A Lizard’s Tale


A Lizard’s Tale
Around midnight last night (my resolution to sleep earlier not going so well actually) I was about to call it a night and climb in to bed when movement caught my eye near the ceiling. It was the lizard that had made itself at home in my apartment the last few nights and had eluded my somewhat half hearted attempts to locate it whenever it made the chirping sounds lizards here make. Slowly I got back...
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The Future of Football


I came across this video today and decided that it is without doubt the future of football. I might start a Government petition to get it included in the Olympic Games too. Even if you don’t like football and think it’s a bunch of overpaid sissies running after a bag of air, you’ll want to watch football if it was played like this. Dubbed boblefotball, it was invented by those crazy…Norwegians. Now every player can bounce and roll around like Drogba and Cristiano Ronaldo whenever another player comes near them. Actually, thinking about it, we should wrap the original man of glass, Michael Owen, up in one of these the next time he steps out in a United shirt.

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My New Year’s Resolution


I forgot to publish a New Year’s Resolution, I hope I’m not too late! I’m going to keep it simple this year, so here we go:

1. Learn English proper, like. I’ve been told by many people that I have a wonderful writing style (Naaw, thanks guys!), but I’ve also been told by an equal number of people that my grammar sucks, my girlfriend even told me that a little piece of her dies every time I use an errant “are” instead of “is”. To rectify this (and to save my girlfriend) by the end of 2012, amongst others, I will have finally mastered the common apostrophe, know the exact times when to use the semi-colon, the colon and of course the hyphen and be the foremost expert on the tricky difference between “which” and “that”.

2. Lose another 4kg. It doesn’t sound like much, it doesn’t need to be much, I just need to be lighter at the end of the year than I am now.

3. Turn 29. Well, I need to have at least one resolution that I’ll be able to stick to! I’ve now successfully turned 29

4. Go to bed early. If I’m going to turn 29 this year then I need to stop going to bed at 1am and stop writing blog posts at 12:30am like this one, even if it is a Saturday tomorrow.

That’s all I can think of at the moment, it should be good enough, I’ll see you in 2013 to see how we all got on.

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How Did John Terry End Up On A Packet Of Cigarettes?


Not sure if it’s been widely reported back in England but it’s making the national news here in India. Apparently someone from the Indian Directorate of Visual Publicity decided to use John Terry’s image as part of a health warning on the packet of cigarettes here. Obviously this wasn’t authorized and Terry has taken legal action against ITC, the manufacturers of the cigarettes. Judging by the comments in the link below it seems many people in India don’t understand what the fuss is about.

From my own experience I have found there to be a certain copy and paste culture in India where people will copy the content from a website and pass it off as their own not realizing the legal or ethical problems with it. A case in point is that I do all the writing for my company website and marketing literature and I’ve lost count how many other Indian IT companies here have simply copied and pasted my content, in some cases forgetting to even remove the company name! An SEO candidate came for an interview once and was very proud of the book he had “written” on SEO and used it to show off his skills. A quick search on Google showed that it was a PDF anyone could download for free. I know copying and pasting happens everywhere but the feeling I get is that it’s more endemic here because there are no implications should you be found out.

In the case of John Terry, I’m sure the designer simply did a Google images search, found this image from the Internet and didn’t see any problem with using it – after all, it is slightly blurred, right?! I’m actually kinda curious as to why they used this image instead of an Indian man, it’s not like John Terry is particularly famous here – although he is now!

BBC News - 'John Terry' image appears in India anti-smoking drive
Terry plans legal action over Indian anti-smoking picturehttp://in.news.yahoo.com/terry-plans-legal-action-over-indian-anti-smoking-132156074–soccer.htmlRepresentatives of John Terry are taking legal advice after an image resembling the England football captain appeared on cigarette packs in India.
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The Battle of The Bulge


The Battle of The Bulge
Weight loss. Fat loss. Dieting. Whatever you want to call it, it’s something that I’m sure most of us would like to do at some point but that carrot cake and latte from Costa Coffee is so much more enticing than pounding the treadmill for 30 minutes solid. Every year I know people make a resolution to lose some weight, or at least not put on any more weight, but we all know what happens...
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A Very Chennai Christmas


A Very Chennai Christmas
This was the third year I celebrated Christmas in Chennai and it’s definitely getting more Christmasy with each year. I know a lot of people still see India as a far off land where everyone is very spiritual and yoga is done by everyone (it isn’t) but there is also a sizable Christian population here thanks to the legacy of the evangelical Europeans of yesteryear and more recently the relentless...
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Christmas Carols Like You’ve Never Heard Them Before


This is a video that will be understood by geeks and confuse the hell out of most regular folk. So the musical duo in the video below recorded themselves singing popular Christmas carols and then uploaded the videos to Youtube. Now Youtube has some automated closed caption technology which tries to understand what’s being said and show the correct words in the captions. As you can imagine the computer coded heuristic algorithms are still a long way from being perfect and famous lyrics like “let it snow, let it snow, let it snow” becomes “there is no, that is now, let us know”. Aww, bless those useless algorithms. Anyway, once the captions had been automatically generated the duo then sing the words that Youtube decided they were singing. Sound strange? It is, but it’ll put a smile on your face!

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The 1000KM Wedding – Part 2


The 1000KM Wedding – Part 2
This is Part 2 of the 1000KM wedding, if you haven’t read Part One of this scintillating story then I suggest you head over here and read it before continuing here. We arrived in Tiruppur about 6:30am, my body was running on auto-pilot from lack of sleep and I was thankful when I collapsed in to the hotel bed – and even more thankful that the hotel was really nice, none of the 5 star nonsense...
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The 1000KM Wedding – Part 1


The 1000KM Wedding – Part 1
“Hey Pete, are you coming to Sathish’s wedding?”. Asking if you are going to someone’s wedding is a daily occurance in India where everyone gets married between the ages of 23 and 29. Heaven forbid you should get to your thirties and your parents still haven’t found you your soul mate, right? So in my office there’s a group of guys a year or two younger than me and...
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The Fastest Foreigner In Chennai


The Fastest Foreigner In Chennai
For the last 12 months I’ve been beating up my body on a near daily basis at the local gym and the results have been nothing short of spectacular. I can now do 8 1/2 press ups without pausing for breath and given enough time to recover I can go on to do another 6. I’m really getting my money’s worth out of it. Every month the gym does challenges; a few months back it was the grand...
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