The Solar Eclipsed Bar at Sawatdee

Look at the wall in the pic behind the bar @Sawatdee (Thai restaurant in St Paul, MN). It gives an appearance of solar eclipse. Damn neat!

Maggianos at Chicago with my GF

Andrew Zimmern at Mall of America

God Bless Mustache

Other than a tourist taking a bus ride for leisure and fun, it is a trivial activity. For me, as a designer, it offers an opportunity to witness lot of interesting encounters.

These days, I am playing tennis over the weekends with my friend Kunal who lives in Minneapolis. Every Saturday and Sunday, I take Bus 94 to 2^nd Avenue and 2^nd Street. The trip time is around 30 minutes.

I do not prefer to carry a book, an ipod, or PSP for entertainment for such a short trip and end up spending time looking outside the window or observing people habits – mostly weird. It is funny to see people with bizarre fashionable clothes, piercings, and behavior.

Last weekend, a gentleman in his late thirties, wearing beige suit and a hat hopped on the bus I was traveling. Besides clothes, the other noticeable thing about this man was his “Dali” mustache. (A narrow mustache with long points bent or curved steeply upward. Named after artist Salvador Dali. More: http://www.americanmustacheinstitute.org/MustacheStyles.aspx)

The gentleman takes the seat and starts grooming his mustache. No, I am not objecting mustache grooming. It is his personal property and he has all the right to groom it in public. As far as I know, grooming mustache is certainly not a crime according to either Minnesota or Federal laws. However, the real problem started when grooming turned to obsession.

By his mustache’s appearance, I could see that it was gelled for perfect styling. He starts with pulling his mustache away from the cheeks, extending the middle section (including ends) upwards and finishing with pointing the ends. That act of pulling the mustache in itself was so gruesome that I - including other passengers – felt repulsive. It was difficult to see the cruelty that he was bestowing on himself. Perhaps, he was enjoying the act of pulling, therefore, continued it for almost 10 minutes. During these painful moments, he pulled the mustache to the extent of ripping it apart. Because of the sheer force of pulling, his upper lips would protrude out of his face and make him look like a chimpanzee showing his upper teeth. I wouldn’t have cared if the pain remained with him but he was spreading it to all of us through our locked stares. We all prayed to God to take off his pain and bless him including us.

Finally, the grooming ended and all of us took a sigh of relief to realize that there was more to come.

Within a minute, his hands went inside his bags and found a CD. I thought that he would play music. My assumption was horribly wrong. He took the CD out of its cover and started using its reflective surface as a mirror. This time he wanted to ensure that the grooming was perfect by examining it with his own eyes – instead of his fellow passengers. By this time we already had become fans of his exotic mustache style.

Mirror is a strange and powerful object. It forces people to groom themselves even when not required. This gentleman, the modern Dali, also could not resist his instincts of giving final touches to the perfect master piece displayed on his face. The grooming session started again with the same intensity, however, for a change, this time it lasted only for 5 minutes.

The moment, he kept the CD back into the cover; we passengers knew that the session had ended. Within next minute he went into deep sleep of peace and accomplishment. Of course, the excruciating pain and the herculean effort in the pursuit of perfection took a toll on his body.

I felt tremendously lucky and blessed to witness this artistic feat. Long live mustache. God bless mustache.

Cirque de Soleil

Life is a circus involving strenuous and demanding situations and to successfully live through it require agility and perfection of an acrobat. Determination, dedication and deliberation define the key to the success of an acrobat; as much as they define it for a simple human being.

Cirque du Soleil’s Kooza is not just another show but a lifetime experience – a charismatic blend of motion, color and sound that engulfs the mind in the exquisite world of the supernatural – where dreams come true.

I decided to buy the tickets for 5^th of July show – the last day of the long weekend week in US. Praveen Shukla had talked about it a lot to me during my trip to Texas. He wanted all of us to go through the experience of Cirque du Soleil. 150 USD that I apprehensively spent for the tickets turned out to be a judicious investment and I realized it within the first 5 minutes of the show.

My seat was positioned in the central first row. Faces of performers were clearly visible from that distance. Faces with perfected expressions and sweat of success bedazzled the stage for over two hours.

Be it either kids or adults, everybody was immersed into the show. Acrobats and jokers, all were integrated gracefully in the presentation. With their elastic bodies, the acrobats performed the actions that wowed everybody; and with their wit and humor, the jokers captivated the audience till the end. Not only the performers but also the addition and removal of equipment from the stage seemed part of the same story. Nothing was disconnected, but a seamless experience.

The background music and songs for the performances engaged aural senses and complimented the show. To my amazement, one of the songs was in Hindi for rope walking trick.

Certainly, Cirque de Soleil is a show of the lifetime. It is one of the things that you would not want to miss in life. Take my words, “it is worth the money.”

USB Crack

Enabling disabled USB drive handy when you are in real need of data transfer.

It involves two steps:

1. Changing values in regedit
2. Renaming certain files in C:\WINDOWS\inf

Please go through the attached images.

Window Desktop Recovery Crack

Window's desktop is very fragile and requires frequent recovery. However, most of the times, the recover button does not work at all. Here is a simple procedure that involves regedit function to recover your desktop.

Of course, do not forget to refresh the desktop after you have made the edits.

Recession Creativity

Another creative and humorous advertisement from Praveen Verma Studios.
This is a logo of an organization, and is protected by copyright and/or trademark.