Chronicles of Gautam

White and Brown Tigers. Majestic . Butterfly Park. Picturesq ue . Elephants. Cute . Zebra. Arrogant . I have some stupid problem in Firefox where I am unable to upload pics to blogger. So I had to use IE to create this post :( Current favourite track: "Paigham" from Lakeer.

On Saturday I visited Banerghatta National Park, and on the way riding on the cheapest public transport I have ever used in my life. I traveled in BMTC's Vayu Vajra bus, from Majestic to Banerghatta (A distance of at least 15 kms ), with AC and all, for a mere Rs. 1. It turns our the BMTC had a scheme for 4 days to sell all AC bus tickets for Rs 1, in an attempt to divert the public's travel preferences from private transport to public. I am not sure that's going to work, nobody in the bus (filled with giggly school girls and awed adults) seemed interested to continue once the fare returned to their normal astronomical selves. The National Park is really worth visiting once at least. It has a Grand safari where one can see lions, tigers, white tigers, bears etc. They also have a unique butterfly park and information centre. The zoo is also good and the animals seemed to be well taken care of. I'll be posting some pics in a later post. I saw the movie 'Memen...

One of my friends had the following status message on Gtalk: "I had to google for the meaning of JFGI, and the irony of it was overwhelming." It indeed is.

This picture shows what it is like inside the huge Philips Innovation Campus (PIC). And this is what my office looks like from the breakout area. 'Dream on' by Aerosmith still going strong. Dream on, dream on, dream on, Dream on till your dream comes true...

I just found this incredible video which is a must watch. Its inspired from 'We didn't start the fire..' Heres the link: Here comes another bubble ... Please do see it. My best part was about the blog paragraph. I can't resist posting the lyrics here: "Blog, blog, blog it all, Blog it if it’s big or small. Blog at the cineplex, Blog while you’re having sex. Blog in the locker room, Babies blogging in the womb. Blog even if you’re wrong, Won’t you blog about this song?" Well, I did!

Thats my Windows desktop! Cool isn't it? Possible thanks to Yod'm3D (Yet anOther Desktop Manager). "Yod'm 3D is a virtual desktop manager available for Windows 2000, XP and Vista. It is notably the first program to offer a cube-style virtual desktop management feature on Windows operating systems.It offers a "cube-effect" like e.g. VirtueDesktops for Mac OS X or Compiz and Beryl for the X Window System when switching between virtual desktops. It's the first desktop manager that makes this feature available on Microsoft Windows. Yod'm 3D makes use of and requires DirectX 9 in contrast to most other virtual desktop managers that use OpenGL. It does not require installation to run." You can get it here . WinFlip is another application that you might want to check out if you like desktop effects. It provides for Vista-like flips between running applications, and does it really well. But it is a bit unstable crashing arbitrarily sometimes (doesn'...

The Biggest news of the day: Google is launching an open source browser ' Chrome '. It promises "a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of Web applications that aren't even possible in today's browsers". Have a look at their official comic strip here Can't wait to get my hands on it.

No, this is not a post about the Big Bang ( although it is interesting enough to merit a separate post itself ), rather it is a post about The Big Bang Theory, an American situational comedy created and executive produced by Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady. The story revolves around two nerds who are particle physics scientists, their two friends who again are similar nerds and a simple (and hot) girl waitress who comes to live across the hall. I liked the series from the first episode itself. The dialogues are really witty and they use a combination of good English and complex sentence constructs to create the laughs. There is a lot of scientific jargon thrown in, and I have a hunch that me being an engineer might have something to do with my liking the show so much. I am not quite sure the Average American would appreciate the jokes. The character Sheldon especially likes to use scientific arguments to prove himself right or to prove someone wrong, and it is done in a very amusing way. S...