Mildly interesting stories
By Anoop Sankar
An elephant, a drunken man and a cron job
It was a serene evening one summer day in 2010. Sony, Sherin, Nandu and I sat chit chatting in an estate tucked away a few kilometers into the woods of Munnar. A much needed rest after a long 5 hour drive from our startup office. A bottle of Old Monk rested on a makeshift table in the little hut we were sitting around. Tempting as it may, the bottle had
Goa - The last stop on the hippie trail
Goa. Those three letters are now synonymous with parties, beaches and cheap booze. It has been taken over by the brute force of commercialism, but look a little harder and you find a lot more in this pocket sized wonderland. It is all but ironical that what kickstarted this transformation of Goa from a little known Portuguese colony, was a bunch of hippies escaping the realities of 'western materialism'. It
A drive through New Zealand - Part 2
The South Island The Ferry, Picton & Nelson The ferry from Wellington to Picton in itself is an experience worth it. The journey was pleasant and relaxed with a picturesque view of the Cook Strait to entertain us, with plenty of photo-ops along the way. Three hours later we hit the shores of the South Island in the tiny town of Picton. Our second rental car, a Toyota Previa, was waiting
A drive through New Zealand - Part 1
The North Island Introduction New Zealand was always a dream destination for me and been in my bucket list for quite some time. So when a plan came up for it; it was an easy decision to say yes. The travelling party consisted of; apart from Sruthy and I; our friends Aravind, Manju, Rahul & Kalyani. We all flew in from different parts of the world and joined together in Auckland
Malayalam slang and their origins
Malayalam has always had a history of assimilating loan words from various foreign tongues. This has been true even in some of the common everyday slang words that Malayalees use in day to day conversations. Some of the most interesting ones that caught my eye are below. Yemandan (യമണ്ടൻ) adj. unusually huge and/or powerful The name came from, believe it or not, a German warship called SMS Emden.
Hello Ghost!
I have been meaning to get this site back on track for sometime now. It has been a while. Procrastination was one primary obstacle, Wordpress was another. But then I discovered Ghost thanks to two of my colleagues [1] [2] . Inspired by them, I migrated the entire blog to Ghost complete with a new shiny handcrafted theme. Migration wasn't that hard and all the heavy lifting can be done by
Flickering text with CSS and JavaScript
This is a simple hack to simulate flickering text using the magic powers of CSS3 and some javascript. Pretty much a lazy evening experiment I did for the landing page of a a cool domain I got my hands on. The CSS The trick behind the blur is setting the font color to transparent and adding a text-shadow with offset set to zero. The original text becomes invisible and only
The Third Home
Photo by Diego Jimenez / Unsplash – L’Auberge Espagnole (2002) The seemingly random chaos of the roads, streets and corners of this city all falls into place now. After 2 years I have finally deciphered the order in the chaos. I understand its pulse. I don’t feel a stranger anymore. Yes, Kochi too is now my home. And I’m loving it.
The Butterfly Effect
*Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?* One of my favourite thought exercise is to romanticize about the chaos theory. So this other day, I was having a conversation with one of my dear friends regarding the multiple ‘what-if’s in our life line. Isn’t it incredible that random actions by random actors cause incredible repercussions to your future? Sometime
The Problem with Choice
One fine evening, tired after the days work, I found myself seated on my couch at home lazily surfing channels on the idiot box, unable to decide what to watch. This thought I’ve had a for a long time resurfaced – Life has become so damn complicated nowadays with all the choices that we have and the small decisions we are forced to make everyday. See, around 15 years ago,