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Thursday, July 19, 2007
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Trivial matters
So how does one actually get to know about these inconsequential yet nifty pieces of information called trivia? Well one very simple way is by just being curious. Let me explain.
I happened to hear this song on the radio (actually the internet radio - one of the very few privileges allowed by my paranoid company) a few days back. It really was a fascinating piece of music with an extremely catchy tune and i kept on humming it even after the song was done with. I vaguely remembered having heard something similar to this track most probably in some ad but i was not able to recollect the details. So what do you do next? Obviously you search for the song! So off i went to Google and after a quick search on the lyrics i found out that the song was called "Tom's Diner" and it was by a Suzanne Vega.
Now that i had identified and found a really good song that most people would not have heard before and most people would like to listen to, the next cool thing is to find the mp3 and send the song to your friends! So that's precisely what i did. One of those friends(in this case Rama) inevitably asks you about the song and that's why you need to read up on it. Since i had never heard of either of "Suzanne Vega" or of "Tom's Diner" before that day, i had to do some more research on the song at songmeanings and on songfacts and that's when i ended up finding out that this particular song was one of the very first pieces of music to be encoded into mp3!!
Actually Karlheinz Brandenburg (the guy behind the MP3 algorithm) accepts that the MP3 compression format is specifically tuned to play the song "Tom's Diner". And that how i also came to know that Suzanne Vega is informally called "The Mother of the MP3"!!
Now that's what you call trivia!
I happened to hear this song on the radio (actually the internet radio - one of the very few privileges allowed by my paranoid company) a few days back. It really was a fascinating piece of music with an extremely catchy tune and i kept on humming it even after the song was done with. I vaguely remembered having heard something similar to this track most probably in some ad but i was not able to recollect the details. So what do you do next? Obviously you search for the song! So off i went to Google and after a quick search on the lyrics i found out that the song was called "Tom's Diner" and it was by a Suzanne Vega.
Now that i had identified and found a really good song that most people would not have heard before and most people would like to listen to, the next cool thing is to find the mp3 and send the song to your friends! So that's precisely what i did. One of those friends(in this case Rama) inevitably asks you about the song and that's why you need to read up on it. Since i had never heard of either of "Suzanne Vega" or of "Tom's Diner" before that day, i had to do some more research on the song at songmeanings and on songfacts and that's when i ended up finding out that this particular song was one of the very first pieces of music to be encoded into mp3!!
Actually Karlheinz Brandenburg (the guy behind the MP3 algorithm) accepts that the MP3 compression format is specifically tuned to play the song "Tom's Diner". And that how i also came to know that Suzanne Vega is informally called "The Mother of the MP3"!!
Now that's what you call trivia!
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Name the problem!
When you move to a new company, the things you look forward to the most are the paycheck and the email id. And trust me it does help to have a short and compact email id. Because at the end of the day you are just another email id in the company records and people actually do find it easy to send you a joke or a forward if you are either a girl or have a short email id. So when i moved to Bangalore i thought i would get a good deal on both these vital parameters. I won't deal with the first one but most definitely will give you all the low down on the mail id front.
I read that 'a rose is a rose is a rose'. But it most certainly wouldn't be named a Rose Perumpramalil Chellappan for all that i know of!! A long surname and a longer middle name is the perfect scenario for the evil admins at companies to have a laugh at your expense. All they need to do is to give you an official email address with all of the name in it. The poor unsuspecting guy has to deal with the trauma and trust me it takes days to get over it. Imagine how Sreejith P C would look when u expand it to FirstnameMiddlenameSurname! I wouldn't be surprised if you run out of memory while imagining that. And the evil IT gremlins didn't even give me a delimiter between the names. So my official mail id is just a continuous lump of 31 characters. And no, i didn't use word-count to count that. The only good thing the admin did was that they were able to fit the whole id on my visiting card.
That's when i pondered over this name thing and realized that there used to be a time when names actually meant something. My father's middle name is "ottaplavunilkunnathil"! Phew, am i glad my grandfather didn't name me!! Anyway my dad's middle name translates to "where a single jackfruit tree stands". Now i am guessing the name stuck because he lived in a household where there were lots of other trees but only a single jackfruit tree. So if you were in some remote village in Kerala 100 years ago and wanted to visit my home, then all u had to do was to look for a house with not two or three but just one jackfruit tree. Pretty simple eh? Who needs GPS and technology!
I read that 'a rose is a rose is a rose'. But it most certainly wouldn't be named a Rose Perumpramalil Chellappan for all that i know of!! A long surname and a longer middle name is the perfect scenario for the evil admins at companies to have a laugh at your expense. All they need to do is to give you an official email address with all of the name in it. The poor unsuspecting guy has to deal with the trauma and trust me it takes days to get over it. Imagine how Sreejith P C would look when u expand it to FirstnameMiddlenameSurname! I wouldn't be surprised if you run out of memory while imagining that. And the evil IT gremlins didn't even give me a delimiter between the names. So my official mail id is just a continuous lump of 31 characters. And no, i didn't use word-count to count that. The only good thing the admin did was that they were able to fit the whole id on my visiting card.
That's when i pondered over this name thing and realized that there used to be a time when names actually meant something. My father's middle name is "ottaplavunilkunnathil"! Phew, am i glad my grandfather didn't name me!! Anyway my dad's middle name translates to "where a single jackfruit tree stands". Now i am guessing the name stuck because he lived in a household where there were lots of other trees but only a single jackfruit tree. So if you were in some remote village in Kerala 100 years ago and wanted to visit my home, then all u had to do was to look for a house with not two or three but just one jackfruit tree. Pretty simple eh? Who needs GPS and technology!
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