Sketching Workshop: 1st week

For last 6 weeks, I been assigned to a project, which is in big mess and days are very hectic, worst is the work is very monotonous and don't feel like achieving anything. To break the monotony, I joined the sketching workshop, which is being conducted in office itself. The workshop is for 10 days for an hour a day but that one hour is very rejuvenating. I have been doing pencil sketching for a while but occasionally but never attended any classes.

The teacher actually doesnt do anything she shows some slides and ask us to practice or draw from the projector screen.

Day 1: i was amazed at the numbers, about 150 odd people was in the room, and was wondering how the days will go. on the first day we had been given the kit, 1 pencil set consist of HB to 8B, black charcoal, eraser, sharpner and drawing board. The type of paper is provided based on what is to be practiced.

We have been asked to draw lines only , 3inches long, straight, horizontal, vertical, criss cross, wavy, then asked us to draw basic shapes , triangle, rectangle, circle to make the hands free. i could well see the embarrasment on every one face, few felt insulting and stopped drawing. Then we all returned with a home work to practice drawing spiral.

here is what we drawn on day 1

Day 2 : second day we all went with a hope of really learnign something great, after all we have paid 1250 rs each. but second day was no different, she again told us about type of pencils and shading for 2 mins and asked us to draw the basics shapes agian, the only differece we were supposed to shade them as below

 Day3: alas we were drawing something on day3 and also learn somethign scientific vanishing poitn concept one point, two point and also three point. and drawn something which can be visualised.

Day4: we started drwaing trees, and stones feeling better.

Day 5: started with a bit of difficulty, we have been given few landscapes and asked us to choose and draw any one. people struggled to find the easiest but all were difficult. we could draw about 10% of it and the hour got over. we are suppose to finish it in coming two days, monday and tuesday.

I hope to complete the big one..and more excited to use charcoal afterwords....

A day without Advertisements

I had a dream today, i was in a land where advertising was banned and it was such a wonderful experience before i got to know the truth.

I picked up and open the newspaper in the morning and there wasn’t any falling fliers. The all the pages had news only and first page was at the beginning and not after the advertisement page. There wasn’t any posters and banners in the street in the city landscape there were trees but not the billboards. Did not get to see any website name printed at the back of Auto Rickshaw and buses and trains will be cleaner and I could see the route map of the Local trains clearly as there was no stickers on top of it. Walls in the city was clean and painted with political party posters and rally slogans. No embarrassing undergarments drawing and secret disease cure on the railway track wall.

Prepaid to postpaid conversion call, Personal loan upto 15 lacks, Lifetime Club membership only for 99999 INR. Sale at central, lifestryle, peter England, Unlimited food offer at tasty buds, mozzerialla, Opening offer of Fashion and You. All day I didn’t got a SMS or phonel call regarding any of this. I surfed freely over internet, without any popup asking me if I am looking for a house, offering free screensavers nor letting me know the details of hot and single females near my area. No one send me any email regarding my winning million dollar lottery.

BUT just before I was about to enter my house thinking that I would get to see the complete episode without any commercial break on TV, they stopped me. Initially they were few. They were hungry they were jobless. Sooner there were many. There were marketers, there painters, there were artist, there were ad agencies, there were call center guys, models, hakims astrologers etc etc. They were young, old, working professional, homemakers, rich and poor all sorts. They were staring at me as if I have stolen all there money. One shouted from the crowd "hey, consumer, what will happen if you look at those wonderfull hoardings" then lots of voices "what harm, my SMS does to you". "we are in fact paying the bus, train, taxi to put ads on it and doing good to them". " we also will pay you for reading the SMS’s"

BEEP BEEP, i recvieved sms…I got up from sleep..but all the question still linger on my mind.

God's Existence

After reading this short story, i couldnt resist but to reproduce...

A man went to a barber shop to have his hair and his beard cut as always. He started to have a good conversation with the barber who attended him. They talked about so many things and various subjects. Suddenly, they touched the subject of God. The barber said:

"Look man, I don't believe that God exists as you say so."

"Why do you say that?" asked the client. "Well, it's so easy, you just have to go out in the street to realize that God does not exist. Tell me, if God exists, would there be so many sick people? Would there be abandoned children? If God exists, there would be no suffering nor pain. I can't think of a God who permits all of these things."

The client stopped for a moment thinking but he didn't want to respond so as to prevent an argument. The barber finished his job and the client went out of the shop. Just after he left the barber shop he saw a man in the street with a long hair and beard (it seemed that it had been a long time since he had his hair cut and he looked so untidy).

Then the client again entered the barber shop and he said to the barber:
"know what? Barbers do not exist."
"How come they don't exist?" asked the barber. "Well I am here and I am a barber."

"No!" the client exclaimed. "They don't exist because if they did there would be no people with long hair and beards like that man who walks in the street."

"Ah, barbers do exist, what happens is that people do not come to us."

"Exactly!" affirmed the client. "That's the point. God  does exist, what happens is people don't go to Him and  do not look for Him that's why there's so much pain and suffering in the world."

Know the features and Choose Right Mobile Phone for You

I had shared in my previous post that I will come up with topic on selecting mobile phones.I am first brieafing the list of features in this post.

Evolution of mobile phone has surpassed the statement "Necessity is the mother of all invention". Cell phone makers are believing that whatever is produced will get sold. This is what making our life troublesome and We tend to pay for what we don’t want or don’t intend to use. Market is inundated with dozens of brands together making thousands of phones with variety of features and most importantly disparity of pricing.

Smart buyers avoid this by simply listing down the features they are looking for and they might need in near future. However to do that one need to be aware of what are the features available and are in the offing. I am attempting in this post to brief about the technology and features which are here now. Firstly I categorized the features based on what popular websites displays and then detail each of it. Though the features are interrelated I would keep it simple for the readers.

1. Telephony and Messaging:Telephony is the basic, what cellphone are meant for. Very commonly people list telephony as CDMA and GSM, earlier CDMA was advantageous as it supported high speed data transfer, but in GSM arena after HSDPA over EDGE the data transfer speed has increased tremendously, and also in GSM you can swap the SIM card between phone, where as in CDMA one need to get configuration done by the operator. However there is much less threat of SIM cloning.
If you are in international traveller CDMA will not offer international roaming, moreover the presence of CDMA is limited to USA and some part of ASIA and Europe, GSM is everywhere.
With 3G technology the voice telephony will not get affected much, but with better bandwidth and high speed the voice CHAT and live streaming of video and TV channels, currently in India the 3G service are little expensive and coverage is also not very good. There are roughly 30-40 TV channels on Live streaming. There is no unlimited plans for 3G as of now and the limited one starts from 500 onwards.
Please keep in mind that where ever the 3G signal are not available, the device will automatically switch to 2G services.
Messages can be maintained on phone and memory, it can have threaded view and lot improved text input methods, like Swype and voice etc. as you go high. More on MMS, push email etc.
2. Screen Type, Size and Resolution: Screen resolutions is nothing but number of pixel per inch, so with increased resolution the clarity increased. If one is looking for video and live TV etc. go for high screen resolution something above 240x320. Another factor of screen is type the TFT & LED the advantage of LED is you can view the screen clearly even under the sunlight. Related to touch screen the capacitive touch is much smoother than resistive touch. Other main touch features are
1. Accelerometer sensor which helps in auto rotate pictures
2. Multi-touch which helps in pinch zoom and rotation
3. Proximity sensor for auto turn off
3. User Interface: User interface very important specially for smart phones, do get a feel of UI and find you like it. Do check the review of usability of the phone you are contemplating on you tube videos.
4. Battery capacity: very Important, these days with high end processing capabilities of phones consumes lots of power. Ensure that your phone is rigged up with sufficient battery capacity. Mostly in reviews manufactures mention the talk time and stand by battery life only but that’s not sufficient, you should ensure battery life at optimum usage. Android phones has this drawback of consuming lot of juice. Even 1200 mAh is not sufficient on Andro sets it will require you to charge twice daily. Also check for life of battery.
5. Camera: What you want from your camera, still, recording, flash, resolution etc. a 2MP camera with good lens and auto focus is sufficient for normal use. For recording 30 frames per second (FPS) is normal. Less expensive ones comes with 15 FPS usually. If you want to use camera more extensively there are phones which comes with very high resolutions and much more advance features.
One Need a front camera also called secondary camera for video calls.
6. Audio/Video and gallery: the quality of sound and video varies a lot, the maker will have usability in mind, if you are using phone for entertainment, check for the audio quality. There are players which plays all formats of audio and videos and some are very limited. Look for the apps in the phone you are looking for. Also the gallery can be organized and synced from your online data, the more high end phone automatically organize the content. Check your needs.
7. Connectivity: Bluetooth, IR, Edge, dual band, 3G, HSDPA, Wifi: IR is obsolete, Bluetooth 2.0 is sufficient for occasional data transfer, however, if relying of Bluetooth on regular synchronization, then ver 3.0 is required. Using Wifi you can access faster internet on your device using broadband services. If your phone is capable of reasonable browsing capacity do look for wifi. Even if you don’t have wifi, you can access internet using Edge, GPRS or HSDPA or 3G connections. Earlier stated 3 is expensive as of now, but if you look few months down the line it may not be as per the past trend. Using HSDPA which will work with 3G bandwidth only u can view live TV, video chat and surf at much faster speed. Usually the HSDPA these days on phone claims to give 3.6 -7.2 MBPS of speed. Ensure your need.
8. Processor, RAM, Storage: if you are going to replace your Laptop with handheld device and later sync, if you want to play high end games and multiple programs together then a high processing capacity and higher RAM is needed. If an android phone having 600MHZ processor this will be just sufficient from starting and switching between applications. And if not used optimally this will hang as well. Normally these days most of the phones comes with the extended capacity upto32GB, but try putting one even 16 GB card and access the data on it. It becomes very slow. Only phone with high speed processer can smoothly support 32 GB memory.
9. Browser: Opera mini is supposed to be fastest browser, so if you are using GPRS which gives data speed usually upto 32-48 kbps, it’s advisable to use opera. Also check the if the flash player is supported or not. For android phone of 2.2 foryo and above support the flash but one might have to purchase from the market.
10. GPS, MAPS and Navigation: If you travel a lot, this is very handy, even if you in unknown territory, you can find your way using GPS navigation and digital compass. On some phone there are limited GPS subscription and some are lifetime, do check on yours if buying one with GPS build in.
11. Operating System: Look for operating system of the phone, special focus with intent of how the applications are available on that platform, how it is prices and accessibility. Symbian, BADA, android etc. are common for Indian market.
12. Applications: how the phone is loaded with applications such as games, SNS integration, search, Youtube, document viewer/editor, photo/viewer/editor, calendar, voice command, audio/video players, antivirus etc. etc. the list is very long, list down your usage and check for them. It should either be loaded or easily downloadable.
13. Organizer and Documents: if you are checking mails whether you can download upload any application or not, viewing and editing of documents like word, excel, notes etc. are possible or not.
14. Aesthetic: this is very personal, you must like the shape, size, texture, finish and handling of the phone you are buying.
15. Value for Money: when a salesperson will pitch in they will try to sell a phone which is fully loaded as you will have all you ask for, but that comes very expensive. It is standard practice that,  you should list down the feature mandatory for you and feature that are good to have and  you might pay additional dollar to have that in your phone. Keeping this list search for phones available and then from the available list go by the combination of asthetics and pricing.

One very good site for checking the phone review is gsmarena and for online purchase of mobiles with reasonable discount in India is flipcart.

I hope this post will help you choosing the right phone for you.