adarsh bhat’s blog

I watched the movie today, and liked it. Read this amazing review of Cloverfield at Chiacago Tribune (spoiler warning).

movie, review, reviews

Make it mean more than just a day off from work. Do yourself a favour and read or listen to this speech by King, which is surprisingly relevant even today.

Beyond Vietnam — A time to break silence

I’m constantly bothered by IM bots that ping me and hand me links to click on. Of course, I make it a point never to reply to them, lest they know I’m for real. But today I was pleasantly surprised to see a bot identify itself as such.

humour

For a while, I had wanted to watch this documentary. Now that I got myself a Netflix membership I have the chance to make up for lost time (what with my mother trying to protect me from English movies in my childhood).

I always knew junk food was bad, so there was no eye-opening there. But junk food happens at an entirely different scale in this country, as compared to some place like India. Sure people eat junk in India. But is not so big an industry. And people still cook most of their meals at home — and I mean really cook everything from scratch, not merely microwave ready food.

This movie is a must-watch for people who crave junk. Just to see the effect it can have on a person. Sure, the guy who eats at McDonalds for 30 days does not grow visibily fatter in an obscene way. But you can still see the other physical and mental changes in him.

Here are some of the learnings that I’m taking home from this movie:

• Eating junk makes you crave more food. I have seen this happen with my friends.
• You can fill a lot of soda in those cups.
• Cheese and sugar are addictive.

I have been trying hard to eat healthy, especially after one month of reckless eating. I look carefully at what I’m buying at the grocery store. Since most of those things are new to me, I have to learn what’s healthy and what’s not. I need to really cook my lunch myself and eat at home. Eating one meal outside every day is bad. And with me living right next door to the office, I really have no excuse. I can come back to the apartment for lunch faster than I can go to a restaurant. And yes, I need to up the amount of exercise I’m getting.

How’s that for a movie that makes you think?

exercise, food, movie, reviews

I came across these writings today somewhere on the internets.

• God’s Simple Plan of Salvation
• Jesus Saves

To me, this seems like an arbitrarily summarized and short-sighted view of Christianity. Although I don’t know too much about the religion, I can still tell that there is a lot missing in this text which claims to be the gist of Christianity.

religion

This is almost like magic. I think that posting my intentions on the blog really did the trick for me. I managed to take an hour out and complete the Wordpress upgrade as I said yesterday. Unfortunately for you, it probably means you’ll get to see more of my boring to-do lists.

The upgrade was painless since the instructions on the website were so great. I have to admit that I did panic at one point when it said there were no posts available in the blog. But then a refresh solved that problem.

The only area where I’m having a little bit of trouble is with the feedburner feed. So please bear with me while I try to get that fixed.

So, that’s one milestone achieved! Now I have all the bug-free goodness of the latest version, if there actually is some such thing.

Update: Making this post solved the feedburner problem. I would have to assume it was a matter of refreshing their cache.

blog, upgrade, wordpress

I have been for ever making plans to improve the web site and the blog. If you look at it today, the home page looks nothing like the blog. It is, as always, high time that I did something about it.

Normally I would just wish I had something better and then sigh. But when my colleague Patrick covered his mouth with his hands and said, “Oh my God! You’re a developer without his own blog template,” I knew it was time to do something about it.

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean that I actually have something ready. But this time, I really want to put this down in writing. I shall blog as I develop the blog — call it meta-blogging if you will. As it is, I don’t write much else that is very interesting. Along the way, I might just as well help a poor soul, another one like myself, who wants to walk the same path. Oh I bet there are thousands of you out there!

Among the first things that I will need to do is upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress (my blogging software). I surely don’t want to be writing any templates for older versions.

Then I will need to write a template for Wordpress. I will have to take care to make sure that the website home page and the blog look like part of the same website. Normally I would have been keen on writing a slim-as-it-gets bare-bones UI by hand. But this time, I am going to try writing a template using one of the javascript libraries. Since I’m most familiar with Ext, now that we use it at work, that is the first and natural choice since development time will be the shortest. If I don’t like what I have, I might look at other libraries.

(Too lazy to finish this)

blog

There was a time when Daler Mehndi’s “Bolo Ta Ra Ra” was a huge hit in India. I learned the meaning of the lyrics today when Arvind linked to it. Hilarious!

After thinking a lot, I realized that cheap SMS is what I miss about living in India.

Earlier on IM today…

After a long and tiring conversation…
Friend: I want to take a crap. I’m so constipated.
Me: eww… go go! I didn’t know that chatting can have such profound effects on you.
Friend: i wish sms were free
Me: I know… that’s so the thing to do on the toilet bowl. I did it all the time.
Friend: who knows that better than me

sigh