Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

Last Thursday, I had my first swimming lesson. Well, not really my first lesson. I took lots of lessons when I was a kid, but never learned because I was terrified of the water. There’s something very unsettling to not be touching something solid.

Anyway, I’ve been meaning to learn how to swim for a while. Since I’m going to Hawaii soon for our honeymoon and work is a little slow right now, I started taking private lessons. I had my first lesson on Thursday at the Pro Club. The pool was full of little 3 to 5 year olds getting lessons; and me. :-)

I started out blowing bubbles under water, trying to touch my toes (you start floating and rolling backwards), and then small pieces of the front crawl. I was planning to work out after my lesson, but a lesson filled of extremely tense work in the pool was enough for me. I wish I was like one of those little kids that aren’t yet smart enough to understand drowning. Then, learning to swim wouldn’t be that hard.

Reuters reports that Americans are getting too fat for X-rays and scans to work. This is creating a new market for imaging technology that can penetrate the patient’s fat layers or just be big enough so the patient can fit in.

Just about every culture is extremely proud of its contributions to the world. For example, the effect of Buddhism and Hindu spirituality spreading throughout Southeast Asia and the world is a point of pride for India. During my travels in India, people there seemed amused at a more recent influence: the spread of vegetarianism. In fact, most people remark that there are now more vegetarians in America then in India.

Seems like a bunch of my friends are becoming pesca-vegetarians: ovo-lacto vegetarian except they eat fish. Since most of them are not the types that follow fads, wondered if there’s a common cause.

For one, it is part of a personal redefinition in changing to a more responsible adult. This includes less alcohol, more exercise, and better diet. By cutting out the meats and processed food, he says his physical, mental, and physiological health has vastly improved. I have another few friends who have this or slight variants of this justification.

Jason, however, seems to fall into another bucket. His first post described that reasons that most people are vegetarians. His highly anticipated second post described his reasons. From what I can tell, his reason went from accident to curiosity to “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

For me, vegetarianism is a deep integral part of myself, even though I don’t care to spread my way of life to others (unlike a PETA and other whackos).

Growing up Hindu in America, the contrast between Western religion and Eastern religion was very clear to me. Eastern religion becomes so much a part of you someone is, in how they think and act, that it is no longer a distinguishable entity from the self. What I think is what I think; it’s not because “the holy book says so”. So when I was growing up, people asked what Hindus did and the only quick explanation I could give is that they were vegetarian and then explain the beliefs that lead to that behavior.

Even though, a lot of Hindus now eat meat, it’s not something I’d consider since the above spiritual reason is reinforced by a few other reasons (also mentioned by Jason): Why kill animals if you don’t have to? In theory it’s a healthier diet (though my cheese heavy diet can be improved greatly). And I have no desire to eat meat.

So what do I eat? Well, I’m trying to make my diet more healthier — it’s something I’ll write in a later post.

Back in 2002, a professor released his findings on an experiment to find the world’s funniest joke. The winning joke was:

Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn’t seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy takes out his phone and calls the emergency services.

He gasps: “My friend is dead! What can I do?” The operator says: “Calm down, I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.” There is a silence, then a gunshot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says: “OK, now what?”

Back in June, the same professor discovered that the joke was originally written by Spike Milligan in 1951 television show.

Though the joke changed slightly over 50-plus years (the setting changed from a sitting room to hunters in the woods), it’s very interesting that the joke is still very funny.

Fox is using a new strategy in advertising their new teen movie John Tucker Must Die: the movie website is on MySpace.com.

Originally, when Fox bought MySpace most people were unsure of what the play was. MySpace didn’t have a clear revenue model, but it was immensely popular. I had thought the play was to do passive market research: data mine MySpace for fads and trends that could allow NewsCorp to respond very quickly and launch successful products.

It looks like Fox is trying a more proactive approach to using MySpace for marketing. By giving the movie a MySpace presence, they can use Web 2.0 elements like blogging and tagging to easily spread word about the movie. Plus it’s a very cheap method compared to traditional TV advertising.

If you do check out the movie’s site, you’ll see that John Tucker has 79,793 linked friends and 1697 people have left a comment (at the time I wrote this). I wonder how effective this advertising will be and if there’s a way to cleanly measure its impact.

I’d never thought about this question until today. Today, Crissy met the postman and he said his wedding gift for us was that he delivered our RSVP cards, despite them being too small to mail. I thought it was very nice of him, considering that we do need those RSVPs to know how much food to order and what not.

However since I have too much time on my hands, this isn’t the end of the story. I decided to research a bit. The USPS has a not-so-easy to find page that gives the minimum size for letters: 3.5 by 5 inches.

It turns out our RSVP envelopes are just over the minimum since the cards themselves are 3.5 by 5, but the envelopes are slightly bigger. So technically, we’re fine. However, we had a few arrive that got chewed and torn up by the post office’s sorting machines. We even had some that got returned to sender for being too small.

So, if we do start a wedding invitation outsourcing business, I think the minimum for RSVP cards we sell will be 4 by 6 inches.

I’m going to run with “new home” and “new blog” analogy a bit more: I’m slowly moving in and getting set up.

The photo section now basically has the same content that the spaces site had, but with better resolution and navigation. I will be adding some more pictures over the next few days. Coppermine (the photo program I’m using) is really annoying me. Let me know what you guys think, if I need to get another one I can. Or, I could just fix the annoying parts I’m seeing. After all, I’m, in theory, knowledgeable on how to use a database to manage files. :-)

The sidebar is slowly changing as my familiarity with these Web 2.0 acronyms (CSS, PHP, etc.) increases. Hopefully that will be resolved in a few days.

Lastly, I do like this blog layout. It’s simple and straight-forward. It does however need some color. I’ll probably add a picture to the header section at some point.

No more renting for me! I’m now a home owner — or more accurately a new web domain owner. From now on, I’ll do all my blogging and photo hosting here at www.vijaybangaru.com. The old site, spaces.msn.com/vrbangaru, will stay as an archive, because I’m not planning on moving that content here.

I haven’t blogged in a long time, so I have a lot of drafts and content (books read, movies watched, etc) waiting to go. But, since the upcoming few weeks are going to be ridiculously busy, we’ll see how much I get done.

Please be patient as I get the site up and running. :-)