electric relaxation

A couple of months ago I ordered a complete DVD set of the excellent BBC six-part documentary TV series, The Story of India, as a gift for my parents. I had to buy it from Amazon UK since it wasn’t available in the US. Of course, I completely forgot that UK DVDs are Region 2-encoded, which means that when we sat down to watch them tonight, my parents’ Pioneer player rejected the discs.

Fortunately, my parents also have an Apex AD-3201 DVD Player in their bedroom that my mom uses for watching Hindi DVDs, and Apex Digital has kept up their wonderful tradition of building in secret cheat codes (I fucking love these guys!) to unlock abilities like Macrovision quashing and region unlocking:

1. Power on the DVD player.
2. Hit eject.
3. 8, 4, 2, 1 on the remote
4. Select ’9′ on the secret menu which pops up (and disable Macrovision for good measure).
5. Done.

I swapped the DVD players so we could watch everything on the big screen downstairs, and now we’re completely engrossed, three hours and three episodes in to the series.

Respect the skills, bitches.

From Bloomberg.com:

Between January 2004 and March 2007 the death toll from terrorist attacks in India was 3,674, second only to Iraq during the same period, according to the National Counterterrorism Center in Washington.

Holy F. I recall Jai claiming at some point that “shit gets blown up all the time in India” when we were having some ridiculous argument about whether terrorists deserve to be called brave (I said no and I believe I won). Still, didn’t realize it was quite this bad. I would’ve guessed Indonesia, or Israel.

Of course The Law of Large Numbers is indefatigable, and 1.1 billion is a very Large Number.

I thought this was pretty cool. VMware has the highest percentage of female upper management among all publicly traded Silicon Valley companies. Unclear if these are pre- or post-Diane numbers, but Diane not withstanding, anecdotally I believe that if anything these numbers are getting better.

Hopefully our HR folks will take advantage of this good PR.

This was the first serious novel I’ve read in what must have been at least a few months if not longer. I’ve been reading mostly non-fiction, with a Sci-Fi binge here and there. And a lot of superhero comics.

Anyway, what the fuck this book was incredible. There’s something unbelievably, indescribably satisfying about the feeling you get when you know that no one else appreciates a creative work in quite the way you do. I guess that that’s actually dangerously close to stalker talk. But so be it. I’m in love with Aravind Adiga, and he will never know. I’m also embarassingly in love with M.I.A. because of the Paper Planes remix. Though that case is even more personal, since she had nothing to do with the remix, so I actually got much more out of the track than any individual put into it.

Anyway. Read the book. But know this, you sister-fuckers – you will never like it, or appreciate it, quite as much as I did.