ramantheb.com

A quick shout out about rachel assil, who i performed with earlier this week at the Bitter End. Do listen and let her know what you think. She can be reached at live@rachelassil.com

So earlier this week, i was waiting outside a subway station midtown when a middle aged (late 20’s) man of Indian origin walked up to me. The conversation went along these lines

middle aged man: Hi, are you from India ?
me: why do you ask ?
middle aged man (I shall refer to him as ‘mam’ from now on): My name is …,i am from Boston. I need some help, i lost my wallet and cell phone today, i know no one in new york. i need to get back to boston tonight etc etc.. i need money for the bus ticket, could you help me out.
me: i have had a lot of people solicit money from me citing similar circumstances only to see them the next day round the block rolling a joint. Why should i believe you ?
mam: I am not like that… i just came from india, i wanted to visit NY, blah blah, (his story is not all that convincing, but his address is valid( i googled it) and his number is not in service as he had it terminated after losing it. He claimed he did it from a pay phone and its a 1-800 number)
me: ok do you have a paypal account ? you could transfer money to me right now(on my phone) and i could give it to you in cash.
mam: paypal, what is that ?

and so it carries on for a while.

Decision time.. though i dont trust the story, i decide to give him the money on the premise that if it were true i could really help someone and get the money back. Worst case, i lose 30 bucks)

its been almost a week and i have not heard back from the person, maybe the story was true, but he just lost my contact info. Maybe he laughed his ass off all the way to the nearest bar. But its interesting how Indians think other Indians are likeliest to help among all.

Will update if i do hear back :).

Here’s a quickly edited video of some footage i managed to get my hands on. The background score is also by yours truly !

and here’s me after the race

ive been wanting to do this for a while, and finally i managed to set aside a couple of hours to put something together before basketball fantasy season starts in a couple of weeks. Baseball just ended last week, I ended up finishing #1,#4,#10 in 3 different leagues of 12 teams each. With a little more attention i could have easily had #1, #1/#2 and #5.

Juggling time across 4 different fantasy games, 8 different leagues is not fun. Hence to make my life simpler i put together a pipe that will aggregate news about my fantasy players(injuries/time off etc) from about 15 popular sites and deliver it to my rss aggregator.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=LuZxK1Rx3BGwOpLv6kjTQA

The pipe currently supports 15 popular sites that i use often, but that information is totally configurable. Pls do mess around and share your experiences with it.
feedback most welcome.

(half marathon, rather) preparations keeping me busy as I’m traveling to Philadelphia to run 14 miles this Sunday . No particular incentive to compete in the marathon except, i guess, self-fulfillment.

I want to use this opportunity to spread the word about Children international, where i have been a sponsor for over 3 years now.

http://mycampaign.children.org/goto/ramantheb

I am sure this cause is worthy enough of your contributions.

Feel free to ping me with me with questions.

(p.s, I’ve never run 14 miles in all my practice runs so hopefully i do complete.)

on the sports field; such an integral part of the professional game, is usually fascinating TV. A mouthful of rubbish or a shirt tug on a soccer field can often lead to a crushing tackle or a sickening head-butt(as was the case with zizou). Baseball pitchers often throw a fastball on the inside of the plate at an opponent hitter and some sort of retaliation follows . In a recent episode a couple of weeks back, alex rodriguez copped one for distracting a third-baseman during a routine play.

The reason i bring this up is that for every act that crosses limits, the on field umpire has the power to eject players for breaking the spirit of the game. Sadly, this is not the case on a cricket field. In the recent test series between India and england, there were some very silly and very serious altercations on the field.

In my opinion, there is a very simple way to prevent future occurrences of similar episodes. Eject the bowler from the game and penalize the bowling team 1o runs if the umpire deems it intentional. Right now, the bowler is allowed two beamers (intentional or otherwise) before he is barred from bowling again in the same innings. I can bet the ball wont be slipping out of the fast bowlers’ hands as frequently as they do these days.

is back in the news(not that he is ever not in the news), this time for submitting an application to buy the Chicago Cubs.

This may exactly be what the Cubs need, some passion, tons of money and the leadership of Cuban. I would not be surprised if one Mr. Rodriguez makes his way to chicago if the yankees dont make the playoffs this year, pocketing another cool $250 million.

In many ways, a-rod is like the ’sachin tendulkar’ of yankees baseball, with critics and fans always at him for not delivering in the clutch. Come august, if the yankees are still close to double digits behind boston, a-rod’s gone.

So tomorrow is the start of what may be a glorious indian summer in england. The time difference makes it a little difficult to adjust for new york viewers but hopefully its worth it.

over the Iphone was/is justified as apple seem to have delivered a very good product. Am just gonna mention a couple of things i noticed when I played around with one last evening at the 5th Ave store. It worked just as well as the advertisements promised,so that encompasses all the +ves.

A couple of things apple could have done better.

i) two handed use of the touchpad to email/message is difficult. apple claims heuristics will improve performance.

ii) For some weird reason there’s no auto-recognition of a 10 digit phone number and a prompt to call ,when its part of an email text or message.

A very,very good product nevertheless. goodies are described in detail here.

p.s there were more media and camera then the number of people in line at the 5th ave store at 6 pm.
last i heard they still had both 4 and 8 gb models at 9 pm. go figure !.

update: i totally forgot to mention the sick adapter thats required to use third party headphones with the IPHONE. When i asked an apple store employee about the headphone jack, he indicated it might be a faulty product and was not aware of the fact that it needed an adapter. engadget has a list of headphones that do work, and apple better get its iphone to work with the grados !.

Whenever attempting to improve my jazz, i always go back to my favorite jazz artists Pat Metheny, Mike Stern and Miles Davis. I had a chance to see Pat mid-April but i decided in favor of this concert the same night. Probably a bad, bad choice. Especially when you listen to this.

(embedding disabled, hence the link)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=zn3zIBBmXiU

and this,

Pat’s usually very meticulous in taking down videos he does not want off yt, so maybe he actually let this be and for good reason too. Pure magic.

update: some of these have been removed already.

(or lack of patterns) in my everyday activity seem to reflect inconsistency and tardiness. My blogging seems to be afflicted with the same disease which i shall correct.  Anyway the last month and a half -> a fun little period in my life that included a trip back home, weekly training sessions for the marathon that i plan to participate in and a renewed (?) interest in music composition.

My trip back home started off well, unlike my last attempt. It was a cramped two weeks which was all the time i was given off work. Managed to meet almost everyone i wanted to and shared some good times with everyone. India is always fun and mom’s koottu still beats the shit out of anything(as always) i get to eat in this city.

some pics from the trip.

http://picasaweb.google.com/ramantheb/IndiaTripMay2007 

http://picasaweb.google.com/backinurface/Gangstaz