Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

NASA has this thing where you can register to send your name to Mars on their InSight lander. Since it is free and seemed like an interesting idea I registered and got my very own boarding pass. So what does it actually mean? Basically my name will be etched on a micro-chip and blasted to Mars on the lander. Pretty cool right? (Just for my name though but still it is cool.Hopefully there will be actual flights to Mars in my lifetime.)

My Boarding pass

If you want to have your name sent then you have till tomorrow to register. You can do so here. More details on the process and the lander are at the NASA page, check it out if you have some time.

– Suramya

I have heard a lot of people complain being bored when they don’t have their phone or are away from TV. Thankfully I never had that problem because ever since we were kids me and my sister were taught that there is always something interesting to do, observe or think about so we were not allowed to say that we were bored.

So I rarely feel bored but till now there was no way for me to check if this was true scientifically. Folks over at the New Scientist have created a quiz that claims to check ‘How easily bored are you?’ by answering a bunch of questions. Now I don’t usually take such quizzes but its New Scientist which is a respectable magazine on Science so I decided to give it a try and this is what I scored:

Your score is 45. That means you have a very high boredom threshold – scores range between 28 (not easily bored) and 196 (very easily bored).

If you score below 63 you are in the 1 per cent of the population who are hardest to bore – you may never or rarely experience boredom. People like you tend to be curious and have good self-control.

If you are curious give the quiz a try: How easily bored are you? (Alternate link, in case the previous one doesn’t work) and do share the results.

– Suramya

So while I was at my sisters place over the weekend I decided to show Vir (my nephew) how to call people using voice dialing on the Moto 360. I used the command ‘Ok Google call Mom’ to have the phone call Mom as an example.  Then we decided to let Vir try it out and surprisingly the phone actually did call Mom when he tried it. (At least it did till he insisted on saying OK boogle instead of OK Google).

The fun started when he wanted the phone to call his mom (my sis) using the command ‘call mom’ and was unhappy when it kept calling my mom. So then I had to explain to him that since it was my phone it was calling my Mom and not his. Over all it was interesting to see how quickly he picked up how to use voice dialing.

Though in hindsight it might not have been the best idea since he will insist on using voice dialing to call people when I visit next. Ah well. Joys of playing with kids. 🙂

On a side note majority of this post was written using voice typing on my moto x. Now if only I could figure out how to add a full stop when dictating things would be perfect.

Well this is all for now I’ll write more later.

Cya,

Suramya

– Suramya

At 4:32pm Sara Bhansali was born. Both mother and baby are doing great.

Will post pics later when I have a better net connection. For some reason my phone is refusing to upload a pic.

– Suramya

At the hospital waiting to find out if I will have a new niece or a nephew.

Hopefully this time it will be less of a wait, but I am fully prepared in any case 🙂

Will keep folks posted.

– Suramya

Today just as I was leaving for home Google Now messaged me that it would take me 53 mins to get home if I drove which was 14 mins more than normal. What makes it interesting is that I live 3.4 kms of driving and 1.6 km walking from work. This means that I would have been driving at an amazing speed of 3.8km/h tonight. How is that for a fast drive? No wonder it took me 2 1/2 hours to get back from Whitefield the last time I drove there.

We really need to do something about the traffic situation in Bangalore. The Roads in Bangalore are some of the most haphazard and ridiculously designed roads that I have ever seen. However the situation does seem to be improving a bit thanks to the newly built St Marks road which is very nicely done and for a change seems to be following a logical plan.

In case you are wondering, I decided to spend an hour more at work and then did the trip in 15 mins. Yes, I had the car today. It’s raining and once it rains the ‘sidewalks’ can be re-branded as swamps so I prefer to drive instead of walking.

– Suramya

Went to watch Jurassic World yesterday and I really loved the movie. When I first heard that they are making another Jurassic Park movie I was a bit skeptical but they did a great job. Thankfully it wasn’t a remake but a sequel. This installment is set 2 decades after the first Jurassic Park movie and has homages to the original all over the place. Basically this one manages to remove the bad taste the last installment in the series left in my mouth.

If you like the series and think you know the movies then you should check out the following quiz created by John Scalzi using
trivia from the first three Jurassic Park films. Get all of the quiz questions correct, and you survive. Miss one or more, and you get killed and possibly eaten by a dinosaur. Which dinosaur? It depends on how many questions you miss. Have fun.

After finishing the movie I was reminded why I loved the first one so much and how awesome the books were so I am going to spend my weekend re-reading the Jurassic Park and The Lost world by Michael Crichton.

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

– Suramya

Testing Auto post publication to FB, Twitter. If all goes well this should be posted to FB and Twitter automatically.

[UPDATE] Yay! It worked 🙂

– Suramya

I was in Wellington this weekend to spend some time with Gaurang, Kangan & Sid and meet Gaurang’s parents. The visit was great but the highlight for me was getting to meet Wing Commander Rakesh Sharma (Retd.), the first Indian to go to space. At first I didn’t realize who we were going to meet because I was still a bit groggy from lack of sleep but then the lights came on and I realized just who I was going to meet. Trust me I was wide awake shortly thereafter. 🙂

We met him twice and I even managed to get a photo with him :). I am not going to go into how/why we met him twice and how it almost became thrice but it was worth it. 😉

Well this is all for now. I need to crash now, will write more later.

– Suramya