Desi movie in the USA

Watching a bollywood movie in the states is a somewhat different experience.Being packed in a darkened theatre with your fellow countrymen can prove interesting enough.If you are in a small city or a non major hub(not the likes of NJ,Chicago or California) you need to buy your tickets from your local desi store.The price is a tad higher which is fine with me as many times its not easy to get these screenings done specially in small centers.Then you need to arrive early and queue up unless you want to get an imax experience sitting in the front rows.

While the queue gets longer,it also tends to bulge specially at the front and in the middle.Reason being that many of my educated fellow countrymen who are oblivious of the concept of waiting in a line are holding places for their friends,relatives,parents,kids..you name it.In my opinion the reason we stand in a line is because its first in and first out deal,you just cant hold places.People who come late should be at the back behind people who are rightfully in the front.Somehow,its never the case.

Anyway,you ignore this and enter the theatre,and are aghast to find that just as you are about to take your seat somebody motions that they have it blocked for someone who is coming later.During one of the movies I watched recently,the situation became so bad that the organisers had to literally reprimand people that they cannot reserve seats like this!.

Well, its not as bad as it appears.There are good things too...you get to meet friends,make new ones if you are so inclined during the movie break.It somehow makes you feel you are back home.

I enjoy going to hindi movies here in the states,its almost fun.Only if people could switch off their fancy cell phones and the popcorn and the soda were not priced like a gourmet meal,I would have taken off that 'almost'.

The inimitable Ipod

Electronic toys are unveiled with monotonous regularity in the first world so what's the big deal about Apple's Ipod.Well,the Ipod is no 'one night stand' gizmo.Here's a product which has the same kind of social and pop culture implications as the Sony walkman when it first came out.

Steve Jobs has a knack of doing things out of the ordinary and Apple as a company completely potrays his flamboyant personality and original philosophy when it comes to product development and brand creation.

Sony's founder Akio Morita on a visit to the US in the early eighties observed how attuned people were to music and they were seen carrying the big 'two in ones' with them outdoors so that their favourite music could accompany them. This observation sparked off an idea in Morito-Why not give the people a portable 'two in one' so that they could carry their music with them at all times.The idea of a headphone attachment was an inspired one serving the double purpose of enjoying personal music without disturbing your neighbour.That this idea would be a guaranteed hit seems now like a no brainer. However,executives and engineer's at Sony were pretty unenthusiastic about this idea which they thought seemed like some sci-fi product.Morita however was convinced and Sony went ahead and launched the world's first walkman.The rest as they say is history and the walkman in more ways than one can be called Sony's flagship product.

The Sony Walkman in a sense is the grand daddy of portable music and reamined in vogue till the world wide web and digital music hit the straps in the late nineties and in the new millenium.Researchers are always looking at broadening the horizon,how can they better a technology,how can they cross the realms of the last big idea.So when the MP3 technology became mainstream obviously the next question was what earth shattering ideas could be created with it.The Walkman and its later avatar the discman suffered from one perennial problem-you could carry only a certain amount of music with you,not to mention the drag of packing compact discs and then changing them when you wanted to listen to a different album.Enter the Mp3 players and suddenly the consumer had thousands of songs at their disposal.

The idea is fascinating almost surreal,I mean how better it can get.You have almost every kind of music available online and once you download it to your player,you can carry it anywhere.No messy,scratched discs..just pure unadulterated digital music!.

Apple was probably one of the early companies who bet big on this idea and as with their other products they lyrically blended the new technology with an innovative user interface.You can have the most cutting edge technology at your disposal but if the user interace sucks then you can bid goodbye to your product.

Apple's hardware engineering chief Jon Rubenstein assembled a team of engineers to design the Ipod, including Tony Fadell, Stan Ng and Jonathan Ive. They developed the product in less than a year and it was unveiled on 23rd Oct 2001. Jobs announced it as a Mac-compatible product with a 5 GB hard drive that put "1000 songs in your pocket." Uncharacteristically, Apple did not develop the iPod's software entirely in-house. Instead, Apple began with Portal Player's reference platform which was based on 2 ARM cores. The platform used rudimentary software running on a commercial microkernel embedded operating system. PortalPlayer had previously been working on an IBM-branded MP3 player with Bluetooth headphones. Apple contracted another company,PIXO to help design and implement the user interface, under the direct supervision of Steve Jobs.

The Ipod's distinctive feature is the innovative 'click wheel' technology that lets you browse through the songs in your library.The Ipods have come a long way from the first model that was launched in 2001. They have taken advantage of the ever growing 'more memory on a chip' technology to pack in more and more power. The fifth generation Ipods come in fabulous 30GB and 80GB memory options.That's thousands and thousands of songs and music at your finger tips.Just when you were wondering what more this brilliant device can do-The iPod can play MP3, AAC/M4A, Protected AAC, AIFF, WAV, Audible audiobook, and Apple Lossless audio file formats. The iPod photo introduced the ability to display JPEG, BMP, GIF, TIFF, and PNG graphic file formats. The fifth generation iPod (which has a 320x240 pixel display) can also play MPEG-4 (H.264/MPEG-4 AVC), and QuickTime video formats, with restrictions on video dimensions, encoding techniques and data-rates.

I own a 30GB fifth generation Ipod and mainly use it for playing music.I rarely use the video and photo capabilities.They are good bonus features to have but kind of overkill for me.In the ever growing world of gadgets if there is one that stands out heads and shoulders above the rest it is the Ipod.