Pawan, Ranjeet and Roadshakers!!!

Love to see my friends in print. Also it coincides with my bike melodrama:) so go on all you bike lovers and check out the following site : Royal Enfield - The Ride
And these guys travelled all the way from Punjab to Goa for the meet of Enfield lovers!!!

And now for Pakau time: I have been speaking of Yam and Bull for a couple of days now and have started getting dreams of Death in the form of Yama on his Buffalo. Ha ha ha! No ha ha??? Well!!! I did point out it was Pakau!!!

Orisinal : Morning Sunshine

For one really well-made site containing beautiful flash games try out Orisinal : Morning Sunshine. And for the Jigsaw lovers among you; try out Jigzone - Jigsaw Puzzle.

Tribute to a Yam!

I have always loved the beauty of engineering, and nowhere else is this more manifest than in motorcycles. Somehow motorcycles are the point where we get a confluence of engineering excellence, pure application of physical sciences, machismo and personality. As people who are regular visitors would already know I am a big big fan of the Bull. If I might digress for a moment here; I saw Rover after quite a number of day and she looks kewl. Pawan had attached this single bucket seat and she looked absolutely fantabulous!!! Coming back on track, I am a big fan of the Bull. However due to different reasons I never had one. Nonetheless I never felt too bad cause I had Divya's bike to ride...a dyed-in-wool YAM(circa 1994ish). Now this is the best consolation prize ever. Riding on a Bull might be great for long distance but riding a yam in the city is the best experience ever. What is so good about the Yam you might ask? Where do I begin, the sheer acceleration, the linear curve of acceleration and deceleration, the nimbleness of its body, the sound of its engine(beautiful symphony, the kind dreams are made of) and the punishment it could take. Never have I found a more powerful bike (especially in the 2-stroke category) which can take the kind of abuse that a RX-100 can take. I am not allowed to ride bikes due to a groin injury. Due to this reason, I have not ridden Divya's bike for around 3 years. Divya is also not in Pune. In other words the bike has not been out for close to 3 years. Last month Divya's cousin came to Pune and wanted to use this bike if possible. I asked him to come and take it but conveyed my reservations on the state of the bike. When he came over we cleaned up the dust accumulated on the bike and then took it to a nearby garage. I assumed that we would need to spend a grand at least to get the bike up and running. Anyways left the bike at the garage and came back home. Next day in the morning when I visited the garage I found the bike all set up, shiny and back to its glory days. I was totally impressed with the garage guy(Pappu was his name, reminds me of Amit's Parker joke) On being asked what repairs had to be done, imagine my surprise when he tells me that he only had to do some minor work on the clutch. It seems he just pumped air into the tyres, filled the tank with petrol, rectified a small hitch in the clutch and the bike was ready to go. Imagine!!! She was in coma for close to 3 years and she starts up without any irritation. Now THAT is a piece of engineering!!!

Hence this ode to the Yam.


Links: none for today as I am not in the mood. However Raoul seems to be big time blog-surfing today...so I thought I might introduce him to others. Raoul is my friend, nuff said:)

P.S: The yam I speak about on he top is the RX-100. I am a fanatic of RX-100s specially the one with the black tank with thin gold trimmings. Please do not speak of any other Yam model except the RX-100, they do not deserve to spoken on the same page as a Yam RX-100 or a Bull. Other bikes!!! Please let's forget we even thought of speaking about other bikes:D

Links and an excuse!

I have been playing around with five ideas today which can potentially become blogs. These ideas are as diverse as ideology, bikes, elections, SDLC(Software Design Life Cycles for non techies) and LOTR. However I spent more time than expected getting through some software design links and am completely bushed. Hence I am going to take the easy way out by using my friend's hard work.

First Sujith has updated his site. Speaking of Sujith he should now rename his site from Title_TBD to B(ack)LOG :)
N'ways he has written a lot of stuff (conscience acting up???) this time around. I specially liked his LOTR article. Do not forget to follow the link in the article to another site where there is a spoof on LOTR. This site basically gives us a glimpse of how LOTR would have looked like had it been written by other famous authors. I specially like the Ernest Hemmingway version and the Meatloaf version. So what are you waiting for, open Sujith's site in a new window and read the article.

People (xcept Pawan and Sarat) have been all updating their sites with thought-provoking and interesting posts so please do move around.

Links of the day:

.Spent lot of time on Joel's site today going through his archive. Reading back on a certain article I followed his link to the following page nomo zilla. Interesting reading which gives us a perspective on how Netscape lost the web-browser war.

. Check out this page 2 + 2. The disenchanted articles are really good but this one was very well written. Again I am not in a position to judge it but it did bring back a lot of information I used to know about pi and phi and came to know about a concept called strange attractors. A must-visit.

.Continuing in the same techie frame of mind I ended up, yet again at Joel's site. As a parting link for the day visit User Interface Design for Programmers - Chapter 1. Well worth it!!! Check out this sneak preview "So that's what days were like. A bunch of tiny frustrations, and a bunch of tiny successes. But they added up. Even something which seems like a tiny, inconsequential frustration affects your mood. Your emotions don't seem to care about the magnitude of the event, only the quality.

And I started to learn that the days when I was happiest were the days with lots of small successes and few small frustrations.

Years later, when I got to college, I learned about an important theory of psychology called Learned Helplessness, developed by Dr. Martin E. P. Seligman. This theory, backed up by years of research, is that a great deal of depression grows out of a feeling of helplessness: the feeling that you cannot control your environment."

Of course the above extract is taken out of context, so go on, visit the site. It will be useful!

And Good Night all!