Green shade: September 2006

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Nightly enlightenment

Just came back from a fancy diner nearby which specializes in *cough* continental food. So you get into this place with all kinds of fancy light effects, plush interiors, the odd hukka lying in the corner. Don't know if this is the correct spelling for hukka, and anyway they don't call it hukka anymore. The newer, fancier name is "Sheesha".. you know like the mirror where you can see your reflection and all. Its just like that, except that you have a pipe coming out and you can actually get flavoured smoke doing rounds of your lungs if you suck on that pipe. You can share the pippette around with your friends, because you would be crazy if you could finish the hukka alone and also you would be crazy to go to a *cough* continental place alone and of all the things in the world start having a hukka... I mean what more could be wrong with you?
Anyway coming back to the previous thread of discussion, contrary to popular belief, smoking hukka doesn't make you high, of course if you are someone like Auto, then it will.
Wait! what was I talking about?
Ahh... the *cough* continental place.. yes.. So we (notice the "we", because I'm not a crazy loner like you) went in. Our ordering strategy was something like this:

1) Look hither thither.
2) Look down on the menu.
3) Randomly hit at three spots on the menu .. and thats it.

Food comes, we eat. *cough* a bit more and leave. So what did I learn out of all this?

Well.. nothing. Thanks for wasting your time.

Sunday, September 17, 2006

Vista RC 1

Rahul, having nothing else to do, downloaded Windows Vista RC 1 and has been generous enough to post some screenshots on his flickr account (which I have conveniently lifted and posted here). Word of caution, the guy has a monster graphics card, so lesser mortals are advised against doing such stunts:

My attempts at drawing

As it is quite apparent from my previous two posts: I can't draw. It was not always like this though.
I still remember that at one time in my life when I was in 5th standard, I actually won a painting competition organized in our colony. My drawing consisted of a teacher teaching a classroom full of students (or eggs, depending on who looked at the painting). That was the time I actually drew for fun (and won something for it).
Then came the time when we had this "commercial" art thing in school, where we were supposed to draw alphabets (!!), pots, different kind of obscure shapes etc. That was the time when I started losing interest in drawing.

Anyway, coming back to today or rather yesterday, when I bought this drawing ka book from a shop in Church street. I started reading and I was bowled in the 1st chapter itself.
I realized that I couldn't draw two freehand similar looking round shapes, however hard I tried. I sucked... big time. I filled up almost 4 sheets of paper with round shapes and not any two of them looked the same.
I guess I will try this for a few more days (As it is I do very little in the evenings, except read books). A few more pages won't do any harm.

Talking of drawing, slashdot had this link to a program called teddy created by a Japanese programmer which converts 2D hand drawn images into 3D (!!) Pretty interesting.