You feel there's no tomorrow
As you look into the water below.
Its only your reflection
And you still aint got no place to go.
-- Deep Purple (Sail Away)

(Yes, I took the pic)

Ka sisaliku tee kivil jätab jälje
Kuigi mi seda ei näe.

(A lizard's track over a stone also leaves a trace
Even if we do not see it.)

- Karl Ristikivi

Rajat loved to talk. He also suffered from a gastro-intestinal condition brought on by an overdose of Diet Pepsi which caused him to ignore all bodily and verbal cues which told him to, "Shut your mouth and stop talking."

He was religious to a fault which means he wasn't religious at all. But what he lacked in religion, he made up for with an extra large can of bird feed. "Aaa Aaa Aaa," he'd go as he fed the pigeons. And "Aaa aaa aaa" would go his elderly neighbour from her balcony window.

Unknown to Rajat, his elderly neighbour had the hots for him. One could tell she had been a beautiful woman in her prime. But now, in the even years of her life, she wondered what it would've been like to have macadamia nut tea with a dash of lime.

Meanwhile, Lime "The Sour" Lemon was planning his escape from the cold storage facility. Equipped with a spoon and a nearly frozen tadpole, he felt he could just dig a tunnel to China. Little did he realize that tadpole would grow up to be King Tuk-a-Luk -- the last ruler of Sparta.

King Tuk-a-Luk peeked into the horizon at the dotted Persian ships. With 300 of his warriors, he started forming phalanxes until the Immortals told them they couldn't play with no clothes on. Angry at being told off, he started the Xerces Corporation to manufacture printing equipment. His subcontractor misspelled it as Xerox -- and the rest, as they say, is history.

So all was well in the Kingdom, until a malcontent by the name of Frank Vivala began agitating for revolution. Vivala, it is widely believed, was jealous because King Ralph was more handsome than he was; in addition, Vivala may have also been suffering some sort of degenerative mental disease brought on by sexual promiscuity. In any case, Vivala claimed it was unfair for the King to collect taxes without letting the general populace have a say in how the country was governed. Apparently in addition to his other flaws, Vivala was unclear on the definition of the word "monarchy".

Welcome to the Kingdom of Loathing - a turn based RPG in which you have to fight monsters and complete quests while building up skills to move on to harder levels. What makes it different, is that this game is a reader's delight! Some of the in-game monsters and items -

Spam Witch

You're fighting a Spam Witch

You look into this seductive creature's eyes and feel as if she can make your sword longer, your bank account bigger, your waist smaller, and show you the secret habits of barnyard animals. You fight to resist her charms.

Wolf Mask

When you put this mask on, you feel as if you've finally discovered the real you, the you that no one else can see. You are a wolf, deep inside. Well, actually you're not.

Trouser Snake

You're fighting The Trouser Snake.

This is the Trouser Snake, so named because it resembles a snake wearing pants. Pants with only one leg. So basically it just resembles a snake.

Sticky Meat Pants

This is one sticky pair of meat pants. Which, on the whole, is much better than a meaty pair of stickpants. Those'd be hard to put on.

If you've got time to kill, go ahead and indulge yourself in the Kingdom of Loathing.

There's a time when a man needs to fight and a time when he needs to accept that his destiny's lost, the ship has sailed and that only a fool will continue.

The truth is I've always been a fool.

-- Edward Bloom (Big Fish)

Life may be tough, but I refuse to give up . Watch out for my paper at IJCNLP-08.

Jyoti was a hyperactive teenager. She just didn't know when to stop. She tapped her feet incessantly on the wooden floor. "I wildy wonder if I can tap dance," she wondered wildly. So she went to the kitchen sink, climbed on to the medieval tap and started dancing.

She was a tiny girl. Sort of like Thumbelina. But larger. People called her Fingerina. She hated that name. "It is demeaning to women," she would say, "And pretzels." She thought about pretzels now, especially the little boy she had fashioned out of mini hard pretzel rods, and it made her happy.

She thought of all the wonderful times they had spent together. That's when she slipped on a soap sud and would've fallen in, had a spider not swung to her rescue.

Moral: Spiders may be good people but they are better insects.

This snippet draws a bar graph that tells you your twitter posting frequency per hour in the last 24 hours.

Screenshot

Instructions

1. Download Twitter Timeline Javascript v0.2 (Requires PlotKit and MochiKit).
2. Edit TwitterTimeline.js and change the userid variable to your user-id. You'll find your user-id at http://twitter.com/account/badge.
3. You will need to include the javascript files:

   <script type="text/javascript" src="/js/MochiKit/MochiKit.js"></script>
   <script type="text/javascript" src="/js/PlotKit/Base.js"></script>
   <script type="text/javascript" src="/js/PlotKit/Layout.js"></script>
   <script type="text/javascript" src="/js/PlotKit/Canvas.js"></script>
   <script type="text/javascript" src="/js/PlotKit/SweetCanvas.js"></script>
   <script type="text/javascript" src="/js/TwitterTimeline.js"></script>

4. Next, add the following lines where you want the Timeline to appear:

   <script type="text/javascript" src="/js/TwitterTimeline.js"></script>
   <div><canvas id="graph" height="200" width="400"></canvas></div>
   

For your reference, TwitterTimeline.js:

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<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
/*
 * Twitter Timeline Javascript v0.2 (March 20, 2007)
 * Pravin Paratey (http://www.dustyant.com)
 * Andrei Virlan  (http://its.squeak.in)
 *
 * Released under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Licence
 * http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/
 *
 * Changelog:
 * 0.2 (Mar 20, 2007) - Moved to PlotKit to draw graphs
 * 0.1 (Feb 23, 2007) - Initial Release
 */
 
var userid = '754023'; // Change this value to your user-id
 
var timelineArray = new Array();
function drawGraph() {
    var layout = new PlotKit.Layout("bar", {});
    layout.addDataset("sqrt", timelineArray);
    layout.evaluate();
    var canvas = MochiKit.DOM.getElement("graph");
    var plotter = new PlotKit.SweetCanvasRenderer(canvas, layout, {});
    plotter.render();
}
 
function twitterCallback(obj) {
	// Create an array to hold the 24 hours of the day
	var hourArray = new Array(24);
 
	// Initialize array
	for(var i=0; i<24; i++) {
		hourArray[i] = 0;
	}
 
	for (var i=0; i<obj.length; i++) {
		// Get date
		var created_at = new Date(obj[i].created_at);
		if(obj[i].user.id == userid) {
			// Increment the hour
			hourArray[created_at.getHours()]++;
		}
	}
 
	// Construct the timeline
	for(var i=0; i<24; i++) {
		timelineArray[i] = new Array(i, hourArray[i]);
	}
	MochiKit.DOM.addLoadEvent(drawGraph);
}
// Makes the twitter call
document.write('<scr'+'ipt type="text/javascript"' +
	'src="http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/' +
	userid + '.json?callback=twitterCallback"></scr'+'ipt>');
-->
</script>

When Dee was little, crew cuts weren't the "in thing". Which, translated, meant that his parents thought their handsome *cough* sonny boy had been blessed with hair that'd even make the Gods turn green with envy. And so every morning Dee' mama would apply a liberal amount of coconut oil and then neatly part his hair with a fine-toothed comb before packing him off to school.

Now, I have hair that's straight and mostly flat. I say mostly cause a part of it refuses to follow the rules. Every time you comb it down, it just springs back up. Like some of those annoying kids in the street who refuse to pipe down. Or my little brother.

Speaking of whom, I recently learnt he likes tomboys. And Russians. Hmm, Russian tomboys. Wonder what that'd be like. "Sapi! Poshlaja svenja! Go clean your room!"

Haha. Me, I prefer the french. Sorta like Audrey Tautou.

There was going to be a point to this post. But I lost it along the way. Really.