RSS Feed Improvements

Got back to some PHP coding today (after more than two years!) and made some improvements to the RSS feed of VarunAbhiram.com. You'll notice that the titles are much neater now, and the feed items now feature thumbnail images! All I had to do was to hook up the RSS code to my nifty PHP script that automatically picks up images from their respective locations, scales them down and feeds them to the browser.

Small change, but makes the feed look a lot richer, wouldn't you say?

Drawing Natalie Portman from "Black Swan"

Watch 6 hours of drawing, shading and digital colouring effort compressed into a little under 4 minutes —

The Making of "Flight"

Since some of you have been asking, here are the base images that were used to make my recent "Flight" wallpaper —

And here's the step-wise process —

1. The three images were overlayed on each other.

2. Orientations of the images were matched to make it appear as if the birds were flying in the same direction.

3. Overlapping birds were cloned out.

4. The tones, brightness and contrast were adjusted.

5. Finally, text was added to produce the final image.

Lazy Sunday Special

Was bored this evening, so I boiled a ear of sweet corn in water, removed the kernels (how time-consuming that can be!) and added some Mango Thokhu pickle, salt, chilli powder and lime juice. For lack of any alternative seasoning (and to make the photo look good), curry leaves were added at the end. Trust me, it tastes as good as it looks.

In case you've noticed, the blog also has a new design now! The template uses Google Web Fonts, which doesn't always display correctly until the page is refreshed. No idea why.

Microwave Experiments

Hard to believe that a whole year of my MBA course is over! My 9-month stint at Wipro definitely felt a lot longer than this. I guess time flies when you're having fun, and when you're too busy with college work to watch the time go right out the window (as Mike would put it).

I will be in Hyderabad till tomorrow and then I'm off to Bangalore for a 2-month Summer Internship at Lenovo. What better place to spend the summer than the city with the best weather in India, and the city with the highest density of CVR population I know (no wonder I get a warm welcome every time I visit)! Ironically, it is the same city I said goodbye to not too long ago.

So what have I been upto the past two weeks here in Hyderabad? Well, mostly experimenting with the new microwave we bought at home. I tried my hand at baking a cake and some biscuits. Here are the results —

Experiment #1: Plain Cake

It looked perfect when I took it out of the microwave, it tasted just fine when I had a piece too. But as it cooled, it became real hard, and not exactly eatable — either the batter was too thick or I must have left in the microwave for too long. Whatever the case, the cake finally had to be thrown away.

Experiment #2: Shortbread

The second experiment didn't turn out as bad, thankfully. In fact, these biscuits came out amazingly well — crisp, buttery and yummy. If only I had a biscuit cutter, they would look as good as they taste!

Apart from baking stuff, I've been reading a book which I would have never imagined myself reading some months ago, and have started watching this intriguing series (with barely an opening sequence) about a bunch of people stranded on an island. I'd say I have enough to keep me occupied for quite a while, wouldn't you?

BBC World - Gaming in the Cloud

BBC World's technology programme 'Click' had a small item on "Taking Gaming into the Cloud" back in June. I had commented on the article after watching the episode, but I had no idea they actually posted it on their website. What a pleasant surprise it was to stumble across the post today!

Read the entire article

Wisdom in Decay

I aged an extracted tooth (not mine, in case you were wondering) for a couple of days and then photographed it the other day on black paper.

Took me around an hour and 100 or so photos before I got the perfect two shots you can see below.

I can hear you say "Ewwww!", but in my personal opinion, I think the final images turned out to be quite artistic!