Life is Beautiful!

I have spent a lot of my time looking for meaning. Everyone does. Our education system is such that at every given stage we are loading our brains with more and more of something. This something just keeps growing with time. Human being as a species is unique because it has developed a taste for something called the meaning. There is a craving for it in us. We have become such slaves to this that if we do not understand something, we just cannot associate ourselves with it whatever that something may be.

Let me try and delve into this a bit more. Have you ever experienced a feeling of complete inactivity? That is your brains is quite active, but your body is numb, refusing to budge. It takes the energy of a thousand galleons just to raise your eyebrows. I am not talking about the time when you are either in a drunken stupor or when you are fast asleep and experiencing something like this in a dream. I am talking about general, normal times.

When you see a child hardly one year old, playing, smiling blissfully, completely unmindful of its surroundings, what do you feel? Why are you and me not able to experience the same blissfulness? Let me put it a bit more straightforward, can you tell me when and how do you think you will be able to experience that blissfulness?

From my entire learning so far, I have only and truly learnt just one thing. And that is that every now and then, there is a part of my body that starts aching, it wants something, even if no one had taught me anything, I probably would have know what it wants. If I were a child and was dependant on others, I probably would have conveyed my need to them in some way. If I was a grown up, then I would probably help myself.

Tips for taking effective videos using your camcorder or cellphone camera

I was watching a program on BBC recently. They had some interesting tidbits on how not to look like an amateur when taking videos. Almost all cell phones now come with reasonably good cameras. Everyone is into capturing something that interests them. So, I thought I would share these tips with all of you.

Buying a Camera
If you are buying a camcorder, buy something that offers advanced video formats, has flash memory or pen drive facility, has more buttons rather than layers of touch-screen options. Usually 10x zoom is good enough; a zoom more than this would only obscure the picture.

Some handy tips for a shoot
1. Hold the camcorder by standing still in one place at a fixed height from the ground. Movement on an axis yields better results than forward or backward movement (for this you can use zoom).

2. When shooting, focus on your subject, offset it rather than making it the centre of your focus, hold your shot for a good few seconds, now pause and change the angle and refocus. Try and contain actions inside the frame. Using different angles, pausing frequently, and holding a shot for a while each time is the key.

3. To avoid shaky movement, use your body as a tripod or lean on a static object close to you.

4. Light is generally friendly for taking good videos. Morning and evening sun is good. When you are shooting at other times of the day, do not use auto exposure. Instead, choose your subject and lock exposure. Or choose objects and backgrounds with similar amount of light on them.

5. Avoid Auto focus for dense or packed backgrounds. They leave your camera confused.

6. Sound is often neglected and can easily reveal your amateurishness. Maintain appropriate distance from your subjects so that you also capture sounds well.

7. Do not use effects such as fades etc during the shoot. Add them later in editing.

8. Think about the composition of your video. Each video tells a story, so plan your shots accordingly. Based on the theme of your composition, you can edit them later to add background music etc.

9. For editing videos you could use basic software like Windows Movie Maker.

10. For tweaking audio files, you can download a free tool like Audacity. I use audacity quite often for editing guitar compositions for my upcoming guitar website for Indian learners. It is a simple-to-use tool with some basic documentation available to get you started.

Hope these tips were helpful to you. Leave a comment or send me links to some of the videos you took. I will be happy to watch them.

WebWatch, my new sidebar element for fun browsing

If you have visited my blog recently you would have noticed the sidebar element that I have conveniently called "WebWatch." Watch this element for info on a new website or webtrend. I will give a brief overview here and if you like whats on offer, might as well go to the site to check it out.

That said, Digital Lego is my first post on WebWatch. As a child I played Lego till the bricks became loose and wouldn't fit into each other any more. I did not even know the name of this game at that time. I enjoyed every moment I spent creating structures with the bricks. I still recall how I used to run to my grand pa to show my creations.

This one here, is a digital lego. That is, you download the .exe file, intall it on your computer and get started.Unlike the physical lego, the online one is cool 'coz there is no end to the shapes of lego bricks you can choose from. If you dont have what you need, just write to the lego team and they will get it for you. If you register, you can borrow unfinished creations from others and complete them, you can share what you have created with others and so on.

Those of you really longing for a break from work, this can get you refreshed instantly.

The website is http://factory.lego.com/.

Only beware, it is very addictive ! :)

Me, Myself and the Web!

My dear Readers,
From now I am going to introduce you to an interesting website every now and then. Some studies proved that taking time out of our daily routine to do some general browsing, playing a net game that tickles our brain, or gathering some general gyan from the web is doing a lot of good to us.

This much-needed break not only refreshes us, it also fills us with renewed energy to finish up the rest of our work for the day.

So, when you are looking for a break, just drop by.

if you have enjoyed what I post in this context, leave a comment and I will be happy to read from you. For those who already know of the websites I will be talking about, well, you can pat your back ‘coz you are keeping up with this ever expanding landscape of the web.

Off I go for now, but I bet my next post will keep you busy clicking.

Painting, a mere painting!

Look at those sketches

You’re right

That’s my music room at home

Me playing the guitar and all

Those are my friends

Been with me through thick and thin

Those blank faces and naïve smiles

All dizzy with smoke and drink

When we found us

Something just collapsed in between

That day I felt it again

Something was collapsing again

I am never the same again

They are never the same again

We are never the same again

We sure had a good time

A painting, a mere painting

Faces that speak the truth

Gazers that read the truth

Me, and me alone, that knows the truth

Cashless World: Are we heading towards one?

The smell of currency paper blending with the smell of polished leather from the wallets that carry it is too hard to resist. The Indian women have the habit putting currency in all sorts of tins and containers giving them varied fragrances of spices and stuff. The touch and the smell of currency is quite an amusing thing.

However, in the past decade, India has seen tremendous rise in the issuance of Debit and Credit Cards making it unnecessary for us to carry a lot of cash. Three out of every five shops in the cities now accept cards for any shopping that you do. Even places like filling stations accept cards for as little as one litre of fuel. What’s more, Online Banking has also caught up fast enough. You can even pay all your utility bills online.

Though it is likely to take more time for this to spread into the semi urban and rural areas of the country, it is definitely a trend that cannot be taken lightly.

If we are in this age, then why not see what are the advantages of this:

• Huge reduction in cost of printing and distribution of currency.
• Reduced security problems both to institutions and individuals.
• Increases the scope of surveillance of account transactions thus giving improved access to law enforcing agencies and the government to cash flow metrics.
• Reduced use of hard cash may even reduce corruption to some extent.

Even if you take the world as a whole, it is still quite difficult to imagine a completely cashless system. A lot of transactions will always remain miniscule. Your bus fare when roaming within the city limits, your local metro weekly pass, your ten rupees worth vegetables for instance.

Not yet, you cannot probably think of referring to the end of currency on the wikipedia. Currency may outlive us for sure.

The magic of Web 2.0!

What is this Web 2.0 and why is this term everywhere?

In a nutshell, what happens in Web 2.0 is users participate in the activity of sharing what they know

• This enhances each other’s knowledge.
• Improves the degree of access a user has to information
• Improves continuously, the quality of the information a user is seeking from time to time.
• Connects people faster than ever before.
• Brings together people with like-minded interests and ideas again faster than ever before.

Where is it more comfortable to do this than on the Internet? With mobile internet access speeds reaching broadband, the Internet fast evolved as a platform for web 2.0. Ease of use became central to all this ‘coz otherwise you cannot get users to participate; you have one site but you can login with any of your existing webmail login credentials; you have one site where you can network with both friends and business allies; you have one site where you can now do literally every activity of interest to you.

The early birds have more number of users, while sites that started late have more number of features.

The term Web 2.0 is attributed to any present day trend which enables some or all of the above things to happen.

Information sharing websites like Wikipedia, Social Networking websites like Orkut, Facebook, Hi5, etc are web 2.0.

If you have a webcam in which you shoot an event, post it on the net all while you are on the fly, that’s web 2.0 alright.

So, do you have a product for which you can say, “Wow! How very web 2.0!”