May 28, 2007

I became famous overnight!



These are snapshots I captured when driving down Fraizer town in Bangalore. But what's the big deal here? Well... how'd you feel if one day driving down the road you see a big hoarding by the road, and your picture was on it!!?? That's (almost) what happened to me. Strolling down Fraizer town I saw this hoarding with my picture on it. Yes, shocked i was! Who wouldn't be??
Now you might be wondering who took the photo in the first place... and why? when??
Let me explain...

It was a regular mid April weekend. I was hanging out with my friends in Kalyan Nagar as usual. All of us had gone to my friends' college to play basketball. As the day passed by all were busy doing their own thing, some playing basketball while some were just watching. Some busy gossiping while some posing for a photo.

In the late afternoon one of my friends got a call from a friend (from another college) asking some of us to come to Indo Asian college cause there was some photo session happening. She did not give much details but just asked around 10 of us to come to the college (which is not that far from where we were). After having mixed thoughts about if we all should go, finally some of us decided to visit the college (we were not doing much anyways). And did we know where the college was and why we were going there?... not really, and that's what made it more interesting. Living in that area for 4 years I never heard of any college called Indo Asia college. So i thought it was worth checking out.

After hunting for sometime, we found the college... finally. And who'd have thought the college would be right in the middle of a large residential area?! We didn't. Sheepishly we all (around 8 of us) entered the college gate. Upon seeing the college buildings we all looked at each other, surprised that the college was still under construction. Only about 40% of it was complete. We still didn't know why we were there.

Our friend (who had called us there) took us to a class room... o yes, this one was a real classroom. It was well furnished, painted and looked very much like how a neat classroom should look like. There were students there too!! We realized were not the only ones invited. But we still wondered.. why?

We were asked to be seated, and we did. Few minutes later a professional photographer entered the classroom(with his heavy camera equipment) and then it was all clear... We looked at each other and smiled. The college wanted to print out brochures and posters. And they wanted to include photographs of students who looked like... how Asians look. Since their buildings weren't even half constructed there was no question of anyone getting admitted. So we were to pose as students of the college. It was indeed a photo shoot!

After having a nice photography session there for around an hour, and joking about how the whole thing was really funny (since I am not even a student, and all others study in some other college) we left the place in the evening. I had taken my camera with me so we had a photo session of our own (Some photos at the end of this page). There was nothing much to remember from our time in the college. We all had nothing to do so it was like we just killed an hour or so of our weekend. All of us returned back... got on with the weekend.
.
.
.
.
After few weeks, when driving down Fraizer town, I see a photo (taken in Indo Asian college) up on a (pretty) big hoarding. My friends did tell me about it before, but only when I saw it, I believed it! I still wonder out of dozens and dozens of photos taken that day, why this one was selected :-)

Well there it is. A little story of mine. Something which doesn't happen everyday... By the way a smaller version of this hoarding has been put up in many streets in Kalyan Nagar!

Here are few points Iwanna mention:

- I am not a student and I am not related to Indo Asian College in any way what so ever.
- The college's image above has been digitally created.
- I got a call from my ex-gf when she saw my photo on one of the news papers ads! She was shocked! :-)
- Someone's thinking right now that this post is way way way too long for my standards (finally I mentioned you in my blog... happy?) ;-)
- I never gave them permission to print my photo ( LOL! )

:-)

May 22, 2007

Software quotes

Going through the bundle of forward mails in my inbox, stumbled upon one which had some pretty cool quotes - software quotes that is. The geek side of me just couldn't help posting it here. Here they are... you might enjoy them as well:

Before software can be reusable, it first has to be usable. -Ralph Johnson

Fifty years of programming language research and we end up with C++? -Richard A. O'Keefe

C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.

There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third works. -Alan J. Perlis

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves. -Alan Kay

Programmers are in a race with the Universe to create bigger and better idiot-proof programs, while the Universe is trying to create bigger and better idiots. So far the Universe is winning. -Anon

As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs. -Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging, 1949

I did say something along the lines of "C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows your whole leg off." -Bjarne Stroustrup

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. -Pablo Picasso

Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there. -Will Rogers

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight. -Bill Gates

May 6, 2007

A day in the corporate world

A classic example of miscommunication... we're all human afterall ;-)