From a Reuters article related to the national elections in India:

Throwing a shoe at someone is consid­ered an insult in India.

Isn’t that strange? In other parts of the world, it is consid­ered a great honor to be showered with footwear.

Oh wait.

Once upon a time, there lived a man in the outskirts of Quantum Village. Schrödinger was his name, and he had a cat called Schrödinger­scat. Schrödinger loved his cat, and he had lived in the village for many years in peace and contentment.

Now Schrödinger was a smart man, and he liked to perform many scien­tific exper­i­ments in his lab. One such exper­i­ment consisted of a little box with a piece of radioac­tive material in it. Who knows what he was planning to do with it? Schrödinger was a smart man.

One cold winter day, Schrödinger­scat went missing. Smart man that he was, Schrödinger realized that his cat must have wandered into his lab, and must have shut himself inside his little box filled with radioac­tivity. Now, Schrödinger faced a dilemma — should he open the box to free his cat?

People like you and I might wonder what the fuss was all about, but Schrödinger was a smart man. He realized that as long as he didn’t look into the box, his cat was both dead and alive, thanks to the wonderful and myste­rious laws of Quantum Village. But if he ventured to look inside the box, the cat could either be alive or dead, but not both. Schrödinger was perplexed; what was he to do? Dare he risk opening the box? After several hours of indeci­sion, Schrödinger finally decided to look. “I might as well open the box and learn the fate of my dear cat,” he thought aloud.

Alas! When he opened the box, poor Schrödinger­scat was lying there, dead. Schrödinger was stricken with grief, and it is said that he was never quite the same again.

Moral of the story: Curiosity killed the cat.

I watched the season finale of Heroes last week. Needless to say, they’ve upheld our glorious tradi­tion of disap­pointing endings. It wasn’t any more disap­pointing than the rest of the season, though…but it still quali­fies, right?

Another great tradi­tion that is followed by televi­sion and cinema is that every­thing must be explained by science. Genes being today’s fashion, every­thing in Heroes used to be explained by those little bits and pieces in our cells. Instant healing, reading thoughts, creating illusions, flying, traveling through time, painting the future and every­thing else used to be manifes­ta­tions of the amazing poten­tial of the human genome. The laws of physics are so ‘yesterday’ after all.

This time though, they invoked the mighty Einstein. You see, there’s this girl who can travel really fast, and this guy who can super­charge other people’s abili­ties. Guess what happens when they come in contact? She travels faster than light of course! That’s where Einstein comes into the picture — by travel­ling faster than the speed of light, she actually travels backwards in time, that is, into the past. With this super-ability, she travels into the past, rescues one of the good guys and gets back. Cute, huh?

But wait — the writers pulled a fast one on us: it’s all very well that she went back in time, but how on earth did she get back? Oh, whatever.

I also ended up watching old episodes from the first season during the last couple of weeks, and with all that wisdom, I feel obliged to share a bunch of dialogues that would summa­rize those twenty-three episodes -

Noah Bennet: I’ll do anything to protect my family!

Claire Bennet: I want to be normal. Boo hoo!

Peter Petrelli: I have everyone’s powers, but I’m still afraid and need my brother to hold my hand. I love him (sob, sob).

Nathan Petrelli: Don’t worry Peter, I love you and will help you just as soon as this election is over. Oh, and by the way, can you get this knife sharp­ened for me? I want it ready so that I can stab you in the back.

Matt Parkman: I’m a loser.

Hiro Nakamura: Don’t worry Parkman, I’m a loser too.

The Haitian:

(blanks out)

(…and now, a preview of the next season!)

Maya Herrera: I’m the reason why all those people died…waaaah! waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! (Somebody please shut her up.)

When I navigated to Google’s search page today, instead of their familiar inter­face, I was greeted by the company’s expanded “add-all-your-widgets-here” webpage called iGoogle.

To tell you the truth, I am not a big fan of iGoogle, My Yahoo! or any such “person­al­ized” sites. First they want me to bookmark them, then they want me to change my homepage, next, they want me to install some toolbar that they claim would work wonders for me. No, thank you.

I can almost imagine Google arguing with me about this.

[2005]
Google: Look, we’ve intro­duced this brand new thing called Google Person­al­ized Homepage.
Me: Oh cool…lemme check…yeah, it’s ok. [Goes back to watching a movie.]
Google: No, look! It’s awesome!
Me: Um, okay.
[2006]
Google: Seriously! Look, we’ve added a lot of cool stuff. Now you can come here and search Wikipedia instead of going to their website. Isn’t that really awesome!?
Me: (Yawn!) …um…yeah, okay.
[2008]
Me: [Opens www.google.com] WTH?
Google: Isn’t that really cool!? We didn’t want you to miss out on all the fun, so we’ve made things even easier by redirecting our old homepage to the iGoogle homepage. Isn’t that really awesome!?
Me: If I tell you it’s awesome, will you stop bothering me and go away?

I have discov­ered that my gray hooded sweat­shirt is, in fact, an invis­i­bility cloak. Oh alright, an invis­i­bility sweat­shirt. Big diff.

Now, I’ve always been able to sneak around silently when I’m wearing that. If no one said anything to me, I just assumed it was because I didn’t say anything to them. I didn’t realize they couldn’t see me; I just thought they didn’t care.

The discovery was an accident, as you may have expected. It happened like this: I had gone to the restroom in my office the other day, and I noticed that when I used the urinal — the kind that uses a sensor to decide if you were done — it would start flushing even as I was standing there! At first, I was merely shocked and unhappy, but when it happened several times in the following days, I began to wonder about the reasons behind it. Was it some kind of misguided anger against me? Did I do something wrong? I searched my soul for answers, and when that didn’t work, I even tried Google.

And then it hit me — it was my sweat­shirt! Sometimes the truth hits you in the face in a moment of perfect clarity, and your thoughts come together like a giant jigsaw puzzle so magnif­i­cently that it leaves you speech­less. It was truly a revelation.

Sometimes I wonder why I was chosen. What did I do to deserve such a wonderful gift, this invis­i­bility cloak? Did I do something right in one of my past lives? I don’t know for sure, but sometimes things just happen and all we can do is accept it.

frus·tra·tion
noun. Staring hungrily at a bowl of spaghetti but being unable to eat it, because it keeps sliding off the spoon, and there is no fork to spare.

Don’t try this at home, kids.

1. Open a console window on your trusty old Linux box.
2. Find a WordPress plugin you don’t need.
3. Start typing rm -fr /path/to/wordpress/plugin-name.
4. Instead, type rm -fr /path/to/wordpress and press enter.
5. Oops.
6. Spend a few hours setting up your blog all over again.
7. Sleep.

Step #5 is the part I love the most.

Did you hear about the geek who acciden­tally published his unobfus­cated email address to his personal website? I asked him if he was relieved he didn’t start getting email spam, but he seemed pretty darned pissed that not even the bots cared to visit his webpage.…