So, I finally watched Interstellar yesterday; after days of, literally, closing ears and eyes on every mention and reference of this word. It is difficult, not to know anything you usually want to know first-hand about. No one else to blame though; I should not leave the decision of ruining a movie or a book to others. That call should stay only with me after experiencing it. This post is about my experience of watching the movie I waited so long for.

Experience, yes. About the movie, no. There are too many intelligent posts already written about it. Reviewing it, explaining it. The plot, the science, everything. This is not a post where I intend to do any of that. This is post where I intend to jot down my thoughts of going through an extravagant experience like Interstellar in India. I want to do this especially given I was watching a movie after a break of more than a year & half. I wanted to see how technical advances have improved, if so, the overall movie going experience.

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So here it goes.

1. Experience of booking a movie has improved since I last did it. Apps have improved a lot. I was pleasantly surprised when the app supported adding the movie ticket to Passbook as an event entry pass. Nice effect and effort of customizing the app to the platform it runs on. Surprisingly, and sadly, not many try to do that.

2. But using the said pass at the movie theatres is still not possible. I searched for the machine or the person to whom I could flash the pass and enter without a physical ticket. Not possible yet, at least not at all the movie theatres. You still have to collect a physical ticket, show it to a person who tears a part of it & hands over what remains as a proof of your approved presence. They do have a machine to collect the tickets though. However anyone, with the booking id, can print the ticket without any validation. He, then, can flash it further as a valid entry pass. Plus it’s heading read ”Booked by Internet”. Sigh.

3. Multiplexes continue to ruin the theatre experience in India. The aim to maximize the earnings out of the small retail spaces is punishing the viewers. Each “Screen” has a maximum of 8-10 rows, with each sitting 15-20 folks. That limited is a Screen. In such small spaces, we have 3 tiers of convenience, Silver, Gold and Platinum. Like a regular middle class person, I selected the middle-tier. Surprisingly, the distribution is as any corporate evaluates its employees’ performance. 10% are awesome. 10% suck. All others are regular blokes who are just okiesh. Same was the case here; 1 row of platinum folks and 1 row of silver. In between the 8 rows of fools. Platinum folks sat with their necks held high, not because they paid more. But because they could hardly see what rolled on the screen without doing so. Then I do clearly recall a “silver” person turning around and laughing at the “golden” dummy sitting behind; pointing at his silliness to have paid more. Sigh.

4. Because “Screen”, the hall, is so small, the actual screen itself is made small. And so very close to the eyes. To be frank, except for the darkness and the silver bloke pointing & laughing at the dummy goldie, this was not that much a different experience than sitting a foot from my LED television at home. Interstellar deserved better. Multiplex are to know that. Sigh.

5. Every movie is to have an intermission. After all , we believe in giving businesses to many. If there’s no intermission, how are the samosa, pop-corn walas to get their earnings? So a movie is abruptly stopped. Usually I feel every Hollywood movie-maker is aware of this fact; so I could find a logical break being put in every movie. But I think the person who is handed this responsibility uses it to break when he has to pee the most. Be it, then, at the most inopportune place, in middle of some secret revealing dialog. Who cares; he has pee to handle.

6. People still chatter during the movie. That is after they have settled into their chairs after arriving late. Especially when in a group during a Hollywood flick. More so if the said group is all guys surrounded by another group of girls. Some smarty has to show off his knowledge or crack a foolish, unrelated joke. Happens.Every.Single.Time. I literally watched half the movie with my left ear closed to avoid one such Einstein explaining every single scene that unfolded on the screen.

7. And then the ‘usualities’. National anthem is still played, with half standing in respect and others poking there noses around. Head-shadows of late comers are still seen. Mobiles are still not on silent mode. Samosas and pop-corns are still money-wise costly and taste-wise cheap. Torch-bearers still enlighten the lost and side-tracked, searching for the seats. Sigh!

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Anyway, Interstellar was a great movie; it deserves a better treatment than is accorded. Wish I had chosen a single screen theatre, booked a balcony ticket after standing hours in queue and experienced this marvel on a huge screen listening only to the whistle, and not chatter. Or else simply stayed home, catching it on my LED television. A foot away. Sigh!

Agatha Christie, a name I saw at every bookstore and avoided every single time. The books ‘looked’ short, felt they had to be short stories for pre-teens. How wrong was I, to neglect the suggestion not to judge books by cover, by how they ‘looked’.

And Then There Were None has to one of the finest, sharpest and crispiest whodunit mysteries I have ever read. Everything is perfect, to-the-point; all about the main story and the characters involved. Chapters after chapters, new plot twists are revealed. The story never stagnates. No character eats up the pages. No sub-plots are introduced just to thicken the book binds.

But most importantly, there is no single person that knows-all-but-shows-none. Incidents occur and they are presented with all the details visible to the characters involved. Nothing is hidden, made visible only to the selected one, the detective. Because there is none.

The experience reading this gem is amazing. I pride myself to foresee the final mystery way bit early than it actually is uncovered; or even hinted at. This one bowled me over. Almost all the 10 characters were on my criminal radar at some point. None stayed there for significant time though. Even post the final chapter, I stayed stumped, wondering what has been uncovered. Because, frankly, nothing is. This, indeed, is a novel of a kind.

If you love mysteries and haven’t yet hopped this ride, you must. Agatha Christie says this was the most difficult novel for her to write, she took utmost effort to make sure she pens a perfect, unsolvable murder mystery. All I can say is she did succeed.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The novel is an entertaining read overall. Expected given that it is penned by an experienced story weaver. But then it also has those parts that make the experience average, at times.

It starts out promisingly, Strike interested me. So did Robin (sigh!) and their case at hand. Mystery is woven, with the prose heavily studded in the initial part. Studded it felt, given I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. It made me know the characters, though very few, more.The main characters and the plot are built perfectly at about a forth into the book. And then it gets stuck.

The mystery that was revealed stays the same; neither does it become more intriguing nor clearer. Lots and lots of characters get introduced, but hardly any new information is unravelled. It was during this time when the prose, that I had initially relished, became a hinderance to my enjoyment. Especially ones that broke the flow of conversation. So unnecessary they felt, so much so that I skipped some paragraphs.

The plot does pick up towards the final third of the book. Unnecessary prose continue. But this is also when the book becomes unputdownable. So much is revealed, in such intriguing a way. And the plot stays interesting till the end. The climax, unlike so many mystery novels, doesn’t feel dragged. The mystery is unravelled in satisfactory a way; a way I do not usually cherish however.

Yes, I do not cherish the style of suspense novels when we do not have the access to the detective’s thoughts. Style where the key information, or the interpretations, are hidden from the reader only to be revealed at the end. The Cuckoo’s Calling presents Strike this way. Satisfactory, but not preferred.

And that’s where the novel lets me down, unnecessary prose, non-preferred style of revealing suspense and too slow a mid-third. Overall, though, for the way the plot & the characters are introduced and the case closed, this is a one-time read for sure.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Ever since I decided to own and host my site, i.e. basically ever since this place has existed, I was planning to write down my reasons and choices for the engines that run this site. Couple of feedbacks finally made me jot down the thoughts.

One thing I was sure about was I did not want to not control any of the knobs of my blog. So I had to go all in.

• Own the domain first
• Run and customise the blogging engine
• Host the engine

Domain

Deciding on domain name was simpler part; that is once I had given up on all the crazy pseudo-names I wished my blog would have. So I went ahead with my real name. Simple.

To register a domain, there were a lot of options out there. Some were way cheaper but were sucky and known to follow shady-practises. Then there few that were comparatively costly, but simple.

I had heard so much about one such simple, no-nonsense domain registration service, Hover. Few visits to Hover and I decided Hover was the one that fit my high-horse attitude the most. I usually tend to support the service providers with principles. And it always comes at a cost.

So I registered my domain via Hover. The experience was simple and positively uncluttered. I recommend the service. Give it a go. You will be impressed.

Blogging engine

I have been blogging for quite some time now and have owned the free blogs at Wordpress.com, blogger, tumblr and even posterous. I even hosted a blog with Wordpress.org. Each had their own benefits and shortcomings.

• Posterous was simple. But it was way too simple.
• Blogger allows heavy customisation, and even monetization via Google AdWords. But it is way too childish. It does not have a professional, or a 'mature' look to it.
• Tumblr has nice social sharing features. But that is what it is. It is more of a social network for bloggers rather than a blogging engine. Plus majority of the themes are not good for text heavy posts, which mine always are. It's perfect for images, especially gifs.
• Wordpress.com/.org is the biggie in the space. It has everything possible under the sun. Customisation, extensibility, theming. But it is way too heavy. And far too common. I never like common.

So I was on a look-out for an option that is simple, lite & powerful and gives me a lot of control with what I can do. Enter Ghost.

Ghost is a simple open source blogging platform that you can completely own. It provides simple writing tools. I have already detailed what I like about Ghost in the first post here. Even the community has accepted it, so there are a lot of customisation options available too.

Plus if you like coding even a bit, there is nothing better. I had my Ghost blog running on my local machine and I was satisfied, only after some customisation i.e. I adopted and adapted the Vapor theme from Seth Lilly.

All that remained was to make it available on the internet.

Hosting

Final call I had to make was about how to host the blog I had running on my local machine. One thing I did not want to do was go with a PaaS solution; basically the solutions that provide you just the platform where you can upload the blog and you are up.

In a way, Ghost made my decision to go against PaaS easier. There are hardly such services that support node.js, javascript based platform, on which Ghost is built.

I had decided to either go all in, i.e. get a virtual server (VPS) or simply not worry about hosting myself.

Ghost allows you both the options. You can either go pro with Ghost and let the team handle the hosting for you, like wordpress.com. Second options is to go free and host it yourself. I knew I wanted to go with the second option. And I did.

For getting VPS, I just had two options shortlisted, Linode or Digital Ocean. Linode was costlier. A more pro-dev friendly. Not something I was ready to sign up for with such simple requirements as mine.

On the other hand I had earlier experience, mostly positive, with Digital Ocean. Plus it had Ghost application pre-built.

So it was really as simple as creating a droplet and I had my blog up. Finally, I also wanted to secure up the Linux node, and an amazing article from Feross Aboukhadijeh got me rolling. It is written for a Linode node; but it can very well work for any Linux server out there. Do not forget to follow these steps. They are must if you are to keep the node running even for short time.

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So a day in and I had a secure Linux VPS node running my blog which was completely customised by me, as per my needs. And it was satisfactory experience and a fruitful journey.

One way to think of writing is to jot down abundance of words, leading towards a story or an account. Another way is to simply think of it as a medium to express oneself. Every person often comes across such occasions to put his thought, his ideas, his expressions in words. Occasions are aplenty. Event in his own life. Event in the lives of acquaintances, friends or near & dear ones. Or just a public event.

One of my friends had a similar occasion, one close to his heart. It was anniversary of his engagement with his fiancé, their's 1st. He took all the pains to decide on the gift, the place to buy it from, flowers to go with it and the time they to be delivered at.

And then he did what I see people doing most often these days. He went to google and typed “1st anniversary wishes/messages”. I wondered why did he not simply scribble what he felt?

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It’s saddening to see people resist the efforts to pen the words they think of. They go after what others have written, beautifully never-the-less, but at the cost of it being not real, fake. They underestimate the power of conveying ones own feelings in whichever way possible. The words, their structure won’t matter much then. And that is one way one can start writing.

Start short, simple and personal.

To start with, don’t miss a chance to write to your loved ones, breed a will to do so. Wish them for their successes/failures. Appreciate their kind acts. Console them for what they have lost. Keep it simple, write the words you feel. Take effort to make it personal. Involving.

Next go for an outline that you feel would be more effective. Decide what is the best way to put your thoughts through. Try and improvise on different ways you could communicate. Do you want to narrate an incident you people were involved in? Do you want to glance with them at the journey you had together? Do you want to reflect upon their qualities, good or bad? Or do you simply want to tell them what they mean to you? Think how best you can convey what you want to convey.

And you would be surprised to see the effect that has; on both the reader and you as writer. Don’t act amazed if you want to open up, to express yourself more. Have belief in yourself and try to write more. Do so even on more public forums, about public issues.

Only difference is, in public, the reader might not be the one you can personally connect to. Write for yourself first. Write what you would like reading, something that will please you.

So if there is one person, you, who you could please with what you wrote, chances are there will be few more. There will always be a group of readers with whom the thoughts you feel would connect. Adornment of affulent words is no longer a need then.

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Remember. Will, Outline and Belief is all it takes

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

-Sylvia Plath

So next time you get an occasion to wish someone, don’t doubt yourself. Start writing. Express.

[Postscript] I had originally written and published this post on Medium. That was before I started writing on my self-owned blog.

It is raining outside, a steady fall of cheerful drops. I look outside, while am gathering my thoughts, again. Rains always make me do that. Especially such.

Cheerful the droplets sound, together. This sound beat is no less than a pleasant sufi composition to my ears. It always cheers me up. It is doing the same to me now too. It's affecting the plans I have for the evening. But I do not feel saddened. Plans can be remade. Such rains are rare.

I adore such rains that have a knack of showmanship. They lead with a thorough built-up.

Elaborate gathering of the hazy clouds in the sky. Gradual darkening of the surroundings. Disjointed, but equally systematic, flashes of lightenings filling the skies. Followed so aptly by a symphony of angered rumbles. Unhurried arrival of tiny droplets. And the final showdown with the downpour. Show doesn't end. Post-climactic spans of the gleeful nature leaves one mesmerised.

Today's is one such showman. It, indeed, has left me mesmerised. Rejuvenated!

I like listening to podcasts and have been regularly doing so. Podcasts have almost become my go-to source of entertainment during my commutes or non-working lone times. If I can focus on what's playing, I listen to podcasts. Music is only for the times when I don't want people to disturb me and concentrate, mostly during work.

It's no surprise, then, that the podcast-listening applications, or podcatchers, are few of the most used, and so most important, apps on my phone. And because I interact with these apps very frequently throughout the day, I look for a frictionless experience while using them.

When Marco Arment launched Overcast I was highly excited. I was waiting for this app since he first wrote about it. I knew Marco would have a different take on how we consume podcasts. I had high expectations while I downloaded the app.

And Overcast did deliver. Almost.

Perfect, except while downloading

Overcast gives a different spin to almost every aspect of the podcast listening experience. Just the first impression promoted the app to my home screen, even my dock. There were so many things that impressed me.

Overall look, user interface and experience of the app has a refreshing feel to it; even the colours and fonts used are easy on eyes. Playlists management and playback controls are simple and intuitive, equally powerful at the same time. Voice boost does assist in making podcasts more audible in a car/bus.

Smart-speed, the silence killer, is brilliant. It's just been 20 days since I started using this app and this feature has already saved an extra 3 hours on my podcast listening time. This feature alone is sufficient enough to make Overcast my default app. It even did for 2 weeks.

However this smart feature was clouded by the data-unfriendly behaviour of the app while downloading episodes. And this was a huge minus for the app.

I feel most of the shortcomings during downloads are due to the misguided assumption on Marco's part; that a user either wants every episode from a podcast automatically downloaded or wants none. The belief, it seems, is one would never decide whether to download an episode, manually, only when it arrives.

Well, that is not true for all. Some of us do like to be notified when an episode of our favourite podcast is released, read what would be discussed and then decide whether to download it or not.

Overcast struggles to do either of it.

You can either "Subscribe to All New Episodes" of a podcast and be notified/not notified when a new episode is released or just disable the subscribe option. There is no way to just be notified, but not download the episode.

Reading about an episode is not easy too. I assumed initially, and accidentally do so even now, that clicking on the episode should expand its description. Rather it starts downloading it. I have to target the (i) and click it to read the description. Not friendly, really.

Even when the download begins, the options visible to take actions are not really intuitive. First of all, there is no information on the data size of the episode. It is especially important to display this information when one has to decide whether to download it over the data connection or not.

Anyway once the download begins, the button changes to something with a pause symbol in it. First of all, as can be seen, the ring around the pause button is no indication of the download status.

Secondly, the pause button does not actually pause the download. It stops it, discarding the already downloaded data and begins re-download from 0% on 'resume'. I understand the limitation that Core Audio puts while storing partially downloaded files, but least I expect is not to show a pause button at all if it does not.

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All these issues with download manager really make it difficult for me to use Overcast. Marco does say he builds apps which cater to him first and solves the problem he faces. So he, may be, did not foresee the way the podcasts are actually consumed, especially in non-first world countries.

He, also, may say that Overcast is not for me and I should try the other independent apps he, so earnestly, showcases in the settings menu.

However I really like Overcast's episode management and playback features and would want to use them. I would miss them in the other apps.

But as long as the app does not value the importance of data, I am afraid it will stay in my backup folder, waiting for the appropriate update.

One's subconscious wakes up pretty frequently, at times during events not that significant in grand scheme of things. This was one such incident.

It was raining outside. I was, however, in a rush to come out of the building. I had already gotten late to leave my desk. Not that I had a bus to catch; rather I had buses to miss. I had to hit the road before the swarm of office shuttles poured on to the roads. That was my best, may be the only, chance to reach home unflustered.

I was trotting along the road, with my mind preoccupied with the thought to reach the parking lot sooner. Shall I take a straight route to the parking lot with just a turn or one with many arcs and twists? I had already started hustling on the straight route.

I, then, felt an itch on my left hand, just beneath the watch I was wearing.

I removed the watch and held it. I was lost for a moment, looking for a replacement place for the watch to reside. I realised I could wear it on my right wrist too and I went ahead to strap it there.

But my subconscious mind, fast asleep till then, woke up making me aware about what I was doing. That is when it dawned on me.

I never wear a watch on my right hand. Never.

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The incident got me thinking why was it so? Why was it that strapping a watch on the right hand was such a taboo for me? When did I decide it should always be on the left hand? I looked around me, none of the people had the watch on their right hand. None. No one.

I could come up with some quick answers as to why that might be the case. But I was not after a particular, rational, answer. I was curious about the pre-programmed behaviour of mine that makes me do, without much thinking, many of the chores I regularly do.

I knew there would be a lot of such wired decisions I keep making, and I went on to identify some of those. It didn't take much time for me to compile the list.

• I prefer even numbers, for any and every thing. Counting, stop-watch, timer, alarm, volume rocker. Every number settles on an even number.
• I hate characters, in alphabet, with pointy triangles in them. V, N, Z. I hate them.
• I prefer path which is straight, with lesser turns, even if longer.
• I pick a pen up when I want to note down something closer to my heart, for reasons I wrote about earlier.
• And many more..

The alternatives just don't feel right to me. Rather I do not even think about or look out for the alternative.

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I might assign reasons, possibly scientific too, to each one of them. But I would go back to doing the things, liking them or hating them, just the way I am programmed to do.

And I feel every one of us, if he or she decides, could come up with one such list. All we need to do is keep our mind open and question.

One might wonder what would he/she gain from the exercise? Well, it is good to know the always-awake, the conscious, subconscious is looking over, making small decisions for you, always.

I would no longer be posting on this weblog going ahead. I have finally managed to own my presence on web completely, again. I knew this was a placeholder for my thoughts till I put together a planned-to-be-permanent place which could be controlled by me. I managed to get that done finally, read my views here.

I have already started writing at the new portal which I have simply named as {amit gawande} as finally that is what it is going to be, a portal just about me. If you have liked my writing, I assure you, you will continue to like it going ahead too. Subscribe to the new rss feed.

This site is a result of in-numerous attempts at pushing myself to own my blog, again.

My last attempt was significant for me because it allowed me to fully host and own a wordpress blog. It had a good run through my bachelor life, got neglected later and finally shuttered, post marriage. Posts still reside, though, at a wordpress.com blog, which, deep inside I knew, was nothing but a placeholder.

So my wait continued for the inspiration that would push me to create and own, again, a simpler place for my thoughts. And that inspiration came from Camel, the blogging engine from Casey Liss of atp fame.

The inspiration, though, was not because I liked Camel, which even now I haven't made my mind about. But it was because I wanted to have something as simple as what Casey had, and get that done in an equally simpler way. At the same time, I also wanted to learn and try something new.

I knew my requirements were not complex, neither did I expect my audience to be huge. So I needed something simpler than a full fledged, php-rich, wordpress blog hosted on a dedicated host, which I also realised is too costly for my needs. Enter Ghost!

New Beginning

So this is where my quest led me to, a simple Ghost based blog to jot my thoughts down. The reasons, I had my own.

Simple I had heard so much about Markdown before. I felt everybody, almost everyone who writes for himself, was using Markdown. And every one of them had all the nice things to say about it. Even I tried learning it numerous times. But, I realised now that it is only when you use it that you appreciate the simplicity of it. It really makes writing, just about writing. Something I really needed.

New I wanted to change everything, the way I write my posts, the way it looks, the way it works and the way I would host. I was bored of all that wordpress or even tumblr, something I played with for sometime, provided. It all felt the same. For some time, I even thought about just using Camel. But then I would have had to work even on the engine along with writing, which I didn't want to sign up for just yet.

Not costly For hosting, I wanted to meet the above 2 points first, at the same time consider the cost factor. A free option existed with Heroko as suggested by Casey and Greg Bergé. However, I either wanted to go all in, with hosting on VPS or just stick to the simplest option from the creators of Ghost. Anything I chose, would have turned out to be a lot cheaper than what I paid for hosting the unnecessarily complex wordpress blog.

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What I, thus, have is a simple, minimalist place for me to just write. I own, again, a self-built, self-hosted blog. Here's to another start!

[Postscript] There would a temporary phase when I focus more on the place than on writing. However, I intend to cross that phase pretty soon. Whatever that results in, I feel, should, more or less, look pretty similar to this.

[Postscript 2] I have writen a followup post that explains the whys and how-tos of this complete process.