Award Friday

Vacation is coming to the final days. Probably the last good vacation without worries. The college reopens in June, and we're put into the pot of burning hell fire with an adamantium lid. That's too much pressure!

So while capturing all the lighter moments while I still can, two awards came my way, from two lovely pretty co-bloggers.

The first one, after a long time, is from the dear Choco:

How apt you see! Isn't this truly the most beautifullest blog you've ever seen? :P
ANYWAYS.

Let me throw a big bunch of warm thank you's on Choco :)

Now who receives this award from me??
Its pwetty simple you know, the award goes to:

DuDo

Shravan two of my blogger buddies, closest at hand, and
Insignia
Vyazz
Shadow


And  then comes one more award.
Okay now this one you're familiar with. Its that award with those cherries on top of cupcakes, with the tag things and all.

Thank you's to, Insignia.
And I'm not doing the tag again, because I've already done so here, last time!
Again, here comes the awkward moment of giveaway.. 
This one I want to pass on to:

Choco

Raphael
NIM

Hailey , who has been offline for a WHILE, and
Chocolate lover
Shreya

Awards sold out! Now if any buddies out their missed out the sale, never worry once, you'll soon get more awesome awards from me!!

Take care not to step on lonely banana peels.

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Exploring Wonderland

 

Thoughts about the rarely explored depths of Wonderland

This is an entry from my journal which date back a few weeks. Today I'm posting it here! 

Lewis Carroll wrote Alice's adventures in Wonderland for Alice Pleasance Liddell, and later was published for kids all over the world. It was implemented and adapted in many forms, out of which some became legends, like the Walt Disney's version.

There are hardly any one who hasn't heard of Alice in Wonderland during their childhood. As for me, this particular story wasn't something which attracted my great attention. Even when I grew up, I never took any effort to take a look at the details of this popular tale.

A panel from Batman:Arkham Asylum

Then, I happened to read a Batman Comic titled Batman:Arkham Asylum. More than the usual adventure, this was an out of box comic - set in a dark, vague atmosphere, it explores the nightmares in the irritated minds of Batman and his archenemy the Joker.
In the beginning pages of this comic, I saw a portion from Alice's story quoted:

Click to enlarge

At this moment, I was largely surprised to see the depth of an otherwise celebrated children's story. The words pictured the exact intensity of madness and chaos dealt within the comic. Right then i badly wanted to read Alice's adventures in Wonderland, and I kept pondering about the scope of the book's content.

The Tim Burton movie

Very soon, justifying my (late) admiration of the book's depth, I could see the trailer of the latest movie adoption of Alice by Tim Burton. The book goes through a number of crazy and weird characters out of their minds. The movie was brilliantly crafted to group these characters, to define relationships among them and thus to weave an excellent story.

Curiouser and Curiouser

Back to the topic, let us take a closer look at Alice in Wonderland.
The ideas in the story are so consistent even when they are ported from a childish sense to adulthood or to philosophy..
The flow of events in the book takes abrupt turns. Conversations are cut off at curiosity awakening questions. The book challenges everything conventional. At many points, we see the rules of language and grammar twisted acording to one's thoughts. Remember the opening where Alice says "Curioser and Curioser". This implies the freedom of thoughts. It is not necessary that we go by predefined rules to get at anything. Our mind has the power to be free. the jabberwocky underlines this idea in its complete sense.

 The Mad tea party

Adventures of the mind

Alice's story is of exploring one's own mind, and the world around. the little girl Alice jumps into adventures and risks and experience a series of wonderful things, in the Wonderland. Speaking of adventure, here's a portion from a letter written by Christopher McCandless, the aesthetic voyager, to his old friend:

So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.

At the end of Alice's adventures, Lewis Carroll concludes it as the wonders of childhood:

..and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood: and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago: and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days.

This highlights the statement  "The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure".

Madness

"Anything's possible in Human Nature... Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite joy."
The God of Small Things

Alice is everyone. And Wonderland is all that world of crazy adventures waiting for us. On a deeper context, this amazingly written children's story takes in a bunch of basic philosophies of life. That's truly a lot of moral we can expect from such a simply told story!
There's no element of wonder in why people heart this book even when they're in their teens, in their twenties or even forties. If you haven't yet had a lucky chance  to read through these fascinating pages, do so at the next slightest opportunity. Wonderland - This is one place you'll blindly fall in love with!

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Lightness

Then she spoke the words, standing in the distance, but all I could hear was the beats of my heart and the scream of my spirit.

Later when our eyes locked in across the distance, everything and everyone disappeared and we, looked. I saw her eyes being narrowed. I saw her face being misty. I saw her cheeks pull in tight. In a moment I realized this is exactly what that's happening to my face too.

Now I think about the future, about the world, and turn my face, cutting through every precious string of attachment : I turn my face away.

But destiny never waits. We meet again. Her little fingers dig into my dark hair. Our faces brought close. Our foreheads pressed to each other and noses poking each other like delicate antenna - we share our thoughts. Then our dreams. Then we live those dreams, hand in hand by the seashore home.

We chose to happen. We don't know why others keep letting go of something *that* obvious.
We prefer simplicity. We can't understand why they insist on being serious.
We're yet to learn - when life is as simple as grabbing a coffee and doing what you love and earning for what you do - why people burn their heads on things that they can't ever like or accept and call it, stress.

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Tale of the spiral head

Here's the story of how the little white character, the blog, and the comic came into being. 

The one above, may be called the first ever digital representation of et. Well, he was not 'et' when this picture was made; he was just nameless.
So, after numerous doodles of et in notebooks during my bored-to-death college hours, I draw him on the computer. The way he sits, the way he looks, everything was either a whim or almost accidental.

That was a time when I was looking out for a sensible name for my blog(I had almost given up after giving weird names like 'The smiling firefly'. Now seriously, what does that even mean?!). And then I sit and look at this character who is carried away in his own world of thoughts. Right then the right name came to my mind. That's it - the eternal thinker.

We have a name now. I was thrilled. But soon I looked back at the character and realized that he was still nameless. This is the one who inspired the name Eternal Thinker. Suddenly I picked up the first two letters of these words and gave him a name: et.

Identity crisis
Now you see that et is one original character with one original name. Nevertheless he had to face a lot of difficulties in establishing his individuality. et reminds everyone of the extra terrestrial, of course. And together with his alien-like looks, our et lost a major part of his originality.



Extra Terrestrial and Eternal Thinker

But et somehow was catching up. He was defining his own place on Earth. Then came the deadly blow.



The Killing Joke

Zoozoo came a year after et. But et still wasn't a brand icon. The awful result - severe loss of identity.
I have this et-made-of-egg thing on my desk, presented by my sister. After vodafone introduced their own fair white character, people would look at this craft and say, "Hey where you got that zoozoo from?!". 

After all

And after all, et found his amazing place in comics. It was a nice deviation. et now starred in a web-comic which is even named after him - et On Fire.
Hopefully the nightmares of identity crisis isn't haunting him much, in this new world of fun. I've set him free by establishing it as an independent webcomic, rather than a secondary section of this blog.
et is on his journey forward. Join him in the discussions, encourage him and wish him good luck. :)

See the very first of et goodies >>

* et window logon screen
* first et wallpaper
* first et wallpapers - more blood!

PS: Today I included transcription in the et comics, where you people can help out in making the comic better. Take a look at it here and see how it works.

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Custom icon for your USB drive

This is a simplified version of my earlier post on USB drive icon customization : Little about the USB stick.

In this post, I intend to explain only the simple steps to get your own icon displayed when your USB drive is plugged in. For detailed information, check the above mentioned post.

So, how to display your custom icon for your USB drive, actually?

#1 Plug in your flash drive. Now you see any lame hard drive icon displayed in its place, of course.

#2 The first thing you need to find is the icon you are going to use. So get a file with a .ico extension. You can google and get like hundreds of icon files, so no worries.

#3 After this, you need to create the autorun file. Go on, create a new text file with the name autorun.inf. Make sure the extension is .inf and not .inf.txt
Now type in the following lines in the file and save it:

[autorun]
icon = et.ico

Here et.ico is the name of the icon file I use. You can replace it with your-icon-name.ico

#4 So well, that's it! Copy the two files (the icon and autorun.inf) into the USB drive, and you're done. The next time you plug in your drive, be ready to see your new icon in action.  

Note #1 This can involve more issues. You may want to hide and protect the above two files so that it doesn't accidentally get deleted every time - in both windows and linux platforms.
Again, you'd have a favourite game or a cool icon for one of the softwares. All you'll have is their .exe file with the icon. Still you can use it as an icon.
Find out more in the old post : Little about the USB stick
 
Note #2 On a quick run, you can download the et icon and autorun.inf files and copy them onto your usb drive in a go.
Download zip

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The beginning

How amazing is the animal kingdom! They are born with a lot of information coded into them, and accordingly they live, survive, and develop. Then comes man with his unique intelligence, with the power of choice to decide, to learn and create.

When we learn any programming language, we start with the "Hello World" program. It is considered the simplest code, with a straightforward function. When we contrast this with the code of life, we'll be surprised to see the similarity in pattern.

The picture depicts the first forms of life to be having the simplest instincts, and is compared to a "Hello World" code. This is a bonus art based on a comic at et On Fire.
Read the original comic >>

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Those little smiles

The vacation, is going great. I'm sinking into coding, reading, and even writing some new comics. The works are going on in full pace, and you can expect a sudden rush of results! :O

And then one fine day Mr.DuDo gives me this lovely(mind it, its seriously cute!) blog award. The Cherry on Top award its called, "for beautiful blogs with that little bit extra". C'mon, now who in their right minds can't accept this award at the MOMENT ?. Not me! :i

There goes. Now that it is handled, lets move on to a simple tag(quite the simplest anybody would've came across)  that came bundled with our cute little award:

Tell 3 good things about you (JUST three ?)
* If I'm telling good things about you when you're around, then it is guaranteed that I won't be telling bad things about you when you're not around. 
* I don't care if your problems sound irritating to others, but my friend, if you need my help, I'd love listen to you and give a hand.
* I don't believe in wasting so much time on nothing. Well, except when we're all having fun and party(now that's a totally different story!)

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Smileys for Blogger #Update 003 [Add smiley panel over your comment form]

Okay here's a little more to add to your very own et Smileys Script, which has helped a bunch of people to use adorable smileys on their blogs!

Now, you have the smileys alright. They are all over your posts and even work in the comments. A little inconvenience here is that, even though all your visitors can use the smileys in their comments, they need not always know the correct smiley symbol to type in (Man, some don't even realize they can actually use the smileys!).

Here's the simple solution - just add a smiley reference panel over your comment form. Your visitors now have a handy guide to et Smileys!

The essential Steps

#0 Make sure that your comment-form is embedded below post. If you are sure about that, skip to Step #1.
Or else go to your Blogger dashboard. Click on Settings --> Comments
Now under Comment Form Placement, select Embedded below post

#1 Go to your Blogger dashboard, find the required blog(everybody has more than one blog!).Now go to Layout --> Edit HTML. 
Don't forget to check Expand Widget Templates, because we'll need the full code here.

#2 Now find the following piece of code in the template : (You can hit Ctrl+F and enter the code to search)

<b:if cond='data:post.embedCommentForm'>

After you find this, all you have to do is to add a small code just after the above line.


#3 You have two choices here:

 a  One, you can display the entire set of available smileys above your comment form. In order to make this happen, copy the below code and paste it after the line, as said in Step #2:

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://et-smileys.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/etSmileysPanelFull.js"></script>

Note: More smileys may be added in the future, and this panel may get bigger then. 


 b  Way two, you can add a minimalist panel of selected, most frequently used smileys. Copy the below code and paste it in the appropriate position:

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://et-smileys.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/etSmileysPanelBasic.js"></script>

Hope you find the smileys panel a most useful addition! :)

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