Sunday, April 24, 2011

Life in Mar 19 - Apr 24

Getting back. When life brings you down, you need to get back to life and even harder. My previous post in "Life in" series was an eye opener, nothing important was going on and i seem to have been wasting my time. It was a bad feeling writing that post. But i am happy to report that it is not the case this time and indeed what a month it has been.

Please see few previous blog posts to see what i have been up to. This post will cover the ones that slid through the cracks.

Played Cosmic encounters on last Wednesday's board games. Enjoyed a lot, as usual.

This month's camera cinema club movie was "These amazing shadows" - a documentary on US National film registry, how it came to existence, the kind of movies it has chosen, how it works etc etc. But more importantly, it was a collage of classic movies, something to feel nostalgic about and reminded us how truly great cinema as an artform is. Well made movie. In the screening before this one, on my feedback form, i had requested that we should have a documentary and this month they picked a docu. Thanks for listening to the feedback.

Books : Started reading the Idiot By Fyodor Dostoevsky. Also, started on The gay science by Neitzche.

MicMacs: Watched the movie MicMacs by Jean Pier Jeunnet - the man behind Amelie and A very long Engagement. Liked it a lot. Definitely not Amelie level but still very high. He has carved his own niche and no one can imitate him. Quite bold in experimentation, highly creative and some great performances. Not to be missed.


Knitting: Now that the rug is complete, i am making a stuffed egg using size 3 needles. A big change from size 50. Going ok so far.
Also, went to Berkeley for Yarn shopping at a store that was closing down with Guy and Christine.

Cooking: Cooking experiments continue. Last one was Chocolate coconut macaroons. Pics can be found here https://picasaweb.google.com/arvindbatra/MyCookingExperiments?feat=directlink

Camping is a joy and so is planning of camping. Very interesting to see an impulse planner thinking two more steps ahead. But quite a lot of shopping - tent, firewood, camping shoes, lighters, lights blah blah.


Audiobooks: Listened to Grapes of Wrath on my way and back from Point Reyes. This audiobook had characters, and seemed abridged, but it had music as well. Overall, i think the story was quite interesting, i think the audio book even though was great while driving, it does not give justice to the book.


India won the world cup: I am very surprised that there are no blog posts from me on this historic news. India Aus match was enjoyed with Amit Rana and Gurshi (who was working). India - Pak match was enjoyed sitting at Gursharan's office with his CEO and some other strangers. India - SL final was enjoyed with Nikesh, Zoheb and Deepak at Deepak's place. (It is very important to document the view venues) . Extremely delighted to see India win. I have more respect for Dhoni than before especially the way he batted in last innings. Overall, i liked Zaheer's agression and not giving up and Munaf Patel's simplicity. Glad to see Gambhir and Virat Kohli in the side. Overall, not impressed by Indian bowlers and even though Yuvraj Singh was man of the series, i still see him as flaky. Kudos to Dhoni for being the brain behind. My personal favorite Indian team was 2003 team which has Sachin, Dravid, Ganguly and Laxman. Too bad in 2003, we didn't convert. Very happy for Sachin that he has the cup on his accomplishments as well.


Got my bike. Yay!!

Battlestar Galactica : I am hooked into this TV series after playing the board game twice with Manish and others at office. BSG is a very interesting series and its creators have managed to mix the sci-fi genre with political drama in a very nice manner. I am in third season now and even though some episodes are drag, most of them are very well written. The acting is also quite good. The interesting things to note is that BSG has devised some constructs which allows them to escape the conventional limitations. For example they use the word frak instead of fuck which is ok for prime time. By making cylons having multiple copies, they can easily kill them and yet have them too. This is so creative if you think the drama Heroes where the watch maker was dragged on for season after season. There are other small small details that make BSG a delight to watch.

And finally the big news - My company was acquired by Walmart last week. There had been a numbers of rumors of acquisition floating around for last two months. But finally it happened. Personally, Walmart as an employer is not that exciting, its like getting an offer to work for Narendra Modi and you know my views about hi,. But there is a lot of opportunity in the area of social ecommerce and Walmart is also way behind the amazon. But, the most important point is that there is a good number attached to work and looking at that number, it may not be that big for others but for someone from my standpoint, it is too good to be true.

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