Tag: funny

Cars and computers

A few days ago, car company Tesla issued a software update which turns existing Tesla Model S cars into self-driving cars (while Google and Apple are busy designing self-driving cars).

This reminded me of the old joke from the 90s which made a comparison of the progress made by cars and computers – “If cars were like Windows, they would crash for no reason — you would have to close all windows and restart the car”.

A few years have passed, and cars are essentially ‘drive-by-wire’ now – which means that there is a ton of software ‘under the hood’ (literally!). Meanwhile, Windows has improved in terms of reliability, so let’s see how the old joke holds up.

1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.

Computers still crash – sometimes spectacularly. But it’s not “twice a day” bad like the days of Windows 95/98 etc. . Since Windows 2000 moved to the NT kernel, things have improved. Cars have started crashing for no reason (Toyota unintended acceleration, failure to detect objects by Tesla etc.) Still I trust my car to run without crashing far more than I trust my laptop! Win for the old joke.

2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.

I’m not sure what the joke referred to by repainting the lines in the context of computers, but technology does tend to get obsolete pretty quickly – especially smartphones these days that seem to be designed to last about two years.

3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the  windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.

This happens to cars already (Infiniti EX35 shuts off while driving).

4. Occasionally, executing a manoeuvre such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.

I suppose they were referring to software crashes etc that would render the computer un-bootable. I would think this is pretty rare these days for typical computers.

5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive – but would run on only five percent of the roads.

While Apple is busy with it’s car plans, a self-driving car start-up (probably qualifies as “twice as easy to drive”) called Cruise has a car which can only drive around San Francisco!

6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single “This Car Has Performed an Illegal Operation” warning light.

This already happens – the Check Engine Light.maxresdefault

7. The air-bag system would ask “Are you sure?” before deploying.

Fortunately, this does not happen, but there have been cases where the air-bags did not deploy due to software errors.

8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.

This sort of happened to us once while we were renting a ZipCar which uses an app based system instead of keys. We were just not able to unlock the car and get in. Eventually, after some fiddling around and calls to customer care we were able to coax the car into letting us in.

9. Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.

Car controls can be confusing too – Example : Unusual transmission controls could increase risk of accidents.

Car navigation systems and media centres can be pretty unintuitive.

10. You’d have to press the “Start” button to turn the engine off. “

This has happened already:
AuroStart002

Computers have become more reliable over the years, but cars have now become computers on wheels. We can only hope car makers are able to stand up to the complexity of software systems!

Portland

IMG_1921

In this city, it often rains. Geography demands it. For beyond the islands scattered west roll endless miles of ocean, while north-east at the city’s back jut jagged mountain peaks. With the slate-gray skies of autumn come the cyclone westerlies, raging winds and boiling clouds that sweep in from the sea. In waves these bloated clouds tear open on the peaks, and the rain which fills each gut spills and rattles down.

To live in this city, you learn to like rain.

Funny how sometimes you retain information from the unlikeliest of sources. I was in eleventh (or twelfth?) grade when I asked a friend if he had anything interesting to read. He lent me the novel Headhunter (Michael Slade). The plot is about Royal Canadian Mounted Police hunting down a serial killer in Vancouver. The passage above is how the story begins (after the first chapter which is more of a prologue). People who live in the pacific north-west would agree that the same passage applies to the other two big cities in this region — Seattle and Portland.

I must have been in fifth grade when I was doing a map (marking cities and lakes and rivers and mountains) of North America. One of the items was listed as “Vancouver (Canada)”. I did not know what Vancouver was; and, seeing Canada in parenthesis, I assumed they meant Canada (even though I had a feeling that couldn’t be right). Later, my sister laughed and told me that I was supposed to mark the city of Vancouver and not just Canada. So I learnt that Vancouver was a city and would later learn that it rained there all the time (courtesy the serial-killer tale above). A few year later, a friend of mine was interning at Starbucks in Seattle. “That is where Starbucks started.”, he told me, and “It rains here all the time.”. Just like Vancouver, I thought. It all made sense.

Almost exactly an year ago, I was having a phone interview. I already had a tentative offer (in Boston!) so I wasn’t taking the phone call seriously. I was on IM with a friend, planning to go to a 5 o’clock show of The Dark Knight. The interview went well and ended just in time for me to get to the movie in time. It was pouring. I got wet just walking across the parking lot. A couple of weeks later, I was in Portland interviewing for the job. It rained the whole day, almost exactly like the day I had been in Seattle, on another interview a few weeks back.

I never made it to Boston – not even for a face to face interview. I ended up taking the offer in Portland – a town that came close to being named Boston.

And that’s how I live in Portland now. In this city, it often rains. Geography demands it. … To live in this city, you learn to like rain.

Test Match Special

Sometimes the feedback to the cricket commentary on the BBC website is priceless:

Robin from Co Kerry, Ireland “I love this form of cricket, so many great batsmen looking like waiters in a bouncy castle trying to hold a tray of glasses when they bat. Love the way you also make fun of the Aussies despite losing to Holland. I wonder if you guys will ever learn not to gloat until you do something yourselves worth shouting about like avoiding an Ashes whitewash.”

Simon in the TMS inbox “Doesn’t Robin (5/6th over) realise that for us to gloat at any Aussie failure is one of our basic human rights as Englishmen? What we do ourselves has no bearing on the matter at all. In fact it’s remarkably similar to the Irish attitude to any English failure…”

Paul in Lancs in the TMS inbox “As both determined neo-Kantian and utter pedant, I feel I must dispute Simon’s claim that gloating about Australian failure is one of our ‘basic human rights as Englishmen’. Such a statement flies in the face of the Categorcial Imperative formulation: ‘Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law’, in that you cannot validly have a human right solely for one part of the human race. This applies even when the ‘objects’ of such a right is Australians, who did not exist in the modern (Euro-centric) sense when Kant was alive. I accept that, had they been, he may have done things differently.”

TrickieDickie, Hollywood, in the TMS inbox “I agree, you are an utter pedant. Kant was familiar with the concept of schadenfreude (see his Lectures on Ethics) and whilst he felt it was a cruel and inhumane emotional response, I’m sure he would have found it hard not to raise a wry smile when the Aussies were ignominiously dumped out of this tournament.”

TrickieDickie, Hollywood, in the TMS inbox “You’re right, he did. Do you remember when Playaway devoted a whole show to existentialism and the pointlessness of the human condition? Seems a propos, as we sit staring at large squares of canvas, waiting for another dead rubber to begin. Honestly, Test matches in May and now pointless Twenty20 games in June. What are the (dis)organisers putting in their tea?”

Paul in Lancs in the TMS inbox “Trickiedickie – I think, then, we are broadly in agreement on the specificity of schadenfreude when it comes to the Aussies. The Australian cricket team, has by virtue of its dominance imbued with arrogance, completely altered the whole face of moral philosophy as we knew it, and created a new epistemological framework for the social sciences. Ricky Ponting should rest easy in Leicester. His work is done.”

Far from this opera for evermore!

I just remembered these crazy soft drinks that I had a long long time ago in a land far far away.

***

Why do “immigrant” authors have to write about “loss and alienation” all the time? Even when the actual immigrants were their parents? Although, sometimes their experiences can be funny. For example, I heard this bit from Samina Ali (author of Madras on Rainy Days) on an NPR story

Everyone spoke Urdu, everyone was Muslim, everyone ate Indian food, and for a long time my son thought that that was India. He would tell people all the time, ‘I’ve been to India! We’ve gone to India; I just was there last weekend!’ And I would tell him, ‘No, that was actually Minnesota!’ And you can tell from his perspective how insular it is.”

***

What would happen if France had a black president? His new motto would be Liberté, égalité and booté!
That’s from last weekend’s Saturday Night Live (not available outside US). That guy is good – incroyablé!

Netherland

I recently read Netherland by Jospeh O’Neill. It is a great read and, at the same time, hard to categorize because it touches so many themes. One review (in New York Times) starts off comparing it to 9/11 novels; in another review it’s described as “an Indian novel” .

It is the story of a banker who moves with his family from London to New York where the couple begin to drift apart. The wife moves back to London leaving him alone to brood over his life. During this time he discovers cricket -the game he played as a child – being played by a bunch of  (mostly) West Indian and South Asian immigrants. He also meets a guy called Chuck Ramkissoon who is described by reviewers as a “Gatsby-like” figure.

The book is simultaneously funny, insightful, informative (unless you know a lot about birds of Trinidad etc), melancholic and overwhelming. Consider the following excerpts:

Even I had heard of Faruk, author of Wandering in the Light and other money-spinning multimedia mumbo jumbo about staving off death and disease by accepting our oneness with the cosmos.

“The Wild West”, Schulz said thoughtfully as he wandered off to absorb the view from atop a nearby boulder. I saw that each of my other companeros had likewise assumed a solitary station on the ridge, so that the four of us stood in a row and squinted into the desert like existentialist gunslingers. It was undoubtedly a moment of reckoning, a rare and altogether golden opportunity for a Milwaukeean or Hollander of conscience to consider certain awesome drifts of history or geology and philosophy, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one to feel lessened by the immensity of the undertaking and by the poverty of the associations one brought to bear on the instant, which in my case included recollections, for the first time in years, of Lucky Luke, the cartoon-strip cowboy who often rode among the buttes and drew a pistol faster than his own shadow. It briefly entranced me, that remembered seminal image, on the back cover of all the Lucky Luke books, of the yellow-shirted, white-hatted cowboy plugging a hole in the belly of his dark counterpart. To gun down one’s shadow … The exploit struck me, chewing mutton under the sun, as possessing a tantalizing metaphysical significance; and it isn’t an overstatement, I believe, to say that this train of thought, though of course inconclusive and soon reduced to nothing more than nostalgia for the adventure books of my childhood, offered me sanctuary: for where else, outside of reverie’s holy space, was I to find it? “

Sometimes when you read a book you wonder how much of it derives from the author’s own life experiences.

A few days ago, I was watching Charlie Rose interviewing a german author Bernhard Schlink (writer of The Reader). Schlink said that all novels are autobiographical, for, how can you write about that which you have not experienced.

In the novel Netherland, the narrator Hans has a lot in common with the author. E.g. the narrator grows up in Holland and lives in England before moving to New York city where, at some point, he stays at the Chelsea Hotel. The author’s prior job as a food reviewer and his review of C L R James’ book also make their way into the novel.

Now these are superficial details but it makes you wonder about some of the more personal life experiences – how much are they from the author’s own experiences or the people around him and how comfortable he or the people around him are with what goes into the book to be read by possibly millions of people.

Last night on TV

Frieda Pinto (Latika from Slumdog Millionaire) was on The Tonight Show (with Jay Leno) last night.  She seemed to be a little nervous but carried it off quite well. She was talkative, funny and looked great. Definitely not the car crash that Aishwarya Rai was on Letterman.

*

On the Big Bang Theory show yesterday, Sheldon likens Ashwarya Rai to a poor man’s Madhuri Dixit and then says to Raj, “Clearly you know nothing about Indian cinema”. The goof there was that when Sheldon points to the TV and says “Isn’t that Aishwarya Rai?”, the song playing was from Kaho Na Pyaar Hai.

*
Quote from Scarface: “Nothing exceeds like excess”.

Car trouble

Tuesday morning. I had to be at work by 8:30. I get out in the morning and it is dark and foggy as hell. And I am in a hurry. So while getting out of the parking lot I scratch my car against the pole. I note the damage, curse a little and try to get to work on time. I drive through the dark and foggy morning, drop my friend and eventually I make it just in time.

At lunch time, I go out to get something from the car. When I try to lock it using the little button on the door nothing happens. I have to lock it with the key. I come back thinking that the car is falling apart. First the scratch then this.

It’s evening and I am ready to go home. As I get into the car, it occurs to me that the button on the passenger side door might still work. I try that. Nope, not working. I sigh and turn the ignition. No lights come up. Nothing. Oops battery is gone. The car is really falling apart. But wait! The button is battery operated. So that is probably still alright. But why is the battery out? It was alright in the morning. Face hits palm. Remember the fog in the morning. I must have left the lights on in the hurry. Sure enough the light switch is on. I switch it back. Sigh again.

I call AAA. Wait for the guy to come and give me a jump-start (It occurred to me after calling AAA that I could have asked someone in the parking lot). About 40 minutes later the guy arrives. The car starts. I ask him if there’s somewhere nearby where I could get the battery charged. He tells me that most places would be closed at the time but suggests a place nearby that might still be open. I leave work, pick up my friend and get to the battery place. It’s closed. At this point I’m considering leaving the car there overnight.

Yes I’m dumb enough not to know whether the battery gets charged when the car is running. I call a friend and ask him this. He recommends that I drive around and let the car run for some time which will charge the battery enough to get it started the next time. I drive home and drop my friend. I think I should let the car run a little more. I drive around aimlessly for about a minute. I start hearing (or imagining) all kinds of weird sounds. I think I should better drive back. I park the car at the apartment parking lot but let the engine be on for a bit. I get out of the car and close the door.

Oops! I have locked myself out. Remember the little lock button? Well, I had toggled it a fair bit to test that it was indeed related to the battery and it was set to the “lock” position when I get out. Well, maybe the passenger side door is unlocked – was the the rattling sound I heard? Nope. locked as well as it can be. Wait there’s a spare key in my laptop bag. Aargh, there’s the laptop bag inside the car. A little bit of backstory – the rear door window in my car was defective. The window used to slide down as the cable that connects the motor and the glass had broken. I had secured it using superglue but that didn’t hold it too well. If it was still held by superglue I might have tried to pull it down. But no, a week ago I went and had the mechanic put in a nut to hold up the glass permanently.

I call AAA. They send a locksmith. I have never seen anyone do anything as fast as the locksmith is in getting the door open. I switch off the engine, lock the car and take the spare key into the house.

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Europe adventures

Kos, Greece

Last month, I attended a conference in Kos. I took the airline shuttle from Kos Airport to get to Kos Town intending to take a taxi from the town to my hotel. I almost got down at the wrong stop but a fellow passenger stopped me. This guy, named Lavis, told me where to get down, walked along with me to the town center from where I could take a taxi. Along the way he told me he was visiting his ailing grandmother-in-law and that his wife and daughter were already there.

Five days later, I was at the Kos airport in the bus which took passengers from the airport gate to the airplane. In the bus, standing right across me, was a guy with his wife and daughter who looked very familiar. “Someone from the conference”, I was thinking when we made eye contact and I suddenly remembered! He was the guy from five days ago – we took the same flight from Athens to Kos and the same flight again from Kos to Athens. “I hope your grandmother is doing okay”, I asked them. “Oh yeah, she says she became 20 years younger upon seeing here great-granddaughter”, said his wife. There were a few other people with me who I met during the conference. They were really confused with this conversation!

***

“Is the conference in Kipriotis?”, Lavis asked me.
“No, it’s some conference center in Psalidi.”, I replied.
“Yeah, Kipriotis is a big convention center in Psalidi.”
“No, I think it’s named Kos International Convention center”.

Later, I found out that it’s acutally Kipriotis Resort – Kos International Convention Center.

***

I stopped by the supermarket to buy a bottle of lemon ice tea. The store owner started talking about what I was doing on the island and where I was from etc.

“There was someone else here last night?”, I asked him.
“No, it was me.”
“Oh.”
“You came looking for a plug adapter.”
“Yeah”, I said sheepishly.

Once I’d told him that I was in computers, he asked me what the latest thing in computers was. I tried to tell him about the petascale supercomputer at Los Alamos which was announced the day before, but that didn’t excite him much. “Can I make my computer type what I speak?”, he asked. “Sure”, was my response.

In the next half an hour, I tried to set up Speech in Microsoft Word, but failed because the menus were all Greek to me (literally!). And there was no Office CD accessible to us. I did try some google searches to find a way, but all my clicks were hijacked by the various toolbars and spyware on his laptop. So I spent some time installing AVG 8.0, scanning his hard disk, installing Firefox 2.0 and setting it as default browser. He thanked me with a Mars bar – pity I’d already paid for the lemon ice tea.

Meanwhile he told me he was from Egypt, hated flying (said he could never go to USA because he couldn’t spend more than 5 hours in a plane), used to be a swimmer from age 8 till 26, was now married to a Greek woman and the wallpaper was his kid.

I friended him on Facebook before leaving.

***

Greece seemed a lot like India. I saw cow tied to a peg, plenty of blue/green polythene bags and most remarkably bougainvillea and shoe flowers (hibiscus). People eat at 9 or later unlike USA where 8 is late for dinner.

Munich, Germany

In Munich I was talking to the person at the tourist information office.
“As you can see the weather is good today”, he said wiping enormous beads of sweat from his brow. He didn’t even blink when he said that.

Rome, Italy

“Parla Inglesi” is Italian for “Do you speak English?”. In Bari, I’d spent the previous 15 minutes asking people this very question while trying to figure out a way to get to the train station. I reached the right bus stop and while waiting for bus number 53, I decided I should confirm with the guy standing next to me. He did speak English, but we didn’t pursue that language for much longer. Reason? He was from Mauritius and spoke Bhojpuri! (which he admitted was a little different and anyway I couldn’t speak more than 2 sentences in that dialect). We talked in Hindi about Italy, India, London, passports, immigration etc till the bus took us to our destinations. Getting down from the bus, I headed to the train station while my gold jewellery and fancy sunglass wearing co-traveller headed to the bus station. “Thanks a lot! Bye!”, I said, replying to his “Dhuko station mein!”

***

In Rome, the Sun Moon youth hostel is located on the 6th floor. The lift, as in most such places, is tiny. I was returning from dinner and there was another backpacker in the lift with me – her friend and the hostel staff were taking the staircase. As I pressed 6, the girl said, “Is it on the sixth floor?”, in (Italian?) accented English. “Parla Inglesi?”, I was quick to respond. “I asked in English!”, she said, with irritation. “Um, yeah, sixth floor”, I said, wishing that tiny little lift could go faster!

Salzburg, Austria

“Are you eating?”, someone asked me in an Aussie accent.
“I’m 28, actually”, I responded.
“No! Eating!”, was the reply, accompanied by some sort of sign language.
“Um, no I just had a pizza outside”, I said, and sat there for a few awkward moments while the others looked at me and smiled, trying hard not to laugh.

***

In Salzburg, I met a guy who was from England but had lived in Melbourne (or the other way around). He told me how he’d seen Bob Willis, Viv Richards (and I forgot which other names he mentioned) live during Boxing Day Test at the MCG. He had just climbed 2 mountain peaks near Salzburg and was resting for a few days. He told me that he’d once travelled from Beijing to Moscow on the Trans-Siberian railway – a journey which took seven days to complete.

Bheja Fry

I saw Bheja Fry yesterday. I wouldn’t have if I had trusted the this review , I probably wouldn’t have seen it. However, I did and liked it too. There isn’t much of a story, but there’s good humour – especially from Vinay Pathak who is the star of the movie. Vinay Pathak and Ranvir Shorey (I hope the spelling is correct) used to host a show during FIFA world cup last year and the show was hugely irritating then (except for the rat which was named Fardeen ). Even on The Great Indian Comedy Show (on Star One) Vinay Pathak used to be very irritating.

However, these two were really good in Khosla ka Ghosla (which reminded many of the Amol Palekar/Farooq Sheikh genre of comedy). I didn’t like the way Ranvir played his character in Bheja Fry.

Cons: The movie is a remake of the French movie Le Diner de cons (The Dinner Game) (But then who cares as long as the movie is watchable). Secondly, they could have come up with a better name.

Stupid stupid people

This person is (in)famous for a video resume that he made for a job application. Apparently he has been featured on some TV shows too.
Aleksey Vayner (video resume)

Before Vayner had even begun his freshman year, his tendency to exaggerate was discussed in an article in Rumpus, a Yale humor magazine.[17] He apparently had visited as a high school senior and told unbelievable stories about himself. Among his claims to people on campus, or to the public, starting with this initial visit to Yale:

  • He claimed that he “is one of four people in the state of Connecticut qualified to handle nuclear waste“.[16]
  • He was employed by both the Mafia and the CIA during his childhood.[17]
  • He gave tennis lessons to Harrison Ford, Sarah Michelle Gellar[17], and Jerry Seinfeld[11]. He further claims to have won two games in a tennis match against Pete Sampras.[11]
  • He is a specialist in “Chinese orthopedic massage.”[11]
  • The Dalai Lama had apparently written his college recommendation.[11]
  • He must register his hands as lethal weapons at airports.[11]
  • He has killed two dozen men in Tibetan gladiatorial contests.[11]
  • He claimed to be “an action star, an espionage expert, and a professional athlete. He would be on the C.I.A. firing range one day and at a martial-arts competition that took place in [a] secret system of tunnels underneath Woodstock, New York.”[11]

Cracking safes “encrypted to 512 thingies”

Go read the latest BOFH story from El Reg:-

“It is! I had to take my laptop to the dealer to get it setup for this safe, and it would apparently take ALL the computers in the world over TEN YEARS to break into this safe.”

“Well, no time to lose then!” I say, making to leave.

“Are you suggesting you could break into this safe?” the Boss asks. “They use these to store Government secrets!”

“You mean secrets like how the Weapons of Mass Destruction disappeared?”

funny

Seen in an ad seeking a roomate:

I have a Flat just Half KM from Office by walk.

Half kilometre by walk! What about other means of transport ;). Does he have to jump over fences!

I was watching Jay Leno last night and there was this British actor from Lost whose name I did not catch.They were talking about Hawaiian words when Leno asked him whether there was any particular American slang that he found odd. This guy said that there is one particular word that is overused in America – “awesome”. He said that there were things that were really awesome — like that fact that the length of the universe is a milliion, milliion, milliion, milliion kilometres , or that the earth weighs 6.5 billion trillion tonnes — but at most times that word is not really required!

At around 7 minute mark in this video:

I concur – totally ;).

Shaayari

From: “Saurabh Prasad”
Date: Thu Jun 12, 2003 3:10 am
Subject: FW: Irshaad Irshaad !

Saurabh | Harvard GMAS | Sapient | ( Desk 91.124.2805949 | Y buzzsaurabh | ( Cell 91.9818357008

—–Original Message—–
Ikhtiyaare tabbasum ki lau ko
Ikhtiyaare tabbasum ki lau ko
Tarrannume naumayish se aghaa dena
Jo iska matlab samajh aaye to
Mujhe bhi batla dena !!