Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
MUMBAI LOCAL & the helpful commuters
A funny incident that took place in MUMBAI
Only local train passengers in Mumbai will know how helpful commuters try to be......
Last week, a hapless victim fell prey to the over enthusiastic Bombay's local train commuters.
Our hero, a man from Pune, wanted to go to Matunga, but as luck and trains would have it, boarded a fast train not halting at his destination. He panicked on realising his mistake but by then the local had started moving. On seeing his plight, a sympathetic co-passenger decided to come to his rescue.
It seemed that he had been commuting by that particular train (6:03pm Kasara Fast) for the past 6 years and had noticed that the train always slowed down just before Matunga station and crawled at a snail's pace while passing through it. He told the man to jump out of the running train as it slowed down and that with a little bit of fleet-footedness, he would make it safely on terra firma. However, knowing the man's inexperience, he added some words of caution:
"Keep running the moment you jump or you'll fall. Just keep running." He stressed the word "running" lest the man not know the laws of motion. The train did slow down just before Matunga station and at the prompting of his mentor, our hero jumped out of the train and started running as if all hell had broken loose.
What he didn't realise, of course, was that he was running parallel to the train instead of running away from it. Meanwhile, the train slowed down further, so that the man was running faster than the train. In the process, he reached the door of the next compartment and the footboard commuters there pulled him in thinking he was trying to board the train! To his agony, the train picked up speed and sped past Matunga and his new co-passengers started to congratulate him on how lucky he had been, until he told them that they had actually undone what he had done with great difficulty.
Those standing at the door of his "ex-compartment" had witnessed the whole drama and just couldn't stop laughing at the poor man's situation, while he grinned sheepishly!! !
Only local train passengers in Mumbai will know how helpful commuters try to be......
Last week, a hapless victim fell prey to the over enthusiastic Bombay's local train commuters.
Our hero, a man from Pune, wanted to go to Matunga, but as luck and trains would have it, boarded a fast train not halting at his destination. He panicked on realising his mistake but by then the local had started moving. On seeing his plight, a sympathetic co-passenger decided to come to his rescue.
It seemed that he had been commuting by that particular train (6:03pm Kasara Fast) for the past 6 years and had noticed that the train always slowed down just before Matunga station and crawled at a snail's pace while passing through it. He told the man to jump out of the running train as it slowed down and that with a little bit of fleet-footedness, he would make it safely on terra firma. However, knowing the man's inexperience, he added some words of caution:
"Keep running the moment you jump or you'll fall. Just keep running." He stressed the word "running" lest the man not know the laws of motion. The train did slow down just before Matunga station and at the prompting of his mentor, our hero jumped out of the train and started running as if all hell had broken loose.
What he didn't realise, of course, was that he was running parallel to the train instead of running away from it. Meanwhile, the train slowed down further, so that the man was running faster than the train. In the process, he reached the door of the next compartment and the footboard commuters there pulled him in thinking he was trying to board the train! To his agony, the train picked up speed and sped past Matunga and his new co-passengers started to congratulate him on how lucky he had been, until he told them that they had actually undone what he had done with great difficulty.
Those standing at the door of his "ex-compartment" had witnessed the whole drama and just couldn't stop laughing at the poor man's situation, while he grinned sheepishly!! !
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
red chilly vs alien
Probably I am watching a lot of Alien flicks, but a second ago this thought just crawled into my mind (I was coding some JavaScript) - while fighting an alien creature with creepy & cruel eyes why don't our protagonist try to blind the alien by throwing some red chilly powder in those hollows. Anyways, they don't know to overpower the ET, so may be this trick can also get a chance on theaters. Any script-writers reading ... ?
Saturday, December 20, 2008
Movie Catalogs
I have turned out to be a movie freak during the past couple of months. With my DVDs piling up, I needed some cataloging software that can help me keep a record of all my precious DVDs while at the same time can compile the necessary movie information from the internet. I usually rely on IMDB for movie ratings and I actually enjoy user comments there, so downloading all this data would be a big plus with any movie catalog I needed.
So I turned up to Google, and the very first link showed this freeware (of course, I also don’t want to pay for it!) - antp.be > Software > Ant Movie Catalog. I must say, Google did come out with the best result at the top. Though visually the interface is not very appealing (though this is taken care of by … – well read on) but all the relevant information about the movie is captured.
Another nice thing is that its a no-nonsense tool when downloading movie information from the net. It can get information from a huge number of web movie databases and the best part is that it offered me source code of scripts it uses to get information from imdb, amazon and other sites. As I am a coder by profession I found it a very useful feature it allows me to practically do whatever customizations are possible in the information I need.
The program has usual import/export features, a unique statistics menu that shows bar charts (whew!) for a lot of stats viz number of movies, movies by countries, genre, language etc. Ant also has a Group by feature though with a lot many by fields (practically all it knows).
Now, about visual – priyatana.org provides Ant Viewer that is a pretty nice user interface to display ant movies catalog (*.amc) files. I find the display it provides the best when compared to other free/paid tools; check out its screenshot for yourself. You will simply love
the softness and the simplicity.
So I turned up to Google, and the very first link showed this freeware (of course, I also don’t want to pay for it!) - antp.be > Software > Ant Movie Catalog. I must say, Google did come out with the best result at the top. Though visually the interface is not very appealing (though this is taken care of by … – well read on) but all the relevant information about the movie is captured.
Another nice thing is that its a no-nonsense tool when downloading movie information from the net. It can get information from a huge number of web movie databases and the best part is that it offered me source code of scripts it uses to get information from imdb, amazon and other sites. As I am a coder by profession I found it a very useful feature it allows me to practically do whatever customizations are possible in the information I need.
The program has usual import/export features, a unique statistics menu that shows bar charts (whew!) for a lot of stats viz number of movies, movies by countries, genre, language etc. Ant also has a Group by feature though with a lot many by fields (practically all it knows).
Now, about visual – priyatana.org provides Ant Viewer that is a pretty nice user interface to display ant movies catalog (*.amc) files. I find the display it provides the best when compared to other free/paid tools; check out its screenshot for yourself. You will simply love
the softness and the simplicity.
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Next Blog
Can that next blog button on the navigation bar wade me through blogs in my choosen language only. Its pretty annoying that so many of those 'next blogs' would be in a language that you cannot make out anything of it.
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