captcha of the day

VW accounts for female drivers

Egg sketches and photos

Here. Enjoi

This was too hilarious to pass up on

Please tell me that I am not the only person who finds this funny.. it appeared on my Facebook RSS today.

Pics from last birthday

It started off as an innocuous evening with C and me watching a random movie, and then people started streaming in. Turned out that my roomie, the resourceful Moitra had pulled off a surprise birthday party.

There was cake, and junta who wanted to help smear it all over muh face. A good time was had by all.

Fun leetil test!

Try it out!!

So we went to Hell

Yeah, on the 2nd of November, just for a lark. Hell is a tiny hamlet in Michigan, occasionally a popular tourist destination. They even boast a tiny post office where you can send yourself or anyone else a postcard marked from Hell. And if you ask for 'the works', they will be happy to singe the edges of the card with a jury rigged cigarette lighter which fires a scary 8 inch long flame. Quite cool. Highly recommended to everyone.

Webcomic

Nandi sent me this.. check out.. a good take on physicists..

Pradeep Babu's Happy Birthday

Pradeep Babu turned something this year. Just this last week in fact. So, I decided to call the C, the Nandi, the children over to celebrate the birthday, with the Padalas' (Rachna and Pradeep) being the guests of honour. A good time was had by all (methinks) with some nice cooking from the C, the Nandi and the kid. We toasted Pradeep Babu with wine poured thoughtfully by our evening's sommelier, Nandi into.. teacups! That, and Pradeep trying to blow out a lighter (no candles, sorry) were the mildly hilarious points of the evening. Many thanks to the C for das photo.

Safecracker in shorts

So we legged it up the crooked steps into the hotel lobby. Or what looked like a lobby. We, I may point out is the esteemed big sis, henceforth referred to as S and yours truly. We carried between us, a backpack, a camera bag and a fookin' huge Samsonite suitcase with a combination lock. I lugged the suitcase through the confusion of Frankfurt's Hahn airport, through the greater confusion of Rome's Ciampiano airport and down a shady side alley where the cobblestones were pockmarked with small treacherous craters. Fookin' cobblestones!! Now I should really explain my resentment at them cobblestones.... back in India, which is home for me, one never drags one's suitcase along the road. You get a rickshaw or something which helps.. and is never super expensive. In the US, on the other hand due to the pervasive strength of the ADA, you can drag anything with wheels. Anywhere!

Add to that the minor complication that one day before flying out from Detroit, I had taken a tumble down the stairs at home and had a badly sprained ankle. More fun!! Anyway, we found ourselves in the hotel lobby and face to face with .. a pheun. Very surreal. One might even suspect that the Wachowski brothers had something to do with this. I pick up the pheun and after some time am directed by this disembodied voice to get my arse up to the fourth floor. Well, as S and me are hauling our gear into the tiny contraption that passes for a lift, this bloke with long graying hair squeezes his arse into the lift. I glare. He smiles back.

We finally make it, via much creaking and clanking of fairly ancient machinery to the fourth floor, where as it happens, said long hair is our night manager. Having signed in and collected our keys, we get to the dorm and prepare to doss down. The loo (unisex) is, thankfully clean; and also thankfully populated by a couple of fairly good-looking birds, who, less thankfully are of the giggling persuasion. Sod.

I lock up my passport, money and stuff in the suitcase and crash for the night, my camera bag snug against my feet. In the morning I am woken up by the big sis and grab a quick cuppa from a conveniently located vending machine. And then promptly discover that somehow the combination lock refuses to budge. Sod. 999 combinations to run through… but the lock has the proverbial steely glint where it would have eyes, had it been human. This was not planning to open up. After ranting and WTFing around in my shorts for a while, I realize the desperation of the situation. All my money, my passport, my fookin’ toothbrush, for crying out loud, kept from me by a couple of centimeters of thermopolymer and steel! And my clothes. Bereft clothes, a man has no dignity. I mentally see myself explaining myself to a cop or a Samsonite repairman in what is basically my undies’ and I shudder. Big sis, quite sensibly has kept a change of clothing handy and is not in the quagmire I find myself in.

Finally, I decide to leg it up to the fourth floor where the somewhat bleary eyed night manager is negotiating with some random blonde. And I ask, very politely for a crowbar. The night manager gives me the once over. Bleary eyed, unshaven, bloke in his undies. Asking for a crowbar. With commendable restraint; he enquires as to the purpose. With equal restraint, aplomb even, I explain. Brief silence. Finally something falls into place and he recognizes me as the bloke from last night. And recognizes further, the desperation not quite hidden away behind the aplomb. In undies, I might add. And offers me the biggest fookin’ screwdriver and what looks like a Grenadier’s entrenching tool. I thank him from the bottom of my heart and return.

Now begins the process of safecracking. I imagine Richard (Feynman) would have a lot to say about my lack of expertise. But I got it, finally.. I managed to jimmy the damn lock open. This event was recorded for posterity by the sis. The lock, of course refused to work any further. So we decided to grab all the valuables and keep them on our persons. Anyone interested in sniffing old socks was welcome to. And then, we went to see the Colosseum.

The human mirror.

All it takes are a few groups of identical twins. Read on about the prank pulled on the subway here. Also check out pictures here and here.

What would Richard Feynman do?

This, apparently...

Of parties, pictures and movies, of looking at cars and thinking about binary search as a tool for finding a girlfriend.

This has been a totally crazy weekend, with an equally crazy week before it... last week I bummed out after running close on to one and a half days of experiments with a crummy lock on ze spektrometer. Needless to say, I was suitably morose. Anyway, the experiments have been run, this time, properly (I hope).. so the advancement of science has not been delayed too much!! The weekend before last, I was taking pictures for the ICMD concert.. and the link is here.

The 30th evening saw my friends Rachna and Pradeep drop in at 11.45 and demand to be entertained until midnight, at which point I was to cut a birthday cake and celebrate. It had been a horrific day with labwork and teaching, and I am sure it was not a leisurely day for my friends either. Moral- I have great, wonderful, precious friends.

The 31st saw my roomie Young Saumen having organized another cake party with a whole bunch of youngsters... yes, at this point its worth mentioning that I turned 26 last week. Not a happy event... apart from the failed experiments.. there is the overwhelming realisation of a life mostly filled with pedestrian achievements... to wit, Asimov had published his greatest work, 'Nightfall' when he was .. what 21? Lawrence Bragg was a joint winner of the Nobel prize at the age of 25 for his work on XRD. Alexander started his conquest of most of the known world when he was hardly into his twenties. Chandragupta Maurya defeated this exact same Macedonian Empire and created the first unified Indian Empire when he was 20. I am in graduate school, for what looks like a large fraction of eternity. There is something relativistic about this.. my friends in the real world have jobs, usually on their second jobs by now. Well, apropos the previous statement.. I have good friends. There are nice things.

Anyway, we had a fairly large potluck with all these friends on Friday night.. which went on into the wee hours of Saturday. The food was pretty uniformly excellent... as was the 'surapaan'. Saturday was devoted to looking at cars and Nandi discoursing upon the use of binary search to look for girlfriends. But much more on that later..

Combinatorics

Disclaimer: came across this on orkut. thought i should put it here for kicks.
Commentary: There are 12 X 31 X 12 or 4464 choices... sooner or later, someone will end up humping a goat because the voices told them to!!

Pick the month (number) you were born in:

1----i shot a
2----i ate a
3----i smacked
4----i sang to
5----i fell in love with
6----i murdered
7----i gave my number to
8----i gave a lap dance to
9----i chocked on
10---i bitched out
11---i had sex with
12---I humped



Pick the day (number) you were born on:


1-------A homeless guy
2-------your mom
3-------a banana
4-------a fork
5-------a mexican
6-------a gangster
7-------a ninja
8-------an ipod
9-------my best friends boyfriend
10-------a goat
11-------my dog
12-------my dad
13-------the computer
14-------my science teacher
15-------my neighbor
16-------myself
17-------a jones soda
18-------a llama
19-------a pickle
20-------a stuffed animal
21-------a permenant marker
22-------a policeman
23-------a condom
24-------a baseball bat
25-------my psychiatrist
26-------my brother
27-------my sister
28-------a football player
29-------a dvd player
30-------a paperclip
31-------my cell phone

Pick the color of shirt you are wearing:

White------Because i was high.
Black-------Because I was drunk.
Pink--------Because im a homosexual.
Red---------Because the voices told me to.
Blue--------Because i cant control myself.
Green------Because I hate myself.
Purple------Because Im naked.
Gray--------Because thats how i roll.
Yellow------Because someone offered me 1,000,000 dollars
Orange----Because i hate my family.
Other-------Because that's how I roll.
none------because im sexy and i do what i want

And then combine what u have made an' post it here as a comment
u'll get really creepy an disturbing things from it