Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

March 31, 2021

French monks praying for buyers for 2.8 tonnes of cheese from their monastery

Filed under: Humor,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 11:59 PM

The Covid lockdown had a major impact on small/medium scale business worldwide though it was absolutely required. It still caused a lot of economic hardship for people and there is a French monastery located south of Dijon in Paris that has a major problem. Due to Covid they were unable to sell their cheese production to restaurants and visitors so they are stuck with over 2.8 tonnes of cheese that they need to sell immediately before it spoils.

“We tried explaining to our 75 cows that they needed to produce less milk but they don’t seem to have understood,” said brother Jean-Claude, in charge of marketing at the monastery, which was founded in 1098.

They are now working with Divine Box, a french startup to allow people to buy the cheese online. Unfortunately they don’t seem to ship internationally else I would have loved to place an order. Maybe during my next visit to France I will visit the monastery and purchase the cheese directly.

Source: French monks locked down with 2.8 tonnes of cheese pray for buyers

– Suramya

February 21, 2021

All Your Base Are Belong To Us: Turns 20

Filed under: Humor,My Life,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 12:05 AM

‘All Your Base Are Belong To Us’ is a phrase that is very familiar to anyone who was active on the internet in 2000’s as this was pretty much the first meme which took the entire net by storm. I remember someone posting a giant version of it in our college dorm windows using A4 paper. Unfortunately I don’t have a pic of it, but there were plenty of other places this popped up over the weeks really confusing a lot of people.

The first version showed up online on February 16, 2001 when a robo-voiced music video went live at Newgrounds.com. The video was a capture from a 90’s video game called Zero Wing with some hilariously bad English translation from the original Japanese. It contained phrases like “How are you gentlemen!!”, “Somebody set up us the bomb” and the infamous “All Your Base Are Belong To Us!”. The video presented the original Sega Genesis graphics, dubbed over with monotone, machine-generated speech reading each phrase. The video is shown below, click on play to view the original video with the awesome soundtrack:


All Your Base Are Belong to Us

The transcript of the video is as follows:

Captain: What happen ?
Mechanic: Somebody set up us the bomb.
Operator: We get signal.
Captain: What !
Operator: Main screen turn on.
Captain: It’s you !!
CATS: How are you gentlemen !!
CATS: All your base are belong to us.
CATS: You are on the way to destruction.
Captain: What you say !!
CATS: You have no chance to survive make your time.
CATS: Ha ha ha ha …
Operator: Captain !!
Captain: Take off every ‘ZIG’!!
Captain: You know what you doing.
Captain: Move ‘ZIG’.
Captain: For great justice.

After the original video from the game it moves on to show the phrase photoshopped into all sorts of images and photos from actual locations where it was inserted really confusing most folks because they had no idea what it meant.

It was extremely silly but great fun. Watching it again has really brought back memories of the great times from college. Here’s to the next 20 years, ’cause remember “All Your Base Are Belong To Us!”

– Suramya

September 4, 2020

A ‘genius’ on Quora wants to know if they can sue someone for removing them from a Whatsapp Group

Filed under: Humor,Interesting Sites — Suramya @ 11:50 PM

Every once in a while you will come across something that highlights the self entitlement of the poster. Today’s winner of entitled litigator (to-be) is a gentleman who posted the following question on Quora: “I want to file a case against a WhatsApp admin for removing me and my spouse from a group without a valid reason. Can it be done as it has affected us mentally?”. I don’t have words on how petty and entitled you have to be in order to think that someone removing you from a whatsapp group is a valid reason to sue the admin of the group.

The person doesn’t say where they are from but based on their eagerness to sue, I have a feeling that they are from the US as American’s are the most eager litigator’s that I know of. On one side its funny but on the other hand its scary how much people think is due to them and how far they are willing to go to get what they feel is due to them. Some of the cases filed would boggle your mind. We have had a kidnapper sue his victims for breach of contract when they escaped and another one sued for being misled that a sugary snack has a lot of sugar. In all a lot of bizarre lawsuits that have been filed till date, mostly in the US but there are a few gems from Europe as well. I was curious and searched for the most ridiculous law suites ever filed and boy did the Internet deliver. Below are some of my favorites from the search results:

Woman Says Jelly Belly Lied To Her

A California woman filed a mind-blowing lawsuit in 2017 when she felt misled by the fact that Jelly Belly candies contained sugar, Jessica Gomez filed a complaint against the jelly bean maker over its use of the term “evaporated cane juice” appearing on the packaging for Jelly Belly Sport Beans.

She said she thought it meant the candies were sugar-free and that they were a healthier snack option. The candy company called the suit “nonsense” and urged the courts to drop it because the product’s nutrition label clearly shows its sugar content.

The case was dismissed after the cart ruled that the plaintiffs failed to show facts specific to their purchase and reliance on advertising.

The next one just made me roll my eyes, the lady this guy sued had a lucky escape. Imagine living with someone so entitled!

The ‘First Date From Hell’

A Texas man made international news and became a poster boy for pettiness when he sued a woman after what he called the “first date from hell.”

Brandon Vezmar, 37, went on a date with a woman he met on Bumble in 2017 and was angered when she apparently spent the whole night on her phone. Vezmar sued the woman, hoping to get back the $17.31 he spent taking her to the movies.

The woman eventually just gave him the money back, so he’d drop the whole thing and leave her alone.

Here’s another Gem, Apparently this genius didn’t know that things in the sun get hot (especially if they are painted black). I learnt that lesson in kindergarten… But why use your brain when you can sue.

Fan’s Burned Butt Means Lawsuit For Dallas Cowboys

In 2012, a Dallas Cowboys fan sued her favorite football team after she claimed she suffered severe burns after sitting on a hot bench at a game. Jennelle Carrillo, herself a Texan, got lawyers involved after attending a team scrimmage in August 2010 and unwittingly sitting on a very hot seat.

The temperatures that day were more than 100 degrees and the bench itself was black, but Carrillo claimed she had no way of knowing that the seat would be so hot because the team didn’t have signs posted warning fans.

The lawsuit disappeared after initial media mentions.

The next one just makes me think, what the hell was this guy thinking?

Dangerous breasts

A man visits a nude bar. We’re not sure how the joke normally goes, but in this instance it ends up in court. In 1996 a a man named Paul Shimkonis sued his local topless bar claiming a dancer’s breasts had given him whiplash. Shimkonis described the breasts as ‘cement blocks’ which had caused him physical and mental anguish. His request fro $15,000 in damages was denied by the judge. We find ourselves wondering what sort of dance move can cause that level of momentum.

If you have some free time and need to laugh you can check out the list of ridiculous lawsuits here and here.

The really scary part is that sometimes these idiots win and then we get warning labels telling us that the Hot Coffee we ordered is actually Hot.

– Suramya

August 28, 2020

Got my first bot response to a Tweet and some analysis on the potential Bot

Filed under: Humor,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 10:21 PM

Today I achieved a major milestone of being on the internet, 🙂 I finally had a bot/troll (potential) respond to one of my Tweets with the usual nonsense. Normally I would ignore but it was just so funny to see this response that I had to comment on it. The reply was to my Tweet about how we could potentially achieve our target of eradicating Tuberculosis by 2025 because of the masks we are wearing due to Covid-19. You see TB bacteria are spread through the air from one person to another and just like Covid TB bacteria are put into the air when a person with TB disease of the lungs or throat coughs, speaks, or sings infecting people nearby when they breathe in these bacteria. Now that wearing a mask is becoming the new normal in most parts of the world (except for some morons who don’t understand/believe science or believe that politics is stronger than science) there is a high chance that it will also reduce the spread of other illnesses spread through air.


My Tweet & the response to it

Once I saw the response, I clicked on the profile and scrolled through the posting history and saw that a majority of the posts (atleast for the amount I was able to stomach while scrolling down) were retweets of Anti-Masker, Covid denial, Pro-Trump, anti vaccine nonsense. As I needed a distraction I decided to spend a bit of time to try and identify if the account was just a stupid person or a clever bot and did a little bit of investigation on the account.

Looking at the account a couple of things stood out right from the start, the first was that the account was created in July 2020 and the username had a bunch of numbers in it which is usually the case for automatically created accounts. So I ran a query on the account via Botometer® by OSoMe which gave me a whole bunch of data on the account and there was a bunch of data that made it stand out as being a potential bot. In just over a month (5 weeks and a day to be exact) the account had tweeted 6,197 times and 2,000 times in just the past 7 days which equates to about 12 tweets every hour every day. The other data point that stood out was that the account tweeted at almost the same time every day which is usually indicative of a Bot.

Interestingly the Botometer does give the account a low possibility of being a fully automated bot but that could be just because the person running it is manually feeding the responses and having the system spray it out. Or it could be a bored person doing it for LOL’s, which is code for morons who don’t know better and think they are being ‘cool’ or ‘edgy’ or whatever. But if that’s the case then they really need to get a better hobby.

Well this is all for now. Wear a mask when you go out and stay safe.

– Suramya

PS: I have no paitience for the anti-masker/anti-vaccine/anti-science nonsense so will be deleting any comments/responses or making fun of the comments depending on my mood at the time.

August 22, 2020

Bangla TV thinks that Scotch Brite scrubs are a valid replacement for defibrillator’s

Filed under: Humor — Suramya @ 11:59 PM

A lot of times TV Serials, moveis take liberties with facts and sometimes even with common sense which is understandable. However there are instances where you see something and go What The Hell did I just see… Case in point is the following screenshot taken from a Bangla TV serial in India. 🙂 I guess they didn’t want to spend the effort to get something that looked like shock paddles of a defibrillator so they used whatever was closest to hand not realizing that people would notice. 🙂


Scotch Brite can now restart your heart and help keep your bathroom clean at the same time.

This is why you need someone to proof watch your shoots before you make them public.

– Suramya

August 21, 2020

Emotion detection software for Pets using AI and some thoughts around it (and AI in general)

Filed under: Computer Software,Emerging Tech,Humor,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 5:32 PM

Pet owners are a special breed of people, they willingly take responsibility for another life and take care of them. I personally like pets as long as I can return them to the owner at the end of the day (or hour, depending on how annoying the pet is). I had to take care of a puppy for a week when Surabhi & Vinit were out of town and that experience was more than enough to confirm my belief in this matter. Others however feel differently and spend quite a lot of time and effort talking to the pets and some of them even pretend that the dog is talking back.

Now leveraging the power of AI there is a new app created that analyses & interprets the facial expressions of your pet. Folks over at the University of Melbourne decided to build an Convolutional Neural Networks based application called Happy Pets that you can download from the Android or Apple app stores to try on your pet. They claim to be able to identify the emotion the pet is feeling when the photo was taken.

While the science behind it is cool and a lot of pet owners who tried out the application over at Hacker News seem to like it, I feel its a bit frivolous and silly. Plus its hard enough for us to classify emotions in Humans reliably using AI so I would take the claims with a pinch of salt. The researchers themselves have also not given any numbers around the accuracy percentage of the model.

When I first saw the post about the app it reminded me of another article I had read a few days ago which postulated that ‘Too many AI researchers think real-world problems are not relevant’. At first I thought that this was an author trolling the AI developers but after reading the article I kind of agree with him. AI has a massive potential to advance our understanding of health, agriculture, scientific discovery, and more. However looking at the feedback AI papers have been getting it appears that AI researchers are allergic to practical applications (or in some cases useful applications). For example, below is a review received on a paper submitted to the NeurIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems) conference:

“The authors present a solution for an original and highly motivating problem, but it is an application and the significance seems limited for the machine-learning community.”

If I read this correctly then basically they are saying that this AI paper is for a particular application so its not interesting enough for the ML community. There is a similar bias in the theoretical physics/mathematics world where academics who talk about implementing the concepts/theories are looked down upon by the ‘purists’. I personally believe that while the theoretical sciences are all well & good and we do need people working on them to expand our understanding, at the end of the day if we are not applying these learnings/theorems practically they are of no use. There will be cases where we don’t have the know-how to implement or apply the learnings but we should not let that stand in the way of practical applications for things we can implement/use.

To quote a classic paper titled “Machine Learning that Matters” (pdf), by NASA computer scientist Kiri Wagstaff: “Much of current machine learning research has lost its connection to problems of import to the larger world of science and society.” The same year that Wagstaff published her paper, a convolutional neural network called AlexNet won a high-profile competition for image recognition centered on the popular ImageNet data set, leading to an explosion of interest in deep learning. Unfortunately, the disconnect she described appears to have grown even worse since then.

What do you think? Do you agree/disagree?

Source: HackerNews

– Suramya

October 10, 2019

Taxonomy of Terrible programmers

Filed under: Humor,Tech Related — Suramya @ 11:58 PM

If you have been in tech for a while you would have had the dubious pleasure of meeting some or all of the types of programmers described in the following post: The Taxonomy of Terrible Programmers

In one of my previous companies I had the pleasure of working with the The Arcanist and trust me it was a painful experience that I still remember more than a decade later. So what is an Arcanist?

Anyone who has worked on a legacy system of any import has dealt with an Arcanist. The Arcanist’s goal is noble: to preserve the uptime and integrity of the system, but at a terrible cost.

The Arcanist has a simple philosophy that guides his or her software development or administrative practices: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it – to an extreme.

The day a piece of software under his or her auspices ships, it will forever stay on that development platform, with that database, with that operating system, with that deployment procedure. The Arcanist will see to it, to the best of his ability. He may not win every battle, but he will fight ferociously always.

All change is the enemy – it’s a vampire, seducing less vigilant engineers to gain entry to the system, only to destroy it from within.

The past is the future in the Arcanists’ worldview, and he’ll fight anyone tries to upgrade his circa 1981 PASCAL codebase to the bitter, tearful end.

We had to fight him to move from a system that required you to edit HEX code for making any changes to a web based UI that controlled the system and gave extra functionality. In the end the project was moved to a different team as everyone realized that he was going to kill it just because he was used to the old system and didn’t want to change.

Check out the linked article for details on the other types. If you recognize some of the behaviour’s described in the post as something you might do, I suggest you take a good long look at yourself and seriously think about changing as being classified/identified as one of the types of people in this list is not a great carrier move.

– Suramya

PS: Before you ask, yes this post links to a really old post. The post has been sitting in my draft folder for ages and I finally decided to publish it.

November 26, 2014

Amazing Shipping options on Ebay

Filed under: Humor,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 11:02 PM

So I was trying to buy a new Hard Disk from ebay and get it shipped to one of my co-workers place before he fly’s to India. (Yes, another one. What can I say; you can never have too much storage). Once I put it in my shopping cart I got the option to select the Shipping and there I got to see the amazing gem below:

Shipping Options on ebay
Shipping options on eBay by Newegg

So I can choose to get my shipment on the 3rd of Dec for free, or I can pay $4.99 or $17.85 and get it quicker on the 3rd of Dec… Now how do I choose which is the best option for me, I think I will go for 3rd Dec for free… Another interesting thing is that the 1 day shipping for which I would shell out $25.16 will get me my package on the 1st Dec (4 days from the day I ordered). Unbelievable.

– Suramya

March 3, 2014

Beard transplant business is booming in New York thanks to Hipsters

Filed under: Humor — Suramya @ 2:07 AM

Do you aspire to look like a homeless guy but don’t have the facial hair to pull of the look? If so fear not, NY Cosmetic surgeons are willing to help you for a mere $8,000. Hipsters all around the world rejoice!

Facial surgeons with private practices in Manhattan and Florida say they have seen a phenomenal increase in demand in the last five years, and hipsters are leading the way.

No longer the preserve of fishermen or aging academics, beards are the signature look of urbane men in their 20s and 30s who consider themselves witty, creative and politically progressive.

New York surgeons can perform up to three or four procedures a week for $2,000 to more than $8,000 depending on how much hair needs to be transplanted from scalp to cheek.

When I first saw this article I thought it was a joke which got accidentally released early for April fool’s day. But unfortunately this is true and that tells us something about these people. They are willing to pay ridiculous amounts of money for stupid stuff like this but won’t spare change for an actual homeless guy. If you really want to feel what the homeless feel, try living for a week on the street without your Starbucks or iPad’s.

The no of people asking for this procedure have gone up from 10 a YEAR to 5 a WEEK. Yikes!

Thanks to The Register for the initial story.

– Suramya

July 21, 2013

Great Insults from Science Fiction and Fantasy Books

Filed under: Books Related / Reviews,Humor,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 10:45 PM

Are you tired of using the same old insults for people who annoy you? Are you tired of using the same insults as everyone else? I know I am, but worry not, the great’s of Science Fiction and Fantasy novels have your back with some really cool insults that you can use without actually abusing. Folks at io9 spent some time to generate a list of 20 best insults and it has some gems. Below are some examples that I especially liked:

3) Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut

“If your brains were dynamite there wouldn’t be enough to blow your hat off.”

5) Mort by Terry Pratchett

“‘It would seem that you have no useful skill or talent whatsoever,’ he said. ‘Have you thought of going into teaching?'”
6) Redwall by Brian Jacques

“To describe the young haremaid’s singing voice as akin to a frog trapped beneath a hot stone would have been a great insult to both frog and stone.”

Check out the whole list at 20 Great Insults from Science Fiction and Fantasy Books

Maybe I should start using these more often. 🙂

– Suramya

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