Noel's blog
Here I irregularly inflict my thoughts upon the world.
God vs. Responsibilities
· ☕ 6 min read · ✍️ noel
Last Friday, there was an ICPF retreat here in Ahmedabad themed “What makes God smile?”. It was good. Better than expected (Or should I say as expected, since God is the master of doing the unexpected!). During the retreat there was some time allotted for a question and answer session. I love those sessions. I love them because I love questions. Questions are those peculiar creatures that go Pop! in people’s heads at random times and then do Kaboom!
Dual booting Windows 7 and Archlinux on Lenovo Ideapad U410
· ☕ 5 min read · ✍️ noel
Last week I got a new laptop. Lenovo U410. It’s a nice ultrabook. However, the chief topic of this post is not to review it, however to set up Archlinux on it without loosing any of the features that are, what should I call them… um, factory inbuilt. I’m talking about a raid0 array and a one-key rescue system that came preconfigured with the system. I searched much on the internet to find a safe way to install linux on this system however all of them did something that I didn’t want to do…
The Fallacy of Social Evolution
· ☕ 8 min read · ✍️ noel
First of all, let me define my terms. What do I mean by social evolution? Well, it’s a close companion to the theory of evolution. It basically states that all of our social behaviors have evolved for millions of years and are still evolving. You should note that this evolution has no direction. It doesn’t understand if it’s going up or down or left or right or if it’s going round and round.
The Safest Route
· ☕ 4 min read · ✍️ noel
He was still in his office when he heard the news. A riot had broken out in the city. Office was closing up and everyone was going to their homes. And so was our hero. He had called his home and everyone was safe, however he was still worried about them. As he was leaving his office, he was wondering which way he should take. He was gifted with an analytic mind by birth and he loved to solve puzzles.
Managing Information
· ☕ 6 min read · ✍️ noel
I’m studying and working. Plus, working in a field that is changing everyday. Everyday something becomes obsolete and without learning something new, one’s skillsets can become obsolete very fast. And then, I like to do a lot of reading outside of my field. What this means is, I have to be on top of a lot of information. I have to keep track of it. I have to revise it periodically.
A compilation of Essays (2012)
· ☕ 1 min read · ✍️ noel
A few days ago, I had an idea. Guess what? Ideas have consequences. Sometimes in blog posts. This is one such post. The idea was that I should compile a list of all the essays I have written in the year 2012 and create an ebook so it can be read offline. I have done just that. You can download the ebooks right here: PDF: 2012 epub:2012.epub (It’s a zip because wordpress wouldn’t allow epub directly for security reasons…)
Hanging by a thread
· ☕ 5 min read · ✍️ noel
There it is. Everyday, before my eyes. Following me everywhere. Like my shadow. A quiet but eager witness. My companion. It is there since I was a child. As far as I could remember, it was always there. When I was young, I used to play around it. It was everywhere in my little world. Everywhere I went, it was there. I used to tell others about it, but I realized nobody else could see it.
Jingles of Christmas 4: Directing
· ☕ 3 min read · ✍️ noel
And then we come to the final topic. The topic of directing. The toughest. Let’s dive right in! Conceptual integrity In the writing part, I told you something about the infinite resources of dreamland. However, did you know that there are a thousand dream-lands? Each unique. With it’s own different style and atmosphere? Well there are. So, in my opinion, the first task of a director is to let the actors in, into his dreamland.
Jingles of Christmas 3: Sound Editing
· ☕ 3 min read · ✍️ noel
There isn’t much to talk about in topic of sound editing ( <- that last statement is meant to show you how ignorant I am… ) except a few things. Let’s go over them quickly… Audacity That’s what I used to do the editing. It’s a pretty good piece of software which supports unlimited number of tracks. Also, the interface is pretty easy to understand. It took be about 5 minutes to get up to speed and start editing the audio.
Jingles of Christmas 2: Recording
· ☕ 4 min read · ✍️ noel
This post is part of the Jingles of Christmas series. In this post, I discuss the lessons I learned about recording the dialogues. Read on! Shooting a moving target As I discussed in the post before this one, I didn’t have a concrete script. So, there were a few modifications made into the skit plot. A few of them happened after the recording was over. So, I had to record the dialogues again for the changed parts.
Jingles of Christmas 1: Writing
· ☕ 7 min read · ✍️ noel
NOTE: When I started writing this post, I didn’t think that it would get so long. So, I’m gonna do it in 4 parts. Each one focused on one particular topic. Writing, recording, sound editing and directing. This one will be focused on skit writing. This Christmas, we had ICPF outreaches in schools. Of which I had the privilege to be a part of. The preparations for this programs started just a couple of weeks ago and I had the opportunity to write a skit to perform.
Roots of Leadership
· ☕ 13 min read · ✍️ noel
From 12th to 15th November, I had the privilege to attend ICPF leadership camp. It was a great time of blessings. There were many sessions taken on the topics like of leadership and especially on what it means to be a christian leader. And in each of the talk there were many contrasting elements between a christian leader and a secular leader. However, nobody talked about why there was such an contrast, and that for a good reason.
Lingering thoughts of Lua
· ☕ 1 min read · ✍️ noel
For approximately a year now, I have been using Awesome as my window manager. It’s great. A few months ago, I was using Luakit as my primary browser when Firefox got in frenzy of releasing new versions of their browser which demanded more and more memory from my computer which it didn’t have. But, what these two amazing pieces of software have in common? Lua. I was introduced to Lua when I configured my awesome window manager.

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