The joker in YOU
(Heath Ledger as the Joker)Prologue
I want to do a character analysis of the character 'The joker' from the batman movie 'The Dark Knight' played by the actor I love the most Mr.Heath Ledger. I have heard that the amount of work he put into this movie to get his character as portrayed in the movie was simply mind blowing. Ledger went on to recieve several awards including Oscar and Golden globe award for best supporting actor for the character he played as 'The Joker'
Introduction
Since so much work was put into the making of this character, I thought we would learn a lot by observing and studying the character using the psychology methods that I have learned. And I would be glad if you too can join the adventure, I bet this would be fun.
Let's Begin
So let's begin. Imagine you are a psychologist and one day, you get an appointment from someone who claims that he needs help. Being in this profession for a very long time, there shouldn't be much things that should surprise you. But still, here in front of you sits a man, who he claims to be a joker.
How would you begin and what are your thoughts ?
Lets analyze the character type first [Update: Mar 8, 2012]
So is he a neurotic or pshychotic person?
Joker always had a clear sense of time and he always knew where he was, although his behaviour was sometimes eccentric and not understood by many, he was surely not psychotic and surely would not require any psychoses interference in the treatment. Being a neurotic person, care must be taken to ensure that all encounters must be taken in that angle( of that of a neurotic patient)
Analyzing scenes from the movie [Update: Mar 15, 2012]
The Dark Knight: Hospital Scene
[Note: This post would be constantly updated, so please come back for more and don't forget to add your comments in the comment section]
Labels: hobbies, psychology
Reaching my first milestone
(Weight graph as on Aug 29,2011)
Hi folks, I am an inch away in the weight tracking graph(see above) to reach my first milestone, that is 70 Kgs of lean mass, with as little fat, as possible. I have started to accumulate a bit fat in my mid-section(core) that I need to take care of. That means, more crunches, running and skipping( jump rope) It gives me so much happiness and confidence that I am going in the right direction, and would love to have all of these shared with the entire world. I want to do some before and after photos soon, again I would love to share that as well.
Currently my food table looks like this:
| When ? | Food item (Primary) | Food item (Alternative) |
|---|---|---|
| Breakfast | Milk with Protein powder, Bread Sandwich | Milk with oats |
| Lunch | Rice | Chapathi |
| Post mid-day | Light snacks | Fruits |
| Dinner | Rice with curry. 2 boiled egg whites | N/A |
Influence of Twitter
I must admit that twitter has to be one place I turn up for inspiration on a daily basis. Right now, I follow about 385 + people, most of them being body builders, fitness experts, nutritionists, athletes, models, fitness figures. Its a great inspiration to be going through their thoughts and aspirations and believing that you too be like them one day. Below is a brief list of people I follow in twitter
| Twitter ID | Name |
| BikiniStaci | Staci A. |
| missleisl | Leisl |
| marissaroxks | Marissa Iuculano |
| DonnaBlase | Donna Blase |
| Tiff_Crystal | Tiffany Crystal |
| Laura_Superhero | Laura_Superhero |
| TiffanyGaughan | Tiffany Gaughan |
| TiffanyyUpshaw | Tiffany Upshaw |
| sha_sha_fierce | sharon phillips |
| theextrarep | Sheri Gaskins |
| desertMike | Mike McCollom |
| MzKameka | Kerry |
| Melanie_Collins | Melanie Collins |
| MissNadiaE | Nadia El |
| HotAtHome | Jackie B |
| karenkwilliam | Health & |
| Heather632 | Heather Chavez |
| FranciscaDennis | Francisca Dennis |
| EJM3577 | Ask Me! |
| MissSnoogie | lauren barthman |
| JillianJones1 | Baybgirl811 |
| ACE_Motivates | Alicia Rachelle |
| Bxtreme_Tanya | Tanya Martinez |
| ChristineGus | Christine Jenkin |
| TonyXXL | Antonio Mosely |
| DustinPoirier | The Diamond |
| ryanbader | Ryan Bader |
In other news..
I was happy to find Melvin's email today morning, telling me that he finds my recents posts as inspirational. Love you buddy.
25 weeks to Arnoldation
Started my workout approximately 25 working days after my 25th birthday. Probably on Jul 5/ 6th. Prior to that, my physical activities included heavy cycling, covering upto 6 -10 kms everyday when I was around 11 to 14 years of age, martial arts (Kung Fu) between ages 20 –23 and I had joined gym back in 2010. Each time, the experience and the results were much different. And now when I consider body building as a serious hobby, to be perfected at home, I bet all my previous experience could help me a lot, which I would love to share with you all.
Short term goals
- Weight gain. Reach 70 KG
- Have a great physique
- Look and feel Healthy(S*xy)
- Weight gain. Reach 80 KG of pure muscle and bone mass
- Well built proportionate body
- Look and feel Really really Healthy(S*xy) and Strong
Week – 1
- Started working out with my dumbelss (2 x 4 KGs), some basic exercises, that I had learnt while I was in Gym
- Jogging ( On spot)
- Medium stretches
- Dumbell Flys, curls and Dead lift
Week -2
- Started food tracking by amazing free site - LiveStrong
- Got myself ‘Arnold’s Modern Encyclopaedia of Body building’ from FlipKart
- Also got myself ‘Dumbbell Training For Strength And Fitness by Matt Brzycki, Fred Fornicola’
Week – 3
- Good news from Doctor. She said, I had the best cholesterol levels she had seen in any patient
- Consulted doctor and as per her recommendation, got myself Protein powder ( 18 g/ scoop)
- Got myself a barbell ( 5” , 3 Kgs approx)
- Shocked to see my weight shot up to 65.4 KG
- Took a couple of ‘before’ photos :)
Week – 4
- Received the book ‘Men’s health big book of excercises’ home delivered by FlipKart
- Shocked to see my weight shot up to 66.6 KG
- Took more ‘Before’ photos
- Posted about my new found interest in this blog
Week – 5
- Bought myself two 5 Kg plates and a skip rope. Tried and found that it’ not that easy, I definitely need more practice and also a place to do skipping
- Prepared a list of things I would eat each day
- Steadily been tracking my food intake for the past 3 weeks, and it’s hovering around a cool 1800 + calories a day. Target is 2000+ so that I could have a steady 1/2 kg weight increase each week
Labels: body building, fitness, health, hobbies
Muscles are forever
And moreover once you start enjoying the benefits of good health and strength, I am sure there is no way you are gonna slow this down.
Labels: body building, fitness, health, hobbies
Skip Rope
(NSFW : Kindly excuse the skimpy clothes in the video, but its indeed a great workout video)
'Skip rope'ing got into me after I saw this amazing video on youtube posted above, about skip rope(jump rope)by Zuzana from body rock site. I googled for several videos since then, and hence I decided to include it in my workout routine. It's been 3 days since I bought the skip rope but it's been idling since then, due to the roadblocks I have listed below.
Road block – 1
My first plan was to head to the nearby park, for skipping due to lack of space at my place. The park closes by 8:00 A.M and several attempts to reach before that turned out to be futile, since I was unable to get up and be there, before that.
Solution: I decided to do skipping on the terrace
Road block – 2
Got up @ 6:00 AM went to terrace on Monday( Jul 19), and started skipping. The loud thud caused by me jumping up and down, was almost unbearable, so I was kindly requested by my cousin to stop it :)
Solution : I have to find some place else, but no idea where . . .
Road block -3
Since the option of going to park and skipping on the terrace was out of question, I had to think about something else. Our bedroom was hardly 8 feet high and there were lot of things inside it(including a TV, closet and a bed), so I couldn't possible even think about skipping inside the bedroom.
I did it !!
I was so disappointed thinking about all that, and I switched on my laptop to hear some music (which I always do when I hit road blocks like these)and stumbled across the video of this muscular guy and something inside me told me that I wanted to be like him.
I got up from my bed, took the jump rope, came back to my bedroom. I moved a couple of things around, made sure I stayed AWAY from the TV and finally tied the rope around my wrist so that the length reduced so that I would not be hitting the ceiling when I do the skipping/ jumping. And guess what ? In 10 mins I had done 8 sets of 4 reps each ! And I am sure this would be daily routine henceforth.
So why sharing this ?
The whole idea of sharing this with you is that, you might be having several roadblocks that prevent you from reaching your fitness goals. Keep looking out for options and I am sure you would hit the solution pretty soon . Several posts by Melola from Spark people had also inspired me in thinking of ways in achieving my fitness goal. In one post, she even stated keeping her jogging machine inside the kitchen since there was no place other than that in her house.
Wishing you all the best.
Labels: body building, hobbies
Body Building
I don't know what got into me, but I just know that, I have fallen in love with body building. And I have just two things in my mind as the goals
- Gain weight in terms of sheer muscle and bone strength ( current aim is 70 KG)
- Endurance training resulting in more strength and stamina along with fitness
Now I know that, these goals cannot be reached overnight, But I just started loving the journey towards it. And the best part was that, my body has reacted in a very positive way (Contrary to my 'friend's' comments that I will never put on weight) And with the mouth watering nutritious food that I get from my fiancee I believe this would be one ride I would not forget(Yeah, she comes to my office just to give me this amazing food)
I was able to gain over 2 Kgs(over 4.4 pounds) in less than 2 weeks, and I want to continue in that path. The best part is I don't look that different :)
Firstly started with a pair of 4 KG dumbells, then recently graduated to a barbell, without weights, since the shop did not have stock for 2 x 2 KG steel plates. But that turned out to be boon for me since I think I might actually move to 2 x 4 KG plates ! in a few weeks time
The current routine looks like this
| Exercise Name | Total Time(mins) |
|---|---|
| Jogging | 10 |
| Stretching (Kung fu based) | 10 |
| Upper body(with weights) | 10 |
| Lower body(with weights) | 10 |
Nowadays, I regularly track my food consumption using Livestrong website and I got a chance to learn from several of these websites mentioned below
- Dumbbell exercises for Men
- Hundred pushups in 6 weeks
- About Calisthenics (Also 'Google' in videos for Calisthenics)
- Review of fitness sites
- Scooby's free site about excercise, nutrition and tips
Books that I am reading now
- Dumbbell Training For Strength And Fitness by Matt Brzycki, Fred Fornicola
- The New Encyclopedia Of Modern Bodybuilding : The Bible Of Bodybuilding, Fully Updated And Revised - Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bill Dobbins
- The Men's Health Big Book Of Exercises - Adam Campbell
I will keep you posted(Hopefully with some 'Before'/'After' photos too :) ) with all the happenings around me related to Health and Fitness.
Happy rocking your body, bye.
Labels: body building, hacking, hobbies
Softwares of the week
Sandboxie (www.sandboxie.com)
This free software sandboxes any software that you have, thereby protecting from potential attacks, especially useful for protecting users from threats that arise out of compromised Web browsers. You can just sandbox any software. For brief intro, check out pcworld and for a detailed intro check out the original site. I just downloaded it and I surely have a long way to go
PS: Visual Studio 2010 installation which just used to fail incredibly after its few mins, ran magically in sandboxie, and I don't know why. Since I am yet to learn about this software, I cancelled the VS 2010 installation in between, not wanting to take any calculated risks
Omni writer(http://www.ommwriter.com/)
From initial looks, looks like a great concept. Its a free WYSIWYG editor with non-cluttered UI. There is a good review @ lifehacker.
My Home project updates
There are 2 projects that I am actively pursuing in my free time
1. Easy music copier/ mover
2. My account and expense manager
I will get back with more details about both these softwares soon.
Labels: free software, hobbies
My guitar story
A short story of boy and his guitar
Okay, now first of all this is a real story about me and music, so you would find very little technical(computer related) stuff in this, so may be, you want to skip this.
Okay now getting back to the story. It started with the guitar classes that I used to attend when I was some 9 years old. It was an acoustic guitar. Back then, I remember it as a very huge instrument, and that I always wanted to play what I wanted, but our teacher, used to have very rigid rules as to how once must proceed during the course of learning guitar. Although the classes stopped when I had to shift my school, the desire remained within.
Fast forward 10 years, now in college, thanks to my amazing friends, Melvin, Nithin, Nandu and many others, I started to get to know and see music and also try out various stuff. In the mean time, I had been trying out various stuff in Fruity loops(Its a great software, where you could have different instruments, and compose music with those instruments, right on your computer, with no additional add-ons)
The break through in music in my life happened, when our class decided to go big time with electric guitar and stuff for one of the events in the college. I was informed that Melvin would be on the lead, with electric guitar and the practice would be happening in the classroom where we had our 1st semester. As I slowly entered the room, I felt the entire room and world getting transformed around me..... He was trying out various effects on the pedal, like wah-wah, echo etc and he played a few licks. It was an amazing experience. After that I made sure that, whenever they practiced, I did not miss that out.
Some months later, when I decided to come to Bangalore to pursue my studies at NIIT, Melvin had come to my place and he had brought his accoustic guitar with him. After he showed me various stuff in it and we spend some time, he just kept the guitar at my home and said he would take the next time he comes to my home. And it did remain so the next couple of weeks at my home. Back then, I did not even know the right way of holding a guitar and this was the time when he just kept it at my home, and I did not know what to say. I tried out various stuff, I mean just playing around until I broke one of the strings :( ( Sorry buddy )
After I came to Bangalore, I kept contact with Melvin and asked about guitars and music. Finally when I saw the movie 'The rocker'(The songs in the movie by actor/ singer Teddy Geiger is just so cool) and 'Freaky Friday', especially the final scene in 'Freaky friday', I wanted to go for an electric guitar. In a span of 4-5 months, and a lot of discussion later I and Melvin decided to hit Brigade road, the home of many guitar and music shops in bangalore. Finally when the day arrived, I was excited beyond measure. And here I was at brigade road, and we hit the first shop.
(The story would continue in the next post)
News aggreagator in Python
Following are some of the links I came across while trying to make a python based rss aggregator. Although the following resources(links) can guide to some really cool stuff, my plan is to have a python based rss aggregator customized to present information in some really cool ways like depending on my usage, tell me which news i like the most and present those and so on. If they are really nice info, I should be able to send it to my news group > uit_tvm, by just a click of a button. I will keep you guys updated on the status of the project.
As per current requirements, the project has 2 parts
1. Python parser - which fetches rss feeds from sites
2. Email the feeds to uit_tvm - either I need to run my own email server(which is really cool ) or I need to access GMail/Yahoomail using python API provided by yahoo.
So the following links to point to the above mentioned ideas.
Email APIs
Send email in python
http://www.daniweb.com/forums/thread136280.html
libgmail — Python binding
SendYmail
http://sendymail.sourceforge.net/
About BBauth required for yahoo mail APIhttp://www.isolani.co.uk/blog/web/LondonHackdayBbauthAndYahooMail
for Google's Gmail service
http://libgmail.sourceforge.net/
Running your own server
Apache emal serverhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_James Comparison of mail servershttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_mail_servers
Misc
PyDigg - A Python Toolkit for the Digg API
http://neothoughts.com/2007/04/30/pydigg-a-python-toolkit-for-the-digg-api/
Accessing Yahoo Mail withtout POP
http://bytes.com/forum/thread521242.html
Yahoo! Mail Web Service Code Samples
http://developer.yahoo.com/mail/code/
A small gift for my mom
(A small gift for my mom : A nice sweet blog)Its been some days, since my mom wanted to write about one of her favorite pass times: Gardening.
She told this to me, and I just said Okay. Some days later, I found her meticulously(since she was new to blogging) going though the cool blogger help, page by page. This really did catch my attention and I asked her what she was up to. She told me she wanted to create a blog, to blog about gardening and was trying to learn about it.
I loved her enthusiasm, in learning new things, and sat with her. She created the blog and added a new post. Since she had selected one of the templates provided by blogger, it kind of looked dull, atleast not at all apt for a gardening blog, I thought, and I told her, of the same. She too liked the idea, and so I decided to chip in, to redesign her blog design.
So as mentioned in one of my previous posts(Changing blogger template) I started with freecsstemplates.org. Got a nice template, Nature's charm , hacked it a little bit to suit her needs and uploaded it to blogger.
But here comes the problem.
The navbar problem
(Due to navbar present at the top every blog, the menu contents has shifted downwards , around 5o pixels or so , which really spoils the aesthetics of the blog)So I decided to remove the navbar. After a bit of research(Googling around), I found that removing navbar DOES NOT violate (citation needed) TOS with Google.
You can hide the navbar, by inserting this code in the style sheet part(css part) of your page
#navbar-iframe {height:0px; display:none;}
Even though you remove the navbar, the content seems to be around 50 pixel, shifted downwards.
So in the template, I added the following code inside the body { }
position: relative;
This effectively shifts the contents upwards. Since the problem was solved, I decided to add the navbar back again - as a small token of thanks to Google.
So everything is cool, and my mother has a really cool, sleek blog which I am proud to announce to you.
So guys do check out this cool new blog, and I wish my mother all the best for this new endeavor :)
