A few pictures from my vacation to Oman
Here are a few pictures from my vacation to Oman. I only wish I had longer that two weeks! I traveled with my wife, my best friend Michael, as well as my sister and her husband. We visited Nizwa, Muttrah, the Grand Mosque, as well as friends and family. The following pictures were taken with my Nikon D3000. I’ve made minor edits like straightening, or converting images to black and white. Hope you enjoy the pictures!
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Rare pictures of Trivandrum
Some of these pictures are from an album titled “Album of South Indian Views”. The pictures were taken by the Government photographer Zacharias D’Cruz. For some of these pictures, the photographer is unknown. Most of these pictures were taken in the late 1800′s and 1900′s. I originally got these pictures from Manu Prasad Revindran’s Facebook album.
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Ghost in the Machine
Yes, I know this is not a very original title, but it’s all I could think of. I’m a skeptical person (being an engineer and all) and although I love reading and listening to ghost stories, I’ve always thought that there is a scientific explanation for supernatural stories that I’ve heard. I don’t believe in ghosts either. If there is no explanation, I just chalk it up to coincidence or observer bias.
That’s what I thought until I experienced the following. Even though I still think that the vast majority of ghost stories and supernatural occurrences have real-world explanations, I am willing to concede that there may be things out there that cannot be explained. Now on to my story.
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I drew this during a meeting
It’s brown marker on napkin.
Desert: Brown Marker on Napkin
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Six-man football releases new album
Alternative indie-band Six-man football has released their latest album titled … you can get silly again.
When asked about why the band has only four members (a vocalist, lead guitarist, bassist, and drummer) they replied:
We realized that only hipsters listen to indie bands until they get popular. Also, hipsters like anything that appears “ironic”. Hence, we only have four members and we also dress in baseball uniforms. Due to this ostentatious display of irony, we expect that we will have a lot of hipster fans until word of our existence spreads to the normal population. This way, we expect to slowly, but surely, grow our fan-base.
Six-man football: ...you can get silly again
This is fake. You can make your own album cover by following these instructions:
- Get a random article from wikipedia. The title of this article is the name of your band.
- Get the last four or five words, or the very last random quote on quotationspage.com.
- Get the third picture on explore the last seven days from Flickr. This picture will be your album cover.
- Use Photoshop, gimp, or pixlr.com to create your album cover.
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DirecTV are a bunch of douchebags
So I went to cancel my DirectTV account today and discovered how difficult it was to do that. First the guy tried to get me on some other plan that was supposedly cheaper. Finally he said that there was a $220 cancellation fee because I apparently had a 24-month contract. I went on DirecTV’s website and supposedly, they do that to offset the costs of their equipment. WTF? What the hell are they subsidizing over the terms of the contract? With a cellphone contract, they provider subsidizes the cost of the phone. At the end of the contract, you pretty much own the phone. What the hell do I own here? So I asked him what the lowest plan was. It was a family plan for $24.99 but since I have a DVR with HD, I would have to pay more and so the total monthly cost was about $31. I told him I wanted to cancel the HD and he then said that I couldn’t because then I wouldn’t have any equipment. Not only that, I can’t swap out equipment. He could explain anything, and just kept mumbling “It’s in the contract… It’s in the contract”.
Finally I asked him how many months I had left on the contract. He said 11 months. As it turned out it was cheaper to pay the cancellation fee than giving those douchebags about $30, every month for the next year. So I went ahead and cancelled. I’m pretty sure I won’t ever be going with them again.
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Some pictures taken with my Nikon D3000
I bought a new camera a few months ago. It is a Nikon D3000 and it is my very first DSLR. I’ve always had point-and-shoot cameras and I’ve tried to take nice pictures with them, but they were obviously lacking. I finally decided to take the plunge and buy an actual DSLR. I got a very good deal from Amazon and got an entire kit, complete with a tripod. I also bought some filters. I’ve taken a bunch of pictures with it, but I haven’t really uploaded them anywhere. These are a few that I like; there are more and I may upload them later.
Bear in mind that the pictures are somewhat large and take a little while to load (around 10 seconds unfortunately; my upstream speed is crap).
Comments are appreciated 
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CherryBlossom
I’ve created a project page for the CherryBlossom programming language. You can check it out here. The interpreter is written in perl.
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Introducing CherryBlossom
Over the past month, I’ve been working on a new project. It’s called CherryBlossom, and it’s a way to write programs using haikus. Strictly speaking, CherryBlossom is a brainfuck analog. I actually spent more time writing the obligatory “Hello World” program in CherryBlossom than I did writing the interpreter for the language. The idea behind CherryBlossom is simple. Brainfuck instructions are mapped to words that convey the essence of the Brainfuck instruction. Of course, this is a little subjective and also a little abstract.
Ultimately, it serves as a way to make program code not just functional, but beautiful and artistic. Thus, we introduce a new criteria to programming. Your code must not only be elegant algorithmically, but must also be poetic and artistic (also, since program code consists of haikus, you need to represent your code in sets of 3 lines with the first and last lines having 5 syllables, and the second line 7. That is, conforming to haiku rules). CherryBlossom serves to blend the programmer and the poet into one entity (hopefully with amazing results).
Here is an example of “Hello World!” in CherryBlossom. I have opted to use a spruced up div tag instead of enclosing my beautiful poem in soulless sourcecode tags.
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The Problem with Shaadi.com
Arranged marriages are common among Indians. I’m not going to go into the merits and demerits of it; that’s not what this post is about. What I want to address is the problem with sites like shaadi.com that supposedly make it easier for Indian people to arrange these marriages. Now don’t get me wrong. There are many people who have met their soul-mates through shaadi.com (and similar sites). My sister met her husband through that. But the problem with these sites is that they are not geared towards the individual. Before I elaborate, we need to talk about what arranged marriages are, and why they are arranged.
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