fables and fairy tales

There was once a man, who was trying to save a scorpion from drowning in a lake. Every time, he would pick it up with his hands, the scorpion would sting him and he would let go of it, dropping it into the lake again. A passerby walked up to him and said, “You moron, that is a scorpion, that is it’s trait. It stings people”. The man replied, “My point exactly, if a scorpion cannot let go of its trait, because it is drowning, why should I, being a human being, let go of my trait of helping other living beings.” He was another  Saint in the making, but we didn’t hear much about him, because he died of  scorpion venom that day.

Moral of the story: Kindness isn’t everything, pick up a scorpion with a stick, or a net. Don’t use your hands, use your head

The Break Up

I know it is really difficult for a lot of dudes to dump their girlfriends. I know that this certain feeling called “guilt” comes in the way of telling her that you are not that interested in her anymore. This is exactly why I have come up with a play book to manipulate your girlfriend into dumping you, so that you don’t have to go through the painful process of “Telling her the truth” and at the end of it all, you are FREE…….

1.  THE HARRY:

Dude: We need to talk.

Chic: Okay, what is it.

Dude:How could you go out for dinner/bowling/coffee/lunch/funeral with those people. I am your boyfriend, you should be doing all those things with me only. EXCLUSIVELY

Chic: Honey… I need a break. This isn’t working for us.

And You are Free…………….

2. THE DJ:

Dude: Can I borrow your credit card. I need to subscribe to this very important technical magazine. My credit card is maxed out, I’ll pay you back

Chic: Okay.

This is when you subscribe to the most expensive  PORN (get creative, use your imagination. You can even subscribe to some Grandma porn or a bestiality magazine). Make sure she finds out, what it is that you are buying with her credit card and when she finds out, YOU ARE FREE…….

3. THE DFT:

Dude: I’m not sure if I love you, or I’m just physically attracted to you..

4. THE VC:

This trick was actually pulled out by a chic, but it still works

1. Make out with a totally random girl you met at a bar

2. Have a gtalk conversation with one of your friends about it

3. Share your password with your girlfriend or better even, accidentally forward the transcript of the conversation to your girlfriend, instead of another friend with a similar name. Gmail auto complete is a bitch

4. When she confronts you, tell her it was a stupid drunk mistake and you just do these things when you are drunk, and it is totally her fault that she  didn’t go drinking with you.

Needless to say, YOU ARE FREE

These plays are sure to work even though they have been tried a million times. Women somehow haven’t developed an immunity to these tricks. For more elaborate plays on how to dump your girlfriend, send me an email.

The End

It was her wedding night. He had to be there, even though he wished he was in any of the million other places which didn’t involve watching her get married to another man.

He met her just before the wedding. She was dressed in a beautiful white saree and wore a dazzling diamond necklace around her neck. “Beautiful” he said to himself, as he caught one last glimse of her. He scribbled something on a piece of paper and handed it over to her and walked away with a smile.

She opened the note and read it. It said,

“This is the end of a chapter in your book and the big ending of my movie…Make it beautiful”

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Laundry Adventures

Ingrads and his roommate were stuck in Minnetonka for the winter. Ingrads couldn’t go to California because “she” wasn’t very sure if it was a good idea and his roommate AV didn’t have any luck with women at all. Unfortunately for his roommate, he had bad luck with cooking, cellphones and even laundry machines. This blog post is about one such mishap in AVs life.

I think bad luck has a way of really biting you in the behind. If the washer breaks down, you can just wear your dirty clothes for another week, but that wouldn’t be so bad would it. But when you realize that the drier is broken down, it is already too late to do anything about it. All your clothes are wet and you cannot dry your clothes outside in the sun when the temperature is -20C and it is snowing.

By now you guys must have guessed what happened. If you haven’t, then here are the details

AV just pulled his clothes out of the washer and transferred them to the drier. He put in three quarters successfully when the the drier spat out the last one. It just wouldn’t take it. The coin box was full. He tried everything possible, but there was no use. He transferred his clothes into the other drier and tried again. This time, it accepted two quarters and then stopped. He called the laundry service guys, but they were all out of town, for the winter holidays.

AV was furious. He came back to the apartment and made a few calls from my phone (remember I told you, he had bad luck with cellphones). He went back to the laundry room to find that some guy managed to put in the last quarter into the first machine and was drying his clothes in there.

“God damn it!!, how is that even possible” said AV. He left a little note for that guy that read.

Three of those four quarters are mine.
Drop’em off at apartment 7.

p.s.: I know where you live.

Well, those weren’t the exact words. But I think, that is what the poor chinese guy read. He was shivering, when he knocked on our door. It was either fear or biting cold, we’ll never know (Some guy left the window open in the corridor).

We finally decided to try the laundry in the other building. You see, our apartment complex has two buildings and the key to the main entrance is the same for both.

The plan was that i would run out in the cold and enter the second building, put the quarters in and then call AV. He would then bring his clothes there and put them in the machine.

Unfortunately, it was the same story there. It just didn’t work. We tried everything we could. It just wouldn’t accept the last quarter.

After struggling with the machine for a few hours, AV and Ingrads read the inscription on the coin and got a shock of their life. It said

“25 cents, CANADA”.

think about it…

I was talking to Ingrads the other day. He is done with his semester and enjoying his winter break. He is all excited about watching the new James Cameron movie. I do not have any new stories to report. I just wanted to share a few thoughts that were running through my head the other day. I was talking to a friend and she said that she doesn’t really know what she wants, but she knew she wanted to be really successful. “That is really funny, how would you be successful, if you didn’t know what you want”, I asked. “No matter what I do, I want to be really rich at the end of it and have a lot of money. Because a person’s success is measured by how much money they have”, she said. I don’t measure my success by the amount of money I have, especially, now because I have absolutely no money.

I ask my self these questions and I hope that the answer is “yes” for at least one of these questions

1. Will people would come visit you if you were terminally ill? if yes, How many?

2. If you needed a kidney transplant, would someone not related to you step forward to give you their kidney. If yes, Have you called that person in the past ten days to check how he/she is doing?

3. If it was someone’s last day at work, will he/she pick up her stuff and leave, or wait for you to come out of a meeting so that he/she can shake your hand and say goodbye.

4. Did you help someone today?

5. Do you remember your first love, and the look in her eyes, the first time you kissed.

6. Have you stopped by at a friend’s place to just talk and drink tea/beer(pick your favorite) recently

The Bestest friend ever

This blog is dedicated to her. The girl who was, is and will be my bestest friend ever. I know, bestest is not even a real word, but i had to coin it for her. She was there for me when i got dumped the first time, and then the second time and then the third time….. you know what, let’s just say, she was there for me whenever I needed a friend. I took her out for lunch once, when she was down. I made fun of her when she got drunk in Goa and acted funny. We talked about her problems in life and we talked about my job and how painful DFT could be at times. We discussed her love life and my lack of it. Miss you girl….

The Future Yet Again….

I have been trying really hard to write something for the past few days. It is almost like the creative side of me was killed by a big “VLSI storm” that hit us some time last week. It took me almost a week to get my act together. The VLSI storm was an eye opener of sorts. It made me realize that I can be extremely painful at times. I was getting to painful to be around me, even I couldn’t stand myself anymore. Okay, enough of retrospection. I don’t wanna talk about that.

I was reading this blog article by Gene Frantz, where he talked about the future of processors. What he and his team of elite scientists in Texas Instruments imagine would be the architecture of future processors. It is easy to look at the present state of affairs and extrapolate the future in the next few years, but seeing beyond three to four years is a real challenge and Gene Frantz and his team tried to do exactly that. His original article can be found here. Even though this article seems very interesting, it is almost like Gene and his team just extrapolated a line with 2 data points.

In my opinion, things change drastically only once every five or six years.(What, you don’t believe me!! look at your own career graphs). Taking this into consideration, we only have time for two drastic changes till 2020. With reduced cycle times, everyone will just reuse IPs, you don’t need to be a visionary to quote that, but what components will be reusable and what will be built from scratch is the question. Honestly, I cannot think beyond a multiplier block to be reused across SOCs.

Innovation is software is probably going to change the world, but for that we need a world where almost all processors that we might buy of the shelf are exactly identical(and capable ). Fortunately for us, the world is heading in that direction.

If Pranav Mistry has his way, we will all be walking around wearing a camera and a projector around our necks and looking ridiculous. The Pico projector technology can come to our rescue here, and we all might actually be carrying phones with these projectors and cameras.

Okay, I really cannot imagine what the future is going to be like, Imaginative people can email me their ideas and i can pass them off as my own

Terrible week

Ingrads is not used to getting negative feedback. He has always been the best in whatever he did, but he has been getting a lot of criticism lately. He went swimming the other day and the life guard threw him out of the pool for not being able to swim 25 yards in deep waters. “25 yards Damn it!!!!, I can spit that far”, said a frustrated Ingrads.

He then went to the VLSI Design lab and some random guy looked at his layout and said, “You are wasting a lot of space at the bottom there. If you keep your NMOS close to the ground rail, you get more routing tracks in the middle.” Ingrads was surprised by this feed back. “I’m drawing an XOR gate dude, I need six tracks in all. Why would I push my NMOS down beyond this” he replied. “Guess you will have learn it the hard way then” said the random guy. He walked away before Ingrads could come up with a good insult.

He then went to work where he makes sandwiches for “Stupid Undergrads”. One of those stupid undergrads had the audacity to write this on the feedback form

“my Sandwich was terrible. The sandwich guy is slow and not that smart. Please don’t let him make sandwiches again”

It was an anonymous feedback so Ingrads is gonna post his reply here Publicly

1. It is a Sandwich made as per your specifications. Everything in it is what you picked. “What you get, is what you asked for”. If it is bad, it is your f***ing fault.

They eat Humus and turkey together. I’m a vegetarian and I know that those two don’t go together

2. I am not slow, f***ing undergrads take so much time deciding what they want on their sandwich.

“I’ll take some roast turkey and a little bit of the ham. Actually, forget the ham, but some beef on that. Can I get a little cheddar cheese on that, Oh wait, may be American cheese is better”.

Make up your frigging mind God Damn it!!! there are a million people in line.

3. It is a Sandwich, not a space ship, how smart do I need to be. Americans manage to make themselves a sandwich every now and then, without burning the house down, I think I am qualified for the Job

My manager saw the feedback and said,

‘Why doesn’t he roll it up and shove it up his a**.” I am not gonna use such strong language but I’m gonna still say… “Up yours!!!!!!!!!”

Harry

We interrupt this series on the exciting life of Ingrads in America to bring you the story of a man, who was very different from all the other characters you have met on this blog.
Harry was a good kid. He didn’t drink, smoke, ogle at women, masturbate.. none of that nonsense. He went to college to become a great engineer, like his role model APC (If you don’t know APC, don’t bother to ask). He always topped the class in high school and never played any sports. He was a Geek and he was proud.

He met her for the first time in college. She was just like him in many ways, but still she was so different. She was also a geek and she was terrible at anything that involved physical labour. Her table tennis tales were legendary. She believed in experimenting. she wanted to try out cigarettes and booze. she wanted to live life on the edge. The things she never did. Everytime she was angry, she wanted to go out and break some rules. He was terrified and fascinated by her wild side. Her smile just left him speechless for days. People thought it was because of the internal exams that he was so silent, but now we know the truth.

He was hopelessly in love with her. There was nothing DFt or Ingrads could do to help him out. They just left him and walked away. “Did you see that chic in the blue dress”, said DFT on his way out. “Woh, She was awesome. Did you get a look at her face? I was busy tying my shoe laces”, said the undergrad Ingrads.

The girl in the blue dress was wearing a low rise jeans with a really short top the next day. Everyone other than Harry went to the cafeteria that day to check her out the next day. Ingrads missed a few classes and forgot to eat lunch. “I never knew that a girl’s waistline can be so arousing man. I think I am gonna quit engineering and go into photography”, said DFT.

In the mean time, Harry was sitting under a tree with “her” eating chocolate. They used to call that place the “Toblerone place” because they usually ate Toblerone there. It was a beautiful day and she was wearing a really nice blue and white Salwar. She looked beautiful as usual and he was madly in love with her. “I love you da, I really do”, she said. “Are you sure”, he asked. “I have never been so sure about anything.” she said. It was the beginning of a beautiful love story. One that would last long. Really really long.

Unfortunately, Harry shared a common trait with DFT and Ingrads. He had a tendency to get DUMPED. One beautiful Sunday moring, Harry got a call from “her”. “This isn’t working da. I wanna break up”, she said. Unlike DFT, who breaks into a laughter when a girl says this, Harry took it too seriously. He was always moody and he talked in really long sentences.

One day, Harry was outside sitting with Mikey. Mikey lit up a cigarette and offered it to Harry. “I don’t smoke”, Harry said. “Why not?” asked Mikey. ‘Because it is addictive. I’ll get hooked on to it and then I’ll just die of lung cancer’ said Harry. “Come on, remember what Mark Twain said.” said Mikey. For some strange reason, Mikey’s words made sense to Harry. He took a drag and he felt good. The second one made him feel really nice. This is awesome”, he said, when he took the third drag. He then went on to finish the whole cigarette and then the whole pack, he then bought a whole carton.

‘What is it with men and cigarettes’, she asked him one day. “I don’t know, i guess it makes life a much better place”, Harry replied. “You think we can be together again?’ he asked her. “Harry, that is not gonna happen again. I’m sorry put it so bluntly, but I cannot think of a better way to make it clear to you.” she said.

He left the room angry and disappointed. He didn’t see the truck coming towards him.

Ingrads was making out with a random girl he met in a Pub, when he heard the news. .

The truck driver was a really hot girl (I know a lot of you will say, that is Impossible. Well, I’m telling the story, so you just have to put up with it). She hit the brakes when she saw Harry walking aimlessly on the road. She got out of the truck to check on him and fell in love with him instantly. They made out in the back of the truck and then they got married.