Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

Most of my friends know that cooking and me don’t go well together. Its not that I can’t cook, just that I tend to get distracted or get lazy and just order out. Infact the main thing I am good at during cooking is chopping stuff up including onions (They don’t make my eyes water) so…

A couple of years ago Surabhi and Vinit were on their way home so they called me to ask me to start boiling rice so that they could make something when they got back home. So I got the instructions over the phone and put the rice on the stove and went to my room to work on the computer and then completely forgot about the rice. Surabhi and Vinit got stuck in traffic and were delayed for a few hours.

About an hour or two later I thought that I smelled smoke. At first I ignored it thinking I was imagining things. Then I thought maybe the neighbours were burning something. Finally after about 15 mins I suddenly realized that I had put the rice to boil. Ran to the kitchen and found it completely filled with smoke. Turns out that all the water had boiled away, then the rice got heated, got burnt and finally was converted to charcoal.

I had to open all the windows in the apartment and setup fans to get rid of the smoke. To make it all the more fun, this happened in the winter so the temperature outside was below zero (probably in the -5 to -15 deg C range) so the apartment became freezing cold. When Surabhi and Vinit got home we made an unspoken agreement that they would never again ask me to cook without supervision.

That all said, I do know how to make sandwiches and Omelettes. But prefer to avoid cooking.

By now you must be wondering why all this talk about cooking all of a sudden. Right? I was browsing the web and saw the following comic strip at Sinfest and it reminded me of the above incident and led to this post:

Now that I am back in India having to cook for myself is no longer an issue. Having a maid cook for you rocks. 🙂

– Suramya

This post is the first time i am posting to the blog from my phone. First impression, Opera mini rocks. It is very fast and responsive. Secondly I wish that this phone had a QWERTY keyboard. Typing on this keypad is hard.

I am currently at Nidhika’s wedding where she is getting ready so i have been kicked out of the room for obvious reasons. So i am passing time by surfing the web on my phone.

This is all for now as i am getting tired of typing on this keypad.

– Suramya

As I mentioned earlier in a post I have recently started listening to audio books (mainly because at that time I was feeling too sick to read or work on the computer). Since then I have read(heard) a couple of them and most of them were pretty good. For me mp3 is the best medium as I can use it on any platform i.e. I can listen to them on my computer/phone/CD player in car.

A couple of days ago I was going through John Scalzi’s blog and I saw a note that METAtropolis (A novel he edited) had been nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation and was available for a free download at Audible.com (Still available for free as of 11th April 2009) I decided to go ahead and download it. This was because
a) The book sounded very interesting
b) It was free
c) The book sounded interesting.

So I went ahead and registered on the site and tried to download the book. I must have spent a good 1/2 hour on the site trying to download it on my Linux system but was unable to do so. At first the stupid site kept trying to force me to install a windows program on my system even when I told it that I wanted to listen to it as an MP3 or on a CD player. Then finally I somehow convinced the system to allow me to download but alas I still didn’t get to listen to the book. What I got was a 300 byte file with a weird name and a .py extension containing a long text string that looked like part of a URL.

Ultimately I gave up. If I had paid for the book I would have been really upset. I still fail to understand why they want me to download a program on my system before letting me download a mp3 file that can be played on any system.

In any case I don’t think I will be downloading/purchasing any more books from them in the near future.

– Suramya

Visiting Antarctica is one of the things that I have been wanting to do for a couple of years now. I was talking to dad today and he was also interested in it so I did a little research on it online. There are a lot of tour companies that take you on a cruise to Antarctica but they cost a lot.

Apparently if you get a ticket for about $5,000 you have gotten a great deal (This doesn’t include tickets to the port of departure). According to this site I found $5,000 – $9,000 is a normal price for these tickets per person. Although I did find one cruise costing ~$30,000 for a 30 day trip. Most tours are 11-14 days.

I am estimating it will take about $8,000 – $10,000 including the flight tickets/stay at the departure port and shopping per person. I really want to go but its very expensive. 🙁 The best time to visit is Nov – March. BTW my birthday is in Dec *Hint Hint* .

Any contributions to the trip fund will be welcome 😉

Well this is all for now.

– Suramya

I guess I really do need more monkeys as I haven’t posted a blog post in more than a month. It wasn’t that I didn’t have anything to say, just didn’t feel like typing it all out. Not that a lot of people have been waiting for me for say something witty… Or the lack of visitors could be because I didn’t post anything interesting to comment on.

This past month was interesting and fun (mostly):

1. Attended Pranav and Jigna’s wedding in Indore. Had a blast.
2. Played Holi for the first time in 10 years. It looked like I had a sunburn for the next day because all the color wouldn’t come out even after multiple showers
3. Met up with friends.
4. Got an eye infection (This was the not fun part)
5. Caught a cold. (This too)

Realized that audio books are great when you have a cold and can’t stand reading or looking at a screen.

Bought a new LCD monitor. (Finally.) Now the 6 year old monitor is finally retired. RIP.

Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

– Suramya

Happy New Year everyone.

This was supposed to be a continuation of my week in HK series but my laptop started having issues (The screen would stop working at random times) so I couldn’t post from there. Once I got back, life obviously got really really busy.

I was waiting to post as I wanted to share the photos from the trip in the post but… Ah well. I have posted some of the pics in my Facebook profile and one of these days I will also post them in my album here.

* Thinking about updating the photogallery script and adding comments functionality to the gallery. Also, maybe an rss feed just for the pics. So that I can post the pics here and publish them elsewhere also by including the feed…

* Have created a collage generator for Linux using Imagemagic and Bash scripting. Its a small script (80 lines) but it works great. *Note to self*: Publish the script on the site

* Need to find a good Mexican place in Delhi. Have heard about one in CP but haven’t checked it out yet.

* need to start posting more often on the blog. When I started I used to post one entry a day. Now its gone down to a post a month, maybe 2. This needs to change.

* Wonder if I should start making micro-blog posts. Just one or two line entries about whatever I am thinking about.

* I got a cool new RC (Remote Controlled) helicopter that Surabhi & Vinit got for me.

* Hopefully I will fly this more often than my RC plane which has only been flown once in the past two years. Although I can fly this indoors so I think I should be able to fly it more often.

* Found a mosaic creation script. Thinking about playing with it to make some nice mosaic’s. Lets see.

Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

– Suramya