Empty stomach, empty wallet, loaded spirit

My trophy for "The Ultimate Challenge".

It was cultural day at college, and it was gooooood, we had way too much fun. Our section dominated the function with 2 skits, 2 songs and 2 solo performances. We had nothing 2 days ago, but somehow came up with all those ideas really fast. We even bought a big bouquet (for an amount that emptied out wallets) and presented it to our class girls. Over all it was an extraordinary day for CSE-B, from Zero to Hero in 2 days! It was a great experience, It was different, no computers/geek stuff/food involved at all!!! (true! we were fasting all day!). BTW my role in the skit was of a junior coming to college for the 1st day. :D

The year is coming to and end, I wonder how the next years gonna be. I am making a list of my best moments this year, gonna post it tomorrow.

Saw Stealth yesterday. It was a good movie till the end, the fly-by scenes sounded really great. But, I didn't undertand one thing, in the ending sequence, the EDI (Super Plane) sacrifices itself just for a gay ass helicopter, not even an attack chopper it could have destroyed that in a msec. Other than that it was an excellent movie. I rate it 8/10. Gonna watch Crash tonight :)

Here are two of my favourite wallpapers.

Quote of the Day :

Cartman: You so much as TOUCH kitty's ass, and I'll put a firecracker in your nutsack and blow your balls all over your pants.
Stan: Jesus, Cartman.
Cartman: Well, I'm just sayn', man, seriously, don't mess with kitty, man.

SIP (Serve in Peace)

Finally.. everything is settled on the lappy :D. /me dances 

Can't think of a title....

1st pic is my XPHome orig CD and the secon pic contains cds of some OSes that I have.

Finally installed XP Prof on the laptop and installed FC4 on VMWare, the Slax I had was on 2.4 kernel so I discarded it.

I'm participating in a lot of events these days, Quiz yesterday, "The Ultimate Challenge" today, and have to direct a skit tomorrow, well not exactly directing but watching, hehe. Quiz sucked for us, we were leadin till the last round just to lose in the rapid fire round. TUC was fun though, tis was easy and we (CSE) won the event. Yay!. erm nvm.

I was bored yesterday and started reading an old newspaper and in it I read something on the lines of "Humanitarian Dacoits". ROFLMAO!. Seems on some intercity bus routes, dacoits loot busses regulary, of them, one gang was kind enough to give every passenger Rs. 100 as emergency charges, after looting them naked (Bwahahahahahaha). Again... Bwahahahahahaha. I have got a nice suggestion for all the folks travelling on those routes (karimnagar I guess), next time you travel take nothing with you, just your clothes, pray that they loot the bus, and when they do, collect the 100Rs for yourself. Travel frequently and you may even become rich by some thousand rupees :D.

Quote of the Day :

Cartman: Naw dude, Independent films are those black and white hippy movies. They're always about gay cowboys eating pudding.

buntu Ubuntu.. Kubuntu??

Funny things have been happening lately. 2 days ago, after answering four questions in english exam and concluding that the time was not sufficient enough, I was told, we were supposed to write only 3 answers. Yesterday, when I though of formatting my laptop and making it a dedicated server, its CD-ROM gave up on me. It refused to read cd-rs, any cdr i put in it, it does nothing, but if I put a factory printed cd, it reads without hesitation. So I went on searching for some printed cds which had an OS on them and found Ubuntu, Xandros and RH9. Since Ubuntu was latest and since I never tried the free cds I got from them, I installed it just to find out how slow it was and how gay linux can get to be.

Today I decided to make my lappy a Dual-Dedicated Server, install Windows install VMWare and then Install linux on VMWare (mostly FC4 or Slackware 10.1). My lappy has 512Meg RAM so VMWare shouldnt create any problems. Then again, I had to install windows xp and I dont have a printed cd of Xp Prof. After another long search I found my oooold virgin Windows XP Home original copy in its box pack, and then another idea struck me, install xphome and then upgrade to xp prof by copying the prof. cd contents via lan :).

Installing XPHome atm, I never worked on home ed before, I suppose it should support basic networking.

BTW, Ubuntu is based on Debian and it sucks balls, slowest linux distro I have ever seen, Windows 2003 worked better on my laptop. XServer forwarding over lan was like internet on dial-up, ffs. It only has Gnome and for KDE you need to download another OS Kubuntu, WTF. Although, installing KDE on ubuntu itself may be possible, but distributing 2 OSes which differing just by the shell seems stupid to me.

For the Love of god!

I am seriously pissed now!! The years coming to an end and so are all my computers and gadgets. FFS what the fuck is going on!?! 1st it was monster, then the GF5600XT, the RAM (512 DDR400), Sonly Clie, soon hdds died and now its the Laptop!! Look at it! The screen is fking broken!! (/me is down on his knees crying). This is really phrustrating. All my typo3 work, everything I ever coded is on that laptop. Well I know ways in which I can use it.. but I dont have a Laptop anymore! (/me rolls on the floor crying).
The only use I can see is to use it as a 24/7 server, and then I will have a dedicated server. Maybe I will put all my 3 comps on NFS, but am not sure, I will have to research extensively.
I just hope the year ends real quick, it has been nothing but the worst year in my entire life. one more week left, I am scared :(. I pray to you god, dont let anything else die! plzzzzz :((( 

Blues..

Ever since monster (my pc :D) brokedown, every small problem started pissing me off! The other day, I bought the december issue of Chip where in they listed the best hardware products of 2005, As soon as I got the book home I started reading that part of the mag, I finished reading the 1st review I was like 'WTF! where are the Ratings and prices?". Stupid people, instead of mentioning the price and dealer infomation at the end of each review, they printed "Reviewed in September, Standalone H/w Review", I have no idea why they did that but that completely destroyed the whole purpose of the article.

Recently Firefox has started poking me too. It randomly corrupts its profile folder and everything gets screwed, all toobar placements, bookmars, search plugins are gone! I googled for such similar issues but the only solution found was to backup the profile folder frequently. The worst part is, its very unpredictable, sometimes happens when I install a new extension, or when updating existing ones or just restarting it (I like firefox coz of its extensions feature, really makes browsing a bliss). Finally, since I couldn't find any proper fix for this, I resorted to using BackupFox to backup my profile folder frequently. Sometimes this happens so many times that I had to put the backupfox shortcut in ma quick launch bar!!!.

Coming back to Monster, ever since I installed the GF6800GT I have been facing HDD problems. My 80s are badly screwed, and the 160s are barely holding up. They are still under warranty though. I have to get them replaced asap or buy new ones, o/w I may go crazy. I believe the SMPS is the main culprit, My mobo has DPS2( Dual Power System ), so its really tolerant to power supply discrepancies, the only ones exposed are the hdds and the gfx. The GFX card needs 19Amps on the 12V rail and my smps can supply only ..... 10!!! :((( . ( gay ass Adcom, its a 400w smps ffs). I also formulated another hypothesis, which states "Any CPU with heavily trashed hdds, when kept near a significantly strong magnetic-field, will get screwed no matter what." where Any CPU.... is monster and the siginificantly strong mag field is the UPS.
I'm still investigating into what exactly happened with monster and why.

Quote of the day :

Cartman: Oh, oh, Jesus. I was laughing so hard--the milk came out of my nose.
Stan: Dude, you weren't drinking any milk.
Cartman: Huh?
Stan: You have to be drinking milk for that to happen.
Cartman: Not with me, man.

BBC... CTC...

The BBC is reporting on a European Union threat to fine Microsoft up to $2.4m a day for their non-compliance with the European Commission's demand that Windows be opened up. Back in March 2004 Microsoft was ordered to open up its Windows operating system by way of making documentation available that would assist work on interoperability with other systems, specifically: 'non-Microsoft work group servers [should be able to] achieve full interoperability with Windows PCs and servers'. According to the article, Brussels has found MS to have not complied with the ruling, and, sounding somewhat exasperated, EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes has given MS a 5 week deadline before the $2.4m/a day fines begin.

WTF!?! What the hell is EU thinking? Why does Microsoft have to accept that, and why would it? What if Microsoft stops all its products in the EU nations? They all will be badly screwed shifting to alternate OSes. They would then have to train every literally employee there, which probably is impossible. Anyways, Last I remember US govt. did the same and MS never paid a penny, think its just going to end up as a settlement case again. Lets just wait and see.

Visited CTC today, again, to get my 5600XT repaired, which went in vain. I gave my RAM for repair though, which supposedly has a 50-50 chance of surviving (512 DDR 400 :( ). I also got to see a new system being born :D.

Parking cars in the city has become a serious issue, It has reached a stage where you have to be very calculative and use the brain!. Today, I did calculate and parked without any hassles :). O/W it wud add another 5 Km to the ride. Damn traffic is bloating up day by day and the people are in a lot of hurry, especially 2-wheelers.

Now tis time for the ....
Quote of the Day!

Stan: Aah, we're always running late you ugly skank.
Mrs. Crabtree: WHAT DID YOU SAY?!
Stan: I said, I can't wait to own a fishing tank.
Mrs. Crabtree: Oh, neither can I.

Sea{Maxtor}gate, OMG!

"Reuters reports that Seagate Technology would buy rival computer disk-drive maker Maxtor Corp. for $1.9 billion. Seagate is already world's largest hard drive manufacturer and Maxtor is the third largest after Seagate and Western Digital."

OMG! This is by far the most shocking news I heard in a long long time, even the HP-Compaq merger wasnt that much of a shock.

The harware industry is turning out to be nothing but duoploy. Almost every major aspect of hardware has turned into a duopoly, Intel & AMD (proccies), nVidia & ATi (GFX), Samsung & Hynix (Memory chips) HP-Compaq & Dell (Desktops).

Now it's down to Seagate and Western Digital as far as quality Hard Drives go. It seems to me that just about every OEM you can buy ships with a cheap Maxtor HD. Will Seagate continue the Maxtor line, or will they dump them and continue to make quality hard drives in place of Maxtor? I think the wost case senerio would have Seagate slapping Seagate stickers on top of Maxtor-quality Hard Drives. Yikes, that would be bad for Seagate's image IMO.

The reason? Maybe it has something to do with intellectual property. Maxtor has been around for ages now, and they have a good number of patents on their name, which may be useful for Seagate. Being a competitor it would have been costly for Seagate to liscence tech from Maxtor, with Maxtor as a separate company, in which case buying Maxtor is the best option for them and gain the extra workforce instantly rather than doing it all over again.

Effects? No idea! How it effects other HDD manufacturers? again no idea! (Other manufacturers include Samsung, Toshiba, Hitachi, which bought IBM's drvies division couple of years ago and Fujitsu). Lets just wait and see :D.

Sheesh!

The web is confusing with all kinds of services, confusion arises only when you have to choose which service to use. For example, I always thought of maintaining a blog, so I started here 1st, then when I got into content management systems, I was impressed by Mambo. Then I thought it was cool and since it was easy I decided to host a website of my own made on here, But soon I faced problems with the host's ads, they screw up the JS editors in Mambo and I had to write everything in HTML, kinda sucked but I did go ahead and did some 2-3 posts.

I'm basically a lazy person, I dont like to go through more than 5 steps for writing a blog entry (Login-Postpage-Write-Preview-Submit), as a result that adventure came to a halt. :D. A month later I visited yahoo's 360 and was impressed by it, I even thought of making another blog there, but somehow I convinced myself all that was useless and I am back here now. (LOL)

The old blog seemed outdated in style, and the address siddharth-a.blogspot.com wasnt attactive (to me atleast). So the new address is http://thescarletcars.blogspot.com. Previously the blog was based on a fixed width template, and I am not a fan of such templates. As I am "well-versed " in html and css I decided to go ahead and make this a viariable width template, and I did! :). May be later I will write a completely new template but for now I think this should be fine.

Ah well so much for now, seems like this post has lots of 'I's :| .

Quote of the Day :

Stan: The note (from Wendy) says to meet her at Stark's Pond after school.
Kyle: Whoa, maybe you can kiss her.
Cartman: Or slip a little tongue.
Kenny: [mumbles]
Kyle: I didn't know she had a cat.

nir·va·na

nir·va·na (nîr-vä'nə, nər-)
n.

1. often Nirvana
1. Buddhism. The ineffable ultimate in which one has attained disinterested wisdom and compassion.
2. Hinduism. Emancipation from ignorance and the extinction of all attachment.
2. An ideal condition of rest, harmony, stability, or joy.
3. A state reached by every physics student at the end of the ‘last lab’.

Time 1400hrs, Location: MS724

It was the Last lab for the semester and there were pending reports, graphs, readings and viva, all to be accounted for in the next four hours. A painful job but which had to be done at all costs. The printer never got to rest and neither did we. And at the end of the day every one made it!

Hmm wait... that doesn’t make any sense. Does it? Let me go through that again...

Time 1400hrs, Location: MS724

It was the Last lab for the semester and there were pending reports, edited graphs, modded readings and viva, all to be accounted for in the next four hours. An easy job yet painful when doing it but had to be done at all costs. The printer never got any rest. And luckily at the end of the day every one made it!

Check out Shaolin Productions for some of the greatest Tricking videos in Quake 3

Quote of the Day:

Cartman: The poor kid passes it to the Jew, the Jew shoots. He misses! Proving once and for all that Jews cannot play hockey!
Kyle: Shut up Cartman! Your body is bigger than the goal!
Cartman: No, I just have a sweet hockey body.

Ah!

Whoa! Long time since the last blog! Well that’s my weakness. Lots of stuff happening, treats, farewells age2x tourneys, websites, repairing websites, playing god with paper, treats, farewells and more…

The semester is coming to an end! That means…. Majors! Everyone starts getting high on mugging again and I can’t stand people complaining about how less they have mugged. I can’t seem to understand the psychology of people here; they mug all night and still are jealous even if others just touch a book. Oh well, I guess I have to ignore that and just go on with my ‘studies’ (ROFL!)

Under pressure from ‘Attila the Hun’ and for my own thirst for being an Admin for an international clan site, I started working on a site for our Age of Empires Clan, called ‘theHNClan’ here http://www.thehnclan.tk . As I am a huge phpbb fan, I used IntegraMOD for the site and it turned out extremely well as you can see on the site.

And finally I am an admin for an international site :D. I recently defeated ‘Attila the Hun’ in a match, and now he’s all like “I want REVENGE”, what he doesn’t seem to get it is that I just don’t care. He seems so violated by that defeat. (make sure you check out www.thehnclan.tk for his rants :)) )

Ah, coming to the ‘big’ events, there is nothing like a treat in a high class restaurant. The outgoing batch of 2001 were kind and generous enough to give us a treat in Waves, where were able to “order whatever we wanted”, which later proved very costly for them, hehe, the total bill came out to around 11k!!!! for 30-odd people. It seemed no one was satisfied with that and then after a week or two (4 days ago) the 3^rd yearites planned a farewell for the to-be pass-outs, this time it was a restaurant near the India Gate, then after the dinner it was “kheench” time, everyone of the seniors had to tell their experiences in IITD, Saran started… and then the guard there kicked us out coz it was 11pm and no was allowed to stay there after 11pm. Good for us. >:)

Here are some pics from the parties.

Treat at Waves


Farewell @ Pindi


and yes all the episodes of South Park after 904 rocked! :)
I aslo am now uptodate with the series Scrubs

Quote of the Day:

Cartman: Now stop wasting Mel Gibson's time, you little pussy prick.
Stan: Don't take that tone with me, kid. I'll kick your ass.
Cartman: Yah. Well, I'd like to see you try. I'm, like, 6 feet tall.
Stan: Yah. Well, you sound like a little bitch to me.
Cartman: Bitch! Don't call me bitch, bitch!
Stan: Bring it on then, bitch!
Cartman: I already brung it, bitch. I brung it, opened it, and set it on the table, bitch.
Stan: Cartman?!

Creative or Altec Lansing?

Creative PCWorks LX520. Well… they are now mine! mine! my precious! Bought them at Nehru Place, along with a new mouse and some DVD-Rs. Kind of a shopping spree. Had to buy the new ones coz I literally had to blow air into the old one’s volume control just to increase the volume and also there was no stereo effect. :D

The new speakers made Marilyn-Manson sound really good, as a result I have been listening to his/their (Don’t know whether it’s a band or a single person) music for the past 4hrs. Death metal and Rock sound great on surround sound systems.

The new mouse has really improved my quaking. I was finally able to beat the Spiterbot at level 50 in ztn3tourney1. Quaking in surround sound has also helped in multiplayer games.

As for the DVD-Rs, I used them to empty 80GB on my HDDs, Though its just 20% of the total space, I can use that space for downloading for the next 2 weeks.

I finally finished my 1^st “Online Lab Report”, (well not exactly an online report but I decided to call it “Online” coz I didn’t write a single letter, pen on paper I mean). 3 pages in word, 14 graphs and 7 excel sheets of readings. It took me 4 solid hours. The lab people recently started accepting printed reports (my area of expertise). Hope I do well in the viva.

And finally I finished the entire Malcolm in the Middle series, all the six seasons including the latest episodes. It was fun while it lasted. I have to find a new series now. Just so you know the series I am up to date are...

1. South Park

2. Friends

3. Titus

4. Malcolm in the Middle

5. Coupling

Quote of the Day:

Stan: Hey, Cartman, what does "Fingerbang" mean anyways?!
Cartman: I heard it on HBO! It means, like y'know, when you pretend to use your finger like a gun or something!
Kenny: {Mumbles}
Stan: Kenny says that's not what it means!
Cartman: Okay, Kenny! What does "Fingerbang" mean then?!
Kenny: {Mumbles}
Cartman: WHAT?! WHO THE HELL WOULD DO THAT?! JESUS CHRIST! GROW UP, KENNY! WOULD YOU?! Alright, boys! Let's do it from the top! ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR...!

P-Day

Knock knock,
“kaun hai yaar”
“oye vote dene aajana paanch baje”
“theek hai”
“kya kar raha hai”
“so raha hun yaar, aajaunga”
“chal bhoolna mat”
“haan haan”
“zzzzzzzzzz”

P-Day!! Poltu Day! The day finally arrived. Full scale poltu this year, far worse and confusing than I expected. One guy comes in and hints you one set, another, a completely different set. Strangely though, our dept. (EP) took keen interest in poltu this year and bagged 3 major posts, Mess, Maintenance and Computer Room Secy! Even after so much poltu, the results came up as all expected. The best parts of this are the Treats. As soon as the results were announced junta was literally was piling up on the winners for the treats, as a result we are were presented with loads and load of Pizzas, Drinks and Snacks.

Leaving this aside, I have broken my own record of being awake for the longest time, 46 Hours, my previous record being 42h. I am in the 47th hour right now and since I am going to sleep now, I don’t think I should count this hour. 46h doesn’t look impressive when considering I slept for only 8 hrs and was awake for 64 hrs. All this because of a stupid lab of ours, messed up my sleep cycle and had to make space for the lab.

When I was at the CSC today a friend of mine introduced me to a MMORPG, Kings of Chaos, and said it was just like Age of Empires but it was all web-based. erm. These kinds of games are not for me! Then I stumbled upon A3 India, an interesting game, it’s worth a try and also it’s free.

Comedy central aired the new South Park episode 904-Best friends forever. I must say, it was the best episode so far in the season. All the others weren’t that good, Carman trying to get rid of Hippies was fun but not as fun as Hell vs Heaven and where “Kenny is basically Keanu Reaves” of heaven. This episode also had a thing on Terri Schiavo, not in a mocking kind of a way but showing how people and media make things worse.

/me gets ready to Hibernate.

Quote of the Day:
"We are out-numbered and in need of someone who can single handedly bring the whole dark empire down. Basically Kenny, you are Keanu Reaves." - Angel Michael in Heaven.

A Day of Horror

Maddu returned from the departmental elections for the Class convener depressed and totally psyched. The reason, A.K. was elected the Class Convener! OMG! OMFG! People have gone totally crazy; Poltu has crossed its limits! Lucky I am no way related to it. The worse thing was he won unanimously, a totally unpredicted result. Poor Maddu was totally distraught.

But anyways keeping poltu aside, we went on to watch horror movies. The 1st one was Alone in the Dark, although it has a 2.0 rating on IMDB, it had some cool effects, no plot but it had Tara Reid in it!. Yum!. Directors have to stop making movies based on video games, this is a very good example showing how bad that can turn out to be.
When I went back to my room, the Ring 2 torrent finished downloading. The word spread and people flocked in to watch. It was goooood. I never expect much with sequels so I was surprised by this one. While it is not as good, or original as the first movie, it is no slouch and far better than the last horror movie I saw.

A few days ago, I read, a movie was in production based on Doom III, starring Johnson aka The Rock(WWF). At that time I was all happy, but Alone in the Dark has changed my perspective, now I just hope they dont screw it up, "Alone in the Dark style". It can either be as scary as Ring or as stupid as Alone in the Dark, we just have to wait and see. Doom 3 had a plot on the lines of Half life 1 but it was the scariest game ever.

More info on the Doom movie here :
IMDB
The Rock solidifies Doom movie role




Quote of the Day:
I've learned something, too: selling out is sweet because when you sell out, you get to make a lot of money, and when you have money, you don't have to hang out with a bunch of poor asses like you guys. Screw you guys, I'm going home. -Eric Cartman

Tango Charlie

As I wanted to cherish all of the Mid Sem, I went on a sleep marathon. When I woke up Namo had taken his speakers and his mouse, leaving me with my old crap. That was the moment I decided, I had to concentrate on my acads, but something happened, an IM window opened saying “aoe??”
…………………………………………………………………………………………….
After a quick aoe session, we decided to end Mid-Sems with a movie. We opted for “Tango Charlie”, impressed by its cast. People make mistakes. The movie was complete hogwash, adding insult to injury we had to watch it from 10 feet in front of the screen, but still we ended up having fun.

When I returned to my room, There were people waiting to play AoE, (practice for our games with IITK) we ended up playing some good games. As usual we analyzed and put a stop to aoe for today.

Then I came across a post on Wareznet about Firefox plug-ins, as I had nothing to do, I immediately started research on Plug-ins. It was 4 AM at this point, since there was no point in sleeping at that time, I went on to research more on RSS feeds and Plug-ins to view RSS feeds. Habari Xenu turned out be the best of all. This slowly led to blogs. It then struck me "I should start a Blog of my Own!"

After a long setup procedure, configuring everything, I finally created my own blog!, and this was the post for today.

OMG, This might be the 1st time that I had typed so much content on my own!

Quote of the Day:
The world isn't fair. I do everything people ask me to. I stand in the lunch line for them, I buy tampons at the store for them, I go on Maury Povich with balls on my chin for them. And yet, nobody accepts me. I am an outcast. A shadow of a man who can find no companion... ship. No love from others. Fine! If I am to be an outcast, so be it! I'm through doin' what others tell me to do, and I am sick of this world and the stin-, and the stinky people in it! From now on I will dedicate my life to bringing chaos to the world that has rejected me! I will become the greatest supervillain the world has ever seen! Where I go, destruction will follow! - Professor Chaos (2002)

Me after a long Quaking session at home.

Well Well well....

My first Blog!...

I have no idea why I had started this.. but.. it seems instresting...