Something about Nothing

Will be off the blogosphere for a month…

A new house, an early morning, time to kill, stuff to unpack, open the first carton, books jump out, stack the books, arrange in shelf, leave the categorization for later, whip out the camera, shoot!

I just hope Life had taken a course in Economics. Last month when there was a severe dearth of time the demand for it was astronomical, now when for the past few days there has been a constant supply of time, the demands have waned.

The house hunt started in early December, took a back-seat for 15-20 days owing to me trusting an untrustworthy person’s words, went on full-fledged for again some 15 days which culminated with me getting the same house that I had set my sights on earlier in December. Worked hard, really hard - devoted many hours to the trials and tribulations of the sometimes mundane, sometimes invigorating office work. Shopped a lot, and by “a lot” I really mean a lot - an impeding wedding does this to you. And now, I have shifted in my new house, the office work has been done, the shopping is all done - all there is left now is the wait to lose the Bachelor’s degree.

Two announcements - We [Rakesh, Utkarsh & me] have started a cricket-centric blog - Cricket Shastra. Many posts are up, go check them out, and catch the feed here. And Felicity - the annual college fest of my alma mater IIIT-H is scheduled for this coming weekend: 8-10 Feb; if you are in Hyderabad, do not miss it.

These days, the Web 2.0 companies are very considerate about your blood pressure, they have used their innovation even when it comes to the dreaded “404 - File not Found”, or “Under Maintenance” errors. Listing some of the errors that I stumbled along when I was visiting the sites.

I think everyone has said “Hello” to the Bloglines plumber one time or the other. This was one of the initial Error 2.0 Message that I saw, and I was very impressed. Not for long though, he gets on my nerves now. I have found many better error messages than this one. Although I think this is where the “cool error message” thing started (correct me if I am wrong).

Jaiku has a humourous one liner.

Technorati tries too, but apart from “brb” nothing can be deemed Web 2.0 classy Wish they had tried a bit harder…

Twitter’s lolcatz. After all lolcatz is the current rage…

Flickr is getting a massage. You get massage, and more RAM… That is one swell deal There was another website where I had seen an error that said “Out on a coffee break” or something on those lines… Seemed to me a direct lift of the Flickr error message and so I did not include that in the list.

These errors were okayish… You read/see, smile a wry smile at not getting the page you wanted, and move on… Then there were three errors that could be deemed really funny.

Reddit’s alien is one of my favourites, and so is Reddit. Reddit has a bookmarklet “Serendipity” which comes to my rescue whenever I am bored - which is quite often A click, and I am instantly taken to some random page. If the page is not available, Reddit does not hesitate to poke fun at itself. There are multiple variations of the same…

Google Reader team would have banged heads to come up with this limerick By the way is this a limerick? What ever it is, I liked it…

But the best of the lot is WordPress. With a short story titled “Confessions Of A Server”, WP takes the cake, and the cherry too… Click on the adjoining image for a readable version of the short-story, the 15 seconds of your life that you give to read that is properly utilized

Technorati: Web 2.0, Error Messages

This book tells a very simple story, and yet it never drags, instead you get all nostalgic reading this novel. It is a simple story about six friends and their travel through the final years of college life. Reading the description of college, the canteen, the college fest, I was instantly transported back to my college days. Of all the memories of yesteryears - I treasure the college life memories the most. Without a doubt, the author - Amrita Suresh - too shares the same sentiments.

The college life is just the backdrop, the main story is, as the title suggests, a love story or rather two love stories. And it is not the filmy type of love, the descriptions seemed so vivid that I had doubts that the book may be a bit auto-biographical Well that is just my speculation, but still the love stories are very realistic. Ankur was sulking as is the case with any jealous lover and earlier he was a pet to Sonali’s charms. Souvik was tongue-tied, even when proposing to Jaishree, the words were not free-flowing. He was a man of written words, not the spoken one.

“When a Lawyer Falls in Love !!!” is a very simple book, it makes you nostalgic, and makes you remember the good college days. There sure are many sentences where the writer waxes eloquently, and you have to re-read the sentence or the paragraph to make sense, but the writer is always allowed her small indulgences. At a very decent price, this book is a perfect way to spend a lazy afternoon.

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This book is so low profile, that I hardly found any references to this book or the author on any website. As far as I know, there is no official website of both - the book and the author. The only information I could glean out was that the writer is a student at HCU pursuing her Masters.

Technorati: Book Review, Review, Amrita Suresh, When A Lawyer Falls In Love