An early visit to the exhibition

We went to the Madurai exhibtion last week. As hostel friends would be leaving home early we planned an early visit and ended up seeing how the shops are built. The exhibition looked a lot different with very little crowd and very few shops. It was a different experience.  As there were very few shops and entertainment aspects we were walking around the whole ground chatting and at times peeking into the shops. Usually the policemen, with the thought of being more vigilant and people friendly are usually hard on college students moving around as a group. This time it did not happen.  We ended up visiting stalls put up by the police department, wildlife department, fisheries, IT department, Madurai corporation. The stalls were informative and were the only place where one could spend some time. One interesting information is that, the road from thiruparankundram C2 police station (TCE college stop) to Thiruparankundram stands second in the road list where more number of accidents happen. Surely, it was not the right time to visit madurai exhibition but its a different exhibition i have seen. Soon it would reach its peak and would demand one more visit. Think that visit would be a lot different.

Disappointing World cup

Inzi retires from ODI after the worst run in world cup. Bob woolmer died under suspicious conditions. Younis Khan declines the offer for captaincy. The batting legend Lara retires from ODI. England coach Duncan Fletcher's term ends and ECB is not in a mood to continue his contract. West Indies coach Bennet King resigns. Above all this Stephen Fleming steps down from the position of New Zealand ODI captain after loss in the semi final. There is only one team whose members are undettered by the early exit from world cup. Except for few angry exchange of words, nothing has happened. Yes, I am talking about the mighty team india. Dravid is the only captain with fighting spirit. Despite the shameful exit from world cup, Dravid is still fighting for endorsements. Hats off to him.

On the whole this world cup turned out to be a disappointing one for me. No team played to its capablity. No team in the super eight was competent enough to face Australia. The result of the super eight matches were easily predicable (except for the one between bangladesh and south africa). The condition would have been different if India and Pakistan had qualified for the super eight. With just the final remaining there is no use in talking about this. Though i hate both the lankans and aussies, i would be supporting the aussies in this final.

Spectacular Show

Twelve suryakirans, the front line aerobatics team of IAF (Indian Air Force) were here in Madurai for the first time and left the people mesmerized with the skills they exhibited here on Wednesday. Suryakiran is one among the three teams in the world who are capable of flying nine flight formation.  The other two being to Royal air force and Canadian air force. They left the Madurai people awestruck with their acumen and precision.

The decision to go to the show was taken in the morning and after going to college found that 90% of the final year students have taken the same decision. Later that evening we realized that reaching the destination is going to be a herculean task as about 75% of the Madurai population were heading for the same location. The fifty buses organized by Madurai corporation were not at all enough. A little away from the location traffic came to a halt. We were left with no option other than relying on our feet to reach the destination.  We were forced to run a half marathon in the road packed with vehicles.

We reached the location just in time to see the Mi-8 helicopter leaving the crowd after showering flowers. Then began the spectacular show. The six suryakirans started exhibiting their skills.  The twenty minutes show started with the phoenix formation and continued with rising sun formation,rays of sun, dives, barrel rolls etc etc. The crowd erupted when two suryakirans created the heart symbol in skies.

The pilots manoeuvred the flight through the open skies with great precision and speed. The return journey was more difficult. There was no space to walk on the road and as usual autos and two wheelers were taking pleasure in blocking the way. At last we reached the bus stop walking through dust and dirt and when we came out, we were stinky with smell of sweat. Later i had to take bath in the middle of night to get back to normal. I should consider myself lucky as there were some who came all the way from the other end of Madurai just to know that the show has ended. Anyway the pain was worth taking, as it was a spectacular show by the fearless falcons of the Indian air force.

Unnale Unnale

A post about a tamil movie after a long time. Unnale Unnale happens to be the fourth movie i have seen in theatre this year after Guru, PKMS and Mozhi. The film had a lot of expectations bcoz of the super hit songs and director Jeeva's fame. Should say the film lived up to its expectations. Like his previous film Ullam Ketkume this film also targets the youth. The story is all about love and how possessiveness of gals affects love.

The hero vinay is a fun loving freak who loves to enjoy every moment in life. Opposite to his character is the heroine sada is a lot possessive and wants his lover to do what she wants.  Unfortunately both of them happen to be lovers and their characters sparks a lot of fight between them. Actually the story starts with the split up between sada and vinay. Then you have a little flash back about what happened between sada and vinay. What happens between vinay, sada and tanisha forms the rest of the story.

Not much in the story but Jeeva handles it story  meticulously. Dialogues being simple and straight is a major plus oint in the movie. You could see traces of madhavan in some of vinay's actions and smile. In fact vinay looks a bit like young madhavan. Sada and Tanisha do their job perfectly. Picturisation of songs too good. Overall it a great movie but half of the lot have other opinions about the movie. Some said the movie is only for lovers but it was interesting to guys like me also.

Cant wait till july 21 (Not for muggles)

July 21, the day half of the world may be waiting for. The day when the final masterpiece of JKR, Harry potter and the Deathly hallows would be released worldwide. That contains the solution to most of the questions purposivley left unanswered in the sixth book, Harry potter and the half blood prince and is expected to be the most interesting among the seven. No wonder JKR is a great story teller. She has handled the plot so well and it has left the whole fan community speculating about the story line of the seventh book. Many had come with wonderful theories about the seventh book with excerpts from previous books supporting their theories. Most of them feel that Regulus Black is R.A.B., Half of the fans are convinced that dumbledore is not dead and feel snape killing dumbledore is just a drama staged by dumbledore and snape but JKR interview's suggest something different. Finally there are hard proof theories claiming harry to be the seventh horcrux. These speculations are quite interesting to read indeed.

The answers would become apparent once the book is released. With expectations building i am set to read the six books again before the final one is released. Though there are a lot of speculations about the final book it would be interesting to see how it has been handled by JKR. The only thing i hate in that book would be the death of main characters. Should wait to see what happens.

Doing it simple

Was chatting with one of my friends sometime back. We were talking about reducing the size of the pictures taken using our digital camera for uploading in web. Though he has GNU/Linux installed in his system he sticks on to windows for doing most of his job. He had been using the paint program to reduce the image size. I had been doing it using GNU/Linux and it looks pretty simple. So thought of blogging about it. Came across this utility called "convert" a longtime back when i was trying to use my own grub splash image. This site http://jaeger.morpheus.net/linux/grubsplash.html contains a lot of information about creating your own grub splash images using convert. Follow the link to know how to create your own grub splash images.

Convert comes as a part of Imagemagick package that provides a set of command line utilities to create, edit and convert images. Convert is a utility that can be used to perform a number of operations like changing the resolution, changing the colour scheme, changing the format of picture etc etc. Convert has made the job a lot easier. The man pages will give more information i suppose. It was this tool i use to reduce the size of the images. To make the job much more easier wrote a simple python script which when supplied the source image directory and destination image directory as arguments, uses "convert" to convert the all the images in the source directory to the required form and stores it in the destination directory. The script can be found here. Convert proves to be a really handy tool indeed.

Google Papers

This is about the latest news from and about google but a little late also. If you know about this you know what to do. Google after establishing its supremacy in the email world with gmail has turned its attention towards postal mails. Google has started a new service called google papers. Google will send hard copies of the mails you want and will let you keep the paper copy of the mails apart from the electronic mail stored in its server. That means you can get hard copy of the emails your girl friend sent you and read it again and again whenever you want. Check out this page to know more about the Google Paper.

http://mail.google.com/mail/help/paper/index.html

If you feel elated and impressed with this, i request you to take a look into the comments. This post is incomplete without the comments.

Totally disgusting...

This is something about indian politics or to be specific tamil nadu politics. Supreme court announced its decision to stay the 27% reservation in IITs and IIMs few days back. This post is not about the decision. One could talk about whether quota is needed or not for days. Actually i have done that many times usually with my friends who have different opinion about the issue. My personal opinion is that quotas are barrier to the development of the country. This post is about what happened after that.

Once the decision was announced, the tamilnadu government announced a one day strike on the pretext of reflecting the view of the people. It looks more like an individual decision than that of people. It was a decision taken hastily by the politicians just to maintain their status.  They could take the credit for disturbing almost everyone in the state. When it comes to disturbing people, the parties forget the differences and work together. Like when the government decided to cancel the Common Entrance Test, the only exam that tested 0.0001% of the intelligence in students all the political parties joined together and abolished it. When something good is proposed they find various flaws and put the plan to sleep. Everything works according the wish of the politicians and they work for the votes and not for the people. Democracy has taken a new meaning. Democracy is by the politicians, for the politicians and of the politicians.