Tag: technology

Semi Old Dog, Heap New Tricks

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I am adaptable with technology but the kind of technology that’s been a constant with little tweaks here and there. Same goes for the hardware part of it I guess. Am currently in the limbo between Windows and MAC OS. The lovable geeks in my life (and a few of the non-geeks) have praised the MAC *quite* a bit and have looked askance at me for using an HP or earlier a Dell laptop. Ok that was just the husband but his askances don’t count since they’re a constant also.

Image result for once you go mac you never go back

Apparently the image above resonates with a LOT of people but somehow I was muddling along with my Windows 10 and all the long-used keyboard shortcuts and whatnots when a MacBook was thrust into my hands today. Red set it up and gave me a basic tutorial and has since left me to find my way through a keyboard which is further scooched up and some two-fingered jazz I have to keep doing to get things to move around. I ended up almost closing this tab a few times before being able to complete the post.

Right now, in this moment, I am a Luddite crying out for the comfort of a Windows laptop with the keypad comfortably located in a way that you don’t feel carpal tunnel-y and where you keep looking to close or minimize the page on the wrong side. Kind of driving on the right side of the road vs the left…erm yeah….Image result for luddite meme

But here are the positives- it’s so pretty!!Image result for blinking eyelashes gif

The darn thing starts up before I can say Siri (or Alexa to some of you) and the resolution is crisp and clear. Just like sparkling clean, artesian well water. I am slightly enamored if you couldn’t already tell.

Oh..conundrum thou art being caught between two OS.Image result for sophie's choice gif

Movie Review: Skyscraper

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Image result for skyscraper posterWill Sawyer is no John Maclane. And Skycraper is no Die Hard. Image result for finger pointing down gifImage result for we're not worthy gif

But be as that may, it has the potential to be an entertaining movie despite having to live up to the rep of movies of the same ilk having scored BIG at the box office and becoming cult classics. There are mainly 3 things to know about this movie:

  • Dwayne Johnson, for all his histrionics during the WWF days, is understated in his portrayal of a worried dad and an ex-FBI agent. In fact this movie could be re-titled Skyscraper: Where The Rock Gets The Stuffing Knocked Out Of Him. The man gets battered all over getting this family back.
  • Neve Campbell, in a far better turn than in all her Scream avatars, is a military doctor mom who has her shit together. She’s not She-Man but she doesn’t go down without a fight either. Image result for sidney scream gif
  • The Bad Guy- Roland Moller is fine as a cold-blooded Scandinavian extortionist-hitman but he is no Hans Gruber either [ takes a moment to pay a silent tribute to Alan Rickman].

One can’t help but compare similarities with Die Hard- 2 law enforcement guys, both jump of buildings and both get the bad guys in the end…by throwing them off the building of course! Oh yeah…spoiler alert. Sorry.

But where Skyscraper has the backing of a lot of technical stuff bringing the high rise hi jinks to life, Die Hard was the opposite. The main technology used were the 2-way radios the terrorists had and of course the code breaking their resident geek did to get to the bonds in the Nakatomi safe. I mean we all know Bruce Willis didn’t actually jump off a building in this scene, but the low-tech worked overall and that too, tremendously!

Image result for bruce willis jumping off building in die hard

So why am I writing about Skyscraper if this is turning into a reason to binge watch the Die Hard series? Because Skyscraper may make you go “meh” but you won’t leave bored. And you’ll be rooting for The Rock the whole way…and it’s a point in his favor that the man doesn’t keep taking his shirt off to prove his machismo. Salman Khan…are you listening?

Image result for salman taking shirt off gif

 

Rating- 1.5 stars

Tech-Pottery

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I love technology. It has no boundaries. The scope of it ranges from the little to the humongous. And that’s really saying something.

I have a sick kid at home who’s been using his “I’m sick” status as a Get Out Of Jail card. I’ve been annoyed, short tempered and most desperately in need of a diversion. Enter Play Store.

I was thinking to myself how I’d like to throw clay around to get rid of my ire and also try out some pottery in the process. Lo and Behold! there was a pottery app (Free&Paid) that I tried out. And it was just what I needed. Well…I actually needed a wheel, kiln and tons of clay but the virtual one wasn’t too bad either.

With any kind of artistic endeavor, the creativity needs to just flow and take shape. Whether it’s drawing, painting, sculpting or pottery…it’s an expression of what you think and feel and what vibes with you.

After vibing with these babies for a while, I am determined to find a teacher and just get down and dirty making pots.

Boredom often leads to an A-Ha experience.

Tech-Savvy Woes

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I’ve written earlier about the advent of Alexa in our lives. Red was in the market for good quality speakers and was considering buying Sonos and then suddenly got his head turned by the cute lil dot that now talks to us in a STRONG American accent and frequently gets our song choices wrong because she doesn’t get us much. And that’s funny because the offspring has his own twangy accent that sounds kind of like Alexa and yet they don’t always communicate correctly.

Properly enunciated crisp diction rings her bells though. Take for example, MLM wanting to hear Ra.One’s Chhammak Chhallo. He yelled out into the general direction of Alexa, “AlexaplaymeChamakChalo” and pat came the reply, “I’m sorry. I am unable to understand you.” El Brato grumbled, “Stupid Alexa” and then yelled out to me, “Ayu…come and tell Alexa the song I want to hear. It’s not listening to me.”

And there I was, speaking to the dot, yet again, telling her to play Chhammak Challo, said with tight lips and no hint of any accent anywhere. And she popped up saying, “Here’s ChamakChalo from VishalShaker”. I swear there was no difference between her and MLM but someone must have a hearing problem somewhere so I’m still running interference for them both and waiting till he asks me to tell her to play ‘Rashke Qamar’. Last time he asked her to play the song she played Paula Abdul’s Rush Rush

For my troubles, I get to hear the dratted song on loop till my brains start to leak out of my ears. *rolls eyes*

Signing off!

Related image

Ring In The Madness…

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There are times when one wants to thoroughly box Alexander Graham Bell’s ears. True, he took communication to a previously unknown zenith but sometimes it’s actually too much of a good thing.

I remember there being 2 different landlines in my parents’ house while my dad was still working and there were plenty of days when both would ring at the same time and he was busy on his mobile and my mother and I would rush from one room to another to answer calls, take messages or furiously mime out a message to my father in case the call was important or urgent.

Fast forward a few years and the same thing is happening now- I get calls on WhatsApp which get disconnected when someone calls on my mobile. And let’s face it; someone always calls on the mobile! Anyhoo, then there are calls on the intercom at home from the building security letting us know there’s a visitor, or a courier and the person making the delivery is usually calling at the same time.

Talk about cacophony. I long to dunk my head under the water in a heated pool somewhere (for I am a sybarite at my core) because things are blessedly silent there.

And before I can wax on eloquently about the joys of having one’s head underwater, I need to put a pin in it because there goes the door bell!

Why is this Friday so chaotic??

am-i-the-only-one-around-here-who-thinks-that-too-many-calls-have-been-taken

All My Pretty Possessions

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I love my stuff. I love getting new things. I like discovering how they work, am ecstatic when they work the way they’re supposed to and most of all I love how it makes me feel when I use them.

My all time favorites have been books and cameras…of course I keep buying knickknacks that I don’t actually need either but we’ll tackle that in a different blog post.

Red, bless his patience and general I don’t-really-care-what-you-buy-as-long-as-I-don’t-have-to-be-responsible-for-itness, bought me an action camera- a GoPro. He’s rather indifferent about photography and prefers not to have to pose or scan through 200 pictures but appreciates a “pretty picture” and generally images of MLM in all his joyous glory aka whopping it up like a monkey or the occasion smiles.

Given that our travels, spare time and overall recreation seldom is a still activity, I’d been hankering for something that gave me the tools to capturing a child in motion and images where getting wet was the norm rather than the exception and GoPro was the answer.

And with the particular one I have, it’s easy enough to tote it around in your pocket and not have to deal with lens changes, filters yada yada yada!

And it’s been a JOY to use this. Very few things make me as happy as something working the way it’s supposed to work, without quirks and too much thought going into figuring things out.

I’ve just started capturing some trial shots of the offspring and other friends in the pool and with a holiday just around the corner, I should be able to do justice to some images in the sea as well.

*picture a chubby woman skipping and clapping her chubby hands in utter glee*

This is a feeling nearly incomparable and I’ve also been heard telling the offspring to handle the camera with care because I like it more than I liked him!

Happy happy days!

P.S: Images from the pool session are uploaded in my photoblog…here.

P.P.S: technology amazes me to no end!

Disambiguation: Need Of The Hour

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My son can be a lazy lump. Anything that requires more effort than he’s prepared to put in; gets shoved under the rug (literally and figuratively) and often outsourced to us.

He’s starting to make some strides in reading now and today’s homework has words that distinguish the gender between people viz mother-father, brother-sister et al. That it doesn’t address the third gender type didn’t worry me much. He still mixes up his right and left shoe so am sure we have long walk ahead of us before we tackle that topic.

I was super happy when he wanted to add to the list by bringing in the animal kingdom. So we sat down and started writing out the animals names which have separate terms for their hes and shes. We did the usual ones..lion-lioness, tiger-tigress when my son started naming all sorts of weird “girl-animals”. In order to show him how not everything is called a girl-fox or a girl-whale I told him to look up what a female fox is called; because let’s admit it…if I say thing is white he won’t rest until half the world aka the internet has confirmed it as well.

Now comes the laziness part. He didn’t type it in but used OK Google instead.and got the answer- vixen. Yay for technology and all that jazz.

Then the lump decides to see how vixens look because he thought the girl animals will be different from boy animals (not sure if he was expecting big bows in the hair and whatnot) and told OK Google, “show me vixen” and that’s when a small child’s mouth dropped open because that particular command brought up all manner of busty, latex-clad women instead of the demure, orange-fur fox.

Thankfully he doesn’t have “boy” hormones yet and made a face and asked Google to show him the girl fox. Google apparently does have boy hormones because it showed him girl f****. And after a heated struggle between mother-child and an under-attack laptop I yelled out Jesus Christ!! GIRL FOX!  That too was a bad call because Google turned up images of Jesus Christ of Fox…whatever that means; and studly men appeared in the search.

After that it was a toss-up who was going to be airborne- my BP or the laptop; out the window. And so I counted to 20 in my native tongue and found that it didn’t help a bit. In the meanwhile a small child was wondering why his already excitable mother was looking to strangle the laptop and he started tip-toe away. I hauled him back, opened up Google and asked him to type out ‘what is a female fox called’ with his stubby little fingers and LO and BEHOLD! Eureka and all the gang appeared and there were vixens and foxes raining like manna from the heavens. There were National Geographic picture quality ones, even some Disney ones thrown in for good measure and finally I could breathe again.

Until I heard him evoke Google again saying, “show me a girl whale”. I rushed back in time to see whales AND massive thongs and butt cracks appear on the screen.

Gods of Google: Please put in a disambiguate plug-in for the sake of my sanity.