Build your own water fountain!

Alright 2 words - Feng Shui! Yeah baby! So I got the FS kick and decided to build me a water fountain. Heck who does not love the gentle sound of water trickling down all day along, especially when you gotta go .... haha!

Okay so how do you build your own little water fall? These are things you will need:

1. A submersible water pump, I got mine from Stein's Garden and Gifts store. You can also get them online.
For example: http://www.water2garden.org/little-giant-water-pump/

2. A pipe that will fit into the pump out and is long enough to bring water from the bottom to the top of the vase

3. Rocks of various shapes and sizes. Clean them after you collect them.

4. Water

5. A Vase to hold the pump, the water and rocks


Here's what you do .... fit the pump to the base of the vase. Fit the pipe to the pump pour some water and connect the pump to test if it works. If not go back to the store and go "why why why you sell me bad stuff huh?!"

















Anyways, if it works ....empty the water, take the rocks and one-by-one fill the vase with rocks so that you have volume for water to collect on one side and the rocks are on the other side. This will take time and requires patience. In fact this task is an exercise in patience : )

So, take your time, arrange the rocks and when you have them all in place - pour in the water and start the pump. If you have left space for the water to collect then the pump should push water out and it should fall into the remaining volume with that 'waterfall' sound!

Remember ... depending on how dry your home is the water will evaporate faster or slower, but it will evaporate and eventually the level will drop. A brilliant thing ...to NOT do is to let the water level drop below the pump's collection point ....otherwise the darn things tend to burn out! So assuming you DO NOT want the pump to burn out, fill water into the pump.

Oh yeah and if you have plants in the house, 'wick' water out of the fountain! Brilliant!

Recreational Coding and ideas in problem solving ....

It was after ages that I had sat down to code... code for fun that is!

Coding at work is fun but it is still work. "Recreational Coding", on the other hand, is theraputic and fun. So here is what I was trying to solve:

"On an m x n array, arrange numbers 1 to m x n, or 0 to (m x n - 1) , in a spiral."

For example, a 3 x 3 array (m = n = 3 ) will look like:

1 2 3
8 9 4
7 6 5


There are a variety of ways to solve this, my first attempt involved crazy matrix manipulation and wrapping a linear (1 row) m x n array to the matrix. Well, lets just say when 'm' was not equal to 'n' this one bombed big time ... remember those "Array out of bounds" exceptions. Yeah!

Well anyways, the next time I did what came naturally. I thought about 'walking' around the matrix and instead of thinking about a row-column layout, I though more from a co-ordinate geometry view point.

What emerged was a general rule which went something like this:


Walk 'm' Left
Reduce 'n' by 1
Walk 'n' Down
Reduce 'm' by 1
Walk 'm' Right
Reduce 'n' by 1
Walk 'n' up
Reduce 'm' by 1


So there you have it! With a little bit of pretty printing and some 'spint n shine' - the code was ready. But that was not the end of it ... here is the next question that emerged that I have not been able to answer so far (have not looked in google for any of this yet) ....

....so now we have a solution, can we get this in a more elegant way? I mean instead of walking Left, Down, Right and Up in a spiral can we generate the co-ordinates using 'step' we are at?

More precisely - Is there a function of 'i' which gives us a Row and and a function of 'i' which gives us a value of Col where 'i' ranges from 1 ... m x n ????

For example:
i Row Col
--- ---- ----
1 0 0
2 0 1
3 0 2
4 1 2
5 2 2
6 2 1
7 2 0
8 1 0
9 1 1

Dance into the light ...

...here is a video that I had made for a friend in 2002 or some era like that.

Days, weeks, months, years later I have removed the cobweb, dusted off the layer of 'stuff' on the video and posted it - yes - on youtube!

I hope it reminds you of better times...

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiRRLgsSVC8

My Grandad!

Guess what!!! I dug up a picture of him, my Grandpa! ...he was my mom's dad, & passed away in, ummm...1994, I think. We were close and I really miss him a lot, especially since I had not been with Dad's dad.

I saw this picture, on the wall, at their (my Grandpa and Grandma's) house in SBP (Sambalpur Orissa)... oh! when I looked into the glass frame, I could see my reflection on his face. The eyes, the jaws ...I'd even sported a similar hair style when I had longer (read more) hair. It was a proud moment! It was like looking back at my genes, looking back in time and all that good stuff. ah!

It was then that I decided to capture the picture on the wall using my digital camera and well ...here it is!!!

Mr. Aniruddha Mishra [1906-1994]

Wachu do this New Years?

Wish you all a Happy 2007. Whatchu do? I danced the night away! Hell yeah!

The past New Years in the U.S have literally sucked. New York was okay, Houghton one's were boring and the one's before are hazy due the amount of alcohol involved. Nothing beats dancing the night/morning away! Seriously!

So the party started around 10 ...we had to goto this Desi gathering at a bowling alley. It was time to take some souvenior (spelling?) pics ...here's one with Dharma and Payal. Come to think of it, its funny how it was the 3 of us who stuck around till 6am later after the rest had gone ....

[Dharma, Payal, Alok - posing]

....first, the dancing started at the alley. Desi dhinchak stuff.

[Mukund and Kumud leading the way]

... then we moved to PI, the local 'posh' club. They play techno there, as opposed to Hip Hop at the other place and it got wild after a while. Napkins flying, Yeager-Bombs flowing, Booty Shakin', Girl-on-Bar-Top-Falling, Bathroom-with-long-drunk-lines kinda wild!!!

The mayhem lasted until 6am when we drove back with Aatif blaring on our car stereo....hummm. "Jaage hain, sooye nahi"

[Payal (cutie), Me (crazy), Dharma (suave)]

Rocky - The Original!!!!

I just remember'd how COOL my doggie 'Rocky' is ...last summer I was home and it was so much fun to see him. He'd roll in the mud (we are a wee bit scratchy) and then come home carrying the filth all over, while looking with those innocent "whaddi-do?" eyes!

So one afternoon, while he was lazing in the air-conditioned room I went all paparazzi on him and clicked a few snaps ...















"excuse me?"

Rigoletto

...oh the Christmas traffic was nuts!!!

Tried to park at the mall today and while I zig-zagged through the rows of cars looking for an empty spot, my ears has wrestled my attention to a magical tone that filled my heart with emotions and conjured it...

NPR (National Public Radio) was playing Guiseppe Verdi's Rigoletto, live from the Metropolitian theatre in New York.

Ah! It was worth the wait for the empty parking spot ....just driving around, listening to the emotions in those voices. Bravo!

• Rigoletto: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigoletto
• The Finale of Rigoletto on YouTube