Most of the autos and a lot of the yellow-painted vehicles in Chennai have this saying on the back “We two ours one” or sometimes simply “Ours one.” Along with the P. James tagging covering everything in Chennai, this was another prevelant sight that Amy and I were not certain what it meant.
We ended up asking one of our local friends about it, and it turns out that this is India’s attempt at population control. The slogan used to be “We two ours two” meaning two children per family, but that has since been reduced to the one child per family recommendation….
The above photo was in an auto that Amy and I took to work one day. We liked both the propaganda for controlling family size and the call for no child labor. Explosive fun!
AKA “Quick, shhh! The Big-boss has just entered….”
I was on the Tata-Dhan Academy vehicle the other day (or, as they like to call it, the “vee-kul”) and one of the passengers was the head of our organization. There was a notable hush over everyone in the van as we sat there waiting for the last members to shut down their computers and pack up to leave. Yet this is a time that most of the passengers chit-chat, play music on their mobile phones, finger drum on the seats, and generally enjoy themselves at the day’s end. But in front of me, two of my colleagues are whispering so quietly that I would guess their actual means of communication was by reading each other’s lips.
I recently had to create an A6 booklet for an event that was being hosted by DHAN Foundation/Tata-Dhan Academy. At first, I thought it would be a nightmare to design and print it—particularly because I only had one day to do the layout for a 60+ page book—but it turns out that using OpenOffice.org (OOo) Writer makes the task quite simple.
I won’t pretend that I don’t have any illegal software installed on my computers, but here are a couple of scenarios that have occurred at work recently.
A student came to me with his new laptop and asked me “Can I have a copy of Office 2007?”
I thought for a minute and said, “Um, why? What do you have right now?”
“They installed Office 2003 when I purchased the laptop.”
I was making a feeble attempt at cleaning out some of the clutter in my living room, and I quickly got distracted when I remembered that I had brought back a copy of the booklet that had accompanied the DWAB “One Final Episode in Our Attempts at Persistence” record. What should I do? Continue cleaning? Or scan the booklet and post it online?
It was a tough decision, but I ended up deciding to go with the booklet option, so here it is…. Lots of mellow drama….
Kiran just reminded me the other day of something I heard about some one year ago or something, but which I had sort of shrugged off because of my slow internet connection: Dropbox. Well, with the reminder came with another set of exploration, in particular, beyond backup, sharing, and synchronization–all of which Dropbox does really well–can it really do anything more for me?
From time to time, I like some minor embellishments in my design, and one such embellishment I use is the drop cap that you commonly find in magazines and so on. In OpenOffice.org (OOo) it is pretty easy to do this throughout a document. As with the last tutorial, this one is also going to focus on how it can be done automatically using “Styles and Formatting” rather than having to manually recreate the effect on each paragraph.
I know… you are all rockin’ out so hard to the new DWAB album “New and Found Songs Keep the Music Playing” and you just don’t know what to do with yourselves while you wait for new DWAB music.
Well, your wait is over since I found another song that I hadn’t included on NAFSKTMP. I couldn’t figure out what to call it, so I simply called it “The Song that Didn’t Make it.”
To add to the findings, I also found my original cover ideas for this album which, by the way, are dated 2004 (just to give you an idea of exactly how lazy I’ve become in my old age).
A couple of years ago (yes, years) I posted two Reality Control? compilations. Most people who know anything about Reality Control? know about the label that was run by John Lyons (by the way John, belated happy birthday!) but I’m not sure that too many know that there was also a band called Reality Control? and yes, John was in it for a while. (It was also the name of John’s super cool zine that he should digitize and post online–I can’t do it from here in India unless he wants to send me old copies of all of them….)
Anyway, I was looking through some of my old MiniDiscs and copying some of the music on there and came across this oddity: a Reality Control? tape titled “Children of Terra.” I don’t have the actual tape with me, so unfortunately I cannot tell you who was on this tape (I know John was not) nor can I tell you what the song titles are. If anyone else has this tape, maybe they can pass the information on.
You might also want to check out Ryan’s post of A Fool’s Paradisewhich not only has songs by Reality Control? but also songs by Suckerpunch (the song’s on the 10″ also, but this is a different recording), Downcast, and others.
I was looking through my posts the other day and I just realized that somehow, my Gallery2 installation totally disappeared. What that means, unfortunately, is that there are a whole bunch of old posts (like my 2007 India Vacation posts) which have a whole bunch of broken links.
Browsing through my file manager, I found that all the albums were still there, but the way that Gallery2 dealt out photos hid their actual album location and gave some sort of “fake” link. I tried to reinstall Gallery2, but in the process got a whole bunch of errors, so I thought I would explore the Gallery3.
So, now, all of the photos have been migrated over to Gallery3 (which I think I already like a bit more than Gallery2), and when I have some time to do some boring link-fixing, I guess I will get around to fixing my broken links. In the meantime, if you find any references to photos which show a broken photo placeholder, you can head over to photos.mrdwab.com and see if you can find them there.
