My technical notes finally found a permanent place. I have had this Tech Blog since 2003, but I did not work on it regularly. I recently resurrected it and moved it from Blogger to Wordpress hosted on blog.softricks.com domain.

So here you go – http://blog.softricks.com is where my technical blog will actively reside.

I will still post some of my thoughts here on Technology in general – some examples of these are my posts on Windows vs Mac here – “Lifetime Change” and here – “Mac vs Windows.. the War begins” and here – “I broke up with my new ‘girlfriend’!!“. But the real technical discussions (like all kinds of Step-by-Step instructions etc) will be on this Tech Blog. So go check it out if you are technically minded.

Christopher Columbus once said, “You can never cross the ocean unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore“….

AOL has been like a shore for me for the last 8.5 years! I am not sure if I am really crossing any ocean or not, but it is certainly a start of a new life. When you come to think of it, I guess you have very few absolute endings in life.. probably just one! Everything else is a new start.. so, I consider this not as the end of my AOL life but a beginning of my life @VeriSign.

And it feels surprising how fast I reached this decision to leave AOL.. especially since I always used to say that I can be here forever! There was still truth in that, except that it was a bit tainted at that time. I really loved the folks @AOL, the environment, the flexibility in everything.. I built a life for myself while working there – considering I had at least 6 important life events during that time.

During my stay, I must have survived at least 8 layoffs.. and I knew there was no way that I could’ve continued to be lucky forever! Now the question was whether to stay and continue to hope that someone else gets laid off instead of me – if it comes to that – or just leave and find a new hope.. The question was whether I can feel motivated again.. And the question was whether I was ready to start all over again (I had even lost my manager in the layoffs)… And finally, the question was also whether I could live with a survivor’s guilt which I had never felt so closely before…

Within two days, I had the answer in my mind – the answer was to get out. There was no way anyone could’ve advised me to stick it out.. I had already done that for 8.5 years! Also, I was almost getting numb and complacent about being in AOL.. yes, I was getting older and older!

In my farewell email, I accepted the possibility that life might not necessarily be better after this decision, that life might actually be more difficult outside of AOL.. but decisions are always like that.. you have to be open minded about the outcome. So I walked out of AOL on March 27th 2009.. with no plan to be back on the following Monday..

I still see so many AOL branded goodies around me – an AOL cup, an AOL frisbee, AOL pens, AOL jackets.. and it feels quite strange to be alienated from these 3 letters now…!

I download a lot of songs. I am no position to brag about having the largest collection of songs, because I really don’t have the largest collection by any standards. Right now, I only have 535 MP3s – some Hindi, some English, a few Marathi songs and Bhajans and a handful of Marathi Stand-up comedy mp3s. Now I am a fanatic when it comes to organizing things! So I have created quite a few playlists such as Old, 70s, 80s, 90s, 200x, New Songs, Fresh, Dance, Disco, Marathi, etc to organize my audio collection.

Here is what I have been doing recently to keep a good backup of my music on an external drive and have it in the same organized manner as the way I am used to having on my iPhone.

Exporting to directories:

I don’t like the way iTunes organizes the physical files because it categorizes by the Artist and then the Album. Sometimes the ID3 tags contain all kinds of crap, and that creates strange directories in your iTunes Music folder. So there are 2 ways in which you can avoid this -

1. Fix the ID3 tags before you import the file into iTunes – I use Mp3tag (http://www.mp3tag.de/en/) and Audio Shell Mp3 Shell Extension (http://www.softpointer.com/AudioShell.htm) for this. I clean up all ID3 tags to my liking using these tools before I import the file into iTunes. But this just ensures that you don’t have weird directory names. iTunes will still organizes by Artist and Album – which doesn’t work for me.

2. You could use an exporter that can export the PLAYLISTS to physical directories. Now I did not find one that did that. So I wrote my own (iTunesXP). This will soon be available from my site – Softricks.com.

Organizing files into Playlists:

Prior to this, I used to drag the mp3s by hand into appropriate playlists.

Today, I thought about setting the ID3 tag Genre as the name of the playlist and making all playlists Smartlists that look for certain strings in the Genre. What if a song is in 2 playlists? Well, use comma separated names in the genre. The Smartlist can say – where Genre contains “xyz”.

More..

I started downloading some relevant Artwork for every song in my collection. I know it is a bit too much.. but I kinda’ like to see the artwork whenever a song is playing on my iPhone rather than have a blank space.

I realized that iTunes allows for mass updating various ID3 fields. Many downloads come with some junk in the “Comments” field or “Lyrics” field. If you select all songs and do “Get Info” in iTunes, you can, say, blank out “Comments” field for all of them at once!

I know it’s a lot of work.. but I guess I like to have a quality collection!

When I was in high school, I took Biology as an elective besides Electronic Instrumentation. I don’t remember why I did that especially since I was never cut to be a doctor. I certainly did not know back then, what I was getting into. Anyway, my vivid memories of my high-school Biology adventures are not for the faint hearted! But well, they are what they are.. Things will get graphic in this post, just like my memories are.. but I am sure many of us who did Biology in high school would remember this and that could lead to some introspection.

Basically, Biology had 2 separate limbs, Botany and Zoology. Botany was pretty harmless and non-violent, whereas Zoology came with some bloody violence. Later in my life I learned that I was lucky enough to get away with just Earthworms and Frogs – and I never had to cut a cockroach or a mouse or whatever else they did in other colleges.

This whole massacre used to be called “Dissection”. I just think it was a mass murder, ethnic cleansing of sort! I doubt how much it helped me in my knowledge about that poor animal. I always say that if you really hate someone and you want to curse him, you might wish him to end up like that in front of some “student” in his next life!

So, we had these slaughterhouses in our colleges that we called the “Labs”, where they would gather all the “students” – some willing and some really unwilling like me, and make them murder these poor animals in semi-conscious state. These “Lab” sessions still might exist in colleges even today, although I have heard lately that they are finally contemplating on using computers for all this now.

We started with these tiny, slimy, wriggling creatures – the Earthworms. Somehow, the Earthworms did not stir the same kind of repulsive, nauseating feelings in me, as the Frogs later did. Of course, I was never fond of any crawling creatures. But it is amazing the way different kinds of feelings work in you – so if a creature is small, you don’t think it is capable of feeling any pain. Kinda’ like, killing an ant is easier than killing a chicken?

Anyway, these Earthworms used to be firmly pinned at the head and the tail, on a tray in front of us. We were supposed to cut it open without rupturing its nerve ring. Whoever managed to do that got the highest credits! I still remember I could never keep the nerve ring intact and then I used to just adjust it so that it would at least look intact to the examiner! So far so good..

Somewhere towards the middle of the year, our lab assistant brought a big bucket with him.. We had special trays in front of us that day – which had 4 corner hooks. All of us were just sitting at our lab desks and suddenly with a thud, an “almost” unconscious frog drops flat in front of each one of us! I still remember girls shrieking and some boys like me trying to look brave even though they were shit scared from inside! Over the course of few more weeks, this routine would repeat. Some of us enjoyed it, some of us did not..

The frogs used to be anesthetized using Chloroform, but I still remember that some of them were not completely unconscious and used to try to get up right in the middle of their dissection and then the screams would follow! We were supposed to tie their legs and hands to the board on which they were to be dissected, and I remember I never had the guts to touch the frog to tie him up. I used to pass the strings around his legs and hands making sure not to touch him and then tie the knot. On the other hand, some kids were brave and I say, those were the dangerous kind.. for the frogs! I am sure the helpless frogs lying on their backs in front of us, must have hoped that these “knowledge hungry kids” with scalpels, kill them instantly rather than slowly. But it was never meant to be that way…

I am still not sure what I learned from the whole experience. We would lose some points, for example, if we did not keep their hearts beating during the whole ordeal. Well, this might be so that they can teach us to be light handed during this “operation”, but if I think about it now, a person like me did not achieve anything by prolonging the pain for those poor creatures back then. Whether it is either the digestive system today, or the nervous system the next week, or some other system the following week – every system in the body required a new body to be killed..

It all ended in an exam for me, and fortunately then, I had to cut an Earthworm and not a frog! As usual I could not keep the nerve ring intact, but I managed to fake it and be done with it. I moved on, towards bloodless, non-violent study options, and back in those Biology labs, newer generations of frogs kept sacrificing their lives. Some sacrificed to give birth to future doctors, but some did so, for nothing. And this wasn’t a producer-consumer ecosystem, because not everybody consumed the knowledge that was supposed to come out of it..

So here I am, just putting something in writing, for those frogs I killed to pass my exams. If I could change some things in my high school life, this would be one of the things I would. This post, is just in memory of those unfortunate souls..

Misery can make a poet out of a moron if it strikes the right chords!

I am currently evaluating several video converters in my attempt to backup my home videos. The problem is as I have stated before. I want to save them so that I can find them easily and also, I want to save them in an efficient way – from storage and quality point of view. I know both these points of views go tangential to each other, but still I want to reach a middle ground that I can live with.

Now what do I have ?

• DVDs – Videos imported from old VHS cassettes and old VHS-C Camcorder cassettes – Mpeg-2 / AC3 audio (720×480)
• miniDV cassettes (DV format – (720×480)
• Mpeg-1 videos on Digital Camera – Mpeg-1 / MP2 audio (640×480)

What do I want the output format to be? I have chosen mpeg-2 as my universal output format. AVI is out of question (will take too much storage space), mpeg-4 DivX or XviD..? hmm.. not sure, it is more for the web and there is too much compression there.

Anyways, so I looked at the following:

• MPEG_Streamclip : Works if you choose “Convert to MPG with MP2 audio” or “Convert to Headed MPEG” which gets AC3 audio. It is Free!
• SUPER from eRightSoft : Too technical but does its job. And it is Free!
• TMPGEnc XPRESS : Too expensive ($99). Did not try.
• AVS Video Converter : You have to pay $59. I have read mixed reviews
• OJOSoft Total Video Converter : Did the job well. You have to pay $26.99 however. If I feel like buying something, I might go for it.

I vote for MPEG_Streamclip or SUPER obviously because they are Free! Still working on finding the easiest and fastest solution for this.. will keep updating this post I guess.

In the meanwhile, anybody has any other suggestions/comments?

For a long time, I did not do much on our main site (http://www.somik.net) since it was too cumbersome to sit down and handcode everything, although I did manage to host videos etc laboriously struggling with complex html tags and hacks for streaming videos.

Finally I found a solution to my problems. I installed Joomla – a Content Management System – and finally was able to get everything going within a day. Very easy to maintain and update. I actually feel good about it!

Check it out – http://www.somik.net

I am investigating this for far too long.. I need some input on how others are doing it. I have done the usual Google search on this a lot, but nothing has convinced me on what is the best way to store your memories. I totally believe that leaving your videos on miniDV tapes is quite inefficient -

1. You can’t find the video you want quickly
2. You have to buy a new tape when you are out of blank tapes
3. Tapes can get damaged / tangled overtime (has already happened to me and I am using a professional repair shop to get my tapes fixed – Pacific Video Repair)

I was thinking of backing up my camcorder videos to external hard drives. Backup to DVDs is not so attractive – although I have done it before, since, again, finding a video quickly is an issue and DVDs can get damaged too. I have already moved my old VHS-C videos to miniDVs and then to DVDs long time ago.

There is a question about the right format too. If I back them up in an uncompressed format like AVI, I know it will take a huge amount of storage space. Hundreds of Mb’s will just fit a few minutes of video. Also if you have your hard drive in FAT32 format, then you have the 4GB / file limit. Of course, now-a-days it is usually NTFS. But on the other hand, is it wise to use compressed formats such as mpeg2 – DVD / mpeg4 – DivX/XviD etc. ‘coz you will lose some detail there in the compression? How will the resulting video look on a 50+ inch TV? Well, DVDs look good, so it should be okay?

Anyways, please take this poll and let me know what you do. I will leave the poll in the sidebar too once this post becomes old. Thanks.

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I always think that in the overall scheme of things, a year is nothing but a man-made milestone that does not have any significance on a cosmic scale. But in general, it is a place from where you tend to look back and see how and where it ended for yourself.

And one tends to do that on all fronts – financial, personal, professional, social..

For me, I think this year was the saddest so far on personal front.. I lost an uncle and my father this year. Almost every day in your life, you gain some, you lose some.. but some of the things you lose are not worth lamenting. People, on the other hand are irreplaceable and you realize this the most after you lose them.

I think the family overall was doing good. You always wish your kid can grow up faster than you do but unfortunately that rate is same for everyone I think if your wife and kid are happy, most of you are happy anyway!

On the professional front, I would say this was a good year, not the best, however. I still kinda’ like to believe that the best is yet to come. Well, I am sure even Bill Gates must be thinking this way every day!

That rounds up the year for me, one always wishes a lot from the future.. wonder how much can be packed in just one year and if God will just hold this post for it..

But still, I think, I would love to say next year that last year was the best so far, and would like all the years thereafter to start with the same comment! …………I think that should do it, right?

So let it be written.. and so let it be done!

We hear this all the time, and each one of us thinks that life has not been fair to him/her at some point or the other. I say that in itself is not a ‘fair statement’.. Most of the times, I think our own approach to life makes it fair/unfair to us. Now all this may sound too idealistic and I hate it if ever I sound like so. So let me explain..

Have you heard the Eagles song “Get over it” (Album: Hell Freezes Over)? It is my all-time favorite for this very reason..

I too, have felt as if life has been unfair to me, on a number of occasions.. but I just make sure I don’t really start believing in it.. the problem with believing in such a thing is that you find an easy excuse for your failures. First of all, one has to forfeit the almost dreamlike and idealistic demand that everything in this world is orderly, reasonable, and fair. That’s the crux of all the confusion..

Now consider this..

• Why is it that this man is doing so much bad and still gets ‘rewarded‘ ?
• Why is it that when I try to do something, the world changes for the worse?
• Why is it that the lottery machine never aligns itself for me?
• Why is it that someone else has a smooth sailing journey through his life and for me even a simple thing becomes a nightmarish ordeal?
• Why is it that I never win anything in a lucky draw whereas these people always win an iPhone or a GPS or a million dollars?
• Why do all the lotteries in this world fall in someone else’s hands?
• Why is it that I always have to spend and spend and spend, to get something when people get things for free?
• Why is it that when I go 2 miles over the limit, I get caught, but the guy driving next to me going 20 miles over, does not?
• Why is it that so and so is always in limelight and I never get any attention?
• Why is it that he gets everything ready in life and I have to struggle to even get a sandwich?
• …..

Find something familiar here? I bet you have! Post a comment and add more to this if you feel like

I say, don’t ever ask these questions.. ‘coz there is nobody to answer these convincingly. There is nobody policing you nor is there a fair court to pass judgements about who gets rewarded and who gets punished. Nobody gets ‘rewarded’ in this world, everything you get is out of the effort / whatever it is that you put in and the timing in doing so. Add some of the magic potion called the ‘luck’ and voila..!

Nobody has answered questions like – ‘why is it that some of the biggest criminals sometimes never have to pay for their crimes’, or ‘why is it that some of the best people in the world got punished the way even the most vicious criminals didn’t or won’t’..

I don’t preach, but I just think that Life cannot be fair or unfair to you, but you can be.. so, I would rather be fair and stop passing judgements, than to dwell over such thoughts..