K World

I was talking to a friend couple of days before. Because of my “The Road Not Taken” problem, he was already little pissed off that I’m about to take a decision which would prove that I’m scared of trying something new.

Leaving that aside, yesterday he saw that Safari 3 Beta for Windows was released (It might be released long time before, he don’t know about windows as he is OS X user) and told me to give it a try. I replied him that I’m quite happy with the way Firefox works. He tried telling me that rendering speeds of Safari are better that firefox etc etc. What ever he is telling is true, actually many people consider that Safari is the best browser available (atleast on OS X, and thats debatable) But, I wasn’t ready to give it a try.

Then he told me something which made me think, actually think a lot. He told me that I tend to become comfortable with my Good Old Life and I don’t want to try anything new. After recollecting so many things like in both life as well as technology aspects. I don’t want to about my out-of-comfort actions in life. The following are few things which came into my mind when I thought about Technology and my Out-of-comfort actions.

• I wouldn’t have tried installing Windows 3.2 on a computer with Windows 98, when I hardly knew how to shut down windows just to see how an old version would look like …
• I wouldn’t have tried having multiple operating systems - 98 and 2000, when I hardly knew that there are many filesystem types, and 98 doesn’t support NTFS …
• I wouldn’t have installed Redhat 7.2 on my computer in my B.Tech second year, when none of my friends or my lecturers or me hardly use to use linux or even knew about it …
• I wouldn’t have tried installing Gentoo on my machine, when I hardly knew whats a Gentoo portage was …
• I wouldn’t have tried doing Linux From Scratch or creating a distro of my own-rules and called it KiX after doing my B.Tech even before I knew about those steps involved it doing it …
• I wouldn’t have tried installing DesktopBSD on my computer and mess up my Partition Table and then edit the partition table by calculating sectors of partitions manually using some tool (This itself is a big journey which I don’t remember clearly, but I’ve used some tool given on Hiren’s Boot CD and a calculator and managed to get my partitions back without losing any data .. But, I remember date exactly 19 Aug 2005, 1 day before I gave aptitude test of my current employer)
• I wouldn’t have installed three operating systems(98, XP and Gentoo) on my machine just to make sure that I can run all the applications
• I wouldn’t have done my B.Tech project in Python when I knew that I’ve to start my project review by explaining the guys sitting there that this Python is NOT a snake but a programming language
• I wouldn’t have tried to move my blog from blogger to my own domain when I was pretty much OK with my Google blogging service
• I wouldn’t have changed 15 mobiles in last 18 months

Guess, these are good enough to convince myself that I’m not a person who is scared of trying something new. But, then, to make him happy, I installed Safari on my box. It’s a good browser, but I’m yet to become comfortable with it. I’m just letting it stay in my box along with 3 other browsers - FF, Opera, IE (and Lynx, installed on cygwin, which I use once in a while for fun)

Yes, I tend to be happy with my Good Old Life, but, I’m not scared of trying something new. I would certainly try if its worthy of giving a try.

Guess, you’ve seen my old blog and came here. Updating what happend here on this blog … I took certain care on the following items

• Theme isn’t black anymore, though I can’t guarantee that it would be same.
• Well, no-more-blogger-service. I’m sure that I’m not going back to blogger. One Google service abandoned.
• All posts and comments are migrated to this blog, so if you want to read any old posts, you need not go back to that dark page. All you would need to do is update your bookmarks or subscriptions in your feed readers.
• Added some ajax-plugins for wordpress to make it easy browsing archives. Looking forward to make it better.

There are certain things going on in the back end. Will update you guys about them very soon. PS: Thanks a lot to Sunil Biswal for suggesting the domain name.

The following is the poem “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost which I saw in my school days.

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Wondering what is so special about this poem ? The poem can be related to all our lives. All our decisions. When you are going to take some big decision, you think a lot, you take advice from your friends, relatives, seniors.

After all that, you take some decision - which is going to change atleast some smaller or bigger part of your life. You might feel that the decision which you made is not good for you or may be the choice which you didn’t select was a great one. Well, there could be a chance that you can trace back and do the missed option. But, not every one could be that lucky.

I’ve taken many not-so-big decisions up to now - like “Further Studies” or “Job” … Actually, I don’t know whether it’s big or not. But, I can certainly tell that, my decision was completely biased one. Job looked desperate for me when I was taking that decision. To be clear, Job @ My Current Employer looked like LIFE to me. But, after took that decision, life was steady for 6 months. Then, the factor which made be biased towards Job felt like nothing. I started thinking about the Road Not Taken … but, I actually never felt that I did something wrong just coz, I’m happy with my Job even if life wasn’t so happy.

Now, I’ve a decision to make. A road to be taken. Both roads look good to me. One road is a high-paced all-comfort all-people-want-to-go road which all usually prefer. One road is a different-yet-great scenic-country-road which I would enjoy to the core. But, here I’m not biased towards any of those roads so that I can take a faster decision like I did previously. I wish, there’s a reason as strong as my previous one which would make me biased towards one of those roads.

[Taken with Canon Digital Rebel XTi on 30 Sep 2007, 12.20 AM]

I’ll give you all I got
If that’s what you want
I’ll give you what I got and more
But just see me through and through
That’s all you got to do
But don’t you dare give dare give dare give me
Artificial Love

[Taken from Bambi - Artificial Love]

I like flowers, especially flowers with water drops on them. When ever I see them, I couldn’t stop myself from capturing them. Almost all the snaps I take are special to me. I see them again and again. While taking them, I take so much time that my friends usually get frustrated by the time I take to take a single shot. As I try to give 100% of myself to that particular shot while framing it, some times, I get decent shots like the above one.

You need not observe the picture carefully to find that the flower is artificial, but if you have to see carefully to find that those drops are not water drops. I really don’t have anything to tell anything about the camera or the shot or the mode or the focal length used to take the shot. There is something different I sense from the picture.

It’s beautiful. But, it’s fake … just like that special “someone” you met in your life. Everyone of us would have met that “someone” atleast once in our lives. That “someone” could be the person whom you’ve loved sincerely or the person whom you would have considered as your best friend or even a person from your family. If you think that you haven’t, the truth could be you haven’t sensed it or you are just one lucky person in this world. But, when you come to know that you are not a lucky person, all you would be doing is tracing through the steps written in one of my previous posts.

Everyone of us would have had some minor to major crushes or even serious loves which failed. For “you” who is reading this right now and comparing the artificiality of this flower to the artificiality of love that your “Ex” showed you … I’ve one thing to tell you.

The flower is fake just like her love
No big deal of blaming her now
The drops are fake so were your tears
Even a cyclone stops as the sky clears
You moved on for the greater future
That’s the same you would get for sure
[Some random rhyme is never a crime]

I wrote this blog post without thinking. One random thought and a very random post. If it makes any meaning, good; otherwise sorry for wasting your time. In a nutshell, I wanted to tell you one thing - If you are a victim of artificial love, just move on. It’s everywhere.

Even though, all my optimist expectations on World Cup became true, I had a very pessimist expectations on outcomes of Indian win.

1. Twenty20 World Cup will be conducted once in every two years. Does that mean, once in two years, there are more chances of mobs burning effigies of cricketers or cricket board as well as state governments pouring money on cricketers.
2. Yuvi is given 1 crore as well as a Porsche 911 by BCCI for his 6 sixers on England and 70-run knock in Aussie match. India played like a team where Yuvi made his mark in 2 out of 6 matches, where as contributions of players like Gambhir, Uthappa, RP Singh, Irfan Pathan, Bajji and even Sreesanth were of greater use in remaining matches. We need to remember that Yuvi was indirect reason for the defeat with NZ giving 38 runs in 3 overs (20 odd runs in single over) runs in single over and scoring just 5 runs in the match. When each and every player played an equally important role in the series, those two giant goodies from the board went only to Yuvi which can certainly make remaining players think.
3. Goodies given to the players by their respective state governments is a different thing. But, this is made an issue by players of another game, Hockey. Indian Hockey Team, which won Asia Cup without losing a single match and with record performances like thrashing Sri Lanka with 20-0 certainly couldn’t withstand the step-motherly treatment for the national game by central and state governments and is now planning to go on a hunger strike.

When a go-straight brain like mine could see so many problems, I wonder what would those complicated brains perceive all this.

Taking all these complications into account, Indian Government either has to check all these goodies given “only” to cricketers or it should start giving bank checks with similar numbers on it to players of other games too.

Update: The complicated brains have started analysis on “Why was Team India in the back row ?” while the front row was occupied by great ministers of Maharashtra and greater BCCI crowd. Great to see that it became a political heavy weights’ meeting rather than the function to honor the World Cup winning team.