Malena: when beauty becomes the curse!

Here is the link my write up about movie Malena. It is published in this week`s Vijaya Next magazine. I will try to post an english version of the article for those of my friends who can't read kannada.

Here is the link to the article. Purchase of the magazine is much appreciated :) 

With two new machines and a fresh blogger!

It is nice to see the refreshing new look of blogger. I had thought that google had forgotten that it has a stone age blogging platform. In front of the features rich wordpress blogger used to seem dull. One had to stand on his head to know about the page visits or traffic statistics. Now it seems like the days of staying inside the closet is over for blogger. The UI is clutter free and has soothing design, could adapt to mobile and tablet and other small screens effortlessly.

Have an update from my side. My laptop was on artificial respiratory system for a few days and eventually went to coma. I purchased a new desktop yesterday. It is an assembled machine having the following configuration:

Processor: core I5
Ram: 8 GB
Graphics card: NVidia 1 GB
Hard Disk: 1 TB
Monitor: LG 23" LCD with LED backlight

For sake of mobility I purchased a sleek and trivially light weight Samsung N100 netbook. It has intel Atom processor. 2GB RAM and 250 GB Hard disk.

Since the desktop is an assembled one, I didn't opt for operating system installation at the assembly point. It is a huge rip off to pay handsome amount to get just an instance of the pirated windows OS. I installed Ubuntu 10.10 LTS edition on it but strangely the LAN stopped working. So temporarily windows is dwelling inside the hard disk.

The Samsung netbook had Meego Os pre-installed. I hastily formatted the hard disk and installed debian over it. Netbook refused to co-operate. Attempts to skim through the web references on a compact screen of my mobile and executing the commands led me no where. A visit to the samsung's official website enlightened me that they have system drivers only for windows 7 and xp. Thought of reverting to Meego but there was no recovery option and generous people at Samsung didn't bother gentle Meego OS to be burnt in to a disk! All resulted in approaching Blue screen God, windows 7.

I will be trying out a number of installations on these two machines in the coming days. So watch out for a series of logs in this respect. 

Break ke baad!

It’s been a long break. There were too many things happening. Finishing college, joining Saaranga Infotech, renting a house, organizing stuff in the house, preparing my own food...

I intend to give a new touch to this blog. I wish to make it more like an informal journal. I desperately want myself to break the habit of writing long passages about things that could be said in a sentence or two.

In the break after exams I collected most of the movies of Stanley Kubrick. However I could watch only a few. One of them was a short feature film spanning to about 15 min. It was about a professional boxer who clinically prepares for a boxing match. Kubrick’s love for details has its origins in this movie.

I also watched Dr.Strangelove, a satirical take in the cold war period, Full Metal Jacket about vietnam war.

Incidentally I came across another movie made about Vietnam war: Apocalypse Now. Made by Francis Ford Cappola. Cappola was inspired and influenced by Kubrick. He has paid tribute to kubrick by incorporating some of the music bits from kubrick’s movies. The cinematography of apocalypse now is artistic, will write about that movie in detail some time.

Read “Annana Nenapu” by Tejasvi. It was a refreshing second time read. I was drawn towards the photography hobby of Tejasvi and how he felt that it influenced him in writing. Had you read his karvalo and some short stories, you would never fail to notice the distance narrator maintains from the happenings even though he is part of it. Tejasvi gives photography the credit for this literary skill!

I have been cooking for myself as there are no decent hotels in the vicinity. Here is an illustration of where I started. The chapati I prepared today are definitely far better! All is in mixing the flour. You have to give a time gap of about ten minutes for the mixed flour to get soften. That was the trick I missed, got to know about it when I had gone home for Ganesh Chaturthi.