Carthik Sharma

Thank God Harry Potter is male….else that would have been an “A” movie, not that i mind, but think of those poor little kids…(hee hee)

this is an article from the NY times,i’m just too lazy to write html code and give a link to that page…you know, i will have to press the shift button and all that…

this is by far the gross-est post in my journal, i’m sorry if i offend you, but i had a good laugh over this, and i beleive a good laugh is getting hard to come by.

ze article:

The “Harry Potter” toy broomstick from Mattel has a vibrating feature that has proven to be too popular with teenage girls.

The “Nimbus 2000″ is a plastic battery-powered replica of the broom used in Quidditch matches by J.K. Rowling’s boy wizard in “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.” The $19.99 toy features a “grooved stick and handle for easy riding,” according to Toysrus.com, and, “enhancing the excitement are the vibrating effects.”

The Web site’s review section is full of comments from parents who are amazed at the toy’s popularity with their young daughters. One mom who bought the broom for her son writes that his sister frequently “fights him over it” and complains that “the batteries drain too fast.”

Another notes, “When my 12-year-old daughter asked for this for her birthday, I kind of wondered if she was too old for it, but she seems to love it.”

An equally enthusiastic parent marvels that “even my daughter’s friends enjoy playing with this fun toy. I was surprised at how long they can just sit in her room and play with this magic broomstick!”

One astute New Jersey mom says of her daughter: “It wasn’t until after she opened her gift and started playing with it that I realized the toy may offer a more than sensational experience. The broomstick has cute sound effects and vibrates . . . what were the creators of this toy thinking? She’ll keep playing with the Nimbus 2000, but with the batteries removed.”

“As always, the well-being of children is our top priority,” Mattel rep Sara Rosales told PAGE SIX’s Jared Paul Stern. “And we in no way consider this toy to be inappropriate.”

A total of 3,025 people – including 23 Canadians – died in the September 11 attacks. The official count does not include the hijackers.

they are pests, you know, like kidae. Either that, or they’ve just been made immortal by the US govt.

Chretien, the Canadian PM , has gone on record in a CBC show saying that the general perception of the west as insensitive to the needs of the poorer nations is resposible for the attacks. that was a nice piece, the interview, i cant find the link, i mean i forgot to save it for you.

thought this might be interesting to friends back home

i took this house quite close to school, in the apartment complex thats perhaps closest to school. i bot a second hand bicycle, so i cycle to school..taxis are NOT affordable to us, its strange, the pricing of things around here, a text book cost 70-150 dollars, and a tshirt just 5 dollars…a lunch costs as much as a tshirt, i even saw a cd advertisement saying its “cheaper than food”. its true too!! these people are crazy, if you buy a small bottle of water, you will be paying 4 times more than what you would have to to get petrol. a taxi for a 10 minute ride will be about 7 dollars. taxis arent very common, you have to phone them and they come and pick you up. we do have a bus service, but the services are half to one hour apart…

foreigners, well, see we dont have a class, as such, everyone is free to choose the subjects he wants to study, so there’s not a single person i know who has my three subject combo…in the masters and phd program in electrical and computer engineering, 82 new students have been admitted, out of which 44 are indians, americans must be about 3 or 4, then we have turks, and chinks. chinks are cheaters, they cheat a lot, and are very isolationist, so are indians, i mean they cheat too. i dont, going by OUR past experiences

chinks are a confused lot, you never know whether they know something or not, their english is generally fucked up, so they cant get across…one chinky babe who handles the same lab as me was so scared that she asked to take her lab, surreptitously , and said she would pay me for it!! i bucked her up saying “you can do it, come on” and things like that, but , honestly , i was shocked when she said that!

Can’t help stealing this from psasidhar!

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sorrow without fear
can be enjoyed like treasure.

the Bangladeshi poet Saratchandra…

thanks to Polash for this pearl and many others….

i saw a totally unbangladeshi bangladeshi female at a party yesterday. the party was for international students, only 15 turned up, when i heard she was bangladeshi i wanted to talked to her, but after observing her for sometime i didnt want to . everyone was dancing to terrible, ugly music and i was sitting by the side, waiting for my roommates, who suggested going to the party….lousy night …. the female was kind of ashamed to say she was from bangladesh, when she was introduced, and i was thinking”she has so much to be proud of about bangladesh, and she chooses to be ashamed” and then i knew i wouldnt talk to her.

i talked to a jordanian instead, he wasnt dancing and i wasnt either, but i sure was feeling uncomfortable there, he wasnt, he was just watching the crowd, and after we introduced ourselves to each other, he says,”dont you find this amusing, all these men dancing, look at that guy in the white shirt, he’s dancing like this is his last dance..”
so i asked him why he wasnt dancing , and whats amusing about people dancing(alright the hip-hop and R&B music was such that you had to make an effort to dance to it, but still…) and then he says…
“where i come from , men dont dance, its the women who do, so you see i cannot dance, i wont think of myself as a male if i do!!” and you should have been there to know that he meant business!! I guess its his last party….

i had this 6 inch at subway today, because i was really hungry after cycling all the way to the research park to submit some papers to the human resources department, who need it to process my pay check. well, this means that i did not get the paycheck today though i ws expecting it, since Grizzel forgot to take a copy of the page in my passport which shows the expiry date. so i have to wait a couple weeks more to get my first check.

alright, so after i submitted the file at human resources, i came back and had this 6 inch. after i had it, as i got a refill of coke, this lady asked me how my sandwich was, and said we both had the same sandwich. she was also an international, but she has been here for 10 years now, she’s from ecuador and has a dutch husband. we were talking for about half an hour about this and that, and she gave me her address and number and took mine. This is perhaps the first real conversation i have had someone over here. it feels good.

I was so sleepy at 7 pm that i left for home without putting the microcontroller sets in the shelf and locking it up. Santhosh , another TA happened to walk by , saw this and called me, and i came rushing back to school right now. my bike doesnt have lights, and so its risky using it at night, the cops will kill me if they catch me, and on the way, at an intersection, the cars from the left wouldnt stop coming even after the “Walk”signal came on, i had a half-second to cross, before the dont walk sign came on, so i rushed across, only to be called a mouthful of unpalatable things by a driver. no mistake of mine! now i have to rush home again to cook, cause its my turn to cook, and its 9.30. i need more sleep, or i need to get adjusted to having a lot of things pending all the time. I just dont seem to be able to get everything done in advance, tasks grow to occupy all available time. i am getting nowhere, i wonder what will happen later, because for now, i dont have a “personal life”. wonder how i will manage to live. perhaps, i too will find a way to get things done without doing them, or whatever!

I could manage with three spoken sentences today, so far, and its 10 pm!! Of course, by the time i woke up my flatmates had left. i arrived at the college at 11 am. searched for solutions/tips to solve at least one of the 10 FPGA design problems, had my packed lunch, searched for suitable papers in software engg to present in class, went to the coffee shop and got a Cafe French Mocha (funny names they got here for coffee…, one of them is called an eye opener, and the bitter taste sure opens my eyes wide as i start wondering how anyone can think of drinking half a litre of it..) came back , read up on software engg again since by this time i got a reply from my software engg prof saying she wants the titles and urls of the papers, besides the general topic….

now i go home…

Killer day!! 4.5 hours of classes, and loads of papers to read. Havent done 50% of what i thought i should! Aiyyo!! its all piling up on me, and i am going home, so silly of me to have forgotten the keys…its 12 now and if i dont go home, my room mates might as weel lock me out of the house.

problem of the day : using memory cells to implement an ALU.

From today’s minstrels poem…

…I can’t feel glad about old times
because I am afraid
that what I see here I suspected then
but shunned the knowing.
…

-harry guest