Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

This is a question I get when I am looking at a lot of the blogs that I follow (including my own). Is it because these people no longer have anything to say about stuff? I know that can’t be true because I still have lots of opinions about various things and so do most of these people.

So what else could be the problem? I was talking to Aditya a couple of days ago and he asked me why the blog was updated so infrequently. My response was.. just because. Basically what seems to happen is that I get an idea for a topic at a random place (driving, in the gym, at work) and at that particular time I have no way/time to compose a blog post and post it. So it gets logged or saved as a draft on my system waiting for me to get time to elaborate it and clean it up. Lots of times it happens that by the time you get time to post something it has lost its appeal or so many people have written about it that you don’t want to become ‘yet another person’ blogging about the same thing.

As an example, a couple of years ago Prince Harry wore a swastika on his dress to a party. It created a big hue and cry and I was going to write an article on it. I thought about it on a flight, made some notes but by the time I got to the point where I had the ability and time to write an article on it 2-3 weeks had passed and it was no longer an issue I wanted to write about.

What I need is a voice to text converter software for my phone so that every time I get an idea I can dictate it to my phone and have it converted to text which I can edit and publish. So far I have not been able to find such a software but I am hopeful that it might happen soon.

Currently I have 5 posts in the drafts sections of the blog. Not sure how many of them will see the light of the day anytime soon. Lets see.

– Suramya

Just finished reading ‘Vorpal Blade’ by John Ringo & Travis S Taylor and found it to be a great book except for one small thing. The author decided to replace commonly used words with nonsensical words. Actually he just replaced two words and the words he replaced were ‘shit’ (replaced with maulk) and fuck (replaced with grapp).

Its ok when an author uses new words or makes up a word for something if it makes sense but in this case there was no reason to replace the words ’cause the book is based in the near future on earth so just replacing the words just makes the book harder to read. To give you an example below is a paragraph from the book:

“You can start going through the pile that’s portside aft is what you can do!” the gunnery sergeant snapped. “That’s all your maulk. I’m going to send a runner up to Hedge to tell him his stuff is starboard side aft and that’s about all the sorting we’re doing. When we’re done loading the maulk that ain’t grapped up, y’all can fight it out to get the rest stored!”

This book is the second book in the series and this is the first time he has done this stuff. If he had done this in the first book I don’t know if I would have read the second book. It got to the point that I was thinking about doing a search & replace in the book and then reading it.

Some authors do this replacing really well, e.g. Mercedes Lackey. In one of her books she replaced bullshit with horse-manure but she only used it two or three times in the book rather than the few hundred times in this book.

What do you think?

– Suramya

Finally watched the new Star Trek Movie today. Wanted to watch it since the day it came out but for some stupid reason the movie distributors are on strike so no new movies have been released in India for the past 1 month and there is no end in sight so far. 🙁

Anyways, I liked the movie.

BTW: The rest of the post might contain spoilers so if you haven’t seen the movie I recommend that you don’t read the rest of the post.

Not going to discuss much of the movie as it will probably spoil it for some. But still. you have been warned.

The first few minutes of the movie didn’t really make sense but after that the movie started picking up. What I found strange was that the Star Fleet decided to send the cadets to actual starships even though they weren’t trained. Where was the rest of the StarFleet? Why did they have to send the cadets to a planet that was being attacked and not the actual fleet?

Also at the end of the movie, how did Kirk go straight to being a Captain from a Cadet? What happened to the ranks in the middle? What about the rest of them, shouldn’t they also have gotten similar rank boosts?

Anyway, all said and done it was a decent movie and not the disaster I was expecting. Definitely better than the last two movies.

– Suramya