Random Thoughts about the Future

Well with the end of first semester at Upenn, im left with loads of free time.. Time to rekindle my old way of spending time- To just think, create virtual things of my own, amuse myself with imagination and... this time thought I would pen down some of my thoughts.. I am realizing that my ridiculous exaggerated imaginations might someday be true. Here they are:

A future Scenario where today's food would be considered taboo just like alcohol and drugs are:

When i see all the delicious tempting food that i cannot stop eating, this thought sort of hit me.. Food when not taken in appropriate amounts leads to obesity just like alcohol when taken in excess. So in the future, all human beings will eat food pills and all tasty food items would be considered addictive and hence treated just as alcohol,drugs are . Cooking food be equivalent to Cooking meth . Death by obesity would be most common cause of death and French fries and the like would be blamed for this lack of control of humans on their sense. And to think,  the addicted junkie guy on the corner of a dunky street would be selling french fries :))

Devices of the Future

Smellograph:

Just like preserving visual objects through photos,  or sound through audio cds, Smellograph would be a device preserving smell.

Since I saw this in Futurama, I always thought it to be possible but in a different way. Why does the device have to have chemicals to get some sort of fumes to your nose. Rather why cant we just simulate the nerves causes the smell. With the way computational Neuroscience is making progress these days, finding the nerve simulations for any sense should be easily doable in the future. And im sure the future computers would be wearable devices on the head (might look cooler than helmet) , with glasses for monitor and some sort of gloves for keyboard and mouse. If that future were true, everything would be directly simulated to the brain. Now for the smellograph, all you gotta do is find those centres in the brain that cause the smell and just simulate them.

Thought Blocker:

These days, the most common problem everyone has is distractions. After sometime, concentration seems to ebb away, distractions tend to set in. In the olden days, people use to meditate without a thought for years together and they used to achieve what they set their mind to. I believe the meditation gives them the focus they need to be so goal oriented that they wont stop till they get what they want, without any distractions. As I see it, even today everything is possible if you keep working on it long enough without giving up. The problem is to not give up. You give up when you have distractions. So well, future device I would like is a thought blocker which blocks away all distractions. All painful memories, all temptations that might come on the way to ur goal. Just like you block a friend in facebook, you would get to block a thought to not cause u harm anymore.

DNA Destroyer:

Well, I cooked this up when we were in a bus to north india tour where I had nothing better to do than tell a future scenario about my diary(which im not getting into right now). Anywho.. identity of a person in the future would be through his dna, no more finger prints or iris recognition crap. It would be through your dna. What we worry now when we go outta the house, would be if we left oven on or if we forgot to lock the door. But in the future, you would be worrying about forgetting to dna-destroy your hair after you finish combing or to destroy your dead skin cells after shower.

My Point Perspective - Explained

Beauty is all around you, you only need notice it

Well I have a problem, I always want everything I make to be special, to be unique, authentic. So I always end up wasting a lotta time on naming stuff – be that the title of a simple composition in 4^th grade in school or the name of my program, even the name of variables in my code.  I want to find that perfect name, that exact that only i would do and noone else. And when time came to find one for my blog, I raked my brain for all sorts of names and nothing was satisfactory.. and finally one day I found it!!

 I found it when I was looking at some random camera angle and graphics and stuff and it hit me. I was reading about perspectives and how everything about the image changes from where you see it. Isnt life exactly that for everyone, isn’t a blog exactly that! How I view life.

Lemme establish a better analogy. One point perspective looks thus:

Thats the first image that comes up in google though.

A 2 point perpective looks thus:

(you might wanna read up more about perspectives to know the details of the above 2 images.)

And as I kept thinking, my blog is all about my perspective. How I view the world with my eyes, through my vantage point. And as I kept thinking, not just my blog, every truth, every story is just a perspective from the narrator. Noone really knows the truth and simply put.. there is no one truth, there always exists multiple truths to the same event. Just like multiple angles to the same object. It might seem ugly from one perspective but beautiful from another.
As i see it, there is no absolute truth, there is only perspective!

So here’s my perspective in life.. 
After a year of early morning walks with my dear dad and his infinite words of wisdom and our long out-of-the-world conversations, I decided that I would look at my life thus – “Beauty is all around you, you only need notice it”.. 

And voila! I found the perfect name for my blog, my diary, my essence, my brand  if u will :D 

Monkey See Monkey Eat

The Game on Windows Store: Monkey See Monkey Eat

I always wanted to make a game. A very simple yet addictive (addictive might be too strong a word here, a game which u feel like playing again and again) game. Tried out all sorts of stuff in flash but never really got around to completing a full fledge game with scores and stuff.

A few years down the line, I landed up in Microsoft, right around the time of windows 8 release. A tiny competition was organized to create an app for windows 8 and we started brainstorming for ideas and came up with a few but I don’t remember how but some how we finalized on developing a simple game.

It was the night of Hyderabad App fest that gave the game some shape. The project I was supposed to be working on got scrapped and suddenly I had the time to explore everything new and found a tutorial that suited what we were doing

Arrived the day of Hyderabad App fest, nervous, we entered the room with a half developed game, making jokes about the “pew” sound. It was a 12 hour coding event from evening 6 pm to 6 am next day. Good food, roamed arnd like ghosts in the building trying to find a conference room to visualize our architecture on a board and ended up drawing designs on it :P. Working together helped us through the points we got stuck in.

Then came the morning, a sleepless yet very fresh morning it was. We were quite pleased with ourselves with the progress and the judges were very impressed with the UI and the simple yet attractiveness of the game. And the icing on the cake was when of the judges invited us to showcase the game with the words - “one of the best looking apps I’ve seen in a long time”. All credits to Battu.

With a smile on our face we walked out into the bright sunrise .

After that fixing all the issues and publishing to the store was the most annoying part and not giving up on the way was the challenging part but we did it anyways.. All credits to Akshitha for her determination.

Here is the link: Monkey See Monkey Eat

Play when u r plain bored with work and need some absent minded refreshment :D

The Journey of My First Time Lapse Video

The Video: Flowers Blooming

Inception:

I still remember the first time we got a computer to our house. I had just finished my 7^th grade and my brother, his eamcet(some lame exam), both with flying colors and exceeding expectations. And the gift was “my computer”. I had no clue what the possibilities of the computer were, back then. All I knew was paint! So after painting a house, a smiley face, a Christmas tree and a lot of random stuff, I got tired and started exploring the free softwares that were shipped with the desktop. I came across the free encyclopedia Britannica, gift for the purchase. Encyclopedia eh! Full of text. Boring!( back then :\).. I wanted to see pictures and videos and searched for all the video files and I vaguely remember that there was something about birds in “galopigas island” (I wonder why I remember that name so well). So anyways there was this one video of a purple flower blooming right from the bud to full bloom and I thought wow! I would so that someday. And of course I completely forgot about it right away :D.

Idle Brain is no longer the devils workshop!

And soo.. 9 years later, I find myself jobless on a weekend (well not literally jobless). Trying to escape from my oh-so-not-happy-thoughts, I suddenly realized that I had been staring at a flower too long with my eyes out of focus – and OMG the flower had started blooming, I could see its little petals unfurling right in front of my eyes and BAM!! The encyclopedia flower blooming video suddenly popped up into my head and then another neuron said time lapse video (outta nowhere). And well.. what was I waiting for?.. I dashed into my room, got my camera and a Tripod, all too excited to start my “first ever timelapse video” , a wish which has been lurking around the corner of my head since 9 years(I wonder how brain works!). And boy! Was that Easy!!(Sarcasm) Read on.. I will be giving few pointers in the end for shooting timelapse video.

Out of Focus:

And so it had begun. I set up the tripod, fit the camera onto it and was clicking away every 10 to 20 seconds for half hour, only to realize in the end that the camera was not on “macro” and the flower was completely out of focus. Damn! Now I had to wait for another weekend  - the flower only starts blooming from 4 pm to 6 pm and I was always gonna be in office at that time during the weekdays. Well, there wasn’t much I could do other than wait for the next weekend. Attempt1 unsuccessful!

Shake it Baby

The next weekend had arrived and with it, arrived my attemp2. This time I was very careful abt the camera set in the right mode and started clicking away.. so sure that I would finish it this weekend. And well.. bad luck strikes again and I tripped over the tripod, the camera position had gone haywire and my timelapse video remained unfinished. No worries, I can still try it out the next weekend rt?!

Wind - Thou heartless Bitch

Weekend with attempt3 has started. This time i made sure the camera mode was macros and my feet weren’t anywhere near the tripod, but the wind started playing the villain. With every whoosh, the flower moved outta its default position. Attempt3 gone to dogs. As always, I consoled myself with the though - next weekend baby!

Battery OVER

Attempt4: battery gave up on me halfway through the blooming. I frantically searched for a way to charge the camera when its connected to laptop, but couldn’t find one. I was getting frustrated now. Helpless.. having to wait for another weekend. I put the batteries in the charger and plugged em in all through the week in the store room so that no1 would disturb it.

Battery Trolled

Well, weekend 5 came with calm sky and no wind yayy!! But bad news was just waiting around the corner- when I went into the store room to get my batteries, the plug had come loose and the lil yellow light that says “charging” was off. God knows when it had come loose, I hadn’t checked it the whole week. But then again, it was blinking when I had put in for charging, so lets hope for the best and well.. the universe seems to be conspiring against me and in no time the display on the camera starts to blink away the “low battery” signal. And suddenly it occurred to me, why don’t I switch the camera off in that 10 to 20 seconds gap when im not clicking the photo. And it worked!! Battery trolled! Oh yeah!! And though I had finished the full flower blooming, I was still not yet satisfied with the video. I was ready for the final attempt and I waited for the last weekend..

Triumph

Finally attempt6 has lived up to my expectations. I used photolapse to stich the photos into a video and the surprising part is that I could use the half done video from all my previous attempts to make  full fledged one–and it turned out better since it had the flower blooming from different angles. Here’s the link. Trust me – There is no such thing as Time Waste, Everything u do WILL someday come in handy!

Tips for TimeLapse Photography

• Choose your subject such that 60% of the frame is static and only 40%(even less is better) is moving.
• Use a software for timelapse photography which takes snapshots by remote capture :P (which i found out later)
• Avoid taking outdoor snapshots for long as the sunlight changes and the video would become flashy
•  Use YouTube-stabilizer for the video - it does wonders.
• Try and confine your video to a closed room with uniform lighting and not much wind throughout the video

My Experiments with "Bus"

Well .. here goes ,

It was a usual morning, getting up late, running all over the place 2 get ready on time, that day I was a little too late. Dad who usually always is very very nice to me yelled at me. I know he had a conference and I should've gotten up early but still it hurts.. 

So anyway I got outta the car at my usual place where I wait for auto.. but that day as I got out a gush of wind swept across my face and at that moment I decided I wanted to go in the bus. The wind usually cheers me up but .. Dad!!.. And before I knew it, there came my bus to OU. Phew! Its empty!!  

I always enjoy my bus rides, there’s so many people with so many things going on. Its so interesting to see how they go about their daily activities like a super human computer analyzing how human beings think(eh well it sounds cool :D).. 
but today I hardly cared to notice.. then before I could enjoy the space a big group of workers got in with their “gampas”(basket kinda things)..Every single person on the bus frowned when these people entered, literally EVERY single one of them. One woman yelled at a worker for just brushing her saree against her. I know her saree is dirty but wth workers are people too!, they have feelings too! 

Then I saw the worker’s face it hardly bothered her.. All of this hardly bothered any of the workers .. They were their usual selves.

Then one of the workers dropped her gampa, more groans from the “non-worker people”. Then, this I didn’t expect.. One of the non worker people helped her and the worker was so happy.. she was so happy that she went around and told every1 that a women helped her.. just a little help made her day..Then I thought.. 

Wow! How can these people be so happy when everyone frowns at them and just one person smiles at them.

How can I ruin my day when everyone smiles at me and just one single person is rude to me because it was my fault and I deserved it too.

Life really is weird; we don’t much realize the importance of things that we have excess of, do we?

Its all about Mistakes

This blog is "life" as seen from where i stand.. as i explore it, as i learn from it.. i  was always told that everyone don't always have to make all the mistakes, its smart to learn from others's mistakes.. And this was all i did my whole life.. Learn from others's mistakes..

But i forgot life is to live not to try so hard to not make those mistakes.. its about making my own mistakes, my own experiences.. 

Its not what you did right that counts in life its what you did wrong.. that's what makes u grow..

Hope my experiences can inspire someone to make their own mistakes, make their own life  :)