Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

Watched the pilot episode of Virtuality today. Its a new show where Earth’s first starship is on a ten-year journey to explore the Epsilon Eridani star system. To keep the crew sane VR (Virtual Reality) modules are installed on the ship and the crew uses them to decompress.

The pilot was decent, I mean it wasn’t awesome great but watchable. If it was going to be produced as a full show I would probably watch it. It has a lot of room for interesting developments. Plus I liked the ending of the pilot.

Basically the main idea behind it is that there is something wrong with the modules and it looks like someone hacked the system, but since the spaceship is beyond pluto, only someone on the ship could reprogram the modules. At times it took a few seconds to figure out if a scene was a VR scenario or the actual show. Another thing that got irritating was the frequent views of the ship from the outside from one of the exterior camera’s. They were interesting at first when they followed the captain through the ship but later they added no content/anything to the story and just took screen time for no reason.

The show is a pretty cool take on how future astronauts could spend long periods of time in space without going nuts.

Catch the pilot if you are interested in these kinds of shows. You just might like it.

– Suramya

As I mentioned before I recently saw the Angels and Demons movie and when I watched it I didn’t remember a lot of the book so I wanted to read it again to a)see how the book was different b) the plot was interesting.

Yesterday I finished reading the book and I am happy that I didn’t remember the plot/ exact details while watching the movie as some of the changes they made in the movie would have irritated me while watching it. A lot of things were changed in the movie to make it simpler and more straight forward. I think the movie was toned down a lot in comparison to the book to reduce the opposition from the Church and religious community. But the good part is that they managed to do it well enough that the movie came out well and was not a complete disaster like the Da Vinci Code.

In all most changes were minor but a few stood out.

1. In the movie there is very little involvement of the CERN, and none at all of its director. In the book he is the one who tapes the branding of the chamberlain while in the movie its recorded by the security camera’s installed in the office.

2. The movie completely glosses over the whole debate of proving genesis using the anti-matter which is covered in great detail in the book.

3. In the movie the last preferiti survives and is confirmed (?) as the pope but in the book he also dies.

4. In the book the final brand used is the Illuminati Diamond (see image below) which is an ambigram of the four elements arranged in the shape of a diamond while in the movie they use the Vatican’s symbol as the final brand. This point irritated me the most and what point was served by changing this is something beyond me. If one of the readers can explain this to me I will appreciate it.

The Illuminati Diamond

While writing this post I found out that some parts of the movie were censored in India (Source: The Hindu) so now I want to watch the uncensored version to see what was different. For that I will have to wait for the DVD to come out, which hopefully will not take that long.

The final verdict? The movie was good but the book was better. 🙂

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

– Suramya

Yesterday I read this post on Schneier on Security about this guy who thought his house was burglarized because he posted about his vacation on Twitter in real time; (stuff like “On the road now”, “Got here in one piece”) and reading the comments that people made to this article asking ‘Why Twitter’ made me think about ‘why Blog?’ and ‘What to blog about?’

Nowadays everyone seems to have a blog, but when I first started keeping a blog very few people did it. So I used to get this question a lot. Another popular one was: What do you blog about?

So, why do I blog? That’s a difficult question to answer for me. I Blog for multiple reasons:

1. I like writing. So it give’s me a place to post my thoughts and idea’s
2. It gives me a way to keep people (Friends/relatives) who want to know about me updated with my life
3. Allows me to post notes about how I did something or how I got something to work so that I can refer back to it later
4. It lets me talk about the stuff I do and places I visit.

Basically this blog is an expansion of the stuff I post on my website, in more detail and with a lot more regular updates. When I started out, I used to post atleast once a day. Then it went down to a couple of times a week, then to a few times a month. Now the frequency varies with how busy I am and what all is happening in my life.

What I don’t do is post about stuff that affects other people or happened to them. I also don’t post about work and my job. The reason for that is simple, what I post out here is available for everyone to read. If I complain about work or post something like ‘oh we had a hard time today because all the developers were drunk’ or ‘the code we write is so bad its a wonder anyone buys it’ or something; then anyone searching about the company or me will find it and its not good for the company or my image.

So instead of trying to figure out what to post and what not to post I avoid posting about work and work related issues. That doesn’t mean that any talk about work is banned, just that 99.999% of it is about non-work related stuff.

In the case mentioned above, did the Twitter post cause the house to be burglarized? I don’t know. It could have. All it did was tell people that they weren’t home. The same information is available from their away message on email, message on voice mail greetings, from their secretary and tons of other places.

It doesn’t make Twitter bad. You just have to use common-sense to decide what to post and what not to. Same thing with any media: blogs, websites etc etc.

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

– Suramya