MATLAB

This is for all those engineers out there who know C like the back of their butt. Thankfully all is not lost for us creed of engineers. Someone thunk and that someone thunk it well that if you are gonna get anything out of these losers, better make coding easier than tacking a 48-pin chip. And that someone came out with MATLAB.....there still is hope! If you are an engineer and you haven't used MATLAB yet (doesn't work if you are one of those coding kinds), you better begin quick.

If you are a die hard MATLAB fan, join the club and blog this. There is also an open-source MATLAB community where you give and take .m files. Hallowed be thy name .....

Chesapeake Bay

Had been to Chesapeake Bay last weekend. Went down to the National Aquarium in Baltimore in the morning. Second in the "all of two" aquariums I have been to in my life (the first was Taraporevala Aquarium in Bombay). Since the first aquarium happened when I was 10, I barely remember seeing any seafood. But this aquarium was simply amazing and there were thousands of aquatic species, half the names I couldn't spell (like a biology class nightmare). And there were sharks too... didn't get to check if they were man-eaters. We left to have a Shrimp Pad Thai (so much for marine conservation).

Proceeded to get drunk at the Hard Rock Cafe. Overlooking the USCG Cutter TANEY (apparently the only ship to survive Pearl Harbor) docked on the serene inland bay, delicious smoke from the barbecue pit, live rock music being played behind us, we sat, me, Tanmay & Sid. After we decided we had had enough, we went to the wharf at Fell's Point and sat down at Timothy's to have some more. We discovered that the Chilli Chicken at Timothy's (fried chicken in garbanzo beans with tortilla chips) was not even remotely like the Chicken Chilli at Dara's Dhaba.

Spam Bots

If you are the kinda guy who jealously guards his inbox. And you have started receiving a lot of spam on your email account and are scratching your head about it, here is something to chew on. Apparently there are programs called spam bots or spam spiders that crawl through the net feeding on email addresses carelessly left lying around. These are used for sending unsolicited mails and probably sold and resold by a whole host of spammers. So if you like to leave smart comments on websites, trying to appear intelligent (like me), and sign off with a flourish - If you wanna find out how smart I am, spamme@iamadumbjoe.com (unlike me), then you are probably getting what you deserve. This is the reason why some really smart guys like me put up their mail ids with an [AT] in the middle.

But I like Bill's solution to this. If you can't stop it, then stuff their faces with it... wot say?