Impulse buy again!

I have been known to have an amazingly nasty habit of buying out of impulse and perhaps thats why I always remained broke. This time it was Think Geek that I decided to raid. Having already found a watch that proved rather useful, apart from the jaw-dropping reactions I got when I took it out to plug it into to my system, I had been a regular visitor at this place, just for its creative ideas. And thats when I chanced upon this . For long I had been planning to buy a pair of shades to protect myself from the impending dangers of exposure to direct sunlight as summer started to squeeze its way out through the snow in Syracuse. This pair of sunglasses with a 1.3MP camera and a 1GB storage space, leave aside the built-in mp3 player (I still need to be loyal to my old ipod 😉 ), turned out to be an obvious choice :D.

If you look at it from a slightly obtuse angle, I see it as photography in its true sense 😀 . Photography to me was about seeing world through my eyes. What more can be a better than a camera sitting right next to my eyes, capturing everything that I see! I wouldn’t say this is photography at its highest order (and I will still be loyal to my Sony DSC P93, just like I will be to my ipod 😀 ), but it does prove handy when moments pass by in a jiffy and you wish you could just convert that into a memory (at least during summer, when you have your shades on 😉 ).

On that note…. this is what I see as I make this post.

Forgive me for the lack of light and focus in the picture. Im still getting used to the fact that I need to turn my head completely to where I should be *really* looking, rather than just moves my eyes 😀

Offbeat: My next buy 😀

Ice Hockey

The spirits were high, the drinks poured freely and the stage was set for the division semifinals between Syracuse Crunch and Manitoba Moose. I was at a loss of words at the first (ice) hockey game watched from the stands. The countdown had begun from 17 minutes to play, by the time we got to the stadium and the home crowd had started chanting “Lets go crunch” in support for ‘Cuse.

17 minutes later, in the game that started with the Canadian and American National Anthems, I witnessed one of the fastest and the most free flowing games in the world! There was no point in time between the game that the players on the court paused to take a breath – the ice never let them stay still 😀 . Even the substitutions happened to smoothly that the game never stopped for the change of players. Unlimited substitutions also meant that every 2 minutes a bunch of players left the field while the game went onto be replaced by an entire new set of players.

Having said that, the game turned rather physical towards the second period, when the players literally “crunched” their opponents to the side walls. However it never reached the standards that I had heard it usually got to, although the visitors saw their goalkeeper carried away due to a broken leg.

After an entertaining 3 hours of game, which went on to the extra time, the Crunch managed to lose 3-2 on a “golden goal” and the crowd left even before the players left the “field” 🙂

Ways to increase the number of pages in your research paper…

I guess this post was born out of an interesting conversation that I had with some of my colleagues in the place I worked. Being the end of semester, and esp. since this is my last semester in school, the month of April indeed stands out as a month of less sleep and more typing, with the number of “pages” I need to submit in each of the research paper being impossibly huge. And obviously, this being at the back of my mind all throughout, I happened to reveal that at one point during my work today. Let me take you through the excruciating task that I have in front of me, before I graduate.

I have a 50-70 page report to submit for my final project, not to mention the presentation slides and the model I need to build, before I do that. Another two reports – one of 5 pages and the second, 20-30 pages for my second course and further two reports – 40 and 20 pages each – complete my next 3 weeks. That makes it a total of 145 – 175 pages to literally type before I graduate!! And having not thought about it till date was perhaps the biggest mistake I did.

Now getting back to the conversation I had today, apparently there are several ways of increasing the number of pages of your report rather phenomenally. One of the suggestions I got was increasing the character spacing, which means, even within a word, the spacing between the characters can be increased from say 1 to 1.3, to produce a significant difference, without actually making it noticeable. Add on increased margin size and this would be just perfect for a 50 page long report.

But perhaps the most interesting suggestion I got today was to increase the font size of just the periods (full stops) and commas. Punctuation takes up a lot of space after it, in word documents. So even a minor change from a font size of 12 to 14 would drastically alter the number of pages. Strenuous as it seems, this might not be a bad idea especially for a person like me, who tend to shorten sentences and descriptions to as minimal words as possible, and often find it difficult to meet the annoying page requirements.