Anti asks me, if I think this is real (For those of you uncool enough to not have an Orkut account, it’s an alleged Orkut profile of John Kerry).

Networking software like Friendster, Orkut were supposed to be the next killer apps. There was even Dogster. Lonely Internet nerds and cynical yuppies were supposed to find like-minded people who were friends of friends and do “stuff” with them. Social Networking was supposed to bring you jobs, friends, hobbies, and who knows, maybe even romance. Did anything of this happen to me when I signed up at Orkut?

I spent a couple of hours creating and modifying a profile that would somehow make me seem more interesting than I actually am. And then I waited. Nothing happened. No one emailed asking me if I wanted to go see Bubba Hotep. No one called me up for a game of tennis. No secret admirer sent me flash sites with slow-fade roses. Maybe I should have taken the initiative and mailed my friend’s friend in oh say, Tennessee. But then, what next?

I’m not sure if there is a strong desi community in Orkut. I’ve noticed a lot of south American people, though. Still, the question remains: Do social networking software actually yield fruitful results, or is just an elite version of Yahoo! chat? Dvorak says it better.

Anti >> Hemanth >> this. Why single Southies are doomed in their love lives – a darn good read!

Google has a blog. It’s been a long time coming, considering Google owns Blogger. But here’s what MeFi has to say about it:
Today’s entry on the Google blog was altered in a subtle way. The earlier entry boasted of their Bangalore data center, but the afternoon’s version now features the Zurich center more prominently and relegates Bangalore to a footnote. Could it be that the company is a little less boastful in their handling of the outsourcing debate than they thought they could be?

Raapi has been posting updates of a “true” “love” story. With main characters generically named Laxmi and Srini, and a contemporary backdrop of a Coffee Day(check out the weird couple on the right), it could be a coming-of-age story of EveryMan, including you.

BTW, What’s up with Nilakantan’s blog? I have to confess that I miss the rantings of a pretty weird individual…

I guess the decision to get a tattoo was on an impulse. Choosing the tattoo – I wanted something to do with the dichotomy of life – its ups and downs, the pain and the pleasure, the sadness and the happiness. I thought it would be cool to get a yin-yang on my small-pox vaccination scar, but the tattoo guy vetoed it. I also had the Ouroboros in mind, so I decided to go with that. I trawled the Net for suitable ouroboros pictures and came with 4 possible ones. One was a simple no-frills image. The second was an aztec symbol for the O, and looked really cool. The third was something I picked off a Chakra-NewAge site that looked vaguely oriental/indian. The fourth was a totally chinese dragon-looking thing. I picked the Indian looking thing because it seemed to be intricate and within my budget($150).

I finished work and went home and grabbed a bite. I arrived at the parlor 10 minutes late. My friendly neighborhood tattoo artist was a big biker guy called “Big Al” with a bald head, a goatee and fierce tattoos all over his arm. I couldn’t have been tattooed by a more cliched figure!

Al had replaced the intricate details of the snake’s body in the blueprint with scales since they were too intricate to be tattooed. I was a bit apprehensive about scales looking good. He told me replacing the scales with a celtic-looking design would take too much time, so I just decided to go with the scales. He also told me it would only cost $100, which was fine and dandy by me.

After signing the required form, I went downstairs with Al. Not surprisingly, Big Al was a big Iron Maiden fan. His room was filled with bloody skulls (not real ones, of course) and iron maiden action figures. After cleaning up my arm and shaving any excess hair, he started in earnest.

I braced myself for the pain. I had read different accounts of tattoos and none of them indicated it would be too painful… and it wasn’t(unless you’re a big pussy). The initial sting is similar to a syringe being injected or a red ant’s bite. The first few markings of the tattoo gun are uncomfortable, then your endorphines kick in and it just feels like someone’s scratching you very hard.

Al started marking the outline with a smaller needle and completed it in 20-25 minutes. Then he replaced it with a broader needle (you could tell by the whine of the gun) and went to work on the shading part. The snake head looked great after shading. He did good work on the scales too, giving each of them a slight shade so that it looks 3D. He was finished in another 20 minutes. He didn’t talk much, neither did I. I guess that was his preferred method of working , and it was my preferred method of being worked on too.

After finishing, he wrapped my arm up in clean bandage and gave me after-tattoo care tips. Looks like I have to wash the tattoo area gently for at least 2 weeks. The skin usually does some peeling off in a week and he told me to be ready for that and not scratch the area. I thanked Al for the great work, bought some ointment and left the premises.

There it is – I now have a permanent mark on my left shoulder. Do I feel liberated or different in any way? Not really. I had made the decision and had decided to go through with it. Has my attitude changed in any way? I certainly don’t feel any more hardcore than I used to. The only justifications I have now are the same reasons I decided on the ouroboros in the first place.

***Update***: A lot of searches hit this page looking for ouroboros symbols. Here’s what I’ve managed to salvage from the dead links.

Aztec Ouroboros

Too little time to browse, too many interesting links!

It’s gonna take me ages to sift through this site on word trivia, but I think it’s worth it. Also came across double dactyls, which, contrary to my first impressions, had nothing to with cretaceous flying creatures.

The low-down/411/*insert urban street talk term here* on Gmail… Just like Orkut, a few selected elite are testing a preview release of Gmail. Here’s the long and the short of it. 9 frames??? Sweet Allah!

Current opinion? A long way to go.

EXTRA! EXTRA!: Get your woefully information-sparse GMail screenshots here and here!

My own personal Lent officially ended when I went on a heavy bout of movie watching.

I started out with “Dawn of the Dead”. Great zombie movie, and enough gore to keep you wincing. Even before the opening credits start to roll, we get treated to an aerial view of a truck crashing sideways into a car and then crashing into a gas station, thereby causing everything in the vicinity to explode. If that’s not a great opening for a disaster movie, I don’t know what is. Other scenes that I really liked:
* Ving Rhames chooses the next zombie to kill by writing “Jay Leno” on a whiteboard. The sniper stuck on another roof, picks the zombie that resembles Jay Leno the most. It was pretty funny, almost like a macabre “Where’s Waldo”. I’m sure there’s a postmodern allusion in there about celebrity status and the plebian desire to see celebrities get their come-uppance, but I’m not going to go into that.
* The arrival of the truck with a few survivors to the mall. It’s a satisfying feeling to watch the truck back up into the standing zombies and see the their heads go splat !

The second movie was “Mystic River”. Great performances by Sean Penn and Tim Robbins. But the ending left me feeling ambiguous. Hmm, maybe I need to watch it again for it to make any sense. Great study of characters, though.

But the piece-de-resistance was “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”. I was buying tickets, and I forgot the name of the movie. The couple who bought the ticket after me forgot the name of the movie too! This seemed to set an appropriate tone for a movie about forgetting. It was funnier than I expected. It’s a great movie about love and the lengths one can go to, to avoid remembering past love. It chaotically plunges into the darkest recesses of the mind(quite literally) and brings back past memories. Jim Carrey (Jim Carrey’s memory image) leads his ex-girlfriend, Kate Winslet (Kate Winslet’s memory image, to be more precise) through the maze of his mind to keep the doctors from finding her and erasing her. The ending is very satisfying and the beginning scenes make more sense when the last minutes of the movie roll in. If you’ve ever truly thought you loved someone in the past and tried simultaneously to forget and remember him/her, this is the movie for you! Even if you don’t belong to the previous category, you should just go see the film for its novelty and technique. Heck, go see it if you want to see Kirsten Dunst dancing in her underwear!

Well, fun-time’s over. Like the Jesus-dude who died and came back to life today, it’s time to start a new cycle.

As a desi living in my comfortable off-campus residence, I’ve avoided the hassle of living in a dorm. Even during my undergrad days, I was a day scholar, thereby depriving myself of the little triumphs and tribulations of hostel life. College, is hands down, the best part of your life. College life, as an M.S. student, is even better. This funny article I read today reminded me of the non-drunken good times I’ve had over the last two years and the occasional episodes of intoxicated debauchery. As a true-blooded desi and a certified nerd, I’ve stayed true to my principles of lifelong virginity, but I can imagine the sort of life that goes on in American dorms.

The reason I’m reminiscing on the good times I’ve had as a student is that they may be coming to an end soon… maybe as soon as next week. It is time again to face the harsh world of corporate competence and one-up-manship. This time though, I can’t sneak back into the protective folds of academia mater‘s skirts. It’s time to put a fresh face on, and go through the rituals of trying to evoke sincerity and certainty.

This is good: Nickelback’s Two Greatest Hits – now available in one convenient song! [3.61 MB] Scientific proof of Nickelback’s suckiness.

Some guy re-enacts the famous ketchup disaster of 33 A.D. I think this picture was taken before Jesus Chainsaw Massacre was released. I’m not sure, there is no way to confirm the date. In the background is the Granada, one of the hottest discos in Lawrence, KS. (One place I’ve never set foot inside… 🙁 )

That’s Kansas for ya!

Google has a truckload of new features on its main page today. It also introduced Personalized search. Since I’m at least partially interested in personalized searching (seeing as how my thesis was based on it and all), I tried it out. I created a profile with 3 or 4 favorite subjects and then started searching. I started playing around with the slider on the top of the page and lo behold! My personalized results started magically sliding upward. It’s always nice to your research project being closely imitated on Google.

A few quick questions, though…

• Shouldn’t your personalized results be part of the answer page right from the beginning of the search? As of now, completely new personalized results appear out of nowhere when you move the personalization slider. This seems to suggest that the personalized results are somehow not part of the initial text search. That doesn’t seem right to me. Personalized icons should appear beside your plain-text search when you begin moving the slider.

  (This is a Personalized icon: )

• You can also search for number ranges in Google now. Type in ‘Playstations $150-$170’ and you should be getting pages that sell Playstations from $150 – $170. Experiment Results??? Not so good. Too much noise in the results page.
• Froogle is now officially on the front page. Maybe the price range input would work well with Froogle? I tried that, and to my surprise… it doesn’t work AT ALL with Froogle!

My newest addiction… DingDongs — The satan-influenced evil sibling of ‘Pure Magic’ biscuits!