Lingaa->Rajni->Balleilakka->Choirs : How mass movies lead to high music

So I watched Lingaa yesterday.

Because of which I was googling and youtubing for rajni's impact outside india; and was largely expecting to find videos from japan - which I did.

But what was really interesting is that I found at least 5 to 6 videos of one song from Rajni's last movie - Sivaji - being sung by school choirs across US.

The song's called Balleilakka, and here's the original:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tma8zoLEPJU

Here's a sampler of schools choirs singing it:

Best that I found: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQWLqcNr9B8
Really fast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rvo1_vLGAGo
Pretty good, but smattering of indians :) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUhMQYW-xmk
Pretty good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09C8s1QhgqE
Shitty accoustics, but points for the effort: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSJYVAB8XQU


.. and I began to wonder: why this song alone? None of them actually mentioned the source of the song; they usually called it an indian song in tamil. I think one mentioned that its AR Rehman's song.

So they were actually using it because it was a complex song musically - it was a tongue twister even for natural speakers of the language and what was really obvious from listening to it when sung by a chorus is that it had many layers and voices to it. I dont obviously know the right musical terms here, but in programming terms, it was a mutlithreaded song - multiple concurrent voices had to be active to make it happen, and each voice was sure to get knotted up in the tongue twister lyrics; not to mention that the beat was really fast! No wonder the choruses are taking it up as a challenge.

Its amazing that I live in a time when composers like Rehman have enough commercial clout to put complex music into a movie meant for the masses. Even better: not only do the intended audiences love the song, so do people who are serious about music!

I fixed some hardware!

This is a personal first. I took my wife's laptop apart and repaired it!

My wife has a Lenovo 670 that we bought in India. Its a low-end laptop that I chose for her because we were in the market due to my son spilling water over the good Toshiba that she originally had. "You use it mostly for browsing", I had reasoned, adding: "Besides, its a Lenovo, which used to be a Thinkpad, so these things are rugged; and more importantly it has the chicklet keyboard so we're covered on the water spillage scenario from now on".

While it indeed was rugged, it didnt endear itself to my wife because it was slow as hell. Still, she was not a fan of the Mac and was happy that it was the one Windows machine in the household.

Fast forward 2.5 years later and across the globe where we are now, the poor laptop had fallen for the umpteenth time from the side table (I think it was the son again - this time a well-placed kick in sleep) and the wife found that she could no longer charge the laptop. The connector could still be seen inside, but it was not in its slot and couldn't be paired with the charger.

"Husband, can you see if you can fix this?" she asked. I quickly googled the nearest Lenovo service center and left it open in a tab for her to see.

A few weeks later, she got around to calling the service center only to be told that they didn't service any models sold outside the US of A, thank you very much.

We considered shipping it off true desi style with some hapless acquaintance to be delivered to a service center in India that DID service such models, but thought it might be not worth all that hassle.

So my wife repeated her original question and went one step further and found a web page with instructions on how to do it.

Two or three weeks later, I got around to looking at it. The initial steps were all pretty standard - unscrew 13 screws, turn over, unscrew 8 other screws and so forth. The rest were decidedly not unless you've been assembling and disassembling laptops (or other electronics) all your life.

Here's the thing about electronics these days: They're giant 3-D puzzles that have been put together in a space the size of a football field and then squished into the final size that you get it in. There is apparently one and only one way to take the thing apart and almost everything requires you to take the whole thing apart. Must be nice to be in a market where your product has no serviceable parts or the act of servicing it will render it non-serviceable.

So I got around to removing the battery (of course), back cover, the hard disk, the connection to the wireless lan and the optic drive. I had skipped the memory hoping it would not be germane to my fixing the power supply connection. Going through the next steps. however, it looked like the only way I could get to the power supply was by removing the fan, the cpu heat sink and the cpu itself.

Now this is not new territory to me - I HAVE disassembled a laptop before - solely because of my cheapness. Back in the early 2000s, they sold an abomination of a laptop called eMachines - they had great specs and were cheap; except they killed themselves whenever you ran more than 3 applications because the cpu heated up past its allowed range due to the cheap heat sink they put in. One way to solve this was to open it up and clean out the sink yourself.

Anyhoo, because of that experience, I knew that taking the CPU out implies putting in new compound - something that I didnt have then nor had now (side note: I had taken a chance with the eMachines and put the hardened compound back as-is and it did work for a while :) ). So I did what everyone would do - tried taking either the bottom half of the laptop or the bevel surrounding the keyboard without touching the CPU or its sink.

After about 5 hours, I gave up. All natural light had gone by then and I really couldnt work with the incandescent lights and the Walmart tools that I had. So I gave up for the next few weeks.

Finally, I picked it back up today. Started at about 11 am and by 6 I had the bevel around the keyboard removed. Here's the kicker: Remember I told you that these things are 3D puzzles? Well, not only are they puzzles, they're also traps: manufacturers put in blue paint on screws and stickers on specific components that will tell them if we've actually looked inside. The thing that held me up for a good 4 hours? One screw that was hidden under a Lenovo sticker. After I found it at 3 hours and 57 mins counting, I realized that special gum those kindly folks at Lenovo used would not allow me to peel the sticker off. It had to be scratched out - leaving no doubt that whatever warranty this laptop could have been under has now been voided.

Once the bevel was removed, I could look at the connector. Sure enough everything was fine and all it needed was to be put back in place. To their credit, this Lenovo had taken all kinds of weird angles of the charger and worked well until recently. I dont know if there was a bit that did hold it in place, but it looked like all they had going to keep it there was a snug fit. So I made that a lil bit snugger with some quickfix glue and closed the whole thing up.

And by "closed the whole thing up" I mean "Spent the next 2 hours painstakingly following the instructions in reverse order, of which half an hour was spent looking - unsucessfully - for the one washer that got away and was now hidden in the beige savannah called my carpet, then reaching the last step only to realize that step 8 was reinstalling the keyboard (a link off to another page) that I'd missed so going back a few steps to take gajillion screws out again and popping the keyboard out and finally getting it all together with 2 screws outside"

As if on cue, the wife showed up and asked nonchalantly: "How's it going?". This must be how CEOs and VPs feel.

We fired it up and it hasn't exploded - yet.

My wife, of course, noted dryly that it seems somewhat slower - like my hardware machinations could have magically slowed down the electronic pathways inside Windows 7.

I was just happy that it worked :). We hi-fived. She said she's proud she married someone who knows how to fix things.

Of Phonewords and Carpet Jingles: Its funny how the brain works

I was talking to a colleague about how my android phone's dialer doesn't have some basic features - like the ability to paste a number directly into it (LG Optimus 500, 2.2 - ymmv).

...which led to..

Me remembering how Blackberries had the ability to dial phonewords directly by pressing Alt.

...which led me to two things:

1. Googling if android does the same. It doesn't looks like it does. Funnily, all searches led to blackberry forums where the Alt trick is described. Isn't progress wonderful?
2. Googling 800-588-2300 - the one number (and jingle) I cannot forget.

... which led me to..

The metafilter discussion about Empire and the empire man.

... which led me to...

1. Wonder how I remember seeing the commercial in NJ when the post doesn't list it as one of states in which Empire operates? Maybe I remember it from my time in Florida? Man, that would make it memorable for a decade! That's some recall power for a product that I've not ever bought.
2. Now run around the whole day in Bangalore singing both the Empire AND Luna jingles!

PS: Best quotes from the metafilter page:

The man has gone, but the goddamn jingle will never die. I hope Hauldren's heaven is plush and stain resistant, with no monthly payments til July

and:

"we're been getting some ads in the same form for Luna carpet, but I haven't the foggiest idea what their phone number is."
877-241-LUNA. I'm ashamed of myself for knowing that.
What? No. 773-202-(boop beep boop beep) LUNAAAAA. 

On a personal note: Remembering 9/11

It's been 10 years.

Like many in our generation, I remember where I was and what I was doing that day. I know Latur probably had greater deaths, as probably did Bhopal; but this is the one that I was closest to.

I lived in Parsippany, NJ then and remember heading out to my car to go to work only to be told that the towers were bombed. I remember watching in disbelief as people jumped from one certain death to another. And then the videos of the plans actually crashing. And then the short messages people sent their dear ones from the planes. I remember a nation coming together immediately.

I remember walking into our regular diner the weekend after 9/11 and being asked: "You're indian, right?" by the guy who'd seated us every time before. If I were him, I'd ask too. I remember the Indians touting American flags on their cars for the next few months.

I remember feeling sad that this tragedy of epic proportions was becoming a media circus, yet being so part of it that I couldn't look away. I remember going to Ground Zero a month or so after 9/11 and feeling viscerally affected - the scene left enough clues as to how it happened: from the huge gaping hole with twisted steel and crumbled slabs of concrete to the charred buildings nearby I could imagine the myriad personal horrors that the people who were there on that day went through. I remember being annoyed by the street hawkers who had already started selling touristy swag nearby, but was numbed enough by the event and the place themselves to ignore such pettiness.

I remember going to Ground Zero last year and still feeling the same as before. I remember being a tad ticked off that the scene didn't look much different from before - maybe it had, but where was the monument to all the people who died that day? Where was the imposing answer that showed that we as humans will not bow down to terrorism?

I remember the firemen being nice to my kids and posing for pictures (they asked to sit on the fire engine), but couldn't ignore the thought that maybe some of them had friends who were no more. And I still couldn't understand the picknicky people swarming the site nor the hawkers with their "I've been to Ground Zero" T-shirts and mugs.

Fiercely apolitical, I have actively shunned news media in all its forms since my college days, but I couldn't get enough of the coverage of the Bin Laden capture. Real or not, it gave me closure to those events from a decade ago - and I didn't even lose any dear ones.

I cannot remember  a date to save my life, but I remember going to the World Trade Center on July 4th 2001.  I was badly hung over from the previous night and the meal from the restaurant at the top of the tower set me right so I could enjoy the view. I remember there being barbed wire surrounding the deck to prevent jumpers - seems kinda pointless now.

I kept the ticket stub to the towers and joke to my friends that I'm keeping it for its antique value, but whenever I happen on it while sorting my keepsakes, I'm taken back to this day, ten years ago.