Away

Been away for a very long while. My creative juices (if I ever had any) seemed to have dried up. All I do is sit and think that I should do something. 

Well, I am reading , at least for the sake of reading. I am not buying books any longer. I rent them out from the library and keep it with me for weeks and sometimes months. Few I read, and few I return when I have lost the interest to open and read it after seeing the book lying around for such long.

My reading count has been very low over the past few years. Well anyways, the last I have read is In the Country of Deceit by Shashi Deshpande. Would write a review soon, if I remember! :-)

The next one in que is Complete/Convenient by Ketan Bhagat. Seems to be a rather long one. Let's see if I make it.

Adobe Captivate - Aligning Mouse Settings

Having joined my new firm, there has been a lot of self learning and investigations I initiated. Unlike in the established firms, where we are given product training, hands on sessions for tools, or at the least there are people around to ask when in doubt, here I was on my own for most of the documentation related stuff. Selecting the tools, exploring the features, lots of trials and errors, creating templates, and so on. Since then, Google has become my greatest and ever dependent friend. But there were some things I could not figure out from the forums and I thought it would help if I have those documented for future references. So, here goes the one I figured today.

Adobe Captivate

I am creating a Product feature video that involves a lot of mouse clicks. Once I created all the call outs and settings for the project, I realized that my mouse display was not uniform across the slides. There were over 70 slides and I did not want to change the setting for each slide manually. I browsed, but could not find the solution. Finally, I figured out that it was right in front of my eyes all the while, but a little obscure.

1. In the Properties pane, set the required properties for the mouse on one slide.
   Example



2. Click and select Apply to all items of this type.

If you want to set the same mouse pointer for all slides in the Project, on a slide where the required pointer is set, right-click on the pointer and select Use the current mouse pointer for all slides.

There, done!

I Read These...

...books over the last two months -

• Riot - Shashi Tharoor
• One Amazing Thing - Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
• Jack and the Beanstalk, Board Book of Fruits, Veg, and Foods :-)
• The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai

Read half of Desirable Daughters by Bharati Mukherjee.

And now reading An Equal Music by Vikram Seth (read it during my college days, reading it once again :-))

Books

I have finally started finding some time for reading again nowadays. My daughter has achieved few little milestones and loves playing and takes a nap for 2 hours. Some days she goes to bed a little early at night and some times loves to play by self. Well, I have started taking advantage of these precious little moments. I started with few Reader's Digests and newspapers. When I understood that I could make it, I took a library membership. Yes! :-)

There is a JustBooks outlet on my way home, right on the main road and it couldn't be easier. So I am back to reading and already finished two. My pace is still slow but I am contended. :-)

Back??

Well, I have been away for a long long while. My life has changed. My interests have changed. And everything around me has changed. Though I love the changes, there still is a part in me which yearns for the good, old days. Days when I could just lie in bed the whole day flipping pages of a book, when I could just sit and watch beautiful movies one after the other without any interruptions, and could even just spend hours gazing at the sky. 

Will those days ever come back? Probably not!

A vacation for me

Wondering why I am not posting anything for the past one month here? Well, it is a long time since I watched a good movie completely. I did go out to watch a few Malayalam films but they did not seem that interesting to be written about.

Have you see The Holiday? The cast includes Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz. I had seen it almost 2.5 to 3 years ago. Recently it came on television and I was watching it. This is one of those movies I love to watch at any given point of time. It is just so lovely and refreshing. I love both the houses in the movies, the characters and to top it all the background scores. It is soooooo amazing. I do really want to write a review for it, but probably I am not in the mood to do so :-) But yes, definitely I will try to write one.

So if you haven't watched it yet, go for it!

Kahaani

Year: 2012
Genre: Thriller
Direction: Sujoy Ghosh
Cast: Vidya Balan, Parambrata Chatterjee, and Nawazuddin Siddiqui
Rating: Excellent

Kahaani is a thriller movie. The plot revolves around a pregnant lady (Vidya Balan), who comes from US to Kolkata in search of her husband, who she believes has gone missing while on an assignment. She lodges a complaint with the local police and seeing that police is of no help, starts the search by herself. Seeing her determination a police inspector joins her with the search. Further we see how both of them together unfold mysteries and are able to create links of why her husband went missing and what his connection with a poison-gas attack in a Kolkata metro was. They slowly identify people behind the crime and are able to infiltrate to obtain more data. The final scene is the best as this is where the story turns around and audience is thrilled. The twist is a totally unexpected one. While watching you keep developing many possibilities of what could have become of her husband. But the twist seemed too fresh and exciting. Though the final scene has been compared with some foreign movies, it seemed to fit the plot well and is very fresh.

This thriller is one of the best ones I have seen in Bollywood yet. The film makind techniques used also are nice. The colors have been kept natural. The makeup is minimalist. There is no feeling of any created sets in the movie. Everything seems to be shot in natural locations among the unaware crowd.

Almost from the beginning of the movie, one gets a feeling of being involved in the movie and being at the places shown. As the plot gets serious, we also get curious of the mystery.

Vidya Balan's performance is highly commendable. She has portrayed the character with ease and naturally. Her body language is also one thing to be appreciated. Vidya has taken extreme care of her walking, facial expressions, and other movements to make the character realistic.

A must watch!