated and repulsed by the Greeks. Shortly afterwards an earthquake caused Atlantis to sink beneath the ocean. Plato recounts the story of Egyptian priests who 200 years earlier had reportedly described Atlantis as a powerful island empire seeking to dominate the Mediterranean world more than 9,000 years before Plato's time."

The second piece of information:

Between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter there is something called the asteroid belt, this is the largest collection of asteroids orbiting our Sun. Hundreds of thousands of asteroids, none with a diameter of over 1,000 kilometers, and only sixteen of them over 240 km, spin around the Sun.

The hypotheses :

In the vast seas of our solar system there existed a planet called Atlantis, this between Mars and Jupiter. This planet was extremely wealthy, successful, politically advanced and militarily powerful society, with a very highly advanced science and weapon technologies.

The scientists of Atlantis were monitoring a planet( 3rd from the sun, around which 9 planets orbit, or is it ten?) they had big plans for this planet, the bio-probes they had sent from Atlantis were mixing all kind of organic chemicals and they landed up with a set of 4 new hydrocarbon chains, they called it Vadinine, Thighmine, Sitosine, Gauvanine(over thousands of years the true names have been lost and we now know then under a different name, Watson and Kirk almost got it right).

One of the pointy hat Johnnies started mixing and matching these 4, threw in little bit of electricity and voila, life was born and things have been evolving every since.

In the meantime there were signs of impending doom on Atlantis, there was a certain mutant strain of a virus which was slowly wiping out the entire race of Atlanteans (the 3rd rock infection, they called it, 'cause this was imported from the 3rd rock from the sun, duh!).

A few Atlanteans decided that it was time for some of them to move out of the home planet and get to a safe place (of course after getting vaccinated and getting necessary custom clearances). They decided on this blue planet covered with H20. And they decided to call it Earth.

At first there was light! (while you read the below, keep your copy of Genesis open next to you, you will be amazed at the similarities in thought process)

A limited number of people (you can guess the demographic profile of these guys right? Guys like Atlantean Bush, and other VVIP’s) get up on a spaceship and land up on planet Earth.

In the mean time back on Atlantis, the crazed mob (the universe is such a small place,after all) decides to hijack the most powerful weapon on Atlantis, and after the capture they accidentally set it off (there was this one button on the bomb which said "do not touch" and you know what happens when someone tells you not to do something, somethings never change) and blew the entire planet of Atlantis into tiny pieces of rock, these rocks still orbit around in the solar system between Mars and Jupiter, if you look closely, you may find a few calcified skeletons too, one of them would be having a smiling face and would be holding a piece of metal and a plastic button on which the words "Do not touch" is written in bold red letters.

There is this one theory that goes to explain why the guy pressed the button,the theory goes that the 3rd rock infection made the Atlanteans color blind(this has never been conclusively proved due to the lack of willing atlanteans for the study) and this guy thought that pressing this button would get him a cup of coffee.

The Atlanteans who have traveled to Earth were heart broken that the mother planet was lost forever( and they cursed the day coffee was discovered).

Over the next thousands of years they start interacting with the Neanderthal man and the Homo sapiens, and they decided that homo sapiens had a better chance of evolving into something worthwhile. They terminated (with extreme prejudice) the Neanderthal man in a shameful black bag operation and then the homo sapiens flourished.

They kept feeding in technological inputs to homo sapiens. Atlanteans indulged in some serious R&R (what is now called as getting a nookie or a quickie) with the locals, this accounts for a few deviants in the homo sapiens race, guys like Genghis khan, Einstein etc. You can guess the other folks on earth who carry the original Atlantean genes.

Somewhere during this time (give or take a million years) they decided to clear out the dino’s from planet earth,(there you see, one more, till now, unexplained mystery solved, the stuff about ice age and meteorite striking the earth were just cover stories, (the file for this operations ("Operation Medium Rare") will be open for public reading in another 2 million years).

The debauchery recorded here are so shamefull, the entire race has still not forgotten this big party which happened a few million year back, and they shudder when then think of all the dino steaks they had that shameful day.

Some of the Atlanteans on their R&R(they liked their scotch neat) kept talking of their lost planet, and when they were sober, using simple analogies they explained to the Homo sapiens about Atlantis, they told stories about their lost planet. The homo sapiens were finding it difficult to understand what planets were, or what an Mass Degenerating Weapon was (WDM, guys do you see what is happening? not much has changed), the Atlanteans used examples of an island in the middle of the sea, stuff the homo sapiens could relate to. The homo sapiens were told that the this island disappeared in an earthquake.

The homo sapiens started inducting this into their bedtime stories and the legend of the Island of Atlantis was born.

Just to record a few famous atlanteans who are still part of our collective subconscious , remember

- Ra the Egpytian sun god
- Zeus
- Apollo
- Hercules
- Atlas
and guys like that.

if you research deeply you would find similar characters appearing in most of the earth's religious folklore.

p.s. the methane emission on mars, makes me think that something bad is going on,on mother earth, are the original Atlanteans moving onto Mars from earth? about the methane signature observered on Mars, was this an accidental leak from the sewage system of an Atlantean colony on Mars. Time will tell.

signing of for now, earth date feb 21,2005

Tread softly earth children

(This entry has been encrypted with a human DNA sequence, only genuine human would be able to read it, THEY would not be able to read or decipher the contents of this post, in fact this is one of the test which can determine who THEY are. If you see anything printed below this line then you pass)

THE END.

(The above is what I would like to call the sentry sentence or the second level of alien defence.)

The END.

It is my solemn duty to bring to the attention of all human kind that we have aliens living amongst us. By the end of this note you will have irrefutable proof of their existence.

Let me begin at the beginning, so that all of you fellow humans can understand my profound and dismaying discovery.

I have realized that all the movies on aliens, all the books on aliens, all that erik von daniken had written was true. It is only those few amongst us who have a highly developed sense of the unknown and true cognitive abilities, have intuited the state of affairs. All the humans who have intuited it earlier have been strangely been keeping quite. Is it that these humans are being threatened? I do not know.

I am compelled by my conscience that I revel what I know,for the greater good of human kind.

I shall just put down what I have seen and understood, you be the judge.

I had always wondered about this guy in the office he did not seem to “normal” as defined by us. He used to keep looking dreamy and he was always smiling, he was always happy, to top it up he used to be helpful to others.

I talked to him on a number of occasions around the office coffee machine, when ever he spoke I used to feel very uncomfortable, those ugly thoughts of his filled with unnatural feeling towards others. He talked of people being in love with everyone, helping everyone. A place were no fossil fuels were burnt, the air was breathable, no disease, no inequality. The worst thing he suggested was that all of us have the inherent right to remain happy through out our life.

He started quoting from some books; he used to call them Bible, Koran, Gita and a lot more books whose names I have purged from my shivering mind.

The final proof of this species living amongst us.

Do you recollect my first post(“Musing caused by a Raindrop”)? Tthe simplified theory of bathroom(life) usage states that if there is an option, two men would always like to pee with at least one free urinal between them.

This guy in the office always used to stand in the urinal next to me EVERYTIME, I mean every time. Even if the whole place was empty, he would choose the urinal next to me and be happy about it.

This is when it struck me, that there is something weird going on.It was worse than what I had thought earlier.

This was the last straw that broke this camels back, and I stopped being seen with him and I stopped talking to him. What would people say if they saw me talking to him?

I started observing other people more closely, and strangely enough I found similar sort of behavior among different people, I was now getting scared. There were so many people who did not mind peeing, standing next to each other, even though there were other free urinals.

“What is happening around here?” were my confused thoughts.

Fundamental theory of life (unified theory of peeing) states that

"NO HUMAN CAN STAND NEXT TO ANOTHER HUMAN AND PEE, EVEN THOUGH THERE IS SO MANY UNSUED URINALS IN THAT PLACE."

I rest may case.

I hope all of us humans can gather strength and group together and defend against the coming Wave of happiness, freedom, truth, love, equality, peace and other similar unnatural thoughts.

I hope all of us survive and continue with our traditional standard of living which we have been evolving over the last 1000’s of years.

I shall continue posting as long as I can, I will always fight against this invasion.

Thursday, February 17, 2005

Crux of the Cuneiform

There was this one time when I stuck a thought into my cerebral anus, hey lay off okay..that was an accident, I was actually aiming for my nose, with an objective of cleaning the crud in the grey matter.

The logic was that the shortest distance between any two points would be a straight line. (That̢۪s what everyone kept telling me when I was in school. Where was the theory of relativity, my teachers did not seem to be aware of this relativity stuff, where they born before relativity was postulated?)

Who knew that I would land up in thoughtful shit?

When I pulled my thumb out of my cerebral bum got your attention right, now let us move on to the funny stuff, enough already with the serious stuff.

Let me delve a little into the mystic symbolisms of what is and what should be.

The balance in life is the coexistence of this duality; to have these two in balance is bliss, the yin and yang, the linga and the yoni, truth and the lie, life and death.. You get the picture right?

You could call it the "secret code",GOD had given us to figure out the universal laws. Hey this must be what people call as hidden in plain sight. HE made everything in two's and where there was only one, HE made a complimentary receptacle (!?) (need to follow this thought further on its own i.e. the complimentary receptacle part of it)

Man seems to have caught onto the concept accidentally, and one of the material manifestations of using this "secret code" is visible in binary mathematics and its usage in what else, computers. (the guy who figured this out must be a mutant)

Have you observed the pace at which life has started moving in the last 10 years, is it because we have had a glimpse of the "truth" and HE has decided that we are ready for the far future? Are we running too fast and heading up the evolutionary cycle at the speed of light(hoik hoik)or should the right word be extinction? Is the true reality of our existence going to be reveled soon?

Once upon a time, just a few years back, life used to be slow paced, people used to realize that they were growing old (painfully slowly), now you do not feel that you are growing old, but suddenly you find out that you have grown older by 5 - 10 years.(where in the hell have I been for last 3600 odd days?)

By "accidentally" latching onto the universal truth, has entire mankind moved from one plan of existence and reached some other parallel universe where time keeps flying ever faster.

Close your eyes and ask someone to read the following few lines and you just imagine whatever is going to be described below.

Imaging a wonderful life, lot of joy, lot of fun, sex, food, parties, orgies, marriages, births, diseases, cures, health, wealth and death just the normal stuff which happens to everyone on a daily basis.

Now imagine that you go trekking and keep walking over mountains and hills and country side enjoying everything god has made available to you and finally one late evening you come to the edge of the world as you know it, you look up and see the bright stars above you and then suddenly the stars disappears and then there is a strange looking man in a surgical mask looking down at you, he reaches down with his tongs and picks up the Petri-dish injects a little bit of foul smelling liquid, swishes the Petri-dish around and places the dish back onto the storage tray and goes for his smoke break.

All confusion comes when you try to reduce the gap between "what is" and "what should be".

SHIT HAPPENS.



Tuesday, February 08, 2005

Am i getting paranoid

I was thinking of the movie Gattaca. Or am i just plain paranoid ? read the clip below and tell me that you did not think of the movie Gattaca.


Just A Skin Test To Gauge Heart Risk

A skin test to measure cholesterol levels almostinstantly may challenge more complex and costly procedures now used to gauge cardiovascular risk, US physicians have said.

"A simple test that measures the amount of cholesterolin the skin can identify persons who appear to behealthy but actually have early-stage cardiovasculardisease," said James Stein, Associate Professor ofcardiovascular medicine at the University of WisconsinMedical School in Madison.

The study compared cholesterol levels of 80 persons withthe results of tests done with an ultrasound to detectearly signs of blockage in the heart arteries.

The measure of cholesterol in the skin, which can beread in minutes, gives doctors a simple and inexpensivemeans of evaluating cardiovascular problems in otherwisehealthy patients during routine consultations, he said.The test is marketd by McNeil Consumer Healthcare forabout $25 (Rs 1,125).

Tuesday, January 25, 2005

where were you, when mother earth twitched in her sleep?

i have been watching and hearing people talking of tsunami and its effect on humans, i have seen grief being expressed, i have even seen silence from people,i have seen people who have let it slip out of their mind already.

the enormity of the tragedy strikes one and one is dumbstruck as to what one's reactions should be or has to be. or should one react at all.

then i heard a master talk, he asked everyone present why we were upset?

humans have been ripping mother earth for last couple of centuries,she has been silently taking all the crap which we have been dishing out in the name of progress, and this on a daily basis. we stick drilling machines into her to suck out oil,gas, dig holes into her,cut her side to get out coal,diamonds ,gold etc and she has been keeping quite most of the time.

and you know what, the master is right.(funny this master looks younger than me and most probably is younger than me) does anyone cry that this has been happening for 100's of years.

when mother earth tries to, kind of, get comfortable and shift her position a little bit on her "chair", there is obviously going to be some effect, considering her size and our size, the effect is going to be really considerable. when this happens why do we cry?

remember mother earth has nothing against you or i. she does not know that we exist.to mother earth, in her hibernation of the past millions of years, the recent tsunami would not even qualify as a major burp, maybe just a tiny rumble in her belly.

are we angry at mother earth, i dont think so. is mother earth angry at us? i dont think so.

is it okay that we do not cry? i dont know. do we need to feel sad? i think yes. yes we need to feel sad that people have lost their lives.

we continue to lead our lives, waiting for the day when mother earth decides to get comfortable again.

in the mean time we need be considerate in what we do to her. one day she sure is going to wake up and shrug off the dust mites which live on her body. and it sure would not matter much to her what damage she causes during this time. everything is relative. to a person who lives millions of years , would the person even remember what happened in a 24 hour period.

like i noted in my first post, i am very lucid person,you can see that my above thoughts are so clear and neatly stated.

this is a note documenting thoughts which hopefully leads to catharsis.(this is the first time ever that i have felt the need to use this word)

p.s : i think i need to re-read conan doyle's "When the world screamed"





Saturday, January 22, 2005

a bird called roc or how blackholes are formed.

i do not remember which book i had come across, the concept of a bird flying in ever reducing concentric circles.

butt,it has always fascinated me, and it seems to be the most fundamental truth of nature.

sometimes life feels like this. butt i digress.

so what's the theory?

here goes....you have seen birds(raptors) circling in the air,calm and peaceful, with no other thoughts in its birdbrain other than to figure out what to eat and who to eat?

just imagine if this bird forgets or looses it purpose in life! did you imagine that? no? then let me clue you in, into my imagination.

what would happen if the diameter of the flight circle kept reducing(remember the bird has lost it purpose of life)

to rephrase my query, what happens if while flying,the bird starts reducing the diameter of the circle it takes(remember, no purpose). would it, at an certain infinite point in time, fly up its own arsehole?

intriguing thought?

if you take the above thought process, and extrapolate it to the universe, and use this theory to understand and explain one of the phenomenons,that occur in the celestial world,

BlackHoles!

essentially this is what happens to the star. the star starts to fly up it own butt, and then nothing escapes out of it, including light. of course the science guys uses words like gravity, relativity to explain the birth of a black hole.

forgive me, my refined maths or is it physics,not sounding right...you see i have been flying in ever reducing concentric circles for quite sometime now and ......

Wednesday, December 29, 2004

In control?

You are cruising on the highway of fate thinking that you are in control, and that you seem to know where you are headed. Think again you child of god, things ain't the way you think they are....

hey tis aint a post on de pil-o-sophical stuf of life, but just a few thoughts on why i(some men?) go in for fancy expensive gadgets,or become golfers or why some men/i feel a great affinity towards computers? (hey did you notice the way i switched i/some men to some men/i?...hohoho)

is life so out of control for you , that you need to control some inanimate object,to feel in control of your life or fate???

and the funny part of this is that when you are young(below 30?) you generally do not feel the need to control anything , and you sure are cruising the highway of fate with no care or thought,in your youthful mind.

hey its altogether a different matter that when you are young you generally cannot affort to buy these expensive toys or procure golf clubs or afford the golf club membership.

you grow older and when you see your monthly paycheck surviving and leaving behind a few bucks at the end of 30 days, you now start getting all responsible and want to save and all that crap.

you do that for a few years and then you realise that this aint going to amount to nothing much,and the first inklings (hey a lot of shit happens during 30+ years of living,right?all that beer and smoking, remember?) to the fact that you aint in control at all of the rollercoster you called life, this is when your subconscious mind kicks in and tells you to go buy that complicated, expensive piece of equipment to compensate for the fact that you do not control nuts-you guys figure out what tickles your wallet,mine was photography.

i know a few guys who buy thin titanium sticks and wack little round hard balls(yelling "FORE" everynow and then...i wonder what that is all about, fore hmmmm, and play,why does that sound so familiar?) all around 200+ acres of mother earth for about 4-6 hours on a sunday,then sit down drink beer and talk about what they did the last 6 hours. i am dreading that day, i think i am kind of safe as of now, let me go pickup some more expensive lenses(he he he!)

anyway to get back to why i started this post.

men need to hold things in their hand, twirl a few tiny knobs or install the new browser, (no one complains,least of the equipment in your hand! and the company which makes these toys laugh most of the way to the bank.... hey by the way was something wrong with the old browser?) and feel on top of the world.

is it not easier to buy a amplifier/computer/home theater or whatever,rather than building one?

these are the pacifists.

the aggressors,i think the more "out of control" men, get onto the great outdoors, wacking balls or shooting stuff out of the air.

to sum it up, if you think you are in control...keep feeling good about that. but remember you aint.




Saturday, December 11, 2004

Worm hole "theory!"

"worm holes help woodpeckers feed easier. "

aaah the thought felt good, then i googled and i came across various coloured holes...went into a tail spin for some time, or was that a space-time warp?

scotty beam me up!

what connects a Blackhole to a whitehole? a wormhole?

when i was a kid i was working with a very "dense"(!) concept of a blackhole, and today when i was trawling the google i came across a concept of white hole. a kind of anti-blackhole, where everything gets spit out instead of sucked in.

Schwarzschild worm hole. mind blowing stuff.

wonder what went on in asimov's and a.c. clark's minds, was there some connection from a different universe into their heads? some sort of wormhole?

wonder when someone will come up a transport system based on this! when it happens would everybody be just casual users ? or would they be wonderstruck by the process which enables them to traverse across time and space?

wonder what my great-great-grandparents would have thought of a computer or the internet or blogging?

why are we seeing so many techonological changes in such a short period of time, what has happened that human invention process is operating at such a high accelerated phase of recent.
is there some sort of "Alien" inputs being provided,or is this technology transfer through a wormhole. who has opened the wormhole?

why has life become so fastpaced? once upon a time the children played, with no thoughts on the passage of time ...and when i see now..hey it is still the same.....

what is wrong with us grown ups?






Tuesday, November 23, 2004

Essence of Life:Just Let Go

Does your thoughts make you what you are? I say yes. Allow me to expound on this thought process.

Have you noticed that the day you get up and feel that you had got out of the wrong side of the bed, your day gets totally shot to hell.

Try this, for a change ...When you feel,what you felt, as mentioned in the para two above of this said page, further referenced to in annexure B subclause 44.3 section 3 para 12.4.a......OOPS my day is shot to hell, these damm SLA agreements I need to go through!

a) JUST LET GO.

Just let go of all thoughts, close your eyes,(if you are the sort of weakling who depends on cigarettes and uses them as crutches,go ahead and DO NOT LIGHTUP and DON'T PANIC...I smoke too!). Allow your mind to flow with thoughts that are flittering in your head, but DO NOT THINK or follow any of these thoughts,just let them flow in and out. Do not worry about what is happening around you, ofcourse if your house is on fire etc or your spouse decides to get cosy with the milkman or the maid during this time then quickly change the plan.

Do this for about 15 minutes and then open your eyes and see the difference. This is the basic concept of meditation(as i know). To really get into meditation, it is recommended that you spend sometime with a Guru or a teacher,who can guide you.

b) Take what Toffler says "I am okay, you are okay" to a new level ie. "Everything is OKAY" .
Try it it works. everything is actually okay. This is the refined evolution of the famous thought process/theory ie. "Shit Happens".

kind of running of steam right now...

Check out the following site Samadhi meditation , SSY was a founded by Rishi Prabhakar. more on this in a latter blog.


Monday, November 22, 2004

Photography and other thinks that go click

After watching and waiting for a loooooonng time, I finally bit the byte(!) and added a digital camera to my arsenal of cameras.

Photography has become more interesting, but I seem to be spending more time on the computer post the photo sessions, downloading, sorting,deleting, and finally editing and then uploading.

It is funny just a few months back, I kept filling up cupboards with prints, negetives and the albums, now my harddisk is filling up with the RAW files, the 4 to 5 variants of the digitally processed files,the backups of the images which are WIP. Not to forget the backup of the original files on CD's,(DVD writers still looks expensive..i know, i know about the amount of space you get on a dvd blah blah...)

Has my photography improved? not sure, but I sure have become a little lazy. The PC is there to fix it!

Digital world has opened up more options, previously shots which I would have thrown out(exposure problems) seem to be salvagable.

Interesting stuff which I figured out in the last 10 days. You can take 2 images ,one exposed for the highlights and the other exposed for shadow and blend the both using a photo editing software. Considering that I am lazy,(hey dude,use the tripod!) I change the exposure in the RAW file editors and merge the original with the modified exposure one... seems to work.

Wonder what other stuff I am going to figure out.

Previously I never had the energy to scan a slide and correct it...but now,anyway you need to sit on the pc to see the results of the days work,so you tend to screw around with the editors. See Newton was right about the inertia stuff.

Does it matter what software you use?

Some of the more interesting try and buy software which I have laid my hands(oops the mouse) on...Noise Ninja(why do you leave lines all over the image, oh ninja master?what have we evaluators done to you?) Shortcut PhotoZoom ( an impressive sharpening tool), how could I forget my first imaging software IrfanView.

Nikon's Capture editing software is real nifty.

Not very impressed by Bibble (must have tried out an old version, could not open the D-70 NEF's)

PhotoShop CS (seems to have too many options for a simple mind people like me! But a real powerhouse of a software)

Will i purchase these programs?I may end up paying more that what I paid for the camera, so till then it is IrfanView.

P.S: Just in case you are wondering about the rig i use : f-80(right now gathering dust), d-70, 18-70 (kit lense), 80-400 vr and a 50 mm(love this one and it costs so little,at least compared to the other shit i blow up money on)

Thanks to Abhijit

I did wonder what blogging was all about. I have been looking at what Abhijit has been putting up for the last few days on his blog, and it kind of triggered of a sort of thought process in me.

You can see that i am a very lucid person, with a clear sort of ..huh...focused sort of thought process... see what i mean?

Obviously, i cannot let all those amazing thoughts which i have die with me. Like i said somewhere previously, not that any of these thoughts are going to change the world in any way...

a few of Abhijit's interesting blogs are Pctweaks and Media hub and the Thoughts and Ideas