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.