Golden Temple: Then and Now

The Golden Temple, 1859, by Felice Beato

I Shaved a Wall

I recently took a photo of a wall on a music store in Glendale, which was a mural in remembrance of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The side wall of the building had signs hung up which I wanted to erase, and I thought I could do this image retouch using Gimp, the GNU Image Manipulation Program.

King of TT

I never really played table tennis until I moved to India. There, it seems to be a very popular activity. Since I was such a horrible player, I became known as टी टी का माहाराजा or "Ti Ti ka Maharaja - grand king of table tennis". At the DreamWorks Animation office in Glendale, there are several tables and just about any time of the day you can find people playing.

We recently held a tournament, and someone captured a video of the final match. I am posting it here. I don't know what happened to game two, but hopefully YouTube user ceark will post it in the near future. Enjoy!

Dragon Day at DreamWorks Animation

DreamWorks Animation recently released How To Train Your Dragon, which I think is their (our?) best work to date. Yes, I work at DreamWorks, but as a computer nerd I had nothing to do with the creativity which led to the magic of this film. Anyway, we celebrated the opening of this film on campus and I wanted to share some photos. I took some pictures too, but some coworkers took much better photos. Links to the complete sets of their photos are available at the bottom, and here are some photos from the day taken by others.

Dragon Wrap Party

The latest release from DreamWorks Animation is How To Train Your Dragon. We attended the cast and crew screening, watching the movie in 3D at the Gibson Amphitheatre. After introduction from the producer, directors and our CEO, a special guest came out to say a few words. Gerard Butler joined us for the screening and expressed how pleased he was with the film, where he voices the main character's father, Stoick. Something funny he mentioned was that he is concurrently in the best rated and worst rated opening films on Rotten Tomatoes, also starring in The Bounty Hunter with Jennifer Aniston (as I write this, one is one hundred percent fresh and the other is eight percent fresh). Of course, this is not his first time working with dragons nor working on horrible films, as he was also in Reign of Fire.

Dinner with Friends at Carousel

Catching back up with friends in Los Angeles has been great. I work with Victor and Raffi, so we met up with them, their wives and a couple who are friends of Raffi and Kristine. Reservations were at Carousel in Glendale. The Middle Eastern cuisine was delicious, and the food just kept coming out well after we were full. I could have eaten nothing but the muhammara, which is a dip of chili peppers, crushed walnuts and pomegranates. Of course, I forgot all about the spicy dip once the boureg and kofta arrived. By the time the entree appeared, we were pretty much done. As much as we wanted them, the kabobs were just going to have to put in a doggy bag.