Economical sound proofing using thermocol / packing tape

My office room is located in the ground floor of our house and is adjacent to the living room of my uncle who lives in the ground floor. We have excellent relations but the trouble was the noise from the television whenever they watched it. There is a door (which is permanently closed) between my office room and their living room. Evenings are always sound-full and so are the afternoons (soap timings) It was annoying to say the least. Whether they followed the stories (are they any?) in the soaps they watch or not, I knew them. I know the characters, some of the dialogues. It's more like listening to AIR dramas in the bygone era. I did not think it was right on my part to ask them not watch it. I can't even ask them to reduce the sound, because my uncle needs it loud to be able to hear. I was searching for solutions on the net. Acoustic curtains, that will cut / reduce noise are there all over the net but I couldn't find any in Coimbatore despite visiting almost all the shops selling curtains / home furnishing items. I almost settled for the status-quo and kept telling myself to focus hard and treat work as meditation. Ignore outside noise, listen to the inner sound, try harder, try harder. The harder I tried more annoyed I became. Out of the blue came a suggestion from a friend, who asked me to  do thermocol packing. I followed his instructions and completed a thermocol packing this morning. 

First, I pasted the brown color packing tape all over the edges of the door. Then stuck thermocol over the gaps in, under and over the door and taped it again. Then made a thermocol door (pasted 4x2 thermocol pieces and taped them), stuck it, leaving 4'' gap from the closed door, between the walls where the door. So far so good. There was considerable reduction in the noise when they switched on TV some time back. It made me feel good, having done all the work for nearly three hours on my own. To make it (sound reduction) more effective, planning to buy a heavy curtain and hang it in front of the thermocol door. 

As you can see it is far from a neat and professional work but has helped in improving the situation. The picture captures only the top half of the thermocol door as taking the picture of the entire door would have meant removing and rearranging all my laptop and accessory wiring. If someone who needs a solution for cutting down noise finds this article, this article would have achieve its purpose.

This seems promising, so I'd like to pass it on.

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 Check out www.graphicdesignoffer.com -if you are interested.

Melting Dosa at Vidyarthi Bhavan

Got up early in the morning to do some work in my hotel room in Bangalore. With my intestines prompting me went down to the restaurant only to be surprised, 'Restaurant not open on Sundays'. Then the name of 'Vidyarthi Bhavan' from my memory splashed across and took an auto to reach Gandhi bazar Road at Basavangudi where it is situated.

Heard a lot about Vidyarthi Bhavan, its famous dosa and the celeb visitors. It, I must say, lived up to the hype. Never tasted a masal dosa so good and the Kharabath (Upma) was good too. Coffee was fine but nothing extraordinary. It costed Rs.61 for a Kharabhath, Masal Dosa and a coffee. You might rush to think it's cheap but it's not. Kharabath quantity is half of what you would get in other restaurants. Masal dosa size too is smaller, akin to the size we make at home. But then it's not pricey, it can at best be put at 'moderate' tag.

The masal dosa was crisp (which means oily) and tasty. The masal is so good that when combined with the dosa, gave a melting sensation once inside my mouth. The dosa is thick unlike regular masal dosa that one would get in other restaurants. One side is crisp and other side of the dosa (inner side if you would like to call it) is soft like it is in uthappam (oothappam). More than the process, which one could gauge and attempt, the ingredients that go into to achieve the taste is bit puzzling. They must be using a different rice variety and may be a different proportion of main ingredients. All in all a good masal dosa to have once in a week.


There isn't much variety (I went there for breakfast). There were only 4 items (Kharabath, Masal dosa, poori and idly).  I saw all four items being served in good numbers, with Masal dosa being the dominant one. When the server came to take order, I said 'Kharabath' to which he asked 'Kharabath and Dosa?', which says a lot about their dosa and its popularity. 

They must be good at all of their morning varieties otherwise one can't explain the heavy rush on a sunday morning at 8.00 am. People were standing near every table when I walked in. Since I was single, found a place easily. When I walked out, loads of people were standing outside, booking tables with the man near the counter. What is even more surprising is it's not just men but families that dominated the crowd at 8 in the morning on a Sunday. Having tasted their Dosa I understand why.

It was good to taste something different. A regular item with a different taste. Overall a very good experience

Still Feeling Sorry about Google Reader

A griping post.

The worst thing that happened last year was the Iron Curtain that fell over Google Reader - when it came to life all of a sudden, I had great hopes for it. It promised a personalised web: in the first week, search results showed up pages from people I were following, and pages I had bookmarked on Delicious, and from the subscribed tags on Delicious. It was brilliant : when you google, say, Brecht, you might get study notes and stuff on the first page of its results- but not on Reader. Reader gave you results that mattered to you.

You use the web for these three things : find, keep and share stuff. Facebook and Twitter are great for sharing stuff, and indirectly finding stuff. But there is no way for you to keep those stuff if you don't do something about it. Try searching Twitter or Facebook for something you noticed a couple of weeks bacjk.

All Google had to do was make it easy to subscribe to the RSS of any particular public page, and create a more easier user interface for sharing stuff from Reader. I used pull in stuff from Twitter and Facebook for safekeeping, sure that I could retrieve them as and when I wanted to do. All that was not to be.

Google Plus is trying to do something that Facebook and Twitter are doing extraordinarily well. But with Google Reader with its superior search engine, they could have given us a personalised web. Google's failure to see this is painful, to say the least.

Two Honourable Gentlemen

"Every person who does a job faces some conflict of interest or the other. There are many people who work for employers whose practices they may not agree with but they don't quit their jobs because of that. Anyway, I don't really think about it as a conflict of interest because every time I comment, I am being completely honest."" - Sunil Gavaskar

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  "You have to see my body of work over 20 years. It doesn't matter who pays me. I have strong views on cricket which I express freely. If others are offered Board contracts, they should sign up as well," - Ravi Shastri

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These two are pretty honourable persons- they are, if this Times of India report is true, they are paid Rs.3.6 Crores per year by the BCCI to sit in the commentary box and waffle, and what is more, it is mandatory for any broadcaster who is telecasting cricket matches from India to, oh, yes, include them in the panel of commentators.

Nice line of business, right? I believe that BCCI is rewarding these two gentlemen of extraordinary honesty for their extraordinary honesty. If only they send some of its money along to us, we are quite amenable to speaking our mind volubly and honestly.

Shame on Nasser Hussain, for claiming he is getting paid by the channel to have an opinion- what is wrong if you get money for not having one?

Here, we have plenty of opinions, we can run it any which way you want, but like I said, not being as honourable a gentleman as Ravi or Sunil, no one is paying anything to us at all.

But we are willing, and waiting.

Batsmen Should Walk- or at least acknowledge

There is no way you can get it hundred percent right, no matter how good technology gets- even laser guided missiles get their trajectory wrong, what hope is there for hawkeye and hotspot? So, to wait for perfection is to postpone the adoption of technology. There will always be errors in the game of cricket, and we have to accept that.

There is a way to get round this, and to suggest it is near blasphemy- fine the batsmen if they don't walk. Let the bowlers appeal to the batsmen, and when the batsman refuses to acknowledge that he is out, the umpire on the pitch comes in, and when he is not sure, they all go upstairs. And when it is proved that the batsman was indeed out, he is fined ten percent for not telling that he indeed got an edge.

All batsmen, however great or small, who refuse to walk cheat, relying on the fallibility of the system to pile up some more runs. They need to be made accountable for at least some of the errors that plague this insane game that has become a religion in these parts of the world.

A Heavy Defeat

Trent Bridge came to a disappointing end, devastating in fact.  Ranklings apart, India is still a good team when it is playing full strength, though one wonders whether it will be able to do so any time in the near future.  The players are not gettng younger, and every game carries with it a greater risk of injury, ipl or not.

This is a tricky situation, and unless you have the replacement players doing something brilliant to keep their place in the team, you  can't really tell which way it will go.  I'd like to have Pujara and Badrinath in the team in place of Raina and Yuvraj, brave men both, but they are obviously not great under English conditions. At least, Kohli could have played, though it looks like everything is not perfect about him.

The bowling is the problem area, where are the fast bowlers? Praveen is a game trier,  and he will remain a trier, you need people who can do quick strikes, not one wicker per ten overs or fifteen. You need someone to give you a break and then ask serious questions about the new man in.

Obviously you can ask questions of this sort and feel good about it, India has just had a dismal performance, but if Sehwag plays and Harbhajan goes out giving way to Mishra, we might see something different.  England is shaky, in spite of all those runs, you know their batting could land them in serious trouble- when your openers both can't outlast the new ball your team will get gutted one day or the next. Same as what happened to India.

England are playing at home, but with Sehwag teaming up with Gambhir, you might see a different result. A team does not go from great to worst in two days.