Kedar's Log, Stardate 2010

Ever since man discovered how products can be traded for money or other goods, he has been building this giant ecosystem of shopping and trading. Starting with simple necessities of life, people started using their skills to create products for everybody who either didn’t have the skills to make them or didn’t have the time or interest or the tools. Others ‘bought’ these goods and the world was happy.

Then came competition, when more than one person in town started making the same thing. I guess, that’s when the makers felt the need to inscribe their names on their creations – so that people can come back to them. Starting from such modest roots, we got what we call now – the consumer “Brands”!

In today’s consumerist society, people have access to a mind-boggling array of products created by an equally mind-boggling number of producers competing ferociously with each other. Modern times have changed our attitudes immensely. We live in a culture full of consumer lust for more products, fancier labels and larger than life product promotions.

We have so much of everything but still…

… it is just not enough to have a car these days – it needs to be either a BMW or a Mercedes or a Lexus or one of those Italian beauties to get an eyeball.. it’s not enough that you are wearing a suit – they will ask you if it is a Versace or Armani or Prada.. you got a handbag? – well, is it a Gucci or Coach or Michael Kors.. hey, what do you know, it’s not even enough to just have clothes on your body these days – are they designed by Tommy Hilfiger or Calvin Klein or Polo.. and even if you just want to wear some skimpy bare-all swimwear – which, by the way, may not even be worth $10 in actual material costs – you had better spent hundreds of dollars to get some designer swimwear like Speedo, CK, or D & G – if you want people to notice and talk about it!..

So you see, it is just not enough to have watches, perfumes, phones, cars, sunglasses, jeans, skirts, purses, jewelry, makeup, wallets, shoes, boxers, underwear (!).. they all have to have a prestigious label. That label has a price and that price is what decides your value in the society!

When I was a kid, we used to have a tiny bottle of perfume for the whole family. I don’t think it had any special name on it, my father must have bought it from some small shop. It smelled good and for it to smell good, it did not need a Calvin Klein or Hugo Boss or Chanel or Elizabeth Arden or Kross or Nina Richi on it. Back then, I never knew what brand my clothes were made of, or what shoes I was wearing or which backpack I was carrying. But I guess nowadays it is different..

I think Shakespeare was way off when he said “What’s in a name.. That which we call a rose. By any other name would smell as sweet”..!

I am not anti-brand.. I guess I am more anti-brandism! I buy branded merchandise too.. but I am not brand conscious! So if I want to buy a bed sheet or a comforter, I don’t go looking for Tommy Hilfiger or Laura Ashley or Calvin Klein or Martha Stuart – heck, for that matter, most of them have some of the most boring designs on the planet IMHO! I am usually in the market for a good product and not for a good brand..

These days it is prestigious to shop for the brands, or rather it is stupid and cheap to buy unbranded products..! People proudly declare their brand allegiance wherever they go, they go out of their way and wallets, to go buy branded merchandise.. so that they can show it off to their friends and family. I wonder sometimes whether it is us buying the branded goods or the other way around!

I use the word ‘brandishing’ for this very reason. People flash their branded merchandise to gain attention, to feel that momentary superiority, to show the world that they don’t settle for anything less, to feel that sense of being-a-cut-above-the-crowd, because someone in some advertisement told them that it takes a connoisseur to recognize and use their brand!

To me, if an unbranded $5 T-shirt looks better than a $75 branded one, I will take it, no matter what someone might say or how much money I have..

I was never a stage person. Every time I tried to do that when I was in school or college, I could not hide the fact that I was nervous. I have sung on stage, spoken a few words, received prizes, given a brief thank you speech.. but all that, quite reluctantly. If I had my way, I would love to receive an award in a jungle or sing a song in my bathroom and transmit it to the world – err, I mean the audio of it

The fact of the matter is, I was never a stage rodeo! So public speaking was not my forte. Although, I used to fantasize being a smarty pants on the stage. But I never tried to bring that fantasy into reality. Because one step on the stage would bring the cruel reality crashing down on me!

Now in my mid-life crisis, I am realizing all kinds of missed opportunities big time, and I am trying to catch up with what I can. Public Speaking is one of those adventures.

I joined Toastmasters about 4 months back. My first thing there was to speak about something during the Table Topics session – impromptu! Not an ideal way to start your public speaking, I was saying to myself on my way to the podium. I was trying to smile, yes sir.. was trying hard to hide under that translucent curtain separating the world outside and a volcano of fear boiling on the inside! Every step of the way was like a step towards the gallows! I thought I must have taken an hour to walk those 10 meters!

The Table Topic for that day was to prove how some of the celebrities would have been better in some other professions than theirs. My combination was to prove that “Paris Hilton would have done well as a terrorist” ! I don’t know what I said, but it was somewhat humorous.. I saw from the corner of my eyes that some people were actually laughing at my apparent joke rather than me! I wound up my little blabbering quickly and just walked back. My heart, was almost popping out of my mouth at that point! Back in my seat, I just wanted to hide under the table – for some reason, I thought everybody in that room was staring at me. Oh God, save me.. I am just a poor man.. save me from this moment of eternal embarrassment!

But, thankfully the meeting moved on..

Next stop, my icebreaker speech. What an apt name.. “Ice breaker” – to break that frozen fear of public speaking. I was supposed to talk about myself in my ice breaker speech. One thing that I had on my side was the fact that I was fond of writing. I already had a blog in place (http://blog.somik.net) and people had told me that they enjoyed what I wrote. Armed with that little tool, I set out on my journey….

In my ice breaker speech I talked about how I missed all kinds of opportunities to become famous throughout my life.. how I never stood first in an exam after my 1st grade or how my childhood dream of being a Superman just didn’t materialize..! Surprisingly, it went quite well – without anybody realizing how crazy my heart was palpitating!

In the days and speeches ahead, the palpitations kept going less and less crazy.. and I started enjoying the whole public speaking ordeal..! I embraced humor as my most favorite track in public speaking. I spoke in front of a TV camera, participated in a couple of contests and secured 2nd place..

I have yet to reach the stage from where I can influence or motivate my audience. I have yet to reach a stage where I can just go on stage and talk for several minutes without being conscious about it.. I have yet to reach anywhere for that matter.. all I have done at this point, is to muster up enough courage to be able to stand in front of people without going weak in my knees and choked up in my vocal cords!

I wasn’t born to be a speaker, I am just trying to break my silence.. and my adventures in Public Speaking have just started..

Trying to type in ‘Marathi‘ (my native Indian Language) here:

मराठी पोस्ट

This wasn’t working for me earlier and I completely scrapped and rebuilt my blog just for this. Before taking such a drastic step, I did basically try some of those “migrate WP db to utf8″ scripts, read scores of documents on the web related to this, tried changing the MySQL db, tables and column collation to utf8 manually, messed around with wp-config.php, but all I got was ????? in the post body (post title was working fine and the values stored in the table were fine too when I checked from phpMyAdmin!).

So finally I made a copy of whatever I wanted from wp-content/ (plugins, themes, gallery) and deleted WordPress, exported all the data from WP tables to SQL, dropped the db, created a new one, installed latest version of WordPress from the actual download (and not from Dreamhost’s One click installs), ran the installation, set the options as they were before, restored plugins, themes and NEXTGen gallery and finally imported the table data one by one taking while into account a couple of dropped fields (wp_posts.post_category and wp_links.link_category) into the new WordPress tables.

And here I am, with UTF8 characters working for me just fine and most of blog is working as desired.. Definitely not a task for the faint-hearted!

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