Ferrari 458 Italia

via youtube.com

Love how mean it looks! The rear is not the best but still good looking. Personally, don’t really like the LEDs on the headlights.

And LOVE the exhaust note! Thunderous!

My blogging trend

So you might think it is a real loser thing to do. But I have made a graph of my blogging trend and above are the results. Started early, did not do much in between and now doing more than ever before.

A notable increase in May and June this year thanks to my summer project. And that I guess has continued till now. Hope to blog more.

No La Liga broadcast in India!

This is absolutely pathetic!

It seems ESPN Star Sports (ESS) has decided to not renew their contract to broadcast La Liga in Asia. They have to pay USD 1 million per year for these rights as opposed to 13.5 million for 3 years for the EPL – this contract expires in 2010. This is the same way they lost the rights to the UEFA Champions League and Cup broadcast to Ten Sports – this also costs 1 million per year.

Their argument is they have enough cricket and EPL in their calendar and not many people would want to watch football at midnight (which is when La Liga is played – IST). Are you kidding me? Just this year when I though there will be more Liga matches on TV thanks to Ronaldo, Kaka, Benzema, Zlatan and more gong to Spain, they decide to take the plug out completely! Not to mention the number of Ronaldo fans who would now want to watch Real Madrid games!

I have no hopes from Ten Sports giving more weightage to Spanish match in the Champions League as well now. To add to all this, it seems no other channel is interested in picking up the rights for La Liga as well.

It is a sad year for football! Atleast for me…

PCom bail-out

One should always have a ‘bail-out place’ wherever you go regularly. What I mean by this is an area where you can run away from other things and people and just be within yourself. This place is normally one’s room in the house or the bathroom for some people, the canteen in college for someone or the cafeteria at work. These places completely bail you out of your misery.

Not that I am suffering from any misery, but I would now come to my place of bail out in college. This is the Placement Committee room or the PCom room as it is known. It is nothing but an average sized room with 6 computers against the walls and a table and chair at one corner which leaves quite a bit of space in the middle. It also has lots of shelves and of course, a couple of phones. This room is just an ordinary room without an AC but two huge windows spanning the breadth of a wall. There are no ceiling fans as ceiling is not high enough and so we have to make do with a few standing fans. Oh, and the best part, it exists between the less visited third floor and the never visited fourth floor, making it completely isolated.

This room is in no way comfortable – it has really old chairs. It is in no way greatly equipped – we have to go all the way to the ground floor to get water. But still, there is something that makes me feel at ease. I usually forget about anything outside the room, classes, projects et al. There is no pressure on me when I am there, no one is telling me what to do, a room where we are all equals. I don’t go to the room to wile away my time, to get away from lectures or projects. But I do feel cocooned once I am there. I feel like being on my toes in there, not wanting to rest, making things happen.

It is not a typical bail-out place for me, but I do feel as if I am bailed out once I am there.

Internet Distractions, In Order of Importance

via reflectionof.me

So what do YOU do on the internet?

Musings on advertising

This is just an old post from my old blog adityathinking.blogspot.com, just wanted it here.

How many times has one seen the old adage of ‘too much of a good thing….’ come true?

Advertising has grown by leaps and bounds in the past few years. So much so that people now when discuss ads (more so those from TV), they have quite a few options to choose from. I mean, right now as I write this while watching the cricket match, I just saw a series of 4 good ads in a row! The new Bajaj Platina DTSi and the Amrutanjan ads are really well conceptualised. The Amrutanjan one is actually quite hilarious!

Coming back to the topic of this long overdue blog update, a couple of years back, NEO Sports I think it was who started with the concept of ads during the match. This was by way of zooming out from the match and displaying vertical and horizontal ads on two sides. It was brilliant! I mean, you don’t miss the match and the ad is right there when you have the maximum attention on the screen.

Neo Sports had just signed a massive contract with the BCCI and were creating a revolution of sorts in the sport broadcasting industry. This was by way of innovative ways to sell their inventory of limited air time. They soon realised the air time was not enough to recover the millions they were going to pay BCCI. Necessity proved to be the mother of invention.

But, as has been happening forever, this brilliant idea has been turned into a not so brilliant one by overdoing it! I am watching the match right now, and I see these ads zooming in and zooming out after practically every single ball! It is being so overdone that they have succeeded in making it a blindspot! Now hardly is the content being read or the brand advertised being noticed.

However irritating the ads would have been as it hinders your viewing pleasure, it really was a great idea to target the audience at the perfect time. Until they messed it up that is.

 

What does a ‘team player’ mean?

I have seen this word in a lot of resumes. And being in the Placement Committee, I have seen more than my share of resumes.

Every person mentions this quality as his strength. Strength is supposed to be something unique that others might not possess, otherwise it is not something worth talking about. However, how many of the people who include it actually have it? And what do they think it means?

No doubt that this is a typical management jargon. However, it has been often used in fields as varied as sports and some other varied field I cannot think of right now. Moving on, the thing about jargon is, it is often open to interpretations. And with a jargon which has two words, you can never be sure. For example, anyone who plays in a team can be called a team player. Try and argue with that! But it is not that simple now is it.

According to me, a team player is someone who thinks about the team that he plays for when he is playing in that team. For example, I am in my class football team, volleyball team, some project team, the placement team and I guess you get the drift. All these teams perform and behave differently and have their own micro-culture and their own unwritten rules. This comes with the fact that the players in each team are different from the others. But, I need to differentiate my efficacy and draw a line between each team. And finally if at some time I am not performing for any of these teams, I should be the individual I actually am so that I can adapt myself to the next team.

While writing this post, I am not in any particular team, and hence I can write without any of my teams affecting the way I am writing it. None of my experiences in any team is influencing me in any way while I type this down. But, all of the experiences will influence me as an individual that I am. Go ahead, join more teams. Become a team player in each of them so that you become a better you.

An incredible urge

I presently have this incredible urge to write something. I don’t know what to, but I have to!

The cause of this urge are two people, my fellow Placement Committee members from the 2011 batch and also fellow bloggers. One is Rachana and the other is Vikash (yes it is spelt that way). They not only liked my blog and what I have written but discussed a few things about blogging and it has now got me going.

What I like about both their blogs at first are the names. I could never think of a cool name for my blog. Mine has always been adityakandala or some other format of my name. But AngelicHuman and DelusionsOfPetrification are two really cool names. I don’t even know what the second one means. Vikash you owe me an explanation. They both write differently, Rachana is more of a formatted serious kind of writer who might not write unless she doesnt have anything concrete to write about, quite similar to me. Vikash doesnt really care about formatting and just goes with his thoughts, I like this. Vikash is also into poetry by the way.

I am not some experienced blogger or writer to comment on their writing and will not do that. This was just an attempt at writing something random without having any particular topic in mind. Done.

Update:

Vikash: delusions of petrification means that…u are under the fake illusion of being tied down ….or stoned…from doin nethn but its just ur illusion …till u realize ur worth!