A Cultured Clown's perceptions – ஒரு நாகரீக கோமாளியின் பார்வைகள்
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Balaji has coded up a nice and small program in Ruby which helps to find the latest visitors of one’s website. I am using it in my wordpess blog. For more information, check out Latest Visitor – Using Web Access Logs in RUBY. Happy tracing! 
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I was a kid when I first saw the sodium vapor lamp ever in my life. May be I was in my middle school days. Our street was without a single light for years and if it had one, it never glowed. One fine evening, we had some authorities from the local municipal department installing a sodium vapor lamp as a street light. They even installed a switch for the same and instructed one of my neighbours on how to operate it. At the first sight of it, I was really amazed to see the power and light it shed.
It was Summer holidays and during night time, we started playing badminton,carrom and chess under the light. One day, my neighbour taught me how to handle the switch so that I can turn on the lights in his absence. After learning to do the same, I was beaming. I felt as if I gave light to millions of life although there were only 15 or 20 lives in our street. I felt like Jesus showering the poor souls with his spiritual lighting. I was the only young kid to operate the lamp when a lot of adults refrained doing the same due to fear of electric shock. This made my mom proud of me and she was boasting of how I would become a engineer one day.!@$%#?&!
Day by day, my curiosity depleted and after a while, I stopped operating the lamp. The local authorities have automated the same to be operated from a central location so that they can turn on a lot of lights from a single location. It still lights our street brightly. That clearly implies that certain people and things do their duty and light others’ lives though no one cares about them. These people and things make life beautiful. I am admired at the power of the Sodium vapor lamp and I would like to be one. I would say a luminary.
P.S.:- This picture was taken with Sundar’s (My neighbour friend) Nokia 6600 camera phone. And the photographer is none other than the great karthick.
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Last week, I happened to read a good blog on avoiding office politics. On the first hand, I do not know how to play politics at work place. Going through the post, I realized that I do have certain ddefects in me which might tempt me to play the dirty game at office. I have seen a lot of people playing the dirty game and that had serious impacts on others’s lives. I even saw a manager at office screaming high to his friend about how to stay focussed and defeat all the opponents in the corporate world by playing office politics. I happened to hear this conversation as he was on a speaker phone. What a funny and disgusting way to grow up in once’s career?
I have decided not to learn tricks of office politics in my entire life. I also hapened to meet a person who boasted about how good he was at this game and he also planned to write a book on office politics. Yuck! I would rather stay away from these people so that I am not influenced by their activities. So, I have decided to follow the below principles to stay away from the bloody dirty game of office politics. They are,
Let me see, how far I am going to achieve this. I hope not to derail from the track I have chosen.
I was on my weekly off from yesterday and had a lot of time to kill. I had surfed all day yesterday and slept only at mid-night. Woke up at 10.30 today morning and wanted badly to kill the time. Borrowed handful of movies from my neighbour and started of with “Kill Bill”. The name interested me a lot and I got it running in my DVD player. I have seen Uma Thurman in some movies before. But, she was at her best in Kill Bill. This movie is the most violent movie I have ever seen in my life. Kill Bill is directed by Quentin Tarantino. I thought this guy must be of a chinese origin and I may be right as there were hair-raising stunts in the movie. But a few were crap with guys walking the walls to reach the ceiling.???????????
The story is about a gang of assasins with Bill as their leader. And every member of this death viper assasins squad has a code name. Something like Black Mamba, Copper head and a few other creative names. Uma Thurman who is a professional killer wants to lead a normal lead a normal life tries to get married to a record music store owner. Her dreams are shattered with a massacre of her friends and her fiance in a marriage rehearsal. She is shot by Bill and goes to coma for 4 years. The rest of the story revolves around how Uma Thurman hits back and takes revenge on Bill and his assasins.
Things I liked in the movie
Things I hated in the movie
I am gonna buy DVDs or VCDs of all great English movies and enjoy all my weekly offs.
Kill Bill was really helpful to kill away the time.
I am really happy to see this kind of thing making news after a long time.
In Santa Ana, California – A homeless man searching through garbage bins for recyclable cans found a missing wallet and had it returned to its owner.
Kim Bogue, who works as a janitor in the city’s government buildings, realized that her wallet was missing last week and doubted she’d ever get back the $900 and credit cards inside, she said.
“I prayed that night and asked God to help me,” said Bogue, who was saving the money for a trip to her native Thailand.
Days later, a homeless man found the wallet wrapped in a plastic bag in a trash bin, where Bogue had accidentally thrown it away with her lunch. He gave it to Sherry Wesley, who works in a nearby building.
“He came to me with the wad of money and said, ‘This probably belongs to someone that you work with, can you return it,’” Wesley said.
Workers at a nearby relief kitchen said the man, who didn’t want to be identified, insists on paying for his food.
“He has a very good heart,” said Bogue, who gave the man a $100 reward. “If someone else found it, the money would be gone.”
Isn’t this a great deed? I am so proud of this guy who could have easily gulped down all the money and walked away coolly. But, he did the right thing by returning it. I remember reading a non-detail lesson during my middle school days. The tile was some thing like this.
“Where love is, God is.” I don’t believe in God but I will add that “Where Truth is, God is”.
For people who are greedy of money and properties, this is really a good lesson. I am bowing myself at your direction. Hats off!
I have started using bloglines as my feed reader and it works really well. I was adding the feeds of all the blogs I read and here is when I found out that blogspot bloggers don’t have a comments RSS for an entire site. I am able to add the comments RSS of wordpress blogs. A bit of googling led me to a site which helps in setting up RSS for comments in blogspot. I have given the link for the same below.
setting up RSS for comments in blogspot
Come the 21st of April, it will be two months since this site was launched. I was curious to see how google ranked me with search queries karthick, karthick raghavan and raghavan. Karthick earns me a spot in the second page. I remember it being in the fourth place a month before. karthick raghavan earns me the first result. raghavan comes nowhere near in the picture at all. Hmmm! May be, my posts do not contain the keywords or the ad-sense or the adwords that google robots are prying for. whatever, I atleast ranked by google. May be I should ask Balaji or Umesh to throw more light on the concept of google page ranking with their posts.
People who have been to chennai or ones who hail from Chennai will be familiar about Satyam Cinemas. A couple of months ago, I thought of going out to a movie with my college buddies. And the apparent choice of the cinema was Satyama and the movie was Rang de Basanti. When I looked in deccan chronicle for the show schedules, the ad about the online ticket booking caught my attention. Logged into Satyam Cinemas’ online booking site. I was in for a surprise with a invalid security certificate warning me. I was still in a dilemma about the site’s security features. Anyway, it thought to take the gamble and booked 6 tickets online. The next hurdle I faced while booking was using a credit card. They don’t accept debit cards. Pretty weird! When I enquired about the same to one of their executives over phone, they said that their policy accepts only credit card bookings. What a great policy?????????
I somehow managed to book the tickets through a ICICI credit card. Thanks to my colleague. Good that Satyam charges Rs.5 extra for tickets booked online. The equation goes this way, for a booking of 6 tickets which cost Rs.110 each, you pay Rs.30 extra. Cool! when compared to the hassles of going to the cinema and standing in the queue for long hours. The ticket confirmation receipt can be printed and the tickets are to collected 30 minutes before the show. It was a very good and a novel experience to me. Outcome was that we enjoyed the movie well with our booked tickets in hand already!
P.S.:-
Certain things are there for Satyam to work on their website .They are
