"Beware of Parrots - II"

As already shown in an earlier post, parrots are nothing but dyslexic raptors, and hence, must be feared.

So, inspired by the No Raptors T-Shirt from the xkcd store, here is the official "No Parrots" T-Shirt... design. No actual T-Shirt available, sorry.

Bonus: You may have noticed the new blog favicon based on this image. If not, look now.

"Hello, $Random_Stranger!"

Hi,

It looks like I've been linked from the outside world now!

This means that if you're reading this, you were not necessarily given this url by me, which again implies that I don't necessarily know you and that you don't necessarily know me.

Though this blog has been in existence for over a year, its readership was restricted to only a handpicked few who knew where to find it. These few too, were sworn to secrecy and made to sign an NDA (ok not really, but I did request them not to tell anyone).

So to all of you who were reading this blog with the condition, "don't spread the url around" -- well, that condition is hereby withdrawn. :)

While I'm meta-posting any way, here are a few changes made recently:

• New feed powered by FeedBurner (Subscribe!)
  

• Google Analytics tracking (I'll be watching you!)
  

• Other stuff (I don't remember/don't care)
  

Post your bouquets in the comments, brickbats can go here. :)

Cheers,
hexium

P.S: If have actually been here longer than a couple weeks, consider yourself a member of a very elite club. ;)

"Great Philosophers"

My Hobby: Quote pop song lyrics with the introduction "as the great philosopher $artist once said..."

Examples:

• As the great philosopher Brian McFadden once said, "you can't lose what you never had".
• As the great philosopher Britney Spears once said, "hit me baby, one more time!"
• As the great philosopher Alanis Morisette once said, "isn't it ironic?"

I got a million of these, but I'm not going to post them all here. In the words of the great philosopher Rob Thomas, "I'm not crazy (I'm just a little unwell)".

"Shut Up and Drive"

"Babit"

(For the memetically challenged, urbandictionary is your friend.)

"Piracy"

Piracy -- The Greatest Evil Ever!!

Or so the MPAA, RIAA and the BSA would have you believe.

However, there might be some good things that come out of piracy. A non-ordered, non-exhaustive list:

• Hardware Sales

If it wasn't for the MP3 music format, Napster and widespread music piracy, there would not be a market for MP3 players, DVD players, media-player enabled mobile phones.

• Reading habits
  

Pirated paperback copies of books are available for less than one-fifth the cost of the original, (pirated) e-books are available for free.

• Merchandise & Concert tickets
  

Ok the 'merchandise' part is dicey, but surely, a live concert experience can't be pirated!

• Skill building, and future sales

Photoshop! AutoCAD! A large number of Photoshop and AutoCAD professionals acquire their skills on pirated copies of the software. When these same users of pirated software reach corporate decision-making (or at least decision-influencing) positions, they usually choose what they are familiar with. Thus, piracy leads to legitimate sales. Microsoft too, understands and embraces this principle for its Windows and Office software.

• Spreading Culture
  

Check out this great video on how piracy helps spread culture!

(Author reserves the right to extend this post into something more coherent and organized at some point in the future. He was forced to post this post half-baked as it was holding back all the other super-awesome post ideas he had, because he accidentally and stupidly clicked "Publish" instead of "Save" when he first created a draft of this post, causing the title to show up in the "meta-feed" section. He then subsequently deleted the post but the link still existed and 404'd. (Well, not any more it won't.))

(Edit -- The link still 404s. Apparently I was supposed to post this in May. Well screw that.)