The gift of freedom

Every so often I pass by a shop that sells birds as pets. These birds, colorful and lovely, cheerful and noisy, are caged. People are supposed to buy these, and keep them at their homes, as pets. What a pity! A natural idea is to buy these birds and to free them.

This can be combined with near ones' birthdays. A gift of freedom to those who need it on someone else's birthday seems to be a perfect gift. So, by this proposition, if there are 4 members in a household, buy a pair of these on the birthdays of each of the 4 members, and free them (when you get home).

I thought about this for a while. Then, it struck me that there is another possible hurdle to this: what if the guys who capture / sell them have injured the birds' wings so that they aren't able to fly away even if the cage door is open? In that case, I would be stuck with having bought those birds, and not being able to free them. This is a very real possibility. One can see this kind of cruelty everywhere. An example: pass by any fish market, and you'll see crabs maimed just enough so that they do not run away, but just alive to be killed fresh when a customer buys them.

I still plan to ask some of those guys, and maybe someday I'll take a risk and buy those birds anyways...to "free" them.

Lunch at Cafe Mysore

Last Saturday, I had lunch at Cafe Mysore, King's Circle. The quality was the same, the quantity a bit reduced, and the price much higher than what it was a few years ago (blame inflation).

I had the "chappati lunch" (with "puri lunch" or "double rice" being other options). The lunch came with 2 chappatis, one subji (cauliflower + carrot + peas) small watis of dal, rasam, black-eyed pea (chawli) "gassi" (a coconut-based gravy), a small glass of buttermilk, one papad. A small mound of rice followed, once the chappatis were gobbled up.

I find the lunch at Cafe Mysore to be simple, and quite easy on the stomach. The quantity is lesser than at other restaurants, but for me, that is fine. I wouldn't like to stuff too much into the stomach.

Experiences with iPod Shuffle

Usually, I've tried to stay away from technical posts in this blog of mine. But since this is also related to the iPod Shuffle I bought recently (a mention of which was made in my previous post), I thought I'll mention it here.

The iPod Shuffle was bought from J. J. Mehta, Dadar(who maintain a wonderful website, and are sellers of cameras and related equipment). The iPod Shuffle came in a nice packed / sealed case. I rushed back by train to my home quite excited. When I reached home, I plugged it into the USB to charge it. After charging it for a while, I decided to fill it up with some songs. My laptop (2 years old) came with a pre-installed version of iTunes. However, when I tried to connect the iPod to the laptop, iTunes complained that it was unable to communicate with the Shuffle (and that I must install a new version). Tried downloading iTunes from the Apple website, and realized that it was more than 60 MB. This would take at least a few hours to download from the slow internet connection at home.

WTH? I thought to hell with iTunes. Just booted my laptop into Ubuntu Linux, installed gtkPod, and loaded the Shuffle with a basic set of songs.

So that's how GNU / Linux helps us...in very small, subtle ways. Nice! And, like I mentioned earlier, my home PC hasn't seen Windows running for more than 2 years now. Everyone at home now uses Ubuntu (well Kubuntu) Linux.

Diwali temptations

Having been without salary for more than a year, I was quite excited to get it in October 2008. I had kept a list of things to buy ready. While I've not bought all of those yet, I've just indulged in buying my first iPod, a 2 GB iPod Shuffle.

My old Mobiblu cube and cute MP3 player had conked off due to my experiments. One day I noticed that there were some large MP3 files on the player which refused to get deleted. So I did a "mkfs.vfat" to reformat it. That foolish decision wiped out the player's software as well, I guess. It no longer worked. I tried to locate the CD that came along with the player, but I could not find it. Downloading the software over the web was not successful either. That's when I decided that it was time to but the Shuffle.

Among the list of things that I've lined up to be bought are:

1. A new laptop (maybe Dell or HP). The old one was pretty useful (especially in my IITB days); however there is only so much that one can do with 512 MB of RAM and the Intel Centrino that came along with it.
   
2. A DVD set containing Srila Prabhupada's videos / lectures (pretty expensive at about Rs. 4k)
3. A set of Bose loudspeakers
4. A new mobile phone which has the capability to set an MP3 as a ringtone (my old one is a good 6 years old)