Saturday, May 23, 2009

Custom Message v3.0

It has been a really really long time since I last posted here my compilation of status messages that I find below friends' names in the various messengers that I use. More than two and a half years actually (damn, that IS long). Since then, countless status messages have been displayed in my messenger friend lists, and some that catch my eye are saved to a raggedy text file somewhere in the depths of my hard disk. But it is now time.

I'll start with something which, while having flashed across my gtalk window ages ago, sorta perfect fits the current situation that the world is in.
"Due to recent cutbacks and until further notice, the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned off." This one was from Jay Mody/Drumster.

Related to the same subject is the next one from fundoome:
"There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers."

Given that the state of the world is not so good, few people do have their doubts about the future. And thus Babboo said:
"The problem with future is that though it is supposed to be better it keeps turning into present."

And on similar lines, Cyrix says:
"A man once told me, "Cheer up, things cud b worse." So I cheered up, and sure enuf, things got worse."

Hmmm, given that the above few post a very depressing picture of the world, lets move on to slightly lighter stuff....

Lets start with another one from Cyrix:
"I hated going to weddings. All the grandmas would poke me saying "You're next". They stopped that when I started doing it to them at funerals."

This post wouldn't be complete without the trademark geeky status message, so here it is, courtesy Anikh Thakur:
"I would love to change the world, but they won't give me the source code."

Last time around, there were a few engineers pissed at Newton and gravitation. We have one more. This one's from Indranil, a fellow engineer and IITian.
"sometimes as an engineer i wish that Newton had decided to sit under a coconut tree ;)"

Talking of IITs, they are magical places, and as usual, the examination time brings out some of the finest status messages to come out of there. The following two deal with the dilemma that the students face towards the end of their stints at IIT.
"xam time realisation : gettin into iit is tough but getting out is tougher :((" - Indranil
"You think getting into IIT is difficult? Try getting out, b***h......" - Rajeev

Some of us believe in getting through these exams and all. Others however differ, as aptly put forward by Abhishek Gupta:
"padh likh kar kya karna hai, ek din sabko marna hai, markar bhi janam liye to nursery se hi to padhna hai!!"

Everyday, countless scientific discoveries are being made. The next statement is from Issac Asimov, but for all purposes, for me, it simply was Vivek Malewar/Matterlogic's status message.
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, isn't 'Eureka!' but rather 'hmm....that's funny'."

And also, often what the scientists and physicists feel while working hard for these discoveries is also aptly put forward by another Matterlogic status message:
"I feel like i'm diagonally parked in a parallel universe!!!"

A lot many people like eagles for being the majestic creatures that they are. Little do they know that "Eagles may soar, but weasels never get sucked into jet engines." I forgot whose status message this was.

It is human nature to make jokes at the expense of our friends. The next one was the status message of Siva Krishna, making fun of Abhishek Chaudhary a.k.a Chow
Chow (verb.), Lacking hope. example: "After failing to impress women, Abhishek felt chowed"

Talking about friends, Anshul Singhal said:
"I don't like to commit myself about heaven and hell - you see, I have friends going to both the places :)"

Of late, I have been interested in photography and camera equipment (okay, I'll admit, I have been obsessing about it for over a year now). The following two were not status messages but forum signatures picked up when hanging around the www.dpreview.com forums
"I don't believe in fate, but I do believe in f8" - Mr. Ken Phillips

You gotta know a wee bit about photography to understand the one above, and you for the one below, you need to know about Nikon's DSLR lineup when the D700 was launched (Mid-2008-ish). This would also please the Chuck Norris fans amongst those who understand it.
"Chuck Norris round-house kicked Ken Rockwell's D3, and now we have the D700. Contrary to slanderous claims that the D3 slept with the D300 ~9 months ago!"

Last time around, after I posted the custom message post, I was requested to include a few of my own status messages. Unfortunately, I never remember mine after changing them on the messenger window. Things like twitter now help. This is what I came up during a recent week long spring break from office:
"an idle mind is truly the devil's workshop. But worse than that, it gives you way too much time to think over your own thoughts....."

Fortunately, Rishi Doshi (RiDo) has a solution:
"I like the music loud. So that I can't hear my thoughts."

In life, we are always in the pursuit of happyness, but sometimes, this is what you should have in mind when heading that way:
"If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story....." - Siddarth Khastgir

We also make a lot of mistakes in life, but I guess you'd never learn without making them.
"Here's the thing about mistakes. Sometimes, even when you know something's a mistake, you gotta make it anyway... Even really, really dumb mistakes." - Ted Mosby, Architect, from one of my fav. TV series, How I Met Your Mother.
"Everybody makes mistakes, that's why they put erasers on pencils" - I picked this one up from a blog post, don't remember whose.

For making mistakes, we often criticize a lot of people. This should help you get a little more out of that process:
"Before you criticize people, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you're a mile away. And you have their shoes." - saw this as Debjeet Sen's status message.

Talking some more about mistakes, one of my friends has caught upon a mistake countless men make. Manuj Nagpal was enlightened with this knowledge:
"Many a man who falls in love with a dimple make the mistake of marrying the whole girl."

If however you do make the mistake, the following are words of wisdom.
"Do u know why a gun is better than a wife? Because u can put a silencer on it." - TKB
"if ur wife wants to learn driving, u shudn't get in her way" - I forget whose status message this was.

We dream a lot about what we want to do and what we want to be, but be very careful, as this quote from one of my favorite game warns:
"Dreams have a nasty habit of going bad when you're not looking." - Max Payne

We all know that English is a very very strange language, with the same word having many meanings, thus leading to funny sounding phrases, strange grammar rules, and on top of that more exceptions than rules. This leads to the following observations:
"More than 1 mouse is mice; more than 1 spouse is spice." - from Bhavesh/Voice

"A famous painter met his death because he could not draw his breath." - Sonali/sonik

There's another one from Sonik, about a cold truth of life.
"If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he'll not bite you. This is the principle difference between a dog and a man."

And as long as we are back to discussing about life, I now present to you(and also close my post with) the status message that got me back into the game, and inspired me to dig out that text file and post the collection of status messages once more. I saw this as a status message a few days ago under Arijit Pal's name on my messenger window.
Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!"

Sunday, March 22, 2009

The Laziest Person On the Planet

It's Official now (atleast as per the life and happenings research department of Psycho McCrazy). I am the Laziest person on the entire planet.

I have been lazy almost my entire life, and if you ask, my parents and my aunts and uncles would vouch for that in a jiffy. I would always be totally unenthusiastic to do anything that did not interest me the least bit. Would more often that not get me into more trouble that I had bargained for, but that was my thing. It was what I did. I was lazy.

As the time progressed, I slowly joined the rank of elite procrastinators, laying off all tasks till the latest possible minute, and had even without knowing that it even existed, started following the "Theory of Round Figures". While the exact definition of this theory is something that the original theorizer only can comprehend, it generally means that the most urgent task at hand can wait till the next hour, or the half hour strike before it has to be begun.

But now, my laziness has gone to levels that the even I wasn't prepared to encounter. I mean earlier it was only the things that I disliked or did not interest me, but now even my hobbies and the things that I used to do when lazying off other real tasks have become victim of the unprecedented levels of laziness that I am displaying.

I like photography, but for the last four or so months, I have not taken out my camera and gone out of the room. I was conveniently blaming it on the cold weather, but now that the last few days have been beautifully sunny without the crazy wind blowing, (except for today, damn rain), I still cannot make myself get off my arse and take a walk outside.

I like to blog, and was pretty darn regular in college when I thought that my laziness was at its peak, with all the bunked classes, the endless hours of doing absolutely nothing, and not giving a damn about it. But now, even though there are a thousand things to choose from to write, I cannot make myself to sit in front of my monitor and type some. (Only I know how I have battled the monster of laziness to come up with this post).

I also am an crazy avid videogamer, but now a days, sometimes I am so lazy that I prefer to stay lying in bed rather than getting up, walk three steps to my chair and play on for few hours. This when I used to laze around about zillions of other things just to play for some time longer.

I mean for god's sake, have I become so pathetic, that my laziness is now getting to swallow up the things that I actually liked to do. Anyway, so far this laziness has not gotten to the point where it causes me some real damage, because as yet it has not caused me to miss work or something like that, but given the levels that it has gotten to, I'm not really sure about how long it will be before that happens. Damn, I gotta do something before it gets me!!!

Saturday, February 21, 2009

That Last Maggi!! Postcard from Japan v2.04

There are both benefits and disadvantages to spending sometime in a foreign country like Japan, away from home. The advantages, while not limited to, include the five day work week, dust free environment, the infrastructures of an developed country, going to the Tokyo Game Show and ogling at the booth babes, and the good traffic sense that allows you to ride a bicycle and keep moderately fit. Also, for those who are into experimentation about their food, a great part is that there are so many new dishes to be tried that they can spend a great amount of time on that.

The fact however remains that almost all of the items are non-vegetarian and thus to a lot of people from India that poses a great issue because of their vegetarian dietary restrictions. For someone like me however, who lies in neither categories mentioned above, while survival in Japan is pretty easy as I can eat the stuff that is available easily in the office and hostel canteens, the McDonalds and Mos Burgers at the crossroads and grab the sandwiches from the 24 hour convenience stores and eat whenever.

But, there comes a time when on the days off, the canteens are closed, one's had way too much bread and milk, and the lazy me is in no mood to go out because of the windchill, Maggi comes to the rescue. Simple enough that someone like me with practically ZERO cooking expertise can prepare it in a jiffy, and then eat it steaming hot.

Maggi has been the mainstay of bachelor sustenance for as long as I can remember, as in my elder cousins taking bucketloads of it to college, me also depending a lot on Maggi at the hostel canteen for all late night snacks, and then carrying mass quantity packets of it to both my trips to the Land of the Rising Sun. Maggi without doubt is one of the god's greatest gift to bachelor-kind, nay, mankind.

However, as I now look at the one remaining packet of Maggi remaining with me, I an wishing for the news of anyone coming here from India on any short term trip so that they can carry some and I can stock up on the supply for another few months.