My Love Story - Books

Books are great companions that are always by my side wherever I needed or not needed. Just carry a book everywhere, it will always act as a filler for boredom. I am forever grateful to my pal Sridhar who introduced me to this wonderful hobby. Back in engineering days he gave me this book, Jurassic Park, written by one of my favorite author, Michael Crichton. That is when I fell in love with books.

Recently I finished The Krishna Key. It is our own Indian version of The Da Vinci Code. It was a page turner with anagrams, interesting characters. There are characters equivalent to Robert Langdon, Silas, The Teacher, Bishop Aringarosa etc. I like the way author explains importance of 108, connection of 786 to 'Om'. This book also added new goals to my travel love story. One day, I want to visit Somnath Temple in Gujarath, Vrindavan and Mount Kailash.

It has pure Indian connection, as the name clearly indicates, it is about Krishna. Author has done a neat job of connecting a lot of dissimilar things to carve a fiction story. Somewhere in the middle, though I was loosing interest, the story immediately gained momentum. Prior to this, I enjoyed living through Shiva Trilogy.

I am not a fast reader. I enjoy imagining the whole scene and become a part of it. There is also a phenomena called Post-Read Depression. Last time I went through this was when I finished 7th part of Harry Potter series. After I completed this book, I didn't know what to do. I took some time to come out of depression, reading the 7th part second time also helped!

Now that I have finished a book, I enjoy choosing the next book. I have been planning on a non-fiction from sometime. Thus my love stories continue....

Love, Life - wandering thoughts

"Love" as a noun means "A strong positive emotion of regard and affection". I am referring to this meaning of "Love" in this post.

It is such a wonderful state of mind to be in Love with someone or something, it can not be explained in words. One has to go through this state to feel it. When one is in love, one starts to live for it (Listen to 'Find Yourself' from Cars!). As one lives through it, one will make a love story. The story invariably ends or looses its intensity at some point in time(Could be happy ending or otherwise).

Now, what next? I think this is very unstable state. One becomes very unproductive in this state. Lot of questions start haunting the mind. A slight negative thought is disastrous in this state. This is also the beginning of a change.

What I propose is that one should start finding the next thing to fall in love with. I think falling in love is the most important and beautiful thing.

e.g. Fall in love with music, learn a musical instrument. Live for it, live in it. Life seems so beautiful.

For geeks, fall in love with a technology and live learning it and live in it.

For elevated souls, fall in love to bring a change in society. Fall in love with nature, follow every rainbow, climb every mountain.
But there are some things that are impossible to fall in love with. Don't loose heart, that is where movies like 'Lucia' comes to help. Fall in love with such things in your dream. Live the impossible in your dream.

Wow... there are so many things to fall in love with. One life is not enough to love everything that is out there!

Lucia - One of a kind movie

"ನೀ ಮಾಯೆಯೊಳಗೊ, ನಿನ್ನೊಳು ಮಾಯೆಯೊ" (Are you inside an illusion or illusion inside you)

This was the whole essence of this movie "Lucia". This is one of the best movies I have watched in Kannada. This has everything - Simplicity, Energy, Life, Love, Dream, Melody, Deception, Fear, Comedy, Greed, Reality, Colors, Devoid of Colors and so on... in appropriate quantities.

This was the second of all the movies I have watched in theaters that I wanted to watch again... no, I wanted to live the movie again.

Songs are very different, people will have their reservation to like or dislike. But I liked.

I don't want to write more. This movie should be watched in theater and one should live the movie. Watching this movie a second time will make it a very different movie.

Director Pawan Kumar has amazingly played with colors(and devoid of colors). Hats off to you Mr Pawan. I am sure you will go places.

As I write this post, I am listening to the very song sung by Sri Vidyabhushana Swamy. Aha, I wish I get lost in my dream, and I think my dreams are devoid of colors.

Restarting digital life...

I knew Google was going to stop their Reader service. I had several bookmarks stored in Google reader I was following regularly. All these days I was so occupied in life, I had not realized that Google indeed had already stopped the service. Now that I have some time for myself, I tried exploring what is happening in digital life. I realized that I have lost all my RSS feeds.
I had lots of blogger friends, I don't know how to get back with all of them.

May be that is an indication for me to clean up my mess and a fresh start. That sounds good. It appears to be in alignment with what is happening in life at a macro scale. I am figuring out how to create and sync feedly on all my digital life interfaces.

Rooting my phone

Finally I rooted my Sony Xperia Neo V to Cyanogenmod Jellybean 4.1.2. I was very reluctant to do this from quite some time.

Thanks to my pal Sridhar who thinks rooting the phone is a matter of fact. Having not rooted the phone this long, I felt like I am an outlier(in negative way) in Android world. I still remember the days when Sridhar told one day that he formatted his hard disk. That was about 14 years ago. I was beginning to learn about hard disk, yet formatting it was already a matter of fact to him. Those are the days....

Coming back to reality, my stock ROM had become a pain to use. As with all mid range Xperia phones, 358MB of RAM, 420MB of internal flash will leave the user with no choice but uninstall an app to install a new one. The phone was so slow that it would show called ID couple of seconds after starting to ring. I had to revive it or brick it.

Whole process was straight forward. I could not get fastboot detect the device on Windows, so did the whole thing on Ubuntu. Now I feel like it is a new phone. So responsive, ability to install apps on SD card, I am feeling like I have a new phone without spending a penny(but of course few hours of time). UI is also refreshing.

Migration to Jellybean is what excites me. I am more interested in Google Now, the feature where the phone starts learning about me. When other humans, including myself, could not understand me, I wonder what will phone learns...

So far, Jellybean has been sweet, everything is working as expected, hope it continues to be that way....

Happy Navaratri!

Happy Navaratri wishes to one and all. May the goodness prevail over all the evil in the world.

I was in US last year during this time. This year I am very much here, had good time washing my car after a long time. The exercise made me feel all rusted rusted parts of my body. I felt good when finally my car looked spic and span, barring a handful of scratches here and there. The bike did not get as much attention as all overexercised parts of the body had started singing.

It was a good scene on roads as all vehicles were wearing a new makeover. Washed, decorated with flowers, colors, banana plants(not sure if it is called something else?). I wonder how many lemons were crushed today!! I did a handful of them...

100th post!!

Whoa, it is my 100th post. Is that an achievement, I don't know. 100 posts in 8 years. When I look back and analyze the number of posts per year, the more I wrote, more I was being myself.
The year 2012 was a very challenging year. The year which saw a new comer, losing someone very close. The year I started questioning my own deeply rooted beliefs about what I believed as the most important ingredient of life.
I bid farewell to 2012 standing on top of Vaishno Devi shrine, hoping genuinely 2013 will bring new perspective in life. While the year did bring some clarity, it has not been very easy one.
For an aquarian born, having INTP personality, I guess I can handle the challenges very well. I am well aware that I will be facing many cross roads in the year to come. It is a tough job to choose right path as life does not offer an 'Undo' function.
Hoping to be more of myself....

Raspberry Pi it is!!

I managed to boot Raspberry Pi today. These are my first impressions.

I powered it using my Samsung micro USB mobile charger. Connected to LG 32" TV using HDMI cable. The awesome part is Keyboard and Mouse! Logitech RF wireless Keyboard and Mouse worked like a charm when I connected the dongle to USB. RJ45 cable connected to Router and Ethernet port on Raspberry Pi. SD card loaded with Raspbian "Wheezy" OS image.

It booted to command prompt. "startx" started the Xwindow system. It was nice to see my entire TV as desktop. Midori browser connected to internet effortlessly! Was happy to see my blog. Logged into facebook.
I wanted to publish this post from the pi itself, but google disappointed me. For some reason midori could not go past google accounts login page. Youtube was also disappointing as there was no flash player installed. I could not install any other browser too. Hoping to explore more over weekend!