Words of Kindness

Words of Praise

Happy SavingBonds!!!

or as should be properly said: रक्षाबंधन की शुभकामनाएँ!!!

It is the festival where sisters tie ‘Rucky Charm(s)’ on their brothers’ wrists. And so on the story continues… just wanted to share the PUN!

To those, who think the posts based on Sketchbook and Sketchbook-like jokes have lasted way too long, I’d just like to say: Don’t worry! …Some more are in the sketchbook!

DeFest

To Learn is to Live…

…or something like that!

I learnt a new word: Proso…, Propa…, Prospa…, …pagnosia. Hell with that, have a look at this video to learn the new word:

The Colbert Report

So, the word is: Prosopagnosia meaning ‘Face-blindness’!

After I heard the explanation by Mr. Close, I almost instinctively remembered Sora, from the now ‘infamous’ manga Sketchbook (here at my blog), who also has some version of it as is evident from these panels:

Just so you know, Asou(-san) usually keeps her hair tied into two ponytails like this:

Hope you enjoyed these. If yes, then also check out

TDS

Keeping Score

So how many times have I made Sketchbook references in my blog posts? Too many times, you’d say; but to be precise, I’ve lost count!

Yesterday, I found another manga, written by Sketchbook’s author “Totan Kobako”, titled ‘Scorebook’. Do you see the pattern here?

It’s not in the ‘famous’ 4-panel style; it’s in the usual free-style. Though, I think people would still assign Sketchbook’s genre of ‘Slice of life’ to Scorebook. It is pitched as ‘a collection of the author’s works’! But still, what is it about? Roughly speaking, it’s about Baseball – high school level baseball – played by Animals including a cow, a rabbit, a box turtle (does it jolt your memory, huh? huuuh???), a cat (named Miké, sounds familiar? doesn’t it???) and Pii-chan (the chicken, anyone? anyone at all??? )...

Now, you may be thinking there go the Sketchbook-like arbitrary characters & themes, but you’ll be surprised how wrong you are (or maybe not!!)! Find out for yourself by reading the first few pages of the first volume:

Scorebook

Prices of Spices

I have to spend too much time during summer months in PathMark for grocery shopping because of Mall Route Bus’ reduced frequency. To pass the aforementioned ‘too much time’, I like reading the names & prices of spices. Here are some of the interesting stand-outs:

Which is the most expensive Spice?

If you thought ‘Saffron’, let the QI-style forfeit alarm go off! It cost something between $400-500 per pound sometime ago. I’ve not seen it in the aisle this summer, so can’t guarantee the price.

If you say ‘Turkish Bay Leaves’, you are close – It costs around $750/lb.

The winner is ‘Chopped Chives’. If you said this out loud, you are also eligible to shout out ‘Bingo’ right about now. It costs around $800/lb!

Which is the cheapest Spice?

If you said ‘Salt’, congratulate yourself. More specifically, it is ‘Sicilian Sea Salt’ ($17/lb!).

Now for some weird ones (all prices are $/lb if you’ve not gotten used to it by now!):

Ground Cumin (63) & Roasted Ground Cumin (53). Roasted one is cheaper? How the hell did they do that?

Ground Coriander (74) & Roasted Ground Coriander (76). Almost no price difference! OK!

Ground Ginger (72) & Roasted Ground Ginger (85). Roasted one is costlier, makes sense…

Ground Saigon Cinnamon (50) & Roasted Saigon Cinnamon (77). Roasted is way too costly, dammit!#%

Mediterranean Spiced Sea Salt (24) is the most weird one! Don’t you think so? Not because of its cost but because of its name! What the hell does one mean by spiced salt? Don’t you mean salted spices! Because all I see in the bottle are brownish, reddish flakes. I don’t see any white ‘particles’ in the bottle and trust me, I can compare ‘white’ with the bottle of ‘Sicilian Sea Salt’ kept next to it.

Spices

Too Much Sketchbook?

I skipped a couple of heartbeats when I saw this ‘photo’:

(Also Musashi Quality is still in business! YOOOO!!!)

This happened early morning today and then I took the bus to YITP. In the bus, I noticed dark clouds adorning the otherwise usual blue sky. This made me remember the fourth episode of Sketchbook ~Full Color’s~ titled A Sketch Competition between Three People. Specifically, the moment when Sora (the heroine) is sketching the cloudy skyline and it gets difficult for her to draw because of humidity. This leads her to think, “I can’t draw a distinct line, and the sky can’t distinctly rain. I feel like we are similar… not a bad feeling at all.”

Indeed, not a bad feeling at all. When you can’t distinctly accept or refuse; can’t distinctly agree or disagree; can’t distinctly cry or laugh; can’t distinctly feel happy or sad; can’t distinctly hate or love; can’t distinctly lose or win; …! Distinct lines are very rare, aren’t they? How do you draw a distinct line between chaos & randomness, collaborators & competitors, defense & offense, dream & reality, enemies & friends, following & stalking, …

It is as if a distinct line

never exists!

Search for Killer Baby…

As of now, people have arrived on my blog post titled Baby, Please Kill Me! from Australia(1), Germany(1), Malaysia(1), Singapore(1), UK(1) and US(2) by searching for or about it. I’m really happy about that! About both the facts that people want to read more of this manga and that they end up on my blog but have to leave in disappointment!

People are mostly led to my blog when they search for Khamakha Hyderabadi. It usually appears as the second (or third or fourth) search result depending on Google’s mood. These people come mostly from India, Middle East, Pakistan and US. In minority, people also end up here if they are searching about Saba Balrampuri. The ‘searchers’ for her have more or less the same demographics as earlier. Though, one difference is that people like to ‘listen’ to Him but ‘talk’ to Her!

Searches for the camera named Casio Exilim Z2000 have also brought some people to my exposition of that magnificent piece of technology! Recently, they have come from European countries such as Bulgaria, Finland & Germany!

However, some have come here searching for weird phrases like “funny botanists sampling” and “first sextubel”, go figure! I’m pretty sure these people did not find what they were looking for, here at my blog. In fact, I doubt the latter search (with that spelling for what I guess should be ‘sextuple’) did any good for the ‘researcher’ at all!

One guy (I’m pretty sure, it’s a guy!) even searched for

“jksmskj”…

How do you do?

Dear Reader, How do You do?

Lost in thoughts for a fitting reply, watch this tutorial(?) video:

QI: Series E; Episode 10

This video is a great segue to the fact that one of my friends here at SUNYSB (let’s call him MEI-G) is getting married today…

Happy (most probably belated) Wedding Day (and beyond) to him!!! (If you are MI-G, then replace ‘him’ with ‘you’.)

Here’s a ‘funny’ (It’s funny to those who find it funny!) card I’d like to dedicate to MI (read the earlier ones and the story behind these here):

Card M

1^st Page: Experts say that the key to a Happy Marriage is for each of the partners to clearly define and declare their roles in the relationship.

3^rd Page: ⇐ Hope this Helps.

2^nd Page (has two circular red stickers in a column):

I’m the BOSS around here.

I’m the BOSS around here when she’s not around.

Altogether four weddings have been the subject of two of my rather short posts recently. So in an attempt to make my posts feel rather lengthy, the most I could do is to give you some info about what the earlier three might have looked like…

…in general!

Magic: MATLAB® Makes Movies!

The Pledge: Let me say that ‘this is not a revelation’, so that we are on the same page. The exclamation mark(!) is present for entirely different reasons. For quite some time, I had been having some troubles making movies using 'getframe' & 'addframe' functions in MATLAB^®. The .avi file would have a botched up initial frame which would drag on forever, i.e. no changing frames and hence no movie! (Did you know that Pigeons would see our movies as a slideshow?)

The Turn: I realized that this has to be due to some conflict with the graphics renderer. So, I explicitly chose the 'zbuffer' renderer and the .avi file now actually contained changing frames and hence a movie. You might think it worked out but not so soon... (If it had, this would have been a pretty ‘lame’ post!) 'zbuffer' does not support transparency but I needed that as you will see below. After digging here & there for a while, I came to the conclusion that I needed to use 'OpenGL' renderer and this was also the cause of ‘improper’ movies being made till now! (OpenGL is chosen as the default renderer if available.)

The Prestige: Digging some more in MATLAB's Help (THE BEST HELP EVER WRITTEN, just wanted to get that off my chest ), I found the magic line: feature('UseGenericOpenGL',1); The problem was that OpenGL supports Hardware Acceleration and it is used by default when available but somehow MATLAB couldn't keep up(?)! So the above line forces OpenGL to use software acceleration instead, which as MATLAB's Help points out rarely causes problems. (If the problem still persists, just restart MATLAB^®!)

That did it for me and here are the proofs:

Umbilic Torus

Werner Boy’s Surface

Here are some more well-made animations in MATLAB^®:

Surfaces