Buried Alive is the story of Roy Hallums, an American civilian (albeit ex-military) contractor who was kidnapped while working in Iraq and spent almost two years in captivity. The very material that is covered means that you will be reading about a unique experience. How many people can claim to have been kidnapped by Iraqi insurgents, and lived to tell the tale?

Reading the book is a breeze; I wrapped this up within a few hours. The narrative is in first person and flows quite easily. Hallums stays away from any sort of political commentary and focuses solely on his experience – which makes it so much more engaging for the common reader. It does feel at times that this conversational style of narrating events get in the way by becoming too wordy, but on the whole I felt that it makes the book better. I think though that the book has not been written by Hallums himself, as it mentions a ‘Audrey Hudson’ – so there’s a possibility that the book might be ghostwritten. The resilience of Hallums is beyond question though, for someone to be able to endure so much for such a long period.

Hallums speaks of the work that we was doing in Iraq, how he came about to be kidnapped and then about his time in captivity. At times, the narrative switches to how his family coped with the crisis. With these sections, you understand the pain of a family that is left in limbo – but at the same time the rational part of you understand why, for instance, media outlets did not give as much coverage as families in that situation would want, or why the government would’ve tried to kept things secret.

The only part that I felt lacking was the conclusion, which I feel was a bit rushed compared to the amount of print dedicated the events before rescue. Maybe it’s because of the timing of the book or a personal call on part of the author, but reading about how he coped post-event would have been interesting.

A unique book and a quick read.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from Thomas Nelson Publishers as part of their BookSneeze book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.

Wasn’t that awesome?! You know this type of setup, don’t you? Must have seen it in countless cartoons – especially old Hanna-Barbera studio toons. That sort of setup, with incredibly complex interactions is called a Rube Goldberg machine. I’ve heard on some places that it’s the world’s largest Rube Goldberg machine attempted so far, but even if it isn’t this has got to be the most awesome so far. I guess OK Go officially displaces Honda’s Rube Goldberg machine ad as the best attempt at this sort of thing so far!

In a sense, the Internet has pioneered and empowered creative people to come up with videos like these. Previously when distribution channels were limited you’d need to make videos really short (for TV commercials, since companies often pay by the second) or at least substantially long enough to be marketed as a DVD. The Internet has a filled a void between the two which allows execution of ideas longer than a short TV commercial, and yet be short enough to capture our attention span.

On that note, also have a look at this commercial…

…and this ‘lip-dub’ video.

The Internet might have given a rise to banal videos of cats doing nothing, but it has also enabled a new generation of creative videomakers to reach out to millions.

PS – To all students back in India attempting their Board exams, I wish you luck! Now that you’ve enjoyed an entertaining break, do get back to studies.

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As soon as I stepped out, a massive blast of fresh air hit me and I felt so much better instantly. That’s when I ’saw’ for the first time how green this town is. Whether it’s on campus or other parts in town, you’ll find large lush green fields, or at the very least many trees dotting every road. I did notice this fact when I came here, but for the first time the greenery all around me struck me as I stood there drinking it all in.

Delhi is a concrete jungle. Even the few trees you have left will be covered with soot from the thousands of vehicles driving past them. I was quite fortunate in that the place where my home is does have more than average green cover.

I miss being in a hectic city where people are always zipping from one place to another, cocooned in the comfort of your vehicle, the Metro, or even the humble autorickshaw. It’s a big change coming to place where practically everything is, at max, half an hour walk away. For one, it’s given me a perspective of how incredibly huge New Delhi is – and given its size, how it does a reasonably good job of handling transportation and civic infrastructure.

I find it difficult to put into words what I was about to say now, but the gist is that that moment outside showed me how wonderful the enviroment of this place is. Given the number of things I’m involved in, I’m often rushing from one meeting to another; rushing from one deadline to another; rushing from location to another as I try to fit in multiple layers of work sandwiched in day.

I won’t lie – I am stressed by this hectic schedule, and I love this stress. I’ve realized this fact about myself that I have often suspected – I enjoy working under pressure. I hate not having to work on something with the clock ticking down.

But I also realized that within this schedule I can and should take some time to slow down. Go for a long walk. Watch squirrels fighting with each other near the lake. Drink in the freshness.

———————————–

Promotional flyers for my Twitter demo

I work part-time at SCEPTrE (not to be confused with the James Bond Evil Inc ‘SPECTRE’), which – to cut a long story short – gets fuckloads of money from the university and external government funding agencies, and puts it to use by paying their employees (even part-time ones) quite well and conducting events to improve ‘personal development’ of Surrey students.

We conducted an event last Thursday, where businesses from various industry verticals came along to learn about social media technologies. We had people from PR companies to give them a lecture first, and then they were given a demo of various social media sites by us. My task was to demo Twitter. At the same time, it was an opportunity for Surrey students to network with businesses.

I was prepared for the fact that a majority of the attendees would not know what Twitter is, even if they had heard of it in mainstream media. I walked in to the event confident I’d be able to field most questions they asked.

What I wasn’t prepared for is the following. Someone saw a flyer mentioning ‘wikis’. So she came up to me to ask:

What are ‘wikis’?

A fair question, you would say. Might not have heard of wikis in general, but would surely have heard of Wikipedia? So I mentioned how it’s “just like Wikipedia”. Pat came the response:

What’s Wikipedia?

I leave that as a parting question. How would you explain Wikipedia to someone who’d never heard of it? I fielded that one, following it up with a prolonged session of headdesking when she was gone.

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You know those times when you receive a text message from someone whose number you haven’t yet stored as a contact? I’m sure we’ve all had moments like that. Back in India if something like this happens you’d probably send back a message saying “Who’s this?”, appending an ‘lol’ perhaps if the text was funny. Or maybe even “Who the fuck are you?”, in case you want to practise your French.

If the same thing happens here in UK though, this is the standard response people send back:

I’m sorry, but I lost my phone [alternatively, 'my phone got stolen'] and I lost all my numbers. May I know who this is?

I kid you not, but this has happened with me at least 5-6 times so far – especially when I’m exchanging numbers with someone for the first time and the other person forgets to save my name as a contact. Then, when I get back to them via text (and if they’d forgotten to store my details), every time I got back a text which says pretty much precisely what I wrote above.

I can imagine British people having secret meetings in hidden lairs across the nation to decide protocols on issues such as this. “Yorrite lads, we need to come up with a jolly good protocol to maintain our stiff upper lip if we make a social faux pas in forgetting someone’s cellphone number.” I wonder whether cellphones sold in Britain have a ‘panic button’ which these genteel folk can rely on to send the nationally approved text response to awkward social situations.

It’s either that, or the poor British folk have rotten luck in actually getting constantly mugged and having their phones stolen.

——————————–

Last Wednesday we had Headphone Disco at our students’ union nightclub. Basically, no sound is pumped through external speakers; instead, everyone gets their personal set of wireless headphones and can switch between a grand total of three different music choices – ‘DJ station A’, ‘DJ station B’, and ‘off’. (The two DJ stations being DJs on stage playing different music.)

Watch a clip from Headphone Disco at University of Surrey’s Rubix

As you can see in the short video above, it can be quite a weird experience. Bunch of folks seemingly dancing to…nothing at all. You can be on the dancefloor jigging along to some song when all of a sudden you realize all of your friends around you are on the other station and dancing along to something completely different.

The system does have its drawbacks. For instance, there was this one instance when both DJs started playing…started played…songs by Miley Fucking Virus.

Somewhere on this planet, Miley 'SnakeMonster' Virus is celebrating this coup

The ‘off’ station came handy at such times. The other problem was that wearing a decent set of headphones meant that a lot of people laboured under the delusion that they were good singers. The cacophony of ’sing-alongs’ that I could hear even over my headphones was so terrible that it must be outlawed under international human rights standards.

When I first heard of Headphone Disco, I was curious to know how they handled clubbers breaking the supplied headphones. Did they have tracking systems installed, and dispatch a SWAT team to bust you in case you broke one?

Turns out they just take a £5 deposit before handing out the headphones.

——————————–

While I’m at it, I might as well give an update on what’s happening in my life.

After a long Christmas break of basically watching my toenails grow, university life has been extremely hectic ever since the new semester started. I think I need to make a copy-paste template saying “I’m busy with work for The Stag and MAD TV and CoLab/SCEPTrE and gooble gobble gooble gobble“. Because I am, and also with all the labs and lectures which make for a much heavier study schedule. I usually get a handful of hours of sleep daily; after that, it’s back to keeping track of all the different things I’m doing and trying to make sense of what to do when.

BTW, I’m also blogging about my experience for The IET (Institution of Engineering and Technology). IET is UK’s professional body of engineers; in a sense, somewhat like IEEE in USA but covering more engineering disciplines. (Trivia – University of Surrey’s Vice Chancellor, Professor Christopher Snowden, is the current president of IET.)

I swear I think they've Photoshopped my neck to make it appear longer

So anyway, these ’student diaries’ have been up for quite a while, and I intended to mention them here but totally forgot. Until today, when they pushed this out as the lead story in their student newsletter. On the other hand, I’m surprised that I got all that Hitchhiker’s stuff approved in my submissions to the IET so far.

The sensible thing to do would have been to invest in more mobile towers – real, tangible stuff that would make a difference. Instead, Idea Cellular went for a strategy Microsoft has adopted for years (before Windows 7 happened) – sink lots of money into retarded advertising campaigns. Over the past few years, using Idea Cellular mobile phones has solved various challenging problems such as illiteracy, caste riots, and obesity.

Emboldened by having tackled such grave issues, Idea has now moved on to saving trees, I hear. They have a new campaign called Use Mobile. Save Paper.

Notice something there? Many of the people trying to save trees are doing so by shifting their reading to iPhones! This is a classic case of the left hand not knowing the fact that the right hand is currently busy jacking off. Somebody forgot to tell Lowe Lintas (the agency which created this ad campaign) that Idea doesn’t sell the iPhone on their network.

Pictured: Idea Cellular not selling iPhone in India

I’m not sure whether Lowe Lintas was the agency behind the other commercials, but it seems that their creative team is permanently high from smelling their own farts. Unless, what they actually wanted to say was “Want to save trees? Why sure, just go and buy a highly overpriced device from two of our biggest competitors!”

One of these days, they’ll come out with a commercial saying something along the lines of ‘using Idea Cellular solves the AIDS problem’. The Nobel committee will then say “What an idea, sirji” and give Abhishek Bachchan a Nobel Peace Prize for being a fucking saint and solving every social issue possible using mobile phones.

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I came up with two different print ads for the event. This first one has been published in the latest edition of The Stag too.

It features guinea pirates. Basically, they’re pirates but at the same time they’re also guinea pigs.

I also made a second ad, which didn’t get approved/published. This one features eyes from Texas Chainsaw Massacre and critical praise from The Washington Toast.

Apparently, this second ad was judged to be too scary for release because of the disembodied eyes.

And yet, after doing all this, I still didn’t truly feel that I was part of the Internets generation. This feeling has been gnawing away at me for quite some time. I had epiphany recently. No, it wasn’t “Bananas are an excellent source of potassium. [slap]“, nor did it have anything to do with the Boob Lady.

- REDACTED -

Oh, did I hear you say “What is MAD TV Madness Week?!”. I guess you’ll just have to tune in to www.madtvsurrey.co.uk to find out.

In case you haven’t read it already, you might also be interested in my previous blog post Has MAD TV Gone Insane?

PS – After discussions revolving around various university and students’ union policies, some content posted here earlier has been taken down.

The continued absence of MAD TV on the airwaves has been raising some eyebrows on campus, apparently. This itself appears to be a startling fact, since MAD TV broadcasts on YouTube, and not actually via airwaves. A boffin claiming to be David Pugh (science editor of The Stag), although suspiciously not like the real David Pugh in appearance at all, said “We have got top-of-the-line Ghostbusters equipment scanning the airwaves for forced jokes made in a studio, but have been unsuccessful so far”.

Students are questioning why hardly any new episodes have been released over the past few weeks. A source reports to us that just this other day an angry mob congregated outside Rubix wielding pitchforks, demanding real-time Twitter updates on when University of Surrey Student News will be back. Angry Mob Protestor #26 said, “I feel listless these days without any new MAD TV episodes. I might just have to go back to…stalking people on Facebook to bide time”. The mob dispersed when they were given £5 vouchers for Young’s Kitchen (valid on any purchase above £300).

Efforts to reach MAD TV executive producer Mike Frazer for a response were mostly futile, except that one time when we had a brief chat to discuss what MAD TV plans to do with all with funds it has got, now that it is an official society. Mr Frazer mumbled something about a new website being developed, before sauntering off hollering “Assemble…”

In other news, a protester who broke into a Stag committee meeting demanding to know who these ’sources’ tipping us off on what he called ‘completely cooked up news stories’ were. He was kindly escorted out of the room and given a free issue of The Stag to appreciate his feedback to this newspaper.

- by Mykfrey Zur

Today’s announcement of the Apple iPad was real dampener, wasn’t it? Honestly, I don’t mind though; rather I’m glad people at last saw through Steve Jobs’s bullshit on a new product launch.

Speaking of good mobile browsing devices, Boost Mobile will be soon launching the gorgeous-looking QWERTY flip Incognito phone, which you can see above. (If you want to know the exact model being launched, it’s the Sanyo Incognito™ SCP6760.) The phone will retail for $129.99 (excluding taxes), and if you buy the phone using this SANYO Incognito link then you also get free shipping! (This has nothing to do with me getting any commission if you click that link; it’s just the way you avail free shipping.)

SANYO Incognito has been praised by external reviewers such as CNET to be quite a capable phone, especially for messaging/browsing – given the full QWERTY keyboard. The external surface of the phone has a touch-sensitive ‘glow-through’ keypad which allows you to dial numbers quickly in case you need to. (It does have a swipe lock so that numbers aren’t dialled randomly.) Once open you have a 2.6″ display that will give you a large viewing area. The phone does have GPS functionality with support for mapping services. The only niggling thing seems to be the 2 megapixel camera – but then a higher resolution doesn’t necessarily mean some other phone will have a ‘better’ camera. In fact, reviews say that the SANYO Incognito’s camera is actually quite good as far as colour reproduction / managing noise goes. It also has support for EVDO, so data transfers can be reasonably fast on the device.

Boost Mobile is offering the device on a no-contract basis, with a $50 monthly fee. On the look of it might sound steep, but for that price they are giving unlimited calls, text messages, AND web browsing! The only thing I didn’t like about how the device is being marketed is that the official Sanyo Incognito page for Boost Mobile doesn’t offer the technical specifications to the cellphone at all; a PDF download of tech specs is offered, but it turns out to be a single-page file telling you to just go Sanyo’s site instead. I get that most people might not be interested in tech specs, but for those who are it makes no sense essentially giving a blank file.

Coupled with the unlimited usage monthly plan and no contracts, SANYO Incognito from Boost Mobile is win-win choice for fashion conscious users who text a lot.

My rating of Up In The Air

Up In The Air is the darling of film critics these days in the run up to the Academy Awards, with many of them calling it variations of “a funny, witty comedy”. A film that’s “right on time, as the recession is on”. I honestly do not understand how a film about a guy who fires people for a living called be ‘comedy’ by any yardstick.

The problem with Up In The Air is that it simply doesn’t bring up anything new at all, nor does it bring up anything we know of in an interesting way. It doesn’t particularly surprise you or move you in any way whatsoever. The plot is extremely predictable and not once does it ever spring a surprise upon you.

Anna Kendrick’s fake acting is terrible enough to earn her a position on the list of ‘Closest Thing Humanity Has To Android Actors’, right up there with Hayden Christensen and Daniel Radcliffe. The only saving grace is George Clooney, who tries his best to save this film from crash-landing. It’s only in the last fifteen minutes or so of the movie that it has some substance in it; when Clooney’s character is coming to terms with the fact that rethinking his way of living doesn’t work out for him.

Up In The Air is nothing more than a chick flick masquerading as a highbrow “witty commentary of the times we live in”. Awkward interactions between humans does not necessarily equate to a good film.

Watch the Up In The Air theatrical trailer

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My rating for The Hurt Locker

The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug.

- Chris Hedges

The Hurt Locker begins with this ‘powerful’ quote from war correspondent Chris Hedges. One could be forgiven for anticipating that the film to follow will be a glorification of war with the kind of slow-motion footage of army soldiers that Michael Bay has championed. Indeed, movie critics have even come up with a cute little (and often overused/misused) term for it – ‘war porn’.

And yet, that is precisely the sort of depiction that the movie stays away from. It isn’t an intense battle movie, like Black Hawk Down was, nor does it have any iconic dialogue. What The Hurt Locker is is a snapshot of what life is for military personnel who aren’t necessarily fighting on the frontline (bomb squad, in this case), and yet face mortal peril each day of their job.

Watch the trailer for The Hurt Locker

The movie deals with the mind games involved with trying to make split second decisions on whether the guy with a cellphone is trying to detonate a bomb or how your team might be picked off by snipers in the middle of a desert. And how diffusing bombs in real life isn’t about nervously deciding to “cut the red wire or the green wire” while a clock ticks down “ten seconds to detonation”.

Yes, the guy _is_ trying to outrun a bomb explosion, but not quite the way it was done in '2012'.

What really makes the movie stand out is how understated the performances are. Jeremy Renner’s performance as the maverick head of the bomb diffusal team (Staff Sergeant William James) who acts in ways others consider reckless, and yet still portraying the character as a human being who is just trying to get the job done, is stellar. The plot is very much character-driven, and it works because the characters are ones you can totally believe in. (You might remember Jeremy Renner as Sergeant Doyle from 28 Weeks Later. BTW, who else finds Rose Byrne from that movie extremely cute?)

This picture has nothing to do with Rose Byrne. Just FYI.

Any film these days suffers from low self-esteem unless they make a comment about rampant commercialism in our lives – while indulging in rampant product placement of course. The film tries to juxtapose the harsh reality of life in downtown Iraq to a downtown supermarket in US of A by showing how utterly unreal it feels for a soldier to be faced with huge shelves under fluorescent lights of just cereal. And how at a trip to the supermarket his shopping cart is completely empty while his wife’s is stacked to the brim.

The tragedy is that such a brilliant movie is probably going to lose out in the Oscar race for Best Picture to a hot air balloon (read ‘Avaturd‘).

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