Sunday, May 17, 2009

Ambigrams


Angels and Demons - The movie is getting released this week. I read the book and am impressed. I had earlier read Da Vinci Code and Deception Point by the same author Dan Brown. Found both the books to be interesting in the beginning but was very hollywoodish,very dramatic at the end. Angels and Demons was better.
I am particularly impressed with the ambigrams of Earth, Water,Air and Fire and the Illuminati diamond created by John Langdon for the book.
It inspired me to create one based on my nick name. Read the text upside down and it will appear the same.
Its short hence was a bit easy. Will try some complex ones later.

Sunday, May 03, 2009

The Night of the Sofa


Friday evening ..5:30pm ..I came back home early from office. I was browsing the Craigslist's furniture section to finalize on a sofa that we (me and my roommates Subhanand and Tanmoy) had been planning for a month or so. "Am not gonna waste this weekend. Have to get a sofa"..I thought to myself. I kind-of liked maybe three or four posts and was busy copy pasting the URLs on a yellow sticky note to show it later to my roomies who still had not returned from office.

30 minutes later I got a call from Tanmoy saying "Nishant, stay at home... we are on our way to get a Sofa set...its a 3-tier and a 2-tier sofa...its a good one..will be back in an hour and a half"
I immediately abandoned surfing (i didn't trash the sticky note though).

I switched on the TV. Whats showing on HBO..same movies being repeated...lets watch some music..MTV? No. CMT? YES.. good country music. Cooked myself a bowl of butter pop-corn Sat down on the carpet and was enjoying Alan Jackson's "Having a good time" and Taylor Swift's "Love Story". And the time flew by.

There was a knock on the door and it was Subhanand. "Nishant, need to make some space here..we have got the sofas. Its in the U-Haul down in the parking area. The Sofas are a bit heavy and will need all of us to get it in".Okay I Said.

Went down to the parking area to the U-Haul. Tanmoy pulled the levers to open the vertically upward sliding door of the U-Haul van. It was dark inside and I could see the silhouette of the two sofas, a bed frame kind of thing and what looked like mattress.

I jumped in and found few cushions. Yes it was a mattress. We decided to carry all the light items first. Then we carried the king-size bed's metal frame and the mattresses.

Finally the turn of the sofas came. It was a custom built sofa with a royale looking solid wooden frame and floral prints.

Now our apartment in Sunnyvale, was on the first floor. The stairs, with walls on both sides went up from the pavement outside to a 5x5 sqrft space with a dead-end and with our door and our neighbor's door on either side.

With great effort we carried the smaller sofa which was approx. 5 ft in length. Carried it upstairs and placed It vertically upright on the sapce in front of our door. It was then that we realized that our door was also about five feet in height. We just managed to push in the sofa.

Houston..now we have a problem!! ..the bigger sofa (6ft approx.) would be difficult to push in.

It was 7:30 pm and we got a call from Arvind inviting us for dinner at his home in Cupertino. We said we would come in by 9pm.

Now we somehow managed to get the bigger sofa onto the space in front of our door. What do we do next. The height of the sofa was about a feet more and there was no way we could tilt it and push it in.

The width of the sofa was also more than the width of our door and there simply wasn't enough space to turn the sofa and push it in.

We asked our neighbours to open their door so that we can get some space. It didn't work. So what next?

We called up Murali and explained him our problem. Murali who lived two streets away from our block reached our place in 5 mins with more ideas. 45 minutes later we were still stuck. We had kind of tried all permutations, all combinations, all angles but the sofa just wouldn't go in.

It was a call from Arvind when we stopped trying and we also realized it was almost 2 hrs that we had been sweating it out.
What next? We decided to give it to Arvind. He also agreed if it would fit in and if Rashi, his wife would also agree to it.

So we loaded back the sofa to the U-Haul and Tanmoy drove it to Arvind's home.
Subhanand drove his grey sports edition Corolla to the place. I accompanied Tanmoy. Arvind and Rashi both took a look and found it to be good but a little long. Their door was also about 5ft and we would land up with the same problem.
So what next? Dinner first was the call :) We had a the lovely dinner. We needed it :) It was already 11:30 pm.

What next? We decided to give it to someone who was in need of a sofa and so we called up Debasis. Debasis said that they already had a sofa at home and wouldn't need one. However he said he would find out if anyone was in need. So we decided to land up with the sofa at his place in Santa clara.

We parked the van in the parking place of 3455 Vista Apartment.
Meanwhile Debasis and his roomies ( Gaurav , Durgesh, Saurav, ) all were busy connecting with people to find out if someone was in need of a sofa. So far ..negative. I called up Gaurav Sethi who was in need but his place was on the fourth floor. So we dropped the idea..

Finally around 12:15 am, Gaurav Agarwal informed us that one of our coleague Soma was ready to take the sofa. Her home was in Cupertino (Villa Serra) . So all of us drove to Soma's place. Tanmoy for a moment and perhaps out of exhaustion, forgot it was US and directly drove the U-Haul van in the left lane and there was an SUV coming right in front. The driver seemed to be an american chinese female who was so shocked that she applied brakes and stopped. Any one would if you have a U-Haul coming in your direction head-on that too at 12:20 am in the night . Tanmoy immediately realised his mistake and swerved to the right and the correct lane and apologised.

Reached villa serra safely. Now we had the task of getting the sofa in the apartment. Soma's place was also in the first floor. We had to be sure we don't make a noise cause it was already midnight.

Debasis, Saurav, Durgesh , Tanmoy, Gaurav, myself somehow managed to get it in after about trying for half an hour. I simply cannot explain how the sofa was moved in :)

We were so relaxed.Finally.

We had to pick up few stuff from Debasis's home so Tanmoy and myself in the U-Haul van and Subhanand and rest of the guys in their cars, drove off to 3455 Vista Apartments.

Midway we saw the cops flashing lights at us asking us to pullover. We were pretty sure we were driving within the safe recommended speed limit. We stopped and were thinking Now What!! Seems like is raat ki subah nahin :(

The cop asked us for our ids and driving license which we promptly displayed. He then asked us what were we doing in the middle of the night with the U-Haul.(Apparently the mexicans use U-Haul to transport people at night). We informed him that we were IT professionals and we didn't get time earlier and we were carrying a sofa to our friends house. He gave us a look and asked us to drive slow saying we were driving above the speed limit. We nodded. As long as there was no penalty we had no problems. The cop went off and we reached Vista Apartments where our friends were anxiously waiting for us as they saw us, pullover with the cops behind us, from far.

We have had enough for a night. We were exhausted with the entire events of the evening. Reached home at around 1:30am. We retired to our bed tired, relaxed and amused. Guess we will never forget "the Night of the Sofa".

Kolkata (K)Nightmare Riders

Kolkata Knight Riders are having a nightmare in the second season of IPL, the "India Ka Tamasha".

They have started on a Murphy's note...start on a bad note and everything that has to go wrong will go wrong..
...Dropping Dada from captaincy and earning the wrath of millions of Indians (what was SRK thinking)
...Bringing in the ridiculous funda of multiple captains..Mr. Buchanan needs to be reminded of the "too many cooks" phrase.
..And finally dropping Kolkata from the team's name. (Kinda blasphemy)

And the results have started to show. SRKs face shows it all.

Wish them good luck. Thats what they need.

Korbo Lorbo phir bhi Haarbo re