Yesterday was one of the laziest Sundays I had seen in a while. Did absolutely nothing. Saturday was my Company’s Annual Day, so was busy shooting pictures at the event. Unfortunately the venue had a shamiana which made everything too dark for my camera. Flash was of little help but since I shoot RAW, was able to get some mileage out of the snaps. Well, that’s enough for a company annual day. It is not my b’day party or something :p

One good thing I did yesterday, apart from beginning to re-read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (it is not spelt as maintain - ence, as I always thought!), was that I began to catalogue all the music/software/backups that I have on CD/DVD. Considering that I have close to 200 disks, it is a Herculean task maintaining all that data! But I found this really cool app called “Where Is It?“. Makes cataloguing a breeze. You can have thumnails for images, make a note of whom you’ve lent disks too, print reports etc. Friends in college had introduced me to a similar program called SuperCat which I used a long time ago. The Where Is It site had this comparison between different cataloguing software, and good marketing got me using it I’d surely recommend this little program. So I spent most of last evening inserting, cataloguing, and removing CDs. Imagine doing that 200 times! Very boring, but best suited for the day it was. The week ahead should be interesting, with one holiday and a trip to Tirupathi coming up.

PS: There is also a freeware, reader-only version of WhereIsIt.

Kids, don’t say we didn’t warn you

Shot this last evening from my window

I have updated my gallery with snaps from Calcutta. Most of them were taken thanks to a generous relative of mine, who drove me around the city, helped me set up the tripod and told curious onlookers that I am making a documentary on Calcutta (One of the guys who was told this replied saying that the city has had so many documentaries, why one more!)

I work for an MNC that has fairly lenient firewall policies. Apart from web-mail sites, I can browse a whole lot of other websites, including blogs. I know some companies that restrict internet access to only mails, and some that totally block blogs. Hell, I can even access The Best Page in the Universe! If you cannot access that page, then try looking up Wikipedia.

I totally understand why companies restrict access to the Internet. Sometimes it can be annoying, like when I cannot access Microsoft’s Windows XP SP2 page (the IT department has apparently not yet tested SP2 on our machines and do not recommend it). However, one thing that beats me is how they allow access to job hunting websites! I have no problems access Monsterindia.com, naukri.com or any of those job sites. Is it in the spirit of ‘free speech/freedom of expression/we-don’t-restrict-people-from-making-choices’ ? Something I haven’t yet figured…

Incidently, would you apply for a company that doesn’t get its facts right?

Taken from MonsterIndia.com

I picked up this book to remind myself all over again what the whole deal about blogging is. The book tries to be funny (like all For Dummies series), but succeeds only in a few places. For example:

The High Road: Self Installed Blogging Programs
Installing sophisticated blog software in your own server space is the most cost-effective way to get full-throated blogging power over a long period (I disagree). This method is also the most challenging way to start blogging. I don’t mean scratch-your-head challenging. I mean tear-your-hair-out challenging. Grown-men-weeping sort of challenge. Self installation of a blog is like building an SUV.

Ha ha! Now that was funny. And I agree with the latter part. But I guess people like Arun may not. He successfully hacked Wordpress to make his site: http://www.split-magazine.com/ And it looks damn good! I wish I had the time and expertise to hack my web-gallery and make it look the way I want it. Which brings me to the question: Are PHP templates editable in WYSIWYG editors like Dreamweaver? Something I intend to investigate today (yea, most of my weekends are spent in front of the ‘pooter). I am completely self-taught on this whole website building thing, and sometimes I wish I spent my 4 years of college learning such useful things rather than trying to find something to do in the jungle!

David’s Gilmour’s new album is out. I had already seen a video (’the island jam’) and heard a track, so wasn’t surprised when the album turned out to be very mellow, very david gilmour. It’s not officially out till the 6th.

On my new gallery of course