my first DSLR camera - Canon 550D

In fact, this is my very first camera.

Here is the Camera Bag

Front View - without the lens

Top View

Rear View

18-55mm Kit Lens & 50mm Prime Lens

The whole set

So, finally it looks like this

I'm just loving it.

PS: The pictures are not clear for they were taken at night.

imseriouslyjoking.blogspot.com

Wahi Anoop, Wahi Blog, Wahi Bharosa, Sirf Pehchaan Nayi!

MyLifeSuxBigTym.blogspot.com 

ab he

IMSeriouslyJoking.blogspot.com!

I'm not Joking. Seriously. I've been thinking of changing my blog address since so long and I couldn't find anything catchy and memorable. I'm not saying the one which I've kept now is catchy or memorable but it's better than the other. My Life doesn't suck anymore. Why should I stick to that address then?

I'm not sure how many of you will be able to get this blog address through their blog-roll because the link might still be pointing to the old one. That sucks! And I wanted 'IAmSeriouslyJoking' but someone's already using it. Yet I hope you guys like this and can still remember 'IMSeriouslyJoking'.

I will leave my new blog address whenever I leave comments. Please don't mind.

Photo Credit: Chris Greene / Image
Caption Credit: Max Life Insurance

and she never texted again.

 “He was the one I was telling you about the other day.” Sarika says pointing towards me. I was waiting near the counter to pay the bill.

 Prakriti wasn’t listening. She was busy with her phone.

 “…condom? That was him.” Sarika says.

 The word condom broke her reverie.

 “Condom? What condom?” Prakriti says

 “The guy I told you about – he is the one. See that tall thin guy walking out?” Sarika says pointing at me.

 Akash?

 I and Prakriti knew each other through Book Club – an arrangement which let the employees borrow books from other employees. Prakriti had taken a few days’ vacation last week and got delayed in returning my book.

 I had sent a reminder message on her mobile for she wasn’t available at office. She apologized. And that’s how it started. We had started texting each other a lot and I instantly liked her.

 Prakriti was remembering the conversation she had with Sarika a few weeks ago.

 “You know what? I saw one guy buying a condom from our supermarket. I just can’t believe he bought a condom, a condom with so many guys and girls around him. I appreciate his guts.” Sarika said.

 “Really? Who? Oh my god. A lot of things are happening around us.” Prakriti says, clearly surprised. “Some people have fun in a different way. Look around. This place is like a mega-hostel with no warden, no parents, no one at all to control them. This is the best place a ‘couple’ can ask for. Anyway, I want to see that guy.” She winked.

 “But condoms? In front of a lot of people?” Sarika said, disgusted.

 “Okay. I agree. Condom’s a bit too much. Don’t tell me you people haven’t had ‘urges’ when you meet him.” Prakriti teased Sarika.

 Few days before…

 “Thank god no one rang the bell.” He said. Sarika was lying next to him in her bedroom.

 “Bell? Thank god you had a condom with you and my roommate has gone home.” She said.

 “Oh Prakriti has gone home? And the condom, my friend, Akash, bought it for me.”

Photo Credit: Mattox / Image

like moon. beautiful & beyond my reach.

Today, there is no money involved. No friends to persuade. Kavita, she is there, alone, 3 cubicles away. All I need to do is go say ‘Hi’. Still, I can’t. This time I do care. I do care what she would think of me. I do care what she would say, what she would tell her friends. I do care this time. Maybe it’s because of the fear of embarrassment, fear of failure. Or maybe it’s because I liked her.Above all, you need guts.

It was all coming back, like a flash-back – the day I had talked to someone, some stranger. “I will give 3000 rupees to whomever goes and talk to that girl sitting over there.” My manager had said pointing one in a group of girls sitting not more than 5 tables away from ours in the food court.It happened 4 years ago. I went and talked to her. I didn’t even know who that girl was. I didn’t care what she might think or what she might say. All I could think of was the money. I was dead nervous yet I managed to go talk to her. I was pretty sure that chances of seeing her again were very less.

Now, it’s different. I make up my mind one day and drop it the next moment. I feel it’s more like gardens. We plan to tend to them. We just always seem to put it off till next week. And to add to that, there is a common misconception among guys that beautiful girls doesn’t seem to share the enthusiasm of making friends with someone who’s hitting on them.

Kavita, she did look serious for I haven’t seen her smiling. Hope she isn’t arrogant. She is kind of modern by the way she dresses;Hindu for sure by her name; Non-vegetarian anddoesn’t look like a nerd. Being serious, not nerdy and being modern perfectly rules out all the possibilities of her not-being-arrogant. Guess she is single too. If not, well, let’s not talk about that. Mostly they tend to be on phone for a long time. I haven’t seen her oh phone at all, maybe once or twice. I heard she is social and jolly and really cool. I never dared to discuss her among my friends. People tend to be reserved when it comes to matters like this. I’m no different.

I knew I would talk to her one day and I did. Out of the blue! I didn’t give her a chance to talk. I was nervous and she was embarrassed I guess. I don’t expect to see her a lot and I’m sure I will save her some embarrassment if I don’t talk to her in front of her friends.

She wasn’t anything that I thought of. She isn’t serious. She looks gorgeous when she smiles. Maybe that’s the reason she smiles less. She is studious; hard-core vegetarian and die-hard religious. I got 4 wrongs out of 5. I don’t want to risk the last one.

She is like rains in Chennai – when it rains, it pours; when she talks, she’s wonderful. Otherwise, I just don’t exist at all.

Photo Credit: Parvez / Image

embarrassed. a little.

That’s her, walking towards me. Oh God, she is beautiful. I try to look away. No. I can’t. I try to catch her eyes. She doesn't seem to notice me. She can’t miss me. No one’s around. I try to remember our first meet. It was out of the blue. She was surprised. Maybe shocked. I felt lucky in some way when she didn't take it bad. Kind of a dream come true. We did talk later. A couple of times or maybe a little more. 

I look at her. I smile.

She doesn’t.

Thank god, no one's around.

Photo Credit: Cris Watk / Image / Website

Digitizing Books One Word at a Time.

Now that I've written about CAPTCHA (read it here), let me tell you something about reCAPTCHA.

reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books. Millions of CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. reCAPTCHA channels the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.

Using Optical Character Recognition, the photographically scanned book pages are transformed into text. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. 

Here is the tricky part. If a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: They give two words instead of one – one which cannot be read correctly by OCR and the next word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. 

What if we can read only one of them? Say, something like this.

I enter the word ‘(Humphrey’ correctly but not the next. In this case, it will be still considered correct but it would not take it for granted. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

Ref: reCAPTCHA / WIKI