Gadgets - Life made easier?????

Sometimes I wonder whether the latest hi-fi gadgets make us work more than making us work less. Isnt the computer industry supposed to reduce manual labour. But guess what, computer industry is the highest job provider here. May be there would have been more jobs if there werent computers. But still I think they had add more work on humans. Consider how I passed last weekend.
I have bought the new iPod and was trying to organize the songs for it. If I had been using the sony walkman cassette player, I would just have to buy a cassette and play it as and when i want to. But now there are lot of features in ipod that requires a lot of ground work before I can use it.

1. I had to download and install iTunes from the net first and have to choose the music folder so that my songs will be organised in appropriate folders automatically.


2. Then I had to download all the songs from the net to make justice to the large 30GB space I have in my ipod. I surely cant have just 10 songs of 50MB in such a huge space. It would be a great insult. So there I went on search of MP3 songs in the net. But guess what?


3. My internet connection was not working properly. So I had to troubleshoot it for few hours to make sure it works properly.


4. Then I realised that the download speed would be faster if I use star download manager. So I downloaded it from the net and installed it.


5. After downloading some 200 songs, I realised that the song titles, album and arist names were not correct in the downloaded songs. So I had to correct them in iTunes.


6. But my knowledge on music was very much limited that I had to rely on internet again to find the correct artists for each album. This task was the tedious one which took more than 4 hours to find about each and every song I have.


7. Phew! Atlast, I had all my songs with correct titles. But there is something more in iPod. You can view the artwork for the album you are listening to. I dont want to miss this good feature of iPod. So I went into the internet again to get the images for each album and add it to every song(I have a total of 809 songs) I have. This took another 3 hours.


8. When I thought that its all over, I found that all my songs have not taken more than 4 GB of space. With my iPod's hunger not satisfied, I decided to add some movies into it. And there we go again. Where can I find movies? iPod needs the movies to be in special format(.mp4).


9. So download the video convertor software and convert the movies which I have in .avi formats. Believe me. This is a very tedious task and I still havent got any proper software that can convert the video with proper audio-video syncronisation. They are always out of sync that sometimes I hear female voice when the hero is speaking to the heroine. Imagine what if the hero says to his wife "I am pregnant". That too in a lady's voice. The romantic movie would become a comedy movie.


10. I decided to download trailers from Apple instead and downloaded most of Apple advertisements from www.apple.com. It came up to 100MB only and I didnt want to work more on this.


11. Then there was this "Photos" section in iPod. Thats the section that I can fill easily. I have a total of 2333 photos so I can fill up atleast 1GB of space in my iPod.


12. So after a long time of collecting all music, movies and photos to fill my ipod, I copied them all to my hifi iPod which took about half an hour to copy into it.


13. So atlast, after 2 days of hard work and most of the internet bandwidth squeezed for the music, my iPod was all ready to rock my ears.

Was all these stuff worth it. Yes! It was worth every bit. The music turned out to be wonderful when heard in iPod. And the photos were very crisp and clear which I couldnt see in my laptop. My 2 days of hardwork didnt go in vain.

Moral of the story: hi-fi gadgets make you work more than before. But its all worthy when thinking of what more you get from it after your hard work.

PS: Now I need to download more movies and convert them into mp4 format. There is still more than 20GB of free space left in my iPod.

Happy Republic Day

Today is 57th Republic Day of India. So its been 56 years since India became a republic nation. I had been having doubts on what is the difference between celebrating Independence day and Republic day. In school days, we had to go to school even though it is a holiday. It would be fun though. No classes will be taken and everyone would be having the flag pinned to their shirts. Though our school dont provide them, it would be the work of some patriotic students that they either buy in the near by shops or would have troubled their parents to the maximum to buy them the best flag. As for me, I dont like the idea of pinning your flag to your shirt. I was( and still I am) really patriotic that even pinning the flag would hurt me as we are making a hole on the flag. I didnt like the idea that I will always keep it in inside my pocket. Sometimes, we would get the ID card cover for keeping the Flag safe.
Coming back to the day, I didnt know the difference other than the name. No one had ever given me a proper definition for republic day. I had wondered if there is any republic day for US. I still dont know the answer. Looks like it doesnt. A search in google ends up only on republic day of India and Turkey. So for 23 years of my life, I didnt know the real meaning of Republic day. I think I learnt something in my history & Civics subject about it. But as it was for acamedic purposes and I tend to forget most of the lessons once the exams are over, I forgot that too.
Enough of this bragging. I found out the right person to ask and found out the real meaning of Republic day and why India has different days for celebrating Independence and Republic day.

And the person is none other than our wikipedia. Here is what wikipedia has to say.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_Day#January_26th_in_India

The Constitution of India came into force, and India declared itself as a "Republic" on January 26, 1950, a date thereafter celebrated annually as Republic Day in India. The Constitution had been prepared by the Constituent Assembly which was set up upon India gaining its independence from the British in 1947. This, in fact, was a deliberate act: the 26th of January was initially India's "Independence Day", one of Mahatma Gandhi's many symbolic acts during India's Freedom Struggle against the British colonial rule, and the adoption of the Constitution on this date was felt able to strengthen its initial meaning, one calling for Indians of all ages to declare their freedom from the British Raj. It is one of three annual national holidays in India, the other two being the nation's Independence Day on August 15 (since 1947) and the birthday of Mohandas K Gandhi or Mahatma Gandhi on October 2. And so, after the disposal of the Empire of India; King George VI was the last and only "King" of the modern India

So even though India got independence from British on August 15ht 1947, we still were ruled by British till january 26th 1950. Or am I wrong again? It was governed by King George VI. So pracitally it was still with British. I am bad at politics. So I am really not sure what happened in those two and a half years. Anyway, now its clear our constitution was made only on January 26th 1950 and we are celebrating as Republic Day!

Happy Republic Day!

Another blog!

I have been doing this for sometime. Instead of creating new posts in a single blog, I keep on creating new blogs. Dont think I am stupid not to know how to creat new posts. Its just that I have the urge of writing blogs on different categories, so trying to organise them efficiently. So much for my organization skills. Anyway, the problem with me is that though I create new blogs now and then, I rarely keep them active. Either I lose the interest in it very soon or I would jump to something better( thats what i usually call). So you can take this as one among that, though I swear that I want to make a difference here and will put my maximum effort in making this different from the rest. Though this may sound like the ones that I have told before, I assure you it is not.... Havent I said this too before.

Anyway, so what is this blog about. Nothing but the same. Just the happenings around me. Something like India Today, this is INJEY today. But I assure you, it wont be much(how much) about me, but about what I see everyday. So for today, I have seen the start of the blog. Lets see whats there for tomorrow's today tomorrow.

The God Father

Just finished watching "The God Father" Trilogy. No doubt it's a classic. We can learn a lot from these movies. I learnt a few too. The first movie is about the life of the Mafia leader. The distinction he keeps about Personal and Business is perfect. His plans for his sons are always worth noting. Different plans for different sons with different attitude. Amazing movie. I couldn't understand much of the second movie. But it's a portrayal deep inside the family. Perfectly done. Then I saw the third movie.

All I was thinking from the start till the end of the movie was "How is he going to die?". And then at the end, he dies. He dies by the worst way he could have ever feared. Such an emotional movie. No one could have ever imagined it. I wonder if any one of the million viewers of the movie would have thought like that. If they had, then they ought to be the most cruelest thinkers in the world. The movie told me something again and again. Whatever you dream of, however you try to shape your path, you always have to open only the closed pandora's box which you never know whats inside. The path is already laid for you and you can just choose it. Not create it. That is life. How well you choose it lies with you. But you are not the creator to make your own path. It never works that way. One who thinks he creates his own path is not seeing the path that's already there. He never created it. He just found it. Therefore, though we are masters of our own destiny, we are indebt to the One who created it.
And then I learnt one more thing. You don't have to shoot someone to kill him. You just have to kill his heart. He will suffer a painful death. For in the soul, the body lives. But its in the heart, the true spirit lives.Amen.