Back To Two Posts Daily

Hey there folks. Great news! Sudhakar is back from his break, which means that you’ll be getting two posts per day in the NASS stream. And not only that, with two authors, you’ll be back to getting all kinds of weird twists and turns that one author alone cannot give you. Enjoy!!!

NASS posts reduce for a week

Hey there folks. We wanted to let you know that for the coming week, you will only see one post per day for NASS, since Sudhakar is taking a truly well deserved vacation. You’ll still get a post a day, and we will go back to full fledged two posts a day after a week. As always, we will keep you updated here, and you can find out more about both Sudhakar and me via our Twitter feeds.

Episode One – The Full Story

Hello there folks. We thought it’d be a good idea to collate all the tweets that formed the first episode and put them in one “traditional” paragraph. So, here goes. Oh and btw, the alternating colors represent the alternating authors, but you already knew that

He sat there smirking, with an absolute air of accomplishment around him, as he hit the ‘Submit’ button. This was going to be BIG. His smirk grew wide, as the progress bar went from left to right. The page reloaded. “Safari can’t open the page”? His smirk vanished. “Damn you!” said Sid, as he almost smashed his iPhone on his table. “I did not even save that post, you moron. Don’t do this to me.” He began to drift into that familiar territory of rage, but suddenly remembered Angr – the anger management help app his buddy had written. ANGR – a path breaking App, was written in primitive C. Sid had been Beta testing his buddy’s baby. But then, that wasn’t all he was doing. He was also trying to port it over to Java, so he could release the app in the Android Market. But none of that mattered right now. Because now, it was judgement time for ANGR, Android or Mac. The sole reason of its existence. Someone was going to get hurt if ANGR failed. Suddenly, Sid heard a familiar buzz, one that irritated him the most. But somehow… he couldn’t place it. “Dammit! Is that… my alarm?!?” But it wasn’t. It was his iPhone ringing. The familiar home screen was black and blank. All it said was – “Wake up Sid. We have you now…” Sid grumbled, “Stupid kids hacking & leaving messages on my phone.” He tossed it aside. There were more important things to be done now. And so, he grabbed his can of beer and flicked his TV on, to watch re-runs of ‘The Simpsons’. Meanwhile, Angr was still running on his Mac. On the other side of town, Tony, his buddy and the original creator of Angr also put on his TV. He wasn’t going to watch The Simpsons. Tony wanted to catch up with the latest episode of Desperate Housewives. He hoped Sid would complete testing Angr soon. But as his TV came to life, it wasn’t Eva Longoria who showed up on his screen. Instead, it was a small blinking square… a cursor. Tony wailed in despair – “WTF? I am broke, and so is my TV? Sid, save me. Test Angr already.” The cursor on his TV screen typed out – ” “ “SOS?” Tony nearly fell off the chair. The figure on the screen was a code used by Sid and Tony, in case of an emergency. “What do I do?” Then, Tony did the unthinkable. He walked up to the TV with a renewed resolve, fear writ large on his face, and… switched the TV off. The next second, WHRR, the location based contacts app on his jailbroken iPhone buzzed. Tony stared at the screen as it read “Sid”. “Sid? Near Me? What’s he doing around here? Wasn’t he supposed to be testing Angr?” wondered Tony, just before someone banged at the door. Tony jumped again. Would that be Sid at the door, or…? He feared to even think otherwise. “How can I be sure?” Suddenly, he remembered. He remembered the peep hole. He peered into it, hoping to catch Sid on the other side. But it wasn’t him. There was no one there but the familiar pimple faced boy from Pizza Hut. He relaxed. Then he remembered, “I didn’t order a pizza today.” By now he was certain that he had no clue. But as he was thinking, he heard a thud outside the door. He peeped out again to find the pizza boy lying on the floor. His iPhone buzzed the familiar tune of WHRR again. Tony hesitated, then checked anyway. What he saw on the black screen made him go white. It flashed ‘Sid’ on WHRR. It said – “So do you still wanna eat a pizza? Then why don’t you open the door? We are watching you… “ Tony fiddled with the settings on his phone to reduce the screen brightness. He didn’t want to go white again! “Sid, change your signature.” As he tossed his phone aside, someone banged hard at the door, and the power went off. As he fiddled for light, a hand touched his shoulder. “Dude, is that my pizza?” asked Sam, Tony’s roomie. Just then someone banged on the door again. Sam flicked on the light on his Nokia 1110. “Don’t open the door dude” said Tony. “I have a bad feeling about this.” This prompted Sam even more to rush to the door, 1110 in hand. Sam knew that this was because of Tony’s “incident” with eating too many pizzas once. He practically lived Weird Al’s “A Complicated Song”. So, ignoring Tony’s pleads, Sam went on and opened the door. There wasn’t anyone there. Just 2 medium sized pizzas on the floor, next to a stack of large sized pizzas. There must have been at least a dozen of them. Tony came out and saw this too, and nearly fainted. Tony saw thick red liquid oozing out from the boxes and shrieked “Blood!” Sam picked a drop in his finger licked it and said “Nah! Ketchup!” Tony was still skeptical. He said, “How come someone just left all this here for free?”. Sam replied, “Nah dude, I ordered it on the TiVo.” “But why so many? You expecting someone dude?” Tony enquired. Sam’s eyes lit up, face screamed with expectation, and said – “Hell Yeah!” “Betty’s coming over. I told her I’d help her setup Windows on her new MacBook”. While Sam continue to grin, elsewhere, Sid was upset. Sid had ditched Betty, his girlfriend of many years, the day she thought of setting up Windows on her Macbook. Sid considered it betrayal. Sam, on the other hand was an Apple hating “Linux hippie”, who refused to buy an iPhone. But Betty was not the reason Sid was upset now. Sid and Sam, ex best friends, were now divided by tech. Sid’s research post to counter Sam’s Search Algorithm was 404′ed by Safari earlier. And now as he sat down, his Apple TV refused to start up. First Safari on his iPhone, now his Apple TV. Sid had a funny feeling. His life had been in Beta and bug-ridden for way too long. It needed a bit of shaking up. He felt something shocking was about to happen. He was in deep thought as he walked over to the Apple TV and touched it. “Ouch,” he jumped as he got a shock, “stupid aluminum case!” “Stupid Brick” he cried. And then something hit him. What if Apple ditched metal and embraced Wood? They could even call the proto The Log. He knew what had to be done. And he knew it had to be done now. He headed over to the phone, picked it up and dialed. “Hello! Acer Hardwares? Sid here from the 31st street. Say, could you send over 2 big boards of the best wood you’ve got? Thank you.” As Sid hung up the phone, he knew that this would be big, no wait… bigger than anything else till now. His smile returned. An hour later, the doorbell rang. And just as he had imagined, the delivery guys bought in 2 big… nah, HUGE boards of premium wood. Things were finally going his way again. He now had The Log, then there was of course, Angr. Suddenly, he remembered… Angr. Oh no! He was so caught up in his current Log project, that he decided to lie to Sam that he had finished testing the beta of ANGR. “Sam?” Sid thought out loud, “Not Sam, Tony! Man I’ve got to get that guy outta my head!” If Log went well, that task would become real easy. And he realized soon enough why he had said Sam. ANGR’s internal search logic employed Sam’s algorithm. “Oh no!”, Sid realized his folly. Now he was torn. Should he continue testing Angr? Or should he work on the Log? Then it struck him. He could do both. “Yes, that’s it.” So during day, he worked on the Log, and by night he started testing Angr more than he ever did, trying to break Sam’s logic. Weeks passed.. Then one day, finally, he had done it. He had written a very detailed document, based on his original. This time nothing could stop him. He saved the document, pasted it on his blog, and hit the ‘Submit’ button and waited. This time, it was indeed going to be big. And it was.. Tony smiled as he saw the “1″ in the red ball on top of his mail app. When he clicked the icon, he realized he was right. “From: Sid”. “Dude! Angr is Beta tested, finally. There are a few bugs, as expected. The attached sheet details them. Ah, there is one more thing though.” “But make sure you’re alone when you read the rest of this email. It is strictly FOR YOUR EYES ONLY”. Tony looked around to make sure. “From what I can see, Sam’s Search Algortihm, is an encrypted back-door to Angr. With proper know-how, a skilled hacker can take control.” “But its not outside hackers we must fear. He has already started adding his own ’suggestions’ for the app to output. Dude, there’s more.” “Check this out. Click the ‘About’ link in the App. Now make a pinch gesture. Follow this with a swipe to the right of the screen. See?” “Dude, how did you meet this guy? What was he before he was your roomie?” At this point, Tony decided to slip out and head over to Sid’s. Tony could not believe what he had just seen. How could someone like Sam do it? As Tony backed up his car on the driveway, his phone rang. He nearly jumped, but thankfully it was only Sid, “Hey man, got my note?” “Yeah,” said Tony, “I’m on my way over. Lets talk there.” Tony drove over to Sid’s place with a thousand things on his mind. He reached and was about ring the bell, when he heard a loud explosion. He jumped again. It was just a car back-firing. “Boy, I sure am edgy,” he thought. Tony was about to knock when Sid opened the door smiling. “So? Still think it was right to pick Sam to work on your code, eh buddy?” Sid grinned. Tony frowned at him “How much damage has been done?” “There has been a bit… But you know how I’ve been playing around with Android on my Nokia tablet? Well, I did a bit more than that” “I tried porting Android to my jail broken iPhone. And you know what? I am almost done setting up a dual boot. But when I was testing it…” “I wanted some apps to run too. In the process, I ported Angr over to Java. So, there’s a version of Angr that doesn’t have Sam’s crap.” Tony looked in amazement “Are all features of the original intact?” “Absolutely” yelled Sid, “And no waiting for Apple to approve ANGR too.” “But what about the testing? Have we done enough?” “Not enough, but hey, this is Google, they love their ‘betas’. Give it a try dude.” And with that, Sid and Tony’s ANGR Beta went live on Android and turned out to be a massive hit. But Sam’s broken-in, iPhone version was rejected mercilessly by the powers-to-be at the iTunes app store. No one heard from Sam after that. And thus – Sid, Tony and ANGR lived happily ever after. P.S – Know what shocked Tony when he saw what Sam had done in ANGR’s About Page? It was an animation of the current Apple logo, fading out into the old colorful logo, still fading out into nothing.

Once again, we hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. As always, feedback is welcome via comments here or Twitter replies. We read every single one.

New Episode Starts Today!

Hey folks, thank you for checking out our blog and also for following us on Twitter. Hope you’ve liked the first “episode” of Not a Stupid Soap (NASS). We will begin the next episode on Thursday, the 15th of January (yes, 2009).

Another thing that we will be doing shortly is to tell you about how NASS came to being and also about the concept of “episodes” and some of the rules that we, the authors, of NASS follow. So, check back soon.

As always, please do leave us your feedback, on this blog or via a Twitter reply. And once again, thank you for following us.

Hello world!

Hello world, and welcome to the home of NASS (Not A Stupid Soap) – an attempt at story telling by two geeks, using Twitter. We thought it would be a good idea to have a blog for NASS, so that updates and other “news” related to NASS could go here, rather than in the Twitter stream. We’ll be adding more details later, but for now, thank you for visiting, and check back soon.