a day to remember.....

shit happens....and to be fair so do sweet surprises. Yesterday was one such day. i mean the sweet surprise one. I got two wonderful surprises and spent a lovely evening. And i didnt even have to ask !
Well this reall sweet estonian flatmate of mine asked if i wanted to join her to a cafe and then we headed out. The only problem we had no idea of where the cafe was, her only contact for the cafe was a geogian girl whose phone number she didnt have, and both of spoke little french. Err... the little here is sort of relative because my 'little' is two basic french classes ;) and her's was a lot better although she remembers hardly any french she studied(her view. i personally think she has a great french accent with no french vocabulary :D ).
Not that i have not found my way to places i had idea about in a place where nobody understood what i was talking about ..but this time i was in no real hurry. And her georgian friend conveniently erased her number from her phone (talk of -pleasant- surprises). So we walked around lausanne poring over maps and generally getting nowhere. Whoever said getting nowhere was no fun surely didnt know what he was talking about.

I picked up a 'little' -again!- Estonian. Basically how to say hello, yes, no, good morning, good night cheers and I love you . What might be a (pleasant ? ) surprise to any soul who wanders by these pages is that Estonians have real cute word endings.....one of them is -sex ;). And the word for cheers in Estonia ends in -sex like lots of other estonian words which is (in her words) the most fascinating part of estonian for foreigners !

Another thing I realizd was that India biggest brand name abroad are Indian Movies ! Everybody seems to have heard of them. Them come the indian food and surprisingly (unpleasant!) a lot of people seem to have heard about the indian caste system. Which i'm really not comfortable talking about so i'll skip it.

well we stayed for about two hours at the cafe and after midnight we returned and she actually found pulao cooked by me good....and she did seem pleased. Either she is a very good actress or she the spices numbed her taste buds. (ok i'm being humble here - the pulao was damn good :D )

she is a psycho-physicist who likes bull fighting (!!!!) and is an expert Falmengo dancer.

Comments

nicolas nova said…
Hey Satyendra
it's nice to read your blog :)

Nicolas Nova
(my blog is at http://tecfa.unige.ch/pav but it's rather work-oriented)
8:11 AM
neo said…
wow, getting a comment like that from someone's whose blog is one of my fav sources for the latest on cool gadgets and interaction design is wonderful. Thank you !

i read your "work related blog" religiously everday :)...i've tried leaving comments but i somehow dont see the authentication image !
10:14 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

going mobile !

Using the push registry to launch midlets : MIDP 1.0 specified only one way to start a MIDlet: manual activation by the user. However the MIDP 2.0 specification adds two new mechanisms to launch a MIDlet: in response to an incoming connection or at a scheduled time. While the process is not really difficult as explained in the papers and articles given on the net ( http://developers.sun.com/techtopics/mobility/midp/questions/pushregistry/ ) The actual implementation of it is tricky mainly because of the practical difficulties and platform implementations. We needed to auto start a MIDlet each time the phone boots up and the most obvious choice seemed to be using the Java Push Registry Alarm method. Having read a couple of tutorials and seen the example code given it didn’t seem something too difficult to do – however, and such is the software jungle, overcoming the practical difficulties seemed to be the biggest hurdle. For example, in my case I was using Eclipse 3.0 with the java WTK
Read more

Expertise

Some of you may be aware of the interesting research done by Dr. Anders Ericsson around the theme of "Acquisition of Expert Performance and Deliberate Practice" An important finding is that it normally takes 10,000 hours of practice to become expert in any discipline. Of course, I can imagine this would vary a lot depending on kind of practice and how it builds on your earlier skill. So I did some quick behind the napkin math: 1. Practice Required = 10,000 hours Assuming a concentrated effort to put at least 4 hours of practice into honing your expertise in your chosen field - the other being taken up by other information tasks (e.g. did you know a large part of the so called “information work” is actually searching for information? – fun fact I gathered while working on Enterprise Search ) 2. Time required to gain that expertise = 10,000/4 = 2500 days 3. Which makes it about 7 years to gain expertise in a discipline. Interesting!
Read more

3 Idiots and Chak De India

I'm a strong believer that who we are shapes a lot of our decisions. So assuming that hypothesis is true, let's try to look at two roles from two major bollywood actors: Aamir Khan and Shahrukh Khan. The purpose to try to see how how they perceive themselves - or project themselves if you will - based on what appeals to them in a role. The two roles we'll look at are - Shahrukh as Kabir Khan in Chak De India and Aamir Khan as Ranchoddas (Rancho) in 3 idiots. Take Racho's character, A genius , who believes the right way is to chase excellence and not success (box office?) which will chase after you if you excel at what you do. The traditional system doesn't understand him and resists his ways at first but ultimately he proves his mettle. Interesting to note that Aamir's characters doesn't do badly in the courses but tops it - despite doing things against the system, and eventually is very 'successful'. If you remove the context of the movie from the a
Read more