八月

I did it. Procrastinated. Kept putting it aside, hoping no one would notice. But that did not happen.

On Aug 7, I received an email from DF Mahesh (MK) that read (literal translation of non-English portions in brackets) - "maamu (uncle)....blogging ka ek usool hai baap (blogging of one principle is dad).....if u say u will post by next week, u shud post by next week. Its kinda important to show up. Not that it matters at the start so much, but down the line ur readers will wait. guess i am waiting :)". I couldn't have asked for better friends. Thanks MK for pushing me to keep it going. I really appreciate it.

I assume that you've noticed the unusual title of this post. After making up my mind about today's content, I realized that the only word that summarizes it all is, August. Not satisfied, I decided to give it a twist -- in Chinese (for obvious reasons).

According to me, China lived up to their promise of hosting the greatest show on earth (leaving aside the-little-lip-synching-girl and fake fireworks controversies). The show was indeed spectacular from the perspective of a television audience like me. As I write, Michael Phelps is getting ready to swim the history-in-the-making race, 200 m butterfly. He has broken the world record (WR) six times in this event before now. [5-minute break to watch it]. Alright, he won (as expected) but did not break the WR this time around. But hey, he just made history; athlete with the highest number of gold medals at the Olympics, now 11 (his 5th in Beijing 2008 and counting). Brilliant! This brings me to my favorite moment @ the Olympics - the 4 x 100m freestyle relay. French swimmer Alain Bernard was quoted saying - "The Americans? We're going to smash them. That's what we came here for". I absolutely love moments like these in sports. After reading this, I ended up glued to the television at 11.30pm EST on Sunday night. And guess what? USA won! Jason Lezak probably swam the race of his life when he came from behind in the final 50 meters to win the race by a margin 0.08 sec. Exhilarating! Check out the expression on the faces of Mike and Garret after their victory. A real sweet moment of success. If you missed it, check it out here. It is a must watch! Another special moment of course, was the first ever individual Olympic gold medal secured by an Indian athlete - Abhinav Bindra (10 m shooting). While following this news I stumbled upon an interesting historical fact. Cricket was played at the Olympics in 1900. Only two teams competed, where England beat France (?). Belgium and Holland were the other two teams that opted out due to co-hosting issues. So, the idea of playing Cricket at the Olympics is not a new one (Twenty20 at the Olympics in 2020?). I am really looking forward to it!

[Rest of this post written on Aug 13]

Moving on. We had a nice get-together on Aug 3 at home with the usual suspects - DFs Viju, Deep, Arvind and Anand. Mom cooked good Indian-Chinese food (I plan to post recipes in the near future). We also celebrated Arvind's birthday (Aug 6) with some delicious cake. Check out some pictures here.

On Aug 9, we visited the Empire State Building (ESB) in midtown New York City (NYC). As much as I love NYC, the view of the city from the 86th floor observatory of the ESB failed to impress me. There may be a couple of reasons for this - [1] I've been atop twice, both during the day [2] I cannot forget the view from the SkyPod of the CN tower in Toronto. Anyways, I managed to take panoramic snapshots of the North, East, South and West side views of the city and the Statue of Liberty at a distance. Also, I thought the view of midtown NYC from DF Akshay's place in Jersey was pretty neat (see photo). Other pictures from the trip can be viewed here. DF Akshay accompanied us to the ESB and while we were at it, he said - "Dude, you should make your blog funny if you want people to read it". I tried to explain/remind him about the intent of this blog and invited him to be a guest writer in my blog to improve its humor quotient (HQ). He agreed. I haven't gotten anything from him as yet, but he did start a blog of his own. Thought I'd do my DF part of advertising it. Look forward to stuff from him in my upcoming posts.

I did however, take Akshay's comment seriously i.e. decided to work on my blog's HQ. I absolutely loved my time at Drexel. I met some of my best friends there and did a lot of fun things along the way. I was casually digging through my external hard drive last week and bumped into some hilarious videos that we made at Drexel. Here is a video that was filmed by Shubham in (~) Oct 2004 (all shot at one time with absolutely no re-takes), but decided not release it at the time. So, you're watching the first ever public screening of this clip (some of you may already have seen it). I hope you enjoy it. This a spoof of a song from a Kannada movie called Premaloka (literally means -- Love World). Check it out here [Requires Internet Explorer, may take a while to load the first time you play it].

DWOM: I probably will never run out of stuff for this section. This time around though, DW obsessively "hates" this song -- "Bleeding Love" by Leona Lewis. I am pretty sure it isn't Leona (she is a fantastic singer!), it may be the lyrics. There is also a song that I've heard her listen to several times -- "Calabria" by Enur feat. Natasja (RIP). It all started with this Target commercial. This is one other video that she's been completely hooked onto and forced me to watch (I loved it too!) -- "Grandparents" by Bill Cosby.

An interesting event took place at work today. Hydrogen powered cars taking part in the Hydrogen Road Tour 08, made a fuel stop at the Air Products H2 fueling station in Allentown, PA. All employees were invited to participate in the event. Some got a chance to drive/ride in these cars (chosen by a raffle draw, I did not make it). I personally did not expect (but pleased) to see perfectly normal looking passenger cars run by H2 fueled IC engines. Air Products personnel also demonstrated safe re-fueling of these cars. While walking back to my office, one of these cars "whizzed" by me. I closely observed the exhaust and actually saw water (H2 + 1/2 O2 => H2O) or condensed steam trickling from it!

Alrighty all, I have to end here. I'm super hungry (mom's cooked methi-chicken and its aroma is activating my stomach acids) and have to prepare for a long day of work tomorrow. I hope you enjoyed this post. (Playing it safe) I do not know when I will be able to post next, but I sure will keep you informed when I do (probably the end of this month). Take care and have a super rest-of-the-week and weekend!