The Right Fit

During my school days, I have often wondered the rationale behind inviting local police chief as guest of honour (aka chief guest) to our school's sports day festival. One cannot imagine a more uninspiring persona to grace the occasion. These police chiefs (IG, DIG or DSP etc etc) are not the ones you see in police-officer centered movies. They are not anything close to Alex Pandian or Walter Vetrivel personality. Not even IPS cadre. Most of them will have a long and forlorn face with a huge belly. Not any athlete myself I would feel sorry for my friends/classmates getting medals from these average joes. May be my school management had some vested interest inviting these folks. They are just not the right fit for the occasion let alone inspiring young minds. In sharp contrast to that, I should recall one Mr. Avvai Natarajan having graced our school for a couple of occasions. A scholar of top calibre and a good orator I have seen him captivating young minds - be it his chief guest address or handing over the prizes with a smile and a few pleasantries.

Fast Forwarding to the present - one decent program that airs in SUN TV is "Asatha Povathu Yaauru". People doing stand up comedy or mimicry or enactment of skit etc. Lot of talented participants and good humor too. The program invites some popular personality - tinsel world mostly - as their special guest. They just sit there and provide inputs/suggestions on the performance of those participating. What I found out was some so-called popular cinema personalities, though decent in their on-screen acts, outright lack the quality to be the guest of such functions and pass some decent remarks/comments. Here is some of the best and worst in the episodes I watched -

Worst - Many new heroes (who claim high flung titles and super-star-dom even before their first film hits the screen), T. Rajendar (for the usual self-boasting comments and nothing noteworthy to the participant).

Best - Bhagyaraj (as immensely talented he is, told lot of good tips/info in general to the participants).

My favorite of all - Bharathi Bhaskar - yes, the pattimandram speaker. She was this no non-sense chief guest, relating the participant's performance to related events and telling suggestions on what they can work on to improve their content/style. Put her traditional pattimandram rival Raja on the host desk, it was a feast to watch them conversing on the performance - much like their pattimandram duels. Thats what I mean by "the right fit".

Still:

As I mentioned in my earlier post, today's pic was shot with my new Panasonic LZ8 P&S. The colors came out vividly and so was the sharpness. The ambiance was bit cloudy not sure if it helped the pic. The lining of the masks in the pic, each of different design, gels with today's post and title as well.

Bought a Pana..

Recently I added another gadget to my arsenal - A Panasonic P&S - Panasonic Lumix DMC-LZ8 - I was looking for a Budget P&S preferably under a $100. Eventhough I was leaning towards a Canon product which are supposed to be having a niche in P&S arena, most canons were in the $150 range. Then I was surprised to find dpreview conducting a comparison of budget P&S involving 2 Canons, a Nikon, a samsung, a sony and this Lz8 for panasonic. And to my surprise, LZ8 aced the list. A quick browse of its price presented another surprise. BeachCamera was carrying it for $99 no tax and free shipping. Bingo ! We have a winner.

I have been using the LZ8 for family outings in the past 3 or so weeks and it has amazing features and capabilities for $99. How much technology has changed since the $200 Powershot A70 I bought 6yrs ago. Now, the price of LZ8 has shot back to $149 if you are able to find one. Obviously a good thing with small price tags is not a seller's favorite !!

The LZ8 uses standard AA batteries - nice thing. Its only 8MP which is what I wanted for a P&S. I have actually set it to use only 7MP so that it spits out 4x6 directly so that I dont have to crop it for print. 5x optical zoom compared to 3x in most top end budget P&S. A display mode that lets you see the LCD even when you are holding the camera high above your head to shoot in front of a crowd or so. etc etc. Now Lo and behold !! it does AEB which my Nikon D40 SLR doesnt do. Of course, it has most bells and whistles of any typical P&S as well. I will upload some pics from that later. One good purchase, and I have even recommended that to one other person already!!

Today's pic was from a mail-list at work. Showed some creative ad photographs. Interestingly the ones I liked were Panasonic Lumix ads. Of course (c) Panasonic implied. The top one was intended to capture your imagination on wide angle P&S (one current Lumix has a 28mm wide end). The second one is supposed to capture your imagination for Panasonic's face recognition technology. I couldnt get the impact of this initially as I looked at the dotted square on the women's face. Then I noticed the little square box on the women's belly. Creativity deserving praise !!

Whose Line Is It Anyway - #11

This post I will start with the pic. Attached pic is a browser screen shot of the front page of the blog maintained by my son's preschool teacher. She has a neat blog for her class and updates with events, photos/videos and has a nice discussion board as well. Lately she has been having a "Featured Child" of the week and puts nice info about each of her students. This week its Sanjay's turn. Hence the pic. You can see some of his favorites etc beneath his photo there.

For today's post,

• My wife as usual goes to great lengths and takes great pain in teaching this kid everything - from words, numbers, songs, spelling etc etc. you name it.. She had already taught him to write and identify numbers upto 100. Now looks like she wanted to find out if he is able to apply the concept of numbering and figure out new numbers by himself. She asked "Do you know how to write 200, 300 etc". An emphatic "yes, I do" really stunned her as she has never attempted to go past 100 with him. When she asked him to write 200 and 300 on a paper, the eager mind obliged with this "2..100 ....3..100". He wrote 2 and a hundred as he heard it. What can you say.
• One day my mom was washing vegetables in the kitchen sink before cooking. The young one who was roaming around there got curious and looked at grandma washing the veggies. He came back to us quizzically - "Are the vegetables taking bath ?"
• A typical trait of people from India is to hang a small figurine of their favorite God (mostly hindus do this) hanging inside their car, preferably from the rear view mirror or have a sticker stuck somewhere in the dashboard etc. We have a small figurine of Lord Ganesh hanging from our rear view mirror. The figurine is a bit cartoonish. One day, I was driving my kid to the temple. Suddenly he asked me "Do we have a God in our car ?". I said "Of course, right here we have Lord Ganesh" and pointed to the cartoonish figurine. He is used to seeing a huge idol of Lord Ganesh at temple. Hence, with a quizzical tone he asked "A Toy God ??". I said yes. After a while, he retorted "Does it work ?". He was not sure how come a toy god function the same way as the real big one. But then the simple question of "does it work" sounded very profound to me which lot of us are trying to get answered and I had to say "I dont know. I am still trying to figure out".

Priorities

After loosing my father, and rather feeling dis-illusioned with life in general, one day by chance, I got to chat online with my long time good friend, Shankar, from Chennai. During the course of the discussion he mentioned the following story. It helped me kind of get things in perspective.

A professor once bought a tall glass jar to his class and asked the student how much space it had. The students said its totally empty. Then he started to put big stones into it. After a few stones, the jar couldnt take anymore. Now he asked how much space was left in the jar. The students said none as the jar was brim with the big stones. Then the professor pulled out some small pebbles from his pocket and dropped them into the jar. A few of them went and filled the gaps left between the big stones. Now he asked how much space was left. The students woke up and still said it was full and hence no space. Now the professor reached his other pocket and pulled out a bag of sand and poured it over the jar. The sand went and filled the space between the pebbles and the stones. Again the question and same answer. This time he reached down and grabbed a glass of water and poured it in the jar. The sand absorbed the water and he was able to pour the entire glass into the jar.

With this the professor looked at his students and said -

"Life is like the tall jar. The big stones stand for one's family. The pebbles represent one's job and hobbies if any. The sand represents one's indulgences. And finally the water, the luxury items in life. As we all just saw, after filling the jar with big stones, we still had space for the pebbles. After the still space for the sand and after that even for the water. But if we reverse the order and start filling the jar with water entirely, we wont have space for any of the other three. And so on.

Hence, even in our life, these things should come in that order - family first, job/hobbies next, followed by indulgences and then luxury. If so, we will be able to accommodate everything. If we dint get this priorities we will be missing big."

Many thanks to Shankar for the timely story - I hope to keep this my Stance in life in general.

Still:

A pano shot of the san diego downtown skyline from Coronado side. Computer stitched images from 6 shots taken with hand without tripod.

From each...to each ...

Stance:

Last month, there was a 9/11 style attack on an Austin IRS center by an American itself. The alleged attacker left an elaborate suicide note on why he was disgruntled with the IRS. A person going to the level of attacking something as uninteresting like an IRS center ready to risk his own life, kind of kindled my curiosity to such an extent that I had to browse through his suicide note. Other than usual disgruntlement with the politicians, political system and how its not standing for common people but biased towards vested interests, the whole note seemed nothing more than a vexed soul pouring out. The final punch or rather only punch, in my view in the whole note was its concluding sentence which succintly and clearly summarized where capitalism is headed. Since I have had my own issues with the capitalistic world, I found the following sentence very interesting and ironically enough, it rhymes with the statement which is considered cornerstone of communism.

"Communism - from each according to his capacity, to each according to his need.

Capitalism - From each according to his guillibility, to each according to his greed."

These words were very well put and really caught my attention in light of how the recent credit crisis put lot of innocent folks life and job in jeopardy while the greedy who should be held responsible (read "execs of failed financial majors") escaped unscathed with a golden severance package parachute.

Again, the bottom line is - no matter which side you are in, unless you respect what you believe in, its going fail.

Now the lighter side of the above story - the family of one of the IRS worker who died in the above said attack is suing the wife of the attacker saying she should have acted responsibly as if she was aware of whats going on in her husband's mind. Loosing a family member in the attack, I can fully empathize. But "suing the wife of the attacker", I dont know how it makes sense.

Still:

Taken at San Diego Zoo obviously, the golden sun making the predator merge with the background and the blurred cage wires adding more meaning.