I’ve felt three Earth Quakes in my life. Yesterday was the third one. Just thought to write about my thoughts while the quake was going on …

The first one, back in 2001, Madras. It was around 9 in the night I guess. I was sitting before a my computer (yeah, I’m spoiled right from child hood) in a dark room and editing an image to create a funny image of some bad guy behind 9/11 to show my disapproval of the attacks. All of a sudden, my chair started rocking and the first thing in my mind was … “What the hell, I didn’t even finish editing, how did they find me. Or … is it a devil?”. Then I came out and mom, granny were watching TV and I slowly asked them … did you feel any tremors … thinking that they will think I’m crazy if I tell them that my chair rocked. They immediately replied … YES! and in my mind I thought “YES!! They dint find me, and it was not a devil, it was just an Earthquake”, after few seconds.. “Wow, EARTHQUAKE!!!” and then I called up all my friends and told them that I felt an Earthquake.

The second one, back in 2009, Santiago. I working in the night/early morning 2-3AM on a package I was supposed to finish. I was very tired, but I just wanted to finish the package before I goto sleep. Then, as usual, all of a sudden there were strong tremors and the first thing in my mind was … “Am I dreaming or did I overload my brain?” .. then in couple of seconds … “Wow. Its an Earthquake and in 12 floor building which is rocking. Am I going to die today???”, then tremors stopped and I was relieved. Then Bala came out of the bedroom and looked at me … waiting for me to confirm that it was an Earthquake. He was also relieved due to different reasons when I confirmed him that it was an Earthquake. Next thing I did was tweet about the quake, called up home and a friend.

The third one, yesterday, Madras. Night 1AM, playing flash games and following a stream of worldcup USA vs UK match. Tremors -> “Wow EARTHQUAKE, I should tweet about this before others do” -> “Let me ask others online whether they felt anything” -> “Did anyone else tweet about this, search.twitter.com”  -> “Wow. Tsunami alert. Let me make fun of Anjali” -> “Okay, now, let me see whats happening within the house” -> “Hope all are safe in the affected areas” -> “Wow, my third earthquake, I should blog about this tomorrow”

And that’s how, the third one went in my mind.

And … yeah, it took an Earth Quake for me to get back to blogging :P

Day before yesterday, I went home in my car, which I wanted to do from a long time, drive home - which is around 150 km from the city where I work. One of my old friends joined me for that drive and everything went smooth. I reached there, spent time with my parents and the next day, it was the time for starting back to the city where I work.

I took my backpack, and another bag with laptop, went to my car kept both of them on the backseat of my car. My pants had only one pocket which already had my mobile and wallet and there was no more space in them. Without thinking through, I kept my car keys on my laptop bag. Then my mom called me to give me some stuff which I’m supposed to deliver to my cousin in the city. I closed the door of my car, went to my mom and … *TADA* I realized that my car has a remote lock, and it locks all the doors automatically, if the key is not in keyhole. I ran back to the car, only to find out that its locked already.

Then, my cousin and another friend called up few drivers and mechanics to find out whether they can pick the lock. Unfortunately or by good reason, it was tough to pick lock of my car and they failed badly. Then, the only other option in my mind was to get the spare key from Madras which is with my cousin.

Then, and there, he comes to the rescue. All I had to do was call him and ask him to get my spare key, which is with my cousin. He didn’t ask a second question, there was no second thought. Started as soon as I asked, collected the key, came back to my town. Dude, you are the best, I’m really proud and lucky to be your friend.

I was reading a thread on Hackers News a while before and stumbled on a site wtfjs.com. The site points some crazy things done by JavaScript, at least, that is what I thought for a while before reading comments on the thread. Then, I read the comment that the author of wtfjs is just naive and doesn’t know about floating points. For a while, I thought it was just anomaly of JavaScript ( I never had any love for things that start with the word “java”) and was totally shocked to know that it’s not just Java Script, I just had no clue about the implementation - till now and this is very embarrassing.

The results were more like our democracy. All individuals are equal, and few are just “more” equal. I’m glad that I know the problem and reason atleast now :D

The last time I was on a small learning adventure was when I was solving challenges at http://hax.tor.hu, and I managed to finish it in couple of months. Then back to boring life without learning anything new. Then, life was the usual, 5 movies a week and regular work without real use of brain.

Then, I remembered Flute, one of my teamies was a big fan of one site named Project Euler. The site is a community of people solving a bunch of math problems. Fun part, problems are challenging. To add little more to fun, you can compare your logic to others. What adds even more to fun is, those guys are crazy. Few guys solve those tough math problems in Assembly language. Yes. Assembly. And to make things even worse, for few problems, for which my code takes around 15 to 20 seconds to solve, there are logics, which solve the problem in half a second.

So, I decided to start solving the problems, with couple of aims. First, solve atleast 100 problems in next 3 months (I’ve solved around 50 in the last week, but problems get tougher after that). Second being, try to solve them with logics that take as less time as possible rather than brute-forcing everything.

Now, there is another site, which runs on similar basis, called RoseCode. There are few nice problems there too. If you enjoy solving Project Euler, you will probably enjoy this too.

Just few moments before, I thought I will create a github repository with all solutions and later changed my mind of making them public and indexable. But anyway, if you happened to start solving Project Euler or Rose Code and want to compare your solutions with mine, I’m a tweet away to send you my codes.

By the way, you might want to register WeChall, if you start solving RoseCode. WeChall is a global ranking site, which can let you fight with few nice coders/hackers etc. Also, my nickname in all the sites is [108, 97, 122, 121, 105, 100, 105, 111, 116]

Of course India. So, the latest rumour is that Mukesh Ambani is behind YSR’s chopper accident. Now, let’s go through the story.

• One Russian website tells that that Larry Summer’s ex-boss’s enemy is dead in Chopper crash. This article links to another article which tells ..
  • Larry Summer’s ex-boss’s brother (Anil Ambani) chopper’s gearbox was tampered.
  • Anil’s mechanic was killed in an accident.
  • Anil suspected business rivals to have planned for the assassination.

Mechanic who found that gearbox was tampered died in an accident two days later.

Now, what Indian media made out of it.

1. Larry Summer’s ex-boss is Mukesh Ambani
2. Mukesh Ambani and YSR had few differences
3. So, Mukesh must be reason for YSR’s death

Now, this is my take -

• One Russian Online Newspaper named “The Exiled” had an article written on 3rd September 2009, that YSR died in a mysterious accident.

Seriously ???? Indian media is digging a column in Russian newspaper, written by Mark Ames (an American Journalist, who use to write articles for Playboy) after 4 long months.

• YSR had differences with Mukesh, Anil as well as their mother over gas deposits from Krishna-Godavari basin

Yeah, YSR had differences with both the brothers who were fighting over price, and their mother, who was trying to settle it. It’s not like he took someone’s side. He was neutral, and he wanted central govt. to take decisions on the price.

• There was an assassination attempt on Anil, the medium was a helicopter. And Anil thought some “business rivals” planned this.

So, the business rival was his own brother. How about the word “coincidence” ?

These are the references from Exiled Online[1][mirror], [2][mirror]. Both articles attack Mukesh Ambani. Its obvious that none has any proofs till now and the author of article is just deducing stories by reading news items from other sources[1][2][3][4].

And the result of the above mess - Congress workers attack “Anil” Ambani’s offices in Hyderabad. Seriously ??? Anil Ambani, himself was a victim in the above story, and his offices are being attacked.

So, TL;DR - One wannabe fiction writer, creates a conspiracy based on various articles. Hungry for sensation - Indian Media sensationalize the story after three months. Work-less political party workers attack younger brother’s offices even though the villain in the conspiracy is the elder brother.