Coming Soon ...........

After a hiatus of 7 months I will be "Coming Back to Life" .............
7 months have been like a Sinusoidal Curve

I am B2B

Finally, after an year long assignment with Hewlett Packard India I am back to Bench in Wipro Electronic City campus. Yet to find out what is there in store for me in the days to come. First and foremost I want to relax for a few days as I have been working really hard for last few weeks.
It was a surprise to me when HP folks decided to bid farewell to me by taking us out on lunch yesterday to The Dhaba (on Outer Ring Road). Everyone who has worked with me during my stay at HP was there on lunch. After having a sumptuous lunch we were back in HP office and I got back to resolving issues which people had with our Framework and the API interface of the framework. After working with HP and helping them to resolve issues, I was free by 6:30 PM and for the first time in last 3 months I reached home early at around 7:15 PM.
The worst part was my headache which started troubling me since afternoon and by the time I was home it was at peak. Somehow managed to get relief from medicines and Divya Dhara (An ointment which is to be applied on forehead during headache) but only at 10:30 PM. Did not have dinner and after watching TV for a while slept at 11:30 AM.
Arrived at Electronic City at 10:30 AM and found that there has been a lot of shuffling of parking lots as there is a parking lot construction going on in EC-4 campus. Had to park my car at the other end of Wipro EC-4 campus and walked down to Tower-12 to find a place to connect my laptop and check mails.
So far so good. Need to meet up with my boss to get some understanding of the situation in Testing Services and the current openings which will suit me.

Might get to spend a lot of time on my blog for a few days atleast. Lets see how long and how much.

Started Using Internet

When I was in my undergraduate college doing computer science engineering from NIT Surat (India). In our 2nd year we got a computer centre and that was the place where I started using internet using the text based browser "lynx" on network consoles running linux operation systems.

Looking for a ruler

I wanted to see how big will a 8 inches by 6 inches envelope be and thought of printing a exact ruler

But How? I searched google for a real ruler image which can be printed on my office paper and this is what I got: Printable Rulers

Nice and Handy for a quick measurement :-)

BrightKite

BrightKite is another site which I came across while browsing through the businessweek slideshow of Best Young Tech Entrepreneur. Based on their description on their web-site:

" Brightkite is a location-based social network. In real time you can see where your friends are and what they're up to. Depending on your privacy settings you can also meet others nearby."

How good OR how bad are they will be known only when I spend some more time on their site. But time is at a premium right now. So I better get back to work, or else .........

Wild Pockets

I was going through a slide-show on the  BusinessWorld web-site about Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs 2009 when I discovered a new web-site called WildPockets.com which allows people to create 3D games by themselves. 

Just registered to try it out. They seem to have a lot of tools to design your own stuff. Be it 3D Advertisements, 3D Product features and many other things. Lets see how good it is.

Some Disappointing Updates

Building of games and other 3D content require installing an ActiveX control which when clicking on install gives an error in the WildPockets page --> Could not download the installer. Now who is playing the spoilsport here? Browser, Organization Firewall OR Wildpockets.com.

Some pics from 27th March

Its been a couple of days since I updated my blog. Yesterday while checking our art group bangaloreartforum mails, I came across a bunch of pics which Prabha had taken during our Lalbagh artist camp. I thought of uploading some of the good ones (according to me), so here they are:
Me Messing around with dry pastels














I seem to be happy, but about What?


Jagdish Sir giving Finishing Touches to my work












Our group of 5


End product after Master's Finishing touches











And the master's own work

An Interesting Book

Recently I came across a web-page (I don't remember the links which took me there) and saw a review/information about an art book which I think is a MUST BUY for me. 

Title

An Illustrated Life: Drawing Inspiration from the Private Sketchbooks of Artists, Illustrators and Designers

Author 

Danny Gregory

BAF Meets at Chitrakala Parishad

On the 12th of April, members of BAF met at a truly inspirational place - The one and only Chitrakala Parishad. Jagdish, Jyotirmoy, Subodh, Usha and a new member Hegde were a part of this meeting which took place in the entry lobby of Parishad. We came up with a couple of thoughts and decided to take up the following as our action items for coming weeks:

1. Have a road/street show of our paintings in Lalbagh (the other side which has the tower on a mountain view), but before that publish the event in all possible media (newspapers, online, Bangalore shopping guide etc.). We also plan to take our paintings to that show and see if there are any interested buyers. But the important point here is that, people should know that an event like this is happening. The date is yet to be finalized but its definitely going to take place within next month.
2. Create a new blog and upload all the soft copies of our art on that blog. The object of this blog would be to sell our paintings. All the members will send soft copies of their art and Subodh will create the blog and upload all the pictures.

Looking forward to a long weekend

As I write this post, I am looking forward to a long weekend starting tomorrow, i.e. Good Friday.

Lots of work at office and will continue to be there until I am at this location. Good part is that I will be moving from this project pretty soon.

On Sunday i.e. 12th April I would be visiting Chitrakala Parishad to see Shobha Goswami's painting exhibition and also to meet up with fellow BAF members for a quick meeting.

Rest Later

Hectic Weekend

This weekend was hectic as expected. Some updates:

1. Received my wife and son at Hyderabad's new airport (I found it much better than the Bangalore airport although both the airports are constructed by the same company :-)). I can write a lot about the goods as well as the bads about both the airports but not now, may be some time later.
2. I met 3 of my old school friends at Hyderabad yesterday. Some of them I met after almost 15 years ..... Had a great (but short) time meeting them.

Chacha Chaudhary brings me back

looking out for themselves

While reading about "Rashomon" on internet, I came across a series of links with one link leading to another and another .....

- Rashomon

-- looking out for themselves

-- Psychological Egoism

-- Circular Logic

-- Infinite Regress

All these are definitely Interesting Reads. 

Bhad-Manush & Rashomon

The setup was amazing. The cast was superb and the performances were outstanding. Based on some Japaneese story "Rashomon" (on which Akira Kurosawa has also made a movie) dealt with dual-faced human being. Quite dark some times the play was on a backdrop of heinous crime committed and the witnesses account of the murder.

Now I am into reading more about Rashomon and the ideology behind this story. Lots of information is there on wikipedia about Rashomon

Theatre

Going for a play "BhadManush". I know nothing about it, so don't even think of asking me the meaning of the word "BhadManush". Only thing I can say is it seems to be a Hindi word to me.

I will try to post some details (might include the meaning as well) about this play tomorrow, as I will be watching it tonight at RangaShankara. Show starts at 7:30 PM so I will have to start from office at around 5:30 - 6:00 pm. There might be a lot of traffic at and around BTM layout so its better to have some margin to reach the venue without getting stuck indefinitely.

The Day That Was - 27th March 2009

Wow, what a day it was. Full of greenery. This was the day when I got up at 6:30 am on a holiday took bath (Yes, thats right, it was a holiday) and reached Lalbagh at 7:45 am. I have never been so committed to the office work as I have been to this activity.
As planned, I was the second person to reach Lalbagh. Myself and Jyotirmoy started searching for a place to start. The location can not be more ideal than the one which we chose. A small hilltop from where you can see the lake and is covered by lot of trees, so there was no problem with Sun shining bright and making us sweat.
An ideal location for "plein air" painting. We waited for others to join and slowly but steadily Sankar, Prabhu, Jagdish Kadur, Usha joined us. We started painting and with lots of chatting breaks we continued. Sharing his experiences were professional artist Jagdish Kadur (who runs an art class in Jayanagar and has his own studio, which we visited later that day) as well as Usha and Prabha. Jyotirmoy was sharing his encounters with the great artists of Kolkata, and how he learnt from them.
Overall it was a great day with lots and lots of creativity flowing in and around. We ended the day at 3:00 pm and then straightaway went to Jagdish's Studio to see his paintings which he is going to exhibit in Chitrakala Parishad starting 1st April. It was a very inspiring visit to that place.
Reached home at 6:00 pm and too bath again.
Will post some pics very soon. In the meantime, please visit our official blog http://bangaloreartforum.blogspot.com for some of the pics which were taken on 27th March.

Gearing up for Lalbagh tomorrow

The 1st activity of Bangalore Art Forum is going to take place tomorrow at LAL BAGH. 

My main intention is to learn from the experts of art. I am planning to take all media which I use for my drawing/sketching/painting and some oils/acrylics as well. 

Outcome of tomorrow will be something interesting. How it goes and what I do there will be reported only after tomorrow.

You need this flying car

You don't need a pilot's license to "drive" this car.

Rasterbate your Photo

Some cool online converter which convert a photo into a big poster by splitting it into dots spanning across multiple pages. Check this out ---> http://homokaasu.org/rasterbator to understand what happens..... I have converted one of my son's pic to a rasterbated image. Let me print it and see how it looks when put together........

Man, there are hell lots of creativity going around in the world....... Just exploring and seeing those will take whole of your life.......

26th-March Update

So I did rasterbate a photo and took a print of the same (the minimum size which will look good will span across 9 pages and will be created as a PDF document). All the pages contained black circles of varying sizes with the largest being 7mm in diameter. You can select the size of the circle when rasterbating the image. Looking at those pages one after the other CAN NEVER MAKE SENSE.

First thing I did as soon as I reached home was to arrange those 9 pages on the floor. It required some Jigsaw skills to put all the right pages in order see the photo appear. Initially when I arranging the pages I was not able to see the picture clearly and a bit disappointed, but after all the pages were put in right place and I took a few steps back, Wow, my son's pic came alive. Though it is black and white (because printers in our offices are b/w) it looks pretty good. I am planning to stick all the pages together with an adhesive and then take snap of the big poster. Will post the pic on the rasterbate site (as requested by the creator) as well as here for all to see.

Geocaching

I came to know about this thing called "Geocaching". What is it? Even I don't know but when browsing through various links, I came across the following site which offers quite a lot of information and details about Geocaching:

http://www.geocaching.com

To me it seems to be an interesting thing, but only if you are an active GPS user and you "own" a GPS device. I don't know much(didn't have time to go through all the written stuff on the site to learn more about it), so I might be wrong.

Will Explore when Time Permits

Its good to get up early

After a whole 1 month I got up early today at 7:00 am. That is too early if you look at the past one month's statistics. It was difficult to get going after waking up so early, but I had to reach office before 9:00 am as I had telecon with my bosses at Wipro. Reached office at 8:45 and attended the telecon and continued working. Its been a hectic day till now.

Lets talk about some work (my work involves development and maintenance of a test automation framework using STAF/STAX and Python). I am currently working in this automation project for HP and working from their office on Whitefield road near K.R.Puram

Spent a lot of time in analyzing the problem which I am facing to handle a particular command in my API automation code. Finally I was able to work around that problem and also fixed a couple of other issues which I had seen some time back. Now actually it is getting pretty boring to keep on doing this maintenance of the code which has become too ugly. Now the customer is talking about running some 350 odd tests with API automation. That seems to be a daunting task, because I am sure there will be lots of issues related to the API code which I will have to fix. 

The weekend that was

The weekend which just passed was very dull. On top of that we didn't have our Bangalore Art Forum's meeting because most of the people were busy with something or the other. I went to meet one of my school friends (yes, friendship goes back to 1992 when I was in Standard XII at Nagpur). He also has a baby boy who is now 8 months old. Played with him for a while as  he reminded me of Vivaan, who is not with me these days as he is visiting his grandfather's place at Bilaspur.

Missing Vivaan a lot. Yesterday I came to know that he was playing with a small Pomeranian dog at my wife's friend's place. It seems he was holding the dog by his tail (just imagine the scene) and trying to pull him around. 

Waiting for him to come back to bangalore.........

Stippling - Coming up very soon

These days (as I am free after I reach home) I am back into my art. Right now I am doing some work in stippling or as some call it pointillism or dot-work with a 0.1 black pen. Pretty soon I will be done with it and then I am planning to upload some to my portfolios at artwanted & artmajeur.

I thing which I must confess is that its a real tedious style, but the result which you get are amazing (atleast thats what I feel :-)) After a couple of hours of putting dots close to each other, my hands get really worked out, but the art which appears in front of you, doesn't let you put the pen down.

Me & My SON

A recent snap which was taken at a wedding in Nagpur. Father and Son, both in "Ghajini" style attire

Blue & Sun

There are news doing the rounds in the global arena about Blue gobbling the Sun. Whats that? What is Blue and why does it want to eat up the mighty Sun? Analysts are saying that it will cost Blue somewhere around $ 6.5 billion. But who is this Blue and what is this all about eating up the Sun and that too for such a hefty amount.

Is Sun such a costly delicacy ?

2nd Meeting of BAF

Sunday: 15th March
We had scheduled a meeting at 4:30 PM in Indian Coffee House and everyone was there by that time, except me. I reached at 5:15 PM but luckily got to spend some time with everyone. Two much more experience ladies were there that day. Both of them have displayed their art works in many places. One Mrs. Shobha was an established artist, who has had around 6 shows in all over India. I am now expecting to learn a lot from them. Mrs. Shobha is again having a solo exhibition at Chitrakala Parishad starting from 6th April.
Mrs. Usha, the other lady conducts art classes at her home. Except myself, everyone seems to be a real good artist so I sometimes feel a little inferior. I know I should not and the whole aim of this forum is to learn as much as I can from artists who have more experience than my.
The greatest part of this forum will be the techniques, new styles, new mediums etc. which I will get to learn from the members. One of the first objectives which I am planning to set for myself is to learn Oil painting. This is one medium which I am really scared to use, because of 2-3 mishaps which I had with Oil colors :-)
Lets wait and watch. So far so good.

New Beginnings

Starting the journey from www.rangrasiya.com I have reached a platform where i will get to meet budding and amazing (hobby) artists from Bangalore. And believe me, we did meet (3 persons, Jyotirmoy - who initiated this forum on freedomofexpression, Prabha - An excellent artist herself and myself) at Indian Coffee House on MG Road on Sunday (8th-Mar-2009)

Looking forward to a new and good creative atmosphere where I will get to learn a lot of things in art. Came to know that Jyotirmoy knows quite a lot of artists from the Bangalore art fraternity so it will be a good chance to meet up with some great artists and learn from them.

Prabha has created a new blog to represent our forum in the internet, http://bangaloreartforum.blogspot.com

Lets see if looking at the activities happening some more people (present in the bangalore art forum community on freedomofexpression) will be motivated to come for the 2nd meeting on 15th-Mar-2009.

Vivaan turned 1

My son Vivaan turned 1 year old on 5th Nov 2008 and we went to Chhindwara (my parents place) where first we celebrated his mundan (removed his hair) and then his birthday.

Coming back to life

I think its high time now and I got to write something here in my blog. The last few months have been full of activities of various kinds and some happy and some sad moments.