God's view of the Portland team
I don't remember the name which these guys gave to their b'ball team for the conference ... pretty sure it was a goofy dumb one ...
Anyways ... I was checking out maps.google.com & I saw this new "hybrid" feature they have. Check this out ...
Dang!! now you'll believe that it's true when people say Indians prefer staying closer to fellow Indians. The red crosses (except one) are homes of the portland team players. The blue one is a home which I miss a lot. The green one is the court where (the useless ptown team and) big bj learnt b'ball. Big bj is a "specialist 2-handed 3-pointer shooter" with a record 4-in-a-row 3-ptr shooting spree!
If I moved the map a bit more to the left, I would have got Aksa's & Shannon's homes too!! That would have made it 7 red crosses in one map :D
Still bored at work ... what do I do next? ...
My workplace is on the news!
As you can see I'm so bored at work, I'm blogging within hours of putting up my last blog.
Anyways, I just saw that we came in the news.
Here is the article in Information Week. We, as in all the people I work with in my building. We were some "pilot" project for some concept commonly known as "Future of Work (FoW)". The building I'm working in, has no traditional cubes/desks. So your next question would be, am I working at the hospital, airport, station etc. Nope! We are all a normal financial company. But the cool thing about FoW here is that, we are totally mobile. We have been given laptops (really good ones in fact) which already have WiFi in them. Our phones are VoIP, which means we can make any phone in the building, ours. How? We just key in our login, and automatically all calls/messages come to that phone. There are laptop ports all over the building in open desk environments (on a normal day), smaller enclosed environments (for quieter working times), enclosed rooms (in case you're going to be on the phone a lot), leather massage chairs (these massage chairs are from Sharper Image ... so yeah they are the in-thing), conference rooms, coffee lounges (for casual chats/meets), cafeterias, etc. Here's the best part, since the whole campus is enabled with WiFi, we can sit out on the grass/lawn and still continue working. They have this treehouse kinda porch outside too ... there's wireless even there!
In fact while I was typing this blog, my friend pointed to the window behind me. I turned around and see an ice-cream truck with people already waiting in line to get some ... so I'm going to go get myself some as soon as I finish the last point ...
UPDATE
(actually the line got really really long later ... should hav taken the pic then)
Yeah ... so we're the cool guys ... but just for a short period of time, though :( Microsoft is coming out with an even bigger wireless internet working campus than ours ... and they will once again own the world ... blah blah blah!!
BRAIN-FREEZE timeeeeeeeee
Golden words indeed!
Calvin and Hobbes (Bill Watterson)"The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us."
P.S. To the anonymous person below, who called me stupid for trying to choke myself ... tell me ur name ... and im quite sure if i know u, i'll b able to say some of the stupid things u've done!
Is the periodic table next??
So I never actually enjoyed the periodic table in Chem. class ... I was reading
this article about some Stewart guy somewhere who has revised and put out a more modern periodic table which "American schools are placing orders daily for".
Then I realised ... isn't it true that ...
"
after seeing the periodic table—it seemed to me an incredible achievement to have brought the whole, vast, and seemingly chaotic universe of chemistry to an all-embracing order" It's also said about Mendeleev ... "
To have perceived an overall organization, a superarching principle uniting and relating all the elements, had a quality of the miraculous, of genius." (Mendeleev is the guy who made the periodic table, if you didn't know yet, DUH!!)
Oliver Sacks' following statement that hit me HARD was ... "
And this gave me, for the first time, a sense of the transcendent power of the human mind, and the fact that it might be equipped to discover or decipher the deepest secrets of nature, to read the mind of God."
YIKES!! It's one thing to be in awe for the Creator our God who has once again proved to be the greatest Designer & Architect there is. But it's a totally shameful notion to think that if you dig deeper, research harder & fuse things together again & again ... you will finally have the whole list of elements that can be ever created in the world & then state that you have successfull "read the mind of God".
I titled this blog so, 'cos I hope no retard would think that the periodic table is another sign that there is a Great Designer behind the existence of everything around us and ask for it to be removed from the school curriculum!! This is the US, anything can happen :P ... JK
The choking game
Many months ago ... I had gone for this Men's retreat with my church guys. I had the inevitable pleasure of having the company of the tall, not-so-dark & handsome Stanley a.k.a Jason & his redhead friend Jonathan. In fact not just their company, but the privilege to share the same room with them too! In fact Jonathan actually attended the India Full Gospel church Sunday meeting for like 30 minutes (with Jason & myself ofcourse):p
Anyways so Jason tells about this great choking game that Jon knows to do, that leaves a person in a state of trance for a few seconds. Jon (after some urging) decided to show us how it is done. He did this wierd stronghold on his own neck till he kinda passed out. He didn't actually pass out. He was more like brain-dead!! Yeah brain-dead ... he was just standing there smiling ... he was smiling when he was trying to "choke" himself ... so he just continued standing there with the same smile pasted on his face like a statue ... then he tipped over backwards and fell on the bed. He woke-up from him suspended state a few seconds after hitting the bed and was asking us what happened. He himself didn't know what happened after he tried to "choke" himself and how he ended up on the bed. Cool huh?!?
Then the two of us decide to join in on the trace ride ... So Jon does the game on Jason. Jason ended up just giving a dumb look on his face for the entire time he was in a trance. I frankly forgot how Jason's trance went exactly. Then came my turn. I remember looking at Jon's face as he was trying to do that wierd stronghold on my neck ... next thing I know I'm sitting with almost completely folded legs at the foot of the bed!! What happened?!? According to the high-schoolers, I stood only for a second or two ... then sat on the bed which was right behind me ... then I slid my butt from the bed down to the ground below & that's why I was in that position when I woke up. Wierd huh?!?
And just today, I read
this article in CNN!! They try to explain it by saying ... the choking game involves "trying to cut off the oxygen supply to the brain to achieve a type of "high" ... "
So, it's a good thing I don't explain how it is done ...
My July 4th weekend ...
Work has been so boring ... everyday I wish there is more to do. But then, finally July 4th weekend came up & I was all excited as I was going to see Niagara Falls!! Yipeee yeahhhh ... Actually I had seen the Canadian side like 15yrs ago, but I don't remember it that well. I'm an ADD victim too.
Anyways, as always I whip out my trusty little Sony Ericsson phone and take photos of things I find wierd or funny or sometime normal too.
So following are some of my observations this weekend.
#1: The No-good Truck (TNT) - HummerSo here I am filling gas just before this big road trip. (Dang, gas is getting costlier nowadays, I shouldn't have bought a V6 sucker) So this lady drives out of the gas station in a H2 with the music blaring and with no regard to on-coming traffic and just barges into the traffic lanes. She made a Corolla almost veer off and hit another car. In my mind I'm like, I wish she learns a lesson somehow somewhere. And after what seemed like eternity, the $$ in the pump stopped counting, I bought a couple of pop cans, picked up already packed up bags from home and I took my gassed-up car down the same road. And VOILA!! what do I see in front of me ... a big traffic jam in the road leading to I-95. By the time I reach the accident site ... what do I see?
The stupid lady crashed into a Cement Mixing truck and her hummer was loaded on top a towing truck!! Check out her number plate ... TNT G&J ... ha ha ha!! Now everyone knows which of the two trucks was the TNT
#2 Uniform mix-upSo my friends and myself are driving north on our way to Niagara. Somewhere in the middle of upstate NY, we stop at a big rest area for our own little golden fountains :) and the usual grub too. As I was waiting near the McDonald's counter, lo & behold I see a kid working there wearing the Ben & Jerry's ice cream uniform.
Now if you're an ice cream fanatic like me, you cannot forget the frooty n bright uniform that Ben & Jerry's has. I wonder what would the McDonald's management do, if they came to know that their own employees were advertising for other companies?!?
#3 Niagara
Wow the falls are big! The view is better from the boat down below which takes you to the foot of the falls. But once your there, there is so much water spraying on you!! there was no way I was going to risk taking out my camera and taking a photo of the better view. So this is the best I could manage before going down onto the boats.
#4 Human assembly lineWhile waiting on the top to take the elevators for going down, I saw this down below.
What you see is a line of humans entering a tent, on the othe side of the tent when they come out they are all blue in color! DUH!! Yeah they get rain coats in the tent you see. And that's why they are all blue. But the way it looks from up there is so cool!
#5 Backseat companyNow we're on our way back to NJ and my 3 great friends who promised they would give company all the while to the end are ...
... sleeping. Yes, agreed it was kinda peace & quiet in the car when they were sleeping. Once they were up, it was like a bunch of 3 kids that just got some huge shot of sugar/glucose and wanted to let it out every few minutes.
P.S. The new 2005/6 Nissan Altima rocks!! The new headlights look better than the 2004 ones. By the way, didn't do any landscaping with this Altima ... There weren't any rosebushes around :P
#6 Indian groceries ... SUBZI MANDIOfcourse we've been to Indian grocery stores in NJ tons of times. But there is this one drink that I used to love back in India and that is LIMCAAAAAAAAAAA ... I am crazy about
Limca. I just love that lemony taste it has. I miss those ads too "Limeny Lemony LImcaaaaaa".
If you look you can see the Mango juice in the cart too.
#7 Returning empty platesNow, when I was growing up, I used to see my Mom & all our neighbors exchange dishes to & fro, not just for a few weeks but for all the years I've lived there!! Whenever someone would bring a dish full of something nice, it was considered mean or taboo to return the vessel/patram/dish/plate (call it whatever!!) empty back to them. Honestly, I don't understand what's wrong with doing that?!? Give it back empty and say the dish or curry was amazing and you liked it a lot. Tell them you will get them something next time you make something nice. Is it necessary to give something right away.
Anyways here are my 2 friends returning their neighbour's plate back, but with
most of the awesome laddu's that we bought from SABZI MANDI just an hour earlier :( If only they could have just returned the plate alone :(
#8 Chicken fry
No better way to end the weekend but with spicy spicy chicken fry. YUMM!!
And that was my July 4th weekend.
