Cinco de Mayo

5th May, is a special day in Mexican history, its celebrated as Cinco de Mayo which is Spanish for May 5th. The Mexicans defeated the French forces in 1862.

The irony of the day is, its celebrated on a bigger scale in the United States as compared to that in Mexico. Though the day's significance in Mexico is more regional but in the US its a full blown celebration right from television programs to shopping mall. So why is it more popular in US ? May be its like other things in the US something commercial value in the US.

My Five Favorite posts

Its difficult to pick your favorite posts and even more difficult to narrow it down to five. But if one sets in some boundaries the work becomes easier.
To pick my five favorite posts I have used the following criteria.

1. The post should be timeless and anytime one reads it a smile is inevitable.

2. It should be an original piece. Inspirations are fine but copying is no good.

3. Book reviews and movie reviews have been left out.


So the list goes as follows, they are ordered in how they appeared on the blog.

1. Wonderful Human Being - I can proudly rate this article as one of my best. Its just feels good article. A chance encounter with a stranger - a genuine, down to earth and simple man. As in the article I wish I can be like Lala when I reach his age.

2. Interesting Love story or is it stories - A great piece. An article out of nothing. A headache at work, turned into a great post and pleasure reading. Even now whenever I read it brings a chuckle. Hope you enjoy it similarly.

3. The Man, the machine... Street hawk - A great nostalgic post, took me back to good old TV days, growing up days, programs I enjoyed watching and even now would love to watch them.

4. You won't believe what happened one night - Great memories, a scary experience, great time.

5. Two men and a truck - One of the fun moments of moving I had with this TV purchase. The TV, the size and the bargain price all blinded me with the crucial part of the purchase - the heavy lifting involved. So big life lesson learned from the experience.

Three years to blogging

Can you imagine it has been three years since I put up my first post on Rohit's Nukkad - Express yourself. Three years, a highly enjoyable time and wonderful period writing blog, 113 published posts quite a feat but still miles to go.

"He who believes that the past cannot be changed has not yet written his memoirs." ~Torvald Gahlin

Well the blog posts are kind of memoirs. They help me reflect how much I have changed over the years - be it my maturity level or my writing skills or my reading interest. Whenever I read any of my old posts its like sitting in a time machine and getting transported to the time when I wrote the post, the incidents happening in my life around the time, how did I write the post, the comments related with the posts etc. Some posts bring a smile on my face, while some make me chuckle, while others make me realize there is lot of scope of improvement in my writing.

Couple of interesting statistics related with posts on Rohit's Nukkad
1. Total posts published 113, that makes it roughly 38 posts per year, though I would have loved to have more posts, the number is still decent.

2. Months without any posts - Though being regular is important but at the same time its the toughest thing to do. I too had couple of my short falls. There were months where not a single post was posted on the blog, 5 months in total - November 2006, July 2007, October 2007, January 2009 and April 2009. Why did this irregularity, I don't have a clear answer for this. Its not like I was extremely busy with my work life in these months. On the contrary months when I was extremely busy I have used blogging as my stress buster and written a good number of posts. Having material for writing is one of the main reasons for being irregular.

3. Book reviews and Movie reviews - these two have been the most regular and discussed topics on the blog. I have written about 8 book reviews and number of book related articles like John Grisham works etc. Well no complains - more book reviews coming your way in future, reading being one of my interests its an obvious path to write about them. Movie reviews have dropped down over the period of time, only when some real good or crazy movie comes up a blog post can be expected.

These were just couple of observations about the blog, watch out for my next article short listing couple on my favorite blog posts so far. But as of now all I can say, good job Rohit, be consist and keep on posting.

The Lord of the Rings moment

"The Lord of the Rings" you might not have seen the movie or read the book but you cannot escape the mention of this epic modern mythological story. Some call it the greatest book of the twentieth century.

Couple of days back I brought a "Lord of the Rings" DVD - a documentary by National Geographic, which takes us beyond the book, far beyond the movie. They look for similarities between the book and real life places, language, people and the various inspirations for the author J R R Tolkien. The idea of the book which started around the World War I and goes back and forth with mythology, past archeological structures long lost languages. A must watch for a "Lord of the Rings" fan.

The story is of gigantic proportions, which takes years, may be decades of hard work to explore, create and bring it together. J R R Tolkien has taken this giant step for us. We need to sit back and enjoy this epic story. My next step would be to either read the books or watch the movies.

Book Review - Click – What Millions of People Are Doing Online And Why It Matters

Bill Tracer, the author is a guy who “loves data”. He talks about this job in this book about analyzing huge amounts of search data on the Internet. The work involves understanding people mindset and in general understanding current worldly search trends.

The author most importantly talks about odd and sporadic behavior seen on the Internet based on the search engine data. He talks about False Hope Syndrome which a lot of people go though due to failed new year resolutions or how the third week of January is the most depressing week of January.

The author talks in length about Web 2.0 where the user content plays an important part. Websites like Facebook, MySpace are part of Web 2.0. For Web 2.0 user participation is calculated as 90-9-1 formula where out of 100 people visiting a web page 90 of them are passive visitors, 9 are partial participant, only one is an active participant. He talks about people like Tila Tequila, on MySpace who has over a million friends. From his analysis based on so much data Bill divides the people online into five categories – innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and the Laggards. Its the Early adopters that you need to look for a profitable online business or popularity.

Overall the book gives a nice perspective about internet search data analysis, how people behave on the net. It talks about some good examples about the strange behavior of the net and walks you though them. Though a lot of examples are specific events related like Katrina or how there was a search surge for Pontiac G6 after a specific advertisement, there are some which can look for trends over years like shopping trends for prom dresses or how new year resolution related like weight loss search. The book is recommended as casual read.

The Google’s “Groundhog Day” Approach

Have you seen the movie Groundhog Day? If not let me share an insight of the movie. The movie is about a local news reporter played by Bill Murray who covers Groundhog day celebration in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. What makes the movie interesting is Bill's character keeps gets up to the same day everyday - Groundhog day. Initially he gets quite frustrated with life monotony and even tries all sorts of tricks to end it. He tries to win over his love interest played by the News reporting team producer. But he soon realized the incidents of the day are same and starts working on improving his days by changing himself slightly each day. He learns new skills right from ice sculpturing to learning piano. He keeps working on his mistakes and learning from them. Towards the end he finally wins over the new report producer and wakes up to a new day.

The learning from mistakes and improving oneself has been the approach of things on the Web. The prime example being - Google; they keep coming with these wonderful products –Gmail, Orkut, Chrome, etc... But if you look at the initial versions (beta versions) of these products they are very crude, raw and very fragile. But they keep improving on them, asking for feedbacks from the users in the form of emails, forums,blogs etc. They kept rectifying the bugs in the product and adding new features to it. Thus making the product very robust and something brand recognition when the actual product is launched.

You were born to Play this Game - Cranium

As kids board games formed a big part of indoor games with friends especially during harsh summer months when the school was off and playing outdoors was impossible. Board games provided a good refuge. Monopoly, business whatever you may call it used to lead the pack followed by other trivia and sport games like cricket and soccer.

But somehow board games lost their charm as I grew older until the day I played CRANIUM. The game tag line says it all "You were born to Play this Game". The game is a mix of activities like clay sculpturing, sketching with eyes closed, acting involving puppeteering, acting out as a famous personality, vocabulary test, general knowledge etc.

The game can be played with any number of players but more the better. The game is not about winning or losing, but amount of laughs and fun it provides that it is hard to stop. One just hopes that the game keeps on going... and going... and going :-)

So if you haven't played the game yet. give it a try you are sure to fall in love with it.

Audio Books

Audio books have been around for a long time. Even before I started reading. The earlier days involved the analog format of audio tapes but nowadays they are available in the form of audio CDs in WAV or MP3 format, making it more portable.

Its just recently I started exploring the idea of listening to audio CDs than reading the book. Though hesitant about the change I did bit of cheating for my first audio book. I picked up a book I had read long time back - It's not about the Bike by Lance Armstrong and Sally Jenkins. And I should say it was a wonderful experience listening to the heroics of Lance Armstrong once again. I was able to listen to at work made it even better. Multitasking at its best :-)

There are couple of benifits of listening to audio books over reading them. The main being it doesn't require your 100% attention, its like listening to music. At some subconscious level your mind is capturing it. And if not then the Rewind button is very handy. You can listen to audio books multiple time as compared to reading a book multiple times (I have not done multiple reading of a book so far).

On the flip side, nothing beats a physical book at hand. The feeling is quite relaxed when one is reading a book. Not all books make a good audio book. It depends on lot of factor right from the contents of the books to the voice over for the book.

Though my conclusion stands that audio books are good though they cannot replace the activity of reading books. It is sure another weapon to keep in an avid book lovers arsenal.

A little more HHOOTTT sauce

Following up with the Mad Dog Hot sauce experience, my curiousness led me again to the sub place to try out some other hot sauce. Though they have nothing hotter than Mad Dog Sauce (the maximum legal possible), I went for the second best available - Da Bomb Hot sauce.

Hmmmm now how can I categorize this one the scale of my tongue's tastebuds. I guess after a certain point anything hot just gives a crazy sensation to the tongue. It is just HOT nothing else, the sensitive parts like tongue and lips burn for 10 mins or so. However taking in lot of water helps. Yes its definately fun.

Also another observation the place has 55 different kinds of sauces. I have a long long way to go in exploring different sauces :-)