Gaurav's Blog

This can usually be found on Twitter.

Am sitting in bed watching My Name Is Earl, which I'd forgotten how well it ages. My second viewing, and every episode is as great as it was the first time around. Unbelievably funny, and it's not even my favourite episode yet. On television this minute: Season 2 ep 4, the the "Time After Time" sequence. Sheer brilliance! And yay!

Was so sick all day today that I completely forgot my tooth was aching. Had horrible KFC food for dinner. I'm avoiding so many people on chat it's not even funny (interestingly, nobody likely to read my blog, so this is all good). Read a play after ages today, which is always nice.

There's a Flickr meetup this Sunday, so um, yeah. Might go in the interest of being a bit more outgoing or whatnot. Let's see how much I change my mind by Sunday.

Two other things: am getting Brazil on Saturday. Brazil! The other thing involved Mars being as big as the moon in Aug 2003, but I guess that's not really important at all.

Labels: flickr, play, random, things

This post was posted by Unknown at 12:30 am | 3 comments | Post a Comment

So I've been up late listening to the special 'Big Link Up' edition of BBC World Have Your Say on the BBC World Service, who celebrate 75 years of broadcasting today (December 19th) - happy birthday, BBC World Service! - and also have a spiffy new website; nice and clean, although I don't know if the interactivity is worth it. I'm wondering whether to recommend that they - or atleast, WHYS - go through the (supposed?) pain of setting up Slash, just so we can get threads and conversations and so on just like this (heh, you thought I wouldn't mention Perl's birthday two days ago? 'e don't know me very well, do he?)

So, umm, yeah. On that note there's somebody birthday I "forgot", except I didn't really forget and it's a long story so yeah. Feel free to complain in person, or wait a while, and it'll all be made up and all. I smashed a bottle today - glass! Glass! The horror. Had to sweep it up and all. Did I mention we don't have a dustpan? Nasty.

Am supposed to be in tomorrow, or rather, I can skip (it's Bakri Id/Hari Raya Haji) but would prefer not to. But obviously I'm not going in in the morning. Had a pretty decent game of Civ4: I started my last game again, but quit it because I'd made some stupid strategic mistakes earlier (mainly: attacked too early). So I started over. Now, my Civ's in much better shape, I think; it's hard to tell, because if either of two huge empires who are currently very friendly towards me suddenly decide to take me down, I've had it. A lot of my money's in the ground, and I can't really finance a war. It really is very Roman, though: hodge-podge of foreign colonies captured from someone else, ruled by one or two purpose-built Roman cities, while the "homelands" are vast open spaces, beautiful cities, Rome herself (3 wonders, I think!) in one corner but very much the centre of it all. And now, as 1400 AD creeps up, I have given up my dictatorship to be King of the Romans! Now, if only I can fill up the uneven areas of my emp... err, kingdom, reform my economy (I'm back up to 40% research taxation, and have lots of ignored techs to work on!) and develop my countryside (particularly in the "colonies" ... I'd prefer to leave the homelands pristine and clear for the enjoyment of true Roman citizens), and avoid not getting swallowed up for fifty years or so, then I could consider declaring war on the Aztecs and finishing them off, giving me - I hope! - a land advantage over the Americans and Germans. Unless they make it to other land masses, I guess. And I better be careful not to let me guard down: both the American and Germans probably feel entitled to my Russian conquests, and to say nothing of the Roman homelands ... let's see, let's see. Lots to think about!

I've spent large portions of last week finding new photographers I like, and especially new favourite photos. I hope I didn't creep anybody up by sneaking up on family photos from the Everybody's Photo list! I'm going to stop for a while, 'cos I'm scared Flickr will think I'm creepy, but hopefully will start again soon in a while. There are so many undiscovered gems lying around (and discovered gems I haven't discovered alsos). And yes, Flickr Stats is just as addictive as I thought it would be.

That might actually be all for once. Several links and other detritus remain unposted, but, hey - do I look like I care? They're time will come, and my Mac has space enough for a large inbox, should it come to that.

Then, friends, 'til break of day - I'll away, I'll away! Goodnight, all.

Labels: bbc world service, birthday, civilization iv, flickr, late night, photos, radio, world have your say

This post was posted by Unknown at 4:26 am | 0 comments | Post a Comment

Flickr now has photo stats! Yet another way to waste time on my favourite photo site!

Labels: flickr, photos, stats

This post was posted by Unknown at 12:37 pm | 0 comments | Post a Comment

Seriously, though. Seriously.

I really wish I could do this with punctuation and everything but my stupid keyboard etc you know the drill so no. Only fullstops. This is going to be all José Saramago and everything. Today was a really nice day not because anything special happened in it - nothing did - but because everything which happened what little that did happen happened nicely mostly well it's like this I got up on time or surprisingly close to I had a nice bath and a nice shave and I was a little late because I don't like using the toilets at work but there you go I wasn't very late and after a mostly unpunctual last week being anywhere near on time was nice. Also I was the first one into office which is always pretty nice just by itself too.

Work hmm what can I say work isn't quite as exciting this week as it was last week because we're sort of waiting on everybody at the moment. Which is nice mind as it gives me time to finish off a couple of tasks I'd hate to leave standing but it's still a pain. For instance I was in late today because I had to force myself to finish something; tomorrow is going to be even worse in that regard but once I finish it it'll be DONE which by itself is a great consolation a great and wonderful thing to know. I did get to fool around with some APIs which is always a little arsebackwards but there you go I suppose when you approach problems the way I do it is to be expected.

The big surprise for today was I went onto Flickr just before leaving work - or so I thought! My total photostream views were around 9,600-odd (aha! commas!) so I was really looking forward until it hit the big 10k. So you can imagine my surprise - nay! shock! horror! awe! - when I saw that my photostream count was at 10,[456?]00-odd! Unbelieveable! Such a huge jump? I quickly traced it to one fairly lacklustre photo (of the Joo Chiat complex lit up for Hari Raya last year) although I still have no idea why anybody would be looking at that photo or why anyone might possibly want to link to it! It's still very extremely odd. Anyway since then my photostream views has gone up to 11,349 views while that one photo has 1,915 views. Not much by Flickr standards of course but unbelievable for a little not-even-minor-league photographer like me.

So yeah either that or I dunno just the weather or something put me into a really good mood thereafter maybe y'know come to think of it it might be the lack of sleep from yesterday night yeah that's possible well something in any case put me into a really nice frame of mind and I found myself singing all the way home then having several nice conversations without being an asshole then watching TV and playing Sims and now look here I am going to sleep. Can't wait until I get paid it'll be nice to not have to run around behind my cash and to be able to buy a few little things to make things easier another shirt even a nice T-shirt maybe a music player I dunno get my phone fixed y'know that sort of thing yeah that sort of thing would be really really nice.

So okay off to sleep now kthxbai!

Labels: flickr, fun, good day, Jose Saramago, today

This post was posted by Unknown at 2:38 am | 1 comments | Post a Comment

Just finished uploading a whole bunch of photos to my Flickr account. As usual, Flickr "friends" see more photos than the rest of y'all. I'm also busy trying to use the new Collections feature on Flickr - essentially, what used to be sets should now become collections, and entirely new sets are going to be culled out of my photographs. Dunno what it'll all look like when the dust settles, but it should be fun!

As an aside, I really like how much better I've gotten at taking photographs - and, in retrospect, how good some of my earlier photos were. Hopefully, this exercise will help dredge out the oldies, so they won't have to hide in obscurity no' mo'.

It's way too late, and I'm kinda hungry, and have gone from being moderately sleepy to not sleepy at all, so, umm, yeah. Tomorrow will likely be a pain in the rear end. Still, lesse.

Labels: flickr, photography, photos, sleep

This post was posted by Unknown at 5:29 am | 0 comments | Post a Comment

My Flickr account has now has 6,000 views! I'm so proud.

Today was weird. Woke up, out of a weird dream, fell asleep again, had another weird dream, which I also woke up out of. Then I took a bath, got dressed, said "f*ck it", got undressed, went back to sleep, had a weird dream, which I also woke up out of. Waking out of a dream is disorienting, and doing this three times in a row is kinda scary. Also, it's raining like a maniac. Wonder how much work I'll get done tonight.

There are multiple good things on the horizon; might be a while before any of them pan out, though. Lesse.

Also: this is very not good. I thought Google could have played it a little better in China - if they'd left a notice on that pages had been removed from the search, I'd feel better about it - but this is just nuts. Isn't this exactly what court requests are for? I would have no problems against Google providing the information on a court request, but to provide it for free? If I was still using Orkut, I'd be really worried about what information I was putting out there - unless I couldn't really figure that out in the first place, what with Orkut having such a horrible interface. But that's another issue entirely.

Labels: dreams, flickr, photos, privacy, sleep

This post was posted by Unknown at 4:38 pm | 0 comments | Post a Comment

That stupid photograph of Sue the dinosaur mould has finally dropped off the top of my list of my "most popular photos (sorted by interestingness)" on Flickr. Its position has been taken by the much more interesting Eastern Express Highway. In other news, my photo of Ruby Pan has had 400 views, way more than any other I've got online, despite the fact that t3htarik still has a much better photograph of her (the importance of metadata, I guess!).

I still feel really, really weak (not to mention horribly bored: lying around all day watching TV can do that to you), but hopefully my illness will pass by tomorrow. Watched a lot of Yes Minister, and ate a lot, and lay around doing very little.

I also got a clock/radio/alarm thingie, so I might actually wake up on time, as well as learn a little as I listen to BBC World while blogging at night. Like right now.

Anyways, sleepytime. Seeya all after I go comatose for a few hours, hallucinate vividly, and then maybe suffer amnesia about the whole incident.

Labels: flickr, sickness, xkcd

This post was posted by Unknown at 12:59 am | 0 comments | Post a Comment