The Cricket Stock Exchange

The Cricket Stock Exchange
Thursday, April 1st, 2010

The Cricket Stock Exchange was inaugurated today to the public amid grand festivities and extravagance. "It is the first ever stock exchange in the history of humankind to allow commoners to invest and trade stocks of sportsmen and watch their bank balances soar like the shiny cricket ball blessed by the Midas touch of Sachin's Willow", chirped Sharad Pawar, President of CSE, wiith his master matador Lalit Modi standing tall beside him. Although there's a lot of speculation around whether people are ready to put their money on the pitch, it is likely to emerge as a strong investment option considering the recent recession in the APAC markets and the long billowing US economy.

Would I, an average salaried class employee, toss my hard-earned Gandhi imprints into this roulette? What are the chances that I'll get to see the Mahatmas back? It turns out that my worries are as confirmed or as unfounded as are chances of India winning the next 5 ODI's against any cricketing nation. At the same time, Sharad and Lalit are Laloo Yadavs when it comes to milking a cow, and it seems that their milch cow has birthed another milch cow almost overnight -- so its easy to figure where the bulls have decided to make their harem: the CSE of course. But the bears, you fear? Well the bears were last seen rummaging through the beehive-infested, and eerily deserted Wall Streets and Dalal Streets of our round planet, which by the way, will soon adorn the looks of a cricket ball-like moneyspinner.

So who're you and what going to trade? CSE wants to play a defensive stroke for now, while promising lofty sixers for the future. It currently provides vanilla segments familiar to investors. The first one is for the long-term investors, your large-cap market -- the ICC Top 40 Cricketers Index (CRIX), the stalwarts who have proved their worth in all forms of the game. The mid-cap segment offers you the confident, promising, delivering youngsters who're poised to adorn the halls of fame tomorrow. As for the small caps, you have the dark horses who've outshone their celebrated comrades at times, but their brilliance is confined to a single form of the game. Then of course, you have an array of mutual funds whose NFOs are coming up round the corner but the ICC is yet to come up with any tax relief schemes with these funds. Hedge funds are still being mooted, says Lalit Modi, who is quick to reiterate the open market advantages of the CSE.

So when do you buy and sell stocks on the CSE? Well, consider these headlines and brace yourself in the pads of an avid investor to get the drift: "Yuvraj fit for the next Aussie Series, promises 5 centuries", "Bhajji and Symonds to star in Spielberg's Bollywood debut", "Steyn pulls a hamstring, unfit for the hyped matchup against Ishant"...

Only time will tell whether CSE will bring the smile back on billions of investors across the globe. Until then, stay vested!

Mother Earth of samples: Blue Note records

Blue Note records, the jazz label, has given me - your average avid hiphop listener, many an instrumental melody that mentally smoke up all those gritty hiphop records I've come to love. My respects to hiphop producers who carefully handpick jazz samples for their beats, and give us listeners everlasting gems. Nearly every hiphop producer, from Dr. Dre to Kanye, would've at some point in time had his hands dusty sifting through the basement looking for old vinyl jazz records to look for that one last sample that would make their artwork complete.

I came about this link that has J Rocc (who I learn is an accomplished beat junkie) mixing Blue Notes' compilation of popular hiphop-sampled jazz samples with the hiphop tracks that samples them. I'm done guzzling the bandwidth for the day so I'ma return tomorrow and roll that stream out.

Is DevnhaLLi airport too far? we found out...

Errbody nowadays, even the 24/7 channels all over the cable bandwidth, are ranting about how horrible traffic conditions are in and BengaLooru and how impractical is it to throw the BIAL aka devanhaLLi airport open to public. So it was high time that my wife and I, as dutiful denizens of Hebbal, which is just (ahem!) 30km away from the airport, drove the distance for ourselves and published our report to the general masses. So here goes:

0900: "yaawn.., are we going on the drive?"

0945: "ಅಮ್ಮ, ಗುಳ್ಳಪ್ಪ ಸಕ್ಕತ್ತಾಗಿದೆ!"

0954: "off we go! meter reading: 116728"

1004: First traffic holdup @ kodigehaLLi gate - 5min

1020: second traffic holdup @ yelahanka bypass - 2min

1035: cruise past trumpet flyover...and the airport entrance

1040: u-turn!

1043: 50 minutes and a 10km deviation later, we're there! meter reading: 116765

1044: Airport 5km stretch entrance: "Sorry madam, get pass from hebbal police station"

1045: On the way bacc, drive's smooth as krayzie bone's flow!

1114: 30 min from the airport and we're at Hebbal flyover! meter reading: 116788

Verdict: The drive from Hebbal is a breeze; the 25km drive took roughly 45 min to, and 35 min from, the airport. This was a weekend but there's no ITPL or electronics city thisaway to account for any substantial addition of traffic on weekdays. Also, even if the airport opens, given the wide roads of Byatarayanapura and beyond, traffic on this final stretch of the drive still should not be a deterrant.

And driving the sierra at 2000 rpm on this stretch roccs! figuratively of course ...

ಸಂದೇಶ್ ರೇಡಿಯೋನಲ್ಲಿ !!

Sandesh ೯೨.೭ FM ನಲ್ಲಿ ಈಗ ಪ್ರೊಗ್ರಾಮ್ ಕೊಡ್ತಾ ಇದ್ದಾನೆ, ತುಂಬಾನೆ ಖುಷಿಯಾಗುತ್ತೆ :-) ಒಂದ್ ಘಂಟೆ ಪ್ರೋಗ್ರಮು, ೫.p.m-೬.p.m, ಸಕ್ಕತ್ ಮಜಾ ಕೊಡ್ತಾ ಇದ್ದಾನೆ. "ಕೇಳಿ ಕೇಳಿಸಿ ಲೈಫ್ ನಿಮ್ಮದಾಗಿಸಿ"!

ಚೀಯರ್ಸ್!

Talib Kweli and Mick Boogie: MCEO

One of the finest additions to my mixtape collection - incredibly good music gifted to the masses for free - mixtapes such as these truly carry the spirit of a musician: music is like philosophy, and an accomplished philosopher would address a crowd of thousands without asking for a penny in return; all he seeks is a deeper insight into his mindworks by listening to himself and to the response of his audience. There're only a few Mick Boogies in the hiphop community but hopefully we will see them get the better of corporate music giants whose shortsightedness is outclouding the yeateryear shine of this crossover genre that is hiphop. Check out his mixtapes including this one at his website or at datpiff.

Talib Kweli's music will certainly be with me on my Noah's arc - first heard him on kanye's College Dropout and then went on to buy his album Kwality -- another great album. So when I heard he's out with Mick Boogie blacksmithing new music, I wanted in!

Elephant in the sand

I would never buy a Fat Joe album, not even at INR100 (at INR50..? maybe..for beat-scavenging). but a FatJoe-diss album served free by the good brothers of G-Unit? Hizell yeah! as i write i'm banging Red light Green light from the mixtape "Elephant in the sand". A 68mb download - a good 30 odd minutes of high quality sound, music, rapping, and well, cursing. But i'm into this for the first three goodies, and for this, i give it a 5.0/5.0.

Alas, this is also going to be the last of DJ Whookid's mixtapes..self-admittedly he's fed up with everything that smells like beef (read rap game rivalries, that are often fuelled by what else, mixtapes) and is going to retire now at 30 (!!) and live far away in his hut in Thailand.

Man...retirement at 30...if i retired today, move with my family away from all this chaos...to a cosy hut somewhere along the beaches of nammooru South Canara...would i still be able to affizzord the internet chizzarges to download mixtapes?? i think i need to kill the lights on this post right now, talk to my better half on retiring and chizzew on it...

Practical UML modeling tips

I found Scott Ambler's site really useful in my work - he covers practical usage of commonly used UML diagrams -- I've gone through his writing on state machines and activity diagrams: clear, concise and illustrative. Here's the jumpoff page:
http://www.agilemodeling.com/artifacts/

Technical search engines

Here're a couple of technical search engines that I've come to use frequently:

CiteSeer: This one's a true goldmine that I've been using since the last 5-6 years
Scientific Commons: This one's a recent find, acts like a frontend to CiteSeer and probably other engines.

Writing a Whitepaper

Did this Google search and found something for starters like me

http://www.mwknowles.com/free_articles/white_paper/white_paper.html

CDs copped

Pharrell - In my mind - Interscope records - INR 100
Snoop Dogg - The Best Of - Priority records - INR 100

Pricing:
"You still make a profit?!!" << "Aiight" << "Is it a gold-plated CD?"

Why buy?:
"Bread and butter, thats why" >> "At this price its nice" >> "Honoring a recommendation"

Bought@ Reliance Timeout

Bad thing about mixtapes

Well, there ain't a bad thing. none. Mixtapes are better than commercial produccs these days, serious! and they're free. and they're downloadable. and with broadband, streaming's aces. So i get my wavepad out and scrape up the whole mixtape stream from the system mixer and there you have it fresh off nero's oven into a 10 rupee, appendable, mp3 cd for every 1200km-a-month odometer bump clocced from home to electronics city and bacc.

Mixtape ROI
So far, my investment on mixtapes has been INR200 (thats 20 cds, one mixtape per cd...now i'm burning mp3s...hey save the loose change..serious!) plus INR1000 on download costs -- thats INR60 per fingerpicced, self-sorted mixxtape album, a sixth of what i pay for a regular double-plastic draped jewelcased rap cd in a forum, musicworld, temptations or a planet-m -- hehe, now here's where a dj like Clinton Sparks would drop his adlib "Ssayy Somethin'!!" - rhetorically. but if u're not into hiphop, i'm surprised you got all the way down to reading this anyway ;-)

Security vulnerabilia

Some interesting wtf stuff on low-level keyboard hotkey rev-engineering
http://www.eeye.com/html/resources/newsletters/vice/VI20051005.html

Interesting stuff on Spied Piper.
http://blakewatts.com/namedpipepaper.html