Serendipity

Yep, another wallpaper. Found this dead frog lying in front of my house the other day... thought I'd take some snaps of the little thing. Of course, I had to bear the stink and ward off all those ants while taking the pics, but it was worth it.

I don't really expect you to set this as your wallpaper (unless you REALLY like dead things), but I bet/hope it's going to hold your interest long enough to say "Whoa!" or "Yuck!" or something like that.

15 May was Karthik's birthday so... Happy Birthday Karthik! We went to watch everybody's favourite Indian Idol contestants, Rahul Vaidya and Prajakta Shukre, perform live at Taramati Baradari (Gandipet) that day, and it was awesome!

I'm extremely busy right now (final exams start in 2 weeks and go on till 15 June), so I'll end this post here. If you have too much time on your hands (like these guys) and want to keep yourself busy, maybe you ought to stare at some autostereograms or better yet, try interpreting those e-Serve ads.

Exploding Tamarind

Didn't go to college today, and I'm finished with the lab internal exams, so I have time to make this post.

The EDC (Electronic Devices and Circuits) lab internal was on Friday — had to plot the frequency response of a Common Collector Amplifier. That was simple. I was more happy when I solved the problem given at the beginning of the test (didn't know I was even capable of solving a problem in EDC until that day). The C lab internal we had yesterday went off well too, I got a Stacks program and the Lagrange's Interpolation program (Numerical Methods). Didn't answer the viva questions too well though... the guy asked me some tricky questions. Here's one of them —

main()
{
        int a=2;
        printf("%d number is"+1,a);
}

I was supposed to tell him the output and explain why, which I did after a while, although it wasn't 100% correct. Actually my viva 'session' was extra long since I finished my programs early :)

Anyway, after the test, we had some extra classes during which it started to rain heavily... wish I had my cam to capture the sky, which was really dramatic with the low-lying rain clouds and all. Reached home pretty late, ate, read an article on the exoplanet which was photographed recently, and then went to sleep.

So what's with the headline you ask? That's just another wallpaper I made a few days ago. Here's a before-after shot (reminds you of those weight-reduction programmes doesn't it?), so you know how much manipulation went into it —



To see the wallpaper click here, or on the image above. Comments welcome, as always.

Old And Very Cool

Uh, no, I am not talking about the new Pope and his Regnal name.

Excuse the dumb joke, I didn't know how else to start this post. I'm actually talking about a new wallpaper I made yesterday — Water Meter. I'm pretty proud of this one, especially since I made it entirely in Irfan View (yes, that very small image-viewing program you can download for free). The text and borders were inserted with Paint Shop Pro. Errr... guess it wasn't made ENTIRELY in Irfan View after all, but you get the point.

Enough blabbering, here's the wallpaper —



Don't know if this is going to be as popular as The Valve or Inside A Computer, guess I'll just have to wait for your comments... (hint hint ;))

Where's The Truck?

Finished writing the fifth set of tests on 15th, so I've just been relaxing since then... watched Kaante the other day (I'm watching so many movies ever since Karthik got here... wonder why...) — it's basically a bad, over-styled rip-off of two very good movies, The Usual Suspects and Reservoir Dogs. But I had fun watching it, and there were a couple of scenes that were filmed really well.

Took some new pictures the last couple of days, you can have a look at them on my photo gallery at bytephoto.com —

Water Meter (2 pics) — We had to remove our water meter the other day, because roots (of trees obviously) were growing into the water pipes and blocking the supply. Now since I love old, dirty looking stuff, this was a perfect subject to shoot :) Overexposed the shots to highlight the subject better.

Vanishing Point (2 pics) — These are pictures of a grill door. I like the way they came out, especially the colours. The name by the way, is a term in perspective drawing (saw Karthik reading about that some time ago), where everything in your view converges to a single point. Seemed like a fitting title for these shots :)

Oh, I forgot to mention that I now have a broadband internet connection at home! I'm getting transfer speeds of about 20KB/sec, which is a LOT faster than the few hundered bytes/sec I used to get earlier, on my dial-up connection. Yay!

A Nasty Little Thing Production

Nothing much to say here. All I did was touch up the scan and add some colours and text. Simply awesome. I think it's his best drawing till date... and I'm not just saying that because I'm in it :)

Thanks a lot K!

Between Tests

Got a break between internals (that's a just a cool-sounding name for a test, in case you didn't know), so thought I'd chip in a post. You see our textbooks are really nice to read, if you ever get around to reading them. I'll give you an example... this is how the chapter Magnetism (wrote a test on that today) starts — "The magnetic effects in magnetic materials are due to atomic magnetic dipoles in the materials. These dipoles result from the effective current current loops of electrons in atomic orbits, from effects of electron spin and from the magnetic moments of atomic nuclei...". With so-called 'introductions' like these, you can see why I like my textbooks so much. Everything is so clear, so easy to understand... isn't it?

Guess I'll just have to put up with all this for another three years...

Haven't done any interesting stuff lately... although I have been working on a little something for some time now. Well it's too early to talk about it, so I won't. And since I don't have a test tomorrow, I might watch The Grudge today. Seems like a good movie. And since I have nothing more to say for now, I'll leave you with this link.


Edit: Saw The Grudge. Practically no story, has lots of effective scares though :)

Identity, New Wallpapers

I wanted to start off this post talking about a movie I watched last night on HBO — Identity. But then I noticed that Karthik had already posted about it on his blog and he already said everything I wanted to say about the movie (including the bit about the movie poster). No point repeating all that here, just go watch the movie, it's one of the best I've seen this year!

I made a couple of wallpapers recently... rather simple-looking, but good nonetheless —



[ Looking Down ] - Took this picture a long time ago (I found this caterpillar at the engineering counselling centre). Just adjusted the contrast and saturation levels to give a 'professional' touch to an otherwise crappy photo. If for some reason you like the caterpillar a lot, you can see more pictures of it in my photo gallery.

[ Molten ] - This was made from another of my very early photos. It's actually a picture of the bottom of a door, but it doesn't look quite like it, does it?

[ The Roof ] - Two overexposed photos superimposed seamlessly. I was getting bored sitting in my hotel room in Manipal last week, so I took out my camera and started taking some pictures. I looked out the window and saw the stained roof and thought it had potential for a wallpaper. This is the result.

Note that these wallpapers are high contrast images, so they'll probably look better on new monitors (which are brighter).