Stocking up on books
Stocking up on books 1
This is a great time to stock up on books for the rest of the year. The Strand Book Festival is on at the Chinnaswamy Stadium till 28th Dec. Their selection of books is a bit hotchpotch and somewhat esoteric. I would go there for random surfing or for discovering something new and unexpected but not to buy a book I’ve been looking to pick for a long time.
Landmark (I speak for the branch in the Forum mall) is also offering a good discount on books these days - provided you pick one from a big pile of books earmarked for festival sale.
If you miss the bus, there is always Blossom on Church Street for year long discounts.
Now as far as online presence goes, none of these shops have anything decent to offer. Botched up software (the last time I visited strandbookstall.com, they claimed that I had 261 items worth Rs. 92636.00 in my shopping cart!) and poor service (ladmarkonnet offers 30-45 days of shipping time on most of their titles) make sure I keep my credit card in my wallet.
I recently discovered (flipkart.com)[http://www.flipkart.com/], and the one time I’ve ordered a book off them, I’ve been delighted. They seem to be the ‘small guys’ who care about books and customers. The best part - they offer free shipping on all books! Worth a shot.
p.s. Directions to the Strand Book Festival - if you are coming from St. Mark’s Road go straight down Anil Kumble Circle and take a left from the Infantry Road crossing. Go down some 50-100 meters and you’ll see an entry into the Chinnaswamy Stadium (gates 17 and 18 if I am not mistaken) where the book festival is.
p.p.s. I moved jobs and am now working at cricinfo.com. This means I’ve also been shopping for a lot of non-fiction:
Stocking up on books 2
My dogged determination to sleep runs into dogs
It’s 3 AM in the morning and I find myself unable to sleep. The friendly neighborhood dogs are exceptionally frisky tonight and just wouldn’t stop barking. All I can do now is post some dog pictures from a visit to Coorg last year.
These fellows were intimidating at first but warmed up to us in no time. The youngest of the lot even let us into her secret - a hiding place behind tall wild grass.
Cuteness 101
Tootsie
Do dogs have nests
Blur
Blur
The past few days have been like one continuous blur. I’ve had to peer through a lot of fog and there’s been the stress of having to play host to that unwelcome guest called self-doubt. It’s over now and I am glad I’ve had to go through this phase as it has brought remarkable clarity to some aspects of my life. Change is in the air and I love the smell of it!
The problem of unreadable CAPTCHAs
A CAPTCHA is usually a severely contorted image of random characters that you are supposed to key in correctly to be able to get into a website. The idea is to thwart automated scripts/programs - the sort of stuff that spammers (among other bad guys) use to create hundreds of fake accounts for spamming. Now as optical character recognition (OCR) becomes sophisticated a simple image or one that is not significantly distorted, does not present a sufficient challenge to an OCR program. As a result we are seeing increasingly more distorted/noisy CAPTCHAs that are beginning to push the limits of even human readability - like the one below from Yahoo India’s e-mail sign-up page:
YahooCaptcha
And then there are CAPTCHAs that just want to mock you, like the one blogger so affectionately threw at me this morning:
GoogleCaptcha
Since CAPTCHAs cannot be read by screen readers, a lot of sites also include an audio version of the CAPTCHA. I hadn’t heard one till recently (I happened to click on the accessibility icon accidentally), but what I heard was stuff of nightmares! Turn down your speakers a bit this stuff is not pleasant:
Obviously, the intent here is to stop sound recognition programs in their tracks by introducing a lot of background noise. The overall effect however brings images of prisons, misery and torture to one’s mind. (Or may be I watched one war movie too many this year!)
And then there is this minor matter of spammers with an army of CAPTCHA cracking humans at their disposal. Or may be that explains why CAPTCHAs are becoming increasingly painful even for legitimate users.
Electric!
Electric! 1
Electric! 2
Electric! 3
A random collection of electricity poles, wires, transformers and such. I think that they are the most common form of visual noise in urban India. I usually hate them for ruining my shots but this time they are the shots. We are now even.
p.s. The moment I published this post, I had a power cut. I am trying not to read too much into it.
Happy Deepawali!
Happy Deepawali!
Here’s wishing everyone a very happy and prosperous Deepawali 2008!
Rant etc: The picture was taken 2 years ago at an HDFC branch near my house. I wasn’t around at Bangalore to inspect the decor last year, but it looks like that this year the Diwali decorations are a lot more muted - which is not unnatural; considering what the financial world in general and banks in particular are going through. I for one am trying to be indifferent. If I were to distill my life’s learning (so far) into one sentence, it’d be this - things in this world are rarely as good or bad as they seem!