A Fools' World

Well this I had to write about, It was just too much to take.
Slashdot's Vastu:
From the article:

"Thirty-year-old Smita Narang is rapidly becoming one of India's hottest Web designers. Her method: applying vastu shastra, the Indian counterpart of feng shui, to the online realm. The process entails mapping page attributes - HTML, colors, graphics - to elements like fire, water, and air. 'Any disturbance of these established elements can cause an imbalance in the site that directly affects its business,' Narang says."

A direct proof to prove that there are in fact a lot of fools in the world who believe in this kinda crap. Seriously, aesthetics is what is needed not vastu you fools. I know, I know there is always this butterfly effect but compromising a site design just for the sake of complying with vastu is just ignorant. Same applies to houses, I still don't get the point with houses. I have seen many people build great luxurious mansions and later destroying them just because some jackass vastu shastry told them their house wasn't compliant and that it would cause them bad luck or put them in grave danger of loosing their money.

I have seen my father getting pissed when someone suggested vastu in his contracts, I always wondered what the problem was. Since its reached my domain now, I understand perfectly how lame it is. I can go on and on about how stupid all this is but, if you wanna hear all that. buzz me :P.

Southpark resumed :) but only one episode was good, rest were boring, come on Matt&Trey you can come up with better ideas! make it another season 8 ;)

As Schumacher is now out of F1, my 8 year Schumi fan phase has ended. Luckily my next favourite driver, Kimi, is moving to Ferrari, so he is the man we cheer for next year. I just hope he doesn't carry forward his bad luck from McLaren to Ferrari. 2008 Champ, Kimi, Alonso will never even be seen on the podium, pakka. I gotta get back to playing the RAMBIT scenario in AOE:TC now, the other bitches are waiting.

"Schumi you are my god :)"
" Kimi you are my angel :) "

11223344 << RAMBITT!!

Ah yes! The blog, I forgot, age2_x1.exe and Gamespy have that effect on people. BSNL rocks and so does Iron Maiden. They released their new album “A Matter of Life and Death”. Although all songs are easy listening type when compared to either the X Factor or Virtual XI, I rate the new album 8/10. No complex music, it is simple and just rocks.

Track listing

• "Different World" (music: Adrian Smith/Steve Harris, lyrics: Steve Harris) – 4:17
• "These Colours Don't Run" (music: Smith/Harris, lyrics: Bruce Dickinson) – 6:52
• "Brighter Than a Thousand Suns" (music: Smith/Harris, lyrics: Harris/Dickinson) – 8:44
• "The Pilgrim" (music: Janick Gers/Harris, lyrics: Harris) – 5:07
• "The Longest Day" (music: Smith/Harris, lyrics: Dickinson) – 7:48
• "Out of the Shadows" (music: Dickinson/Harris, lyrics: Dickinson) – 5:36
• "The Reincarnation of Benjamin Breeg" (music: Dave Murray/Harris, lyrics: Harris) – 7:21
• "For the Greater Good of God" (music & lyrics: Harris) – 9:24
• "Lord of Light" (music: Smith/Harris, lyrics: Dickinson) – 7:23
• "The Legacy" (music: Gers/Harris, lyrics: Harris) – 9:20

You guys gotta play the RAMBIT Scenario in AOE:TC, its just infinite fun. Get 8 people and you can enjoy for weeks together or just login to Gamespy and you will never go back!!

Quote of the Day

Auctioner: Our first item is a pair of panties confiscated from a prostitute.
Quagmire: Fifty bucks.
Auctioner: She had nine STDs.
Quagmire: Forty-five bucks.
Auctioner: And when we caught her she wet herself.
Quagmire: Fifty bucks

Monsoon

Rains not only drown Hyderabad but also, kill my net connection. This is what it used to be in the before days. It got worse; the internet service at my home had reached a stage where it works only when it wants to or if the ISP wants it to, whether it rains or not is irrelevant. So if I want to access the net, I have to call the ISP and yell at him and his lousy service and then hope I’ll get connected. It is analogous to a dial up connection where the yelling relates to the gibberish sounds the modem makes when it connects. However, after a few days of successive dial-up-isp-get-cable-internet-for-20min-at-50%packetloss-5KBps, everything shut down. The connection doesn’t even exist now. The internet led on my router doesn’t blink anymore, at the same time though I went off to live at my aunt’s place and was not bothered about it. Meanwhile at home dad and sis were paranoid over the lack of packets and started calling me for access as if I were an intermediate server. A week later I called him up and howled for I think almost twenty-five minutes telling him that if he didn’t fix it by the next day evening I would no longer be paying for his services, assuming he would ignore my threat I called up home and requested dad also to serve an ultimatum. I was expecting this plan to work, but it seems he never sent a single person for check-up or call back. I was amazed at their customer service; he has such a big base of ignorant users he decided to completely ignore us. Finally, to sum up I don’t have an always on connection anymore, which renders all my systems completely useless even the monster.

Luckily though, I have a Tata-Indicom wireless phone line which provides internet access via dial-up at 40ps per min. I think I will be on this for a while and hence my presence online will decrease drastically. Right now I am on a mission to convince people at home to get a BSNL line and improve their cyber-lives. I think its working, and so well that if I were a BSNL salesman I would have sold a thousand connections by now. Only issues being the initial 2000Rs+ installation, the 900Rs monthly rental and if BSNL is in we have to disconnect the wireless line. A hard notion for my father to digest on but I’m willing to wait.

Notice: All Schumacher/Ferrari fans, it is requested that you perform a ritual/prayer/ceremony/sacrifice/offering in your respective religion and ask your god to crash Alonso in the coming Hungarian GP. This will close up the championship tables and make the season more interesting. Thank you.

X1: The death

It all started when I wanted to search for a document I stored a month ago. I couldn’t find it anywhere as I couldn’t remember its name, so I used the built in windows search. I disable the indexing engine as soon as I install the OS, and so none of the files on the disk were indexed and the normal search couldn’t find what I was looking for. It was then; I felt the need of a desktop search tool. Once on Slashdot I was reading an article on some topic related to desktop search wherein a hippie wrote that Google should be scared about X1 Desktop search engine being made free. He also bragged about how great an indexing engine it is. I was convinced and decided to give it a try, a 12MB download which took almost a full night to finish on my gay ass connection, I was all set to install it.

That evening I installed it and set it to the recommended indexing aggressiveness. It was running all night, the next day morning and also even when I came back home the next day. It was almost 20 hours since it started and it was still indexing, saying “Optimizing file index”. It used almost all possible resources available; I decided to free all the resources by rebooting the system.

It shut down and restarted posted well and everything was normal till the Intel RAID (ICH5R) bios showed up. It was showing the HDDs’ status as “Unknown” for both the 160G 7200.7s on the controller. In my experience I have seen “Normal” and “Error Occurred” but I have never seen “Unknown”. After a couple of reboots one disk showed up as “Normal” but the other didn’t, even after checking it with 4-5 HDD diagnostic tools like Sea Tools, MHDD etc. The “Unknown” status was holding back the controller in detecting the RAID0 (Stripe) Set. As a last attempt I used Norton Disk Doctor, and NDD without any user intervention, said something about fixing the drive and started doing something all on its own. I lost all hopes at that moment, I had to wave goodbye to my 320GB data. All the little hopes I had of retaining the data were lost when the RAID bios reported both the disks as “Normal” but wasn’t able to detect the previous RAID set. I was mortified! All the 320GB data gone! Vanished!

What was the reason? X1. It tried to index every byte of the files in the RAID partition; the HDDs couldn’t take that torture and failed one after another. All the 320G data was nothing but videos, yes 95% of the data was either movies or TV series, and I still don’t know what X1 was indexing in those files. Key frames? What ever it did, it was the reason I lost 320Gigs of data. It didn’t really bother me because I have seen almost every byte on those disks, so I am not that disturbed as I was be when I lost my 5600XT. Fortunately both the disks are under warranty and I am absolutely sure ill be getting new disks when I claim the warranty, some good news at last.

X1 will never be forgotten. It reached the top of my “Worst Software ever” list, right above Norton Antivirus 2002. The next time I see such suggestions by hippies on Slashdot, I’ll openly flames their asses.

Guilt Traps

I read a bunch of books on psychology in the past week. They have a detrimental effect on the way we think. We start analyzing every reaction, every response and then try to relate them with the theory in the books. The analysis is involuntary, it doesn’t stop and can’t be stopped either. In the beginning it may seem a bit interesting but as we go deep it gets confusing and everything relates to everything and nothing. Somewhat like Kyle’s paranoia in the episode “Tooth Fairy tats”. On the plus side though, you get to understand people better and also, ourselves better. But in the end it all comes down to a person’s mental strength, a weak mind can turn totally paranoid or a sensible one can find his weaknesses and improve on them. If you are one of those whose thinking is most of the times influenced by other people or surroundings, don’t ever read these! However, if you feel you are strong enough, go ahead read them and see what you really are or aren’t.

What I observed is that Guilt is an inconceivably strong weapon. You can force, order or push a person into doing something but there is always a possibility that he might rebel. You can also plead, beseech, but again there is no guarantee that the deed will be done. But, if we bring in guilt into the picture and make the person feel guilty for not doing something, I assure you, that job will be done whatever the odds. I call this the “Guilt Trap”. When I knew about this and thought back, I found out that I was trapped into these guilt traps in numerous occasions. One might not realize it but it is true. The moment we are guilty we start hating ourselves and that is the catalyst for what follows. Some people use this to their advantage and get things done, in my opinion it is nothing but manipulation and cruel. This manipulation soon becomes a habit as it is the easiest way to get things done. So my advise would be to ask you people to think whether you have been trapped into feeling guilty or you are genuinely guilty. If you think you are being trapped into feeling guilty, reverse the whole situation, try and make them feel guilty or put all the responsibility on them or just ignore them.

What effect the books had on me? I started to worry about what people thought of me. I stopped caring what people thought about me long back, but it all came back for those three days, I was, you can say paranoid for a while.

Warning psycho alert!

Since school, I had many awful experiences, like being sent out of class for sleeping, almost everyday, at Ramaiah. They had no long term effect on me, but I slowly turned into an insensitive, anti-social, irresponsible, Para geek. Then my two years at the IIT changed me a lot again. I was ever more confident about my abilities. Although I wasn’t able to develop my ability to prioritize, I became stronger. I still had more negatives than positives but it was an improvement none the less. Still it proved costly as I was slow in developing myself. However since I don’t let drawbacks take me down, I was working on myself all last year. Frankly, I again have changed a lot and this time. I think I now have more positives than negatives. I now know what my priorities are; I now stand up for myself and what I believe. I now assert myself whenever I have to, which I never could before. I know a lot more about myself.

The most significant development is that I am now able to balance my academics with my passion for computers (or you can say obsession). I never had the balance before, that’s why I was forced be away from computers whenever I had to study. Since I was always forced, I never valued the balance and took it for granted. In the end I was kicked out of IITD. A painful experience, the worst part about this is, even though I and my family are over the disaster, outsiders aren’t.

And yes, I was this big a psycho even before reading those books.

The Come back from hibernation post?

OMG! My blog is popular! There have been many instances where people asked why I stopped blogging or why there were no new posts. I am overwhelmed by the fact that so many people read this. This is the answer to all their questions.

First off I had my external exams, which btw went extremely well and I ended up with distinction and secondly it was “holiday” time after the exams. By Holidays I assume that every second has to be pleasurable to an extremely high level, I live to enjoy, and so I dropped the priority of blogging to the lowest along with academics and social interaction for the 3 weeks to come. Although I was assigned some small web designing projects, I put them just above blogging in the priority stack.

So, what did I do in holidays? One word: Oblivion (The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion). This game has a great history with Morrowind Morrowind-tribunal etc but I never played any of those though, truth to be said, I never played an RPG, no Diablo, no NWN, none. The only reason I plagued Guns till he gave the game to me was because all the hardware review sites were over-enthusiastic on how the game stressed the graphics subsystem. I couldn’t resist, I had to test mine. Being an FPS freak I never liked RPGs and so I was just installing it to rape the individual subsystems. I installed the game and started playing just to admire the HDR rendering and the beautiful grass and trees with shadows, even with 20fps it looked cool. I liked it, I was happy that the monster was finally able to handle it. Oh and by the way, I revived the monster and this time for sure. I sold the old rotten 80G HDDs on eBay and got a new 160G 7200.9 and an extra 512MB stick to replace my old dead one summing up to 1GB of DDR440. Although dual channel isn’t working (coz I have 3 banks and 2 modules of memory) I think its fine as long as I don’t create A2 size posters in Photoshop. Coming back to the game, as I was admiring the pixels generated, I soon was involved in the game and within a day I was addicted! Its not a fast paced game at all, nevertheless I was attracted by the intricacy of the game. All FPS games are linear but this game is in no way linear, I guess all RPGs are like that. I was so obsessed that I changed my profile in orkut from being completely South Park friendly to Oblivion stats update page. In conclusion I passed all my holidays playing Oblivion.

Here are the Statistics.

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tHeSiD

Race: Nord
Birth sign: The Thief
Class: Knight
Level: 9

Factions

Arena: Grand Champion
Dark Brotherhood: Listener
Mages Guild: Warlock
Blades: Knight Brother
Thieves Guild: Pick Pocket
Knights of the White Stallion: Knight-errant
Fighters Guild: Apprentice


Major Skills

Blade: 80
Block: 47
Blunt: 44
Hand to Hand: 30
Heavy Armor: 63
Illusion: 37
Speechcraft: 37

Strength: 75
Intelligence: 36
Willpower: 38
Agility: 57
Speed: 64
Endurance: 65
Personality: 44
Luck: 66

Stats
Days passed: 122
Active Quests: 12
Completed Quests: 80
Skill Increases: 329

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Also, during the exams I was inflicted with another disease, orkut. Then, I was restricted to a net connection and a pc based on the 865 chipset, dad’s PC. I had two options Y!Msgr or browse, at times no one was on yahoo and so I remembered that I had an orkut account and logged in to check in what the hell was going on in there. Slowly got keen on that too and started scrapping people I thought I was not in proper contact with and now because of that my Outlook inbox is flooded with mails from randomhash@mail.orkut.com. Oh well, It helped me pass time during the exams. It will slowly die down.

Dissecting a Laptop

Windows

Linux

Ofcourse all this was before the screen broke to bits and pieces. Why I am posting this now? Coz I thought of posting this long back and found it now when backing up stuff on monster. Why now? Coz Theres no fuking monster and I cant think of a way to spend time :D.

Test Results

rofl!

Soup!

Oh my god! I just made myself the tastiest soup eva!

I couldn’t find anything to eat but found a knorr sweetcorn soup packet lying near the stove. I wanted to eat something bad, (the main reason why I am so... ah hell, fat!) so started off to make the normal soup, following the instructions on the rear of the packet. It was going well till I realized the amount of water was more than required. Then I remembered what my cousin did when that happened and followed her foot steps. Cutting short here is the recipe. BTW her soups taste first class!

Recipe

Ingredients :
½ Packet Knorr Sweet corn soup powder.
350-400ml water.
½ beaten egg. (Beat a full egg and then throw away half :P)
Pinch of Aginomoto or I think its called China salt.
¼ teaspoon of soya sauce.
1½ teaspoon of Maggi chilli-tomato sauce.

Procedure.
Start making the soup as instructed on the back of the packet. Then when its ½ way through, a stage where its not too watery nor too thick, dump in the soya and the chilly sauces, the aginomoto, and mix them up well. Then when its fairy hot and when you can hear bubbles popping, start rotating vigorously. As you rotate it, take the beaten egg in a glass and start pouring it in slowly where the velocity of the soup in the bowl is the highest, ie the circumference of the whirlpool you create. That’s it let it boil for a while and when it becomes thick enough pour it into a bowl and treat yourself with the best soup you’ll make.

The egg trick I learnt from my cousin and the rest of the ingredients were just random, just put whatever I could find as much I wanted and it turned out quite well. However, this serves only one person. If more number are to be served multiply all the ingredients by that number. :P

Disclaimer: If you screw up and god forbid end up in the toilet for the days to come, don't blame me!.

Other Backward Thoughts

As monster was taken away from me, I am left alone in the room to study. 45 minutes into a study session, my brain gets maxed out; it leaves the books and starts wandering. It was then the row over the reservation made me think and think I did.

What is wrong with this country? After analyzing what dad talks about and collecting data from all the “upper” meetings with friends, I came up with several reasons.

• Turning personal interests into public interests.


• Corruption


• Religion


• Lack of rational thinking among citizens.


• More, still to be discovered.

For example, consider the controversy over the OBC reservations. The Congress government is weak at this moment, that’s why the ruling party is the UPA and not Congress. As Sonia Gandhi has absolutely no chance of being the PM of India, their only figure is Rahul Gandhi, so next time around in the elections, the Congress need to be dominant so as to make RG the next PM. For that to materialize they need to increase their vote base. The OBCs constitute a handful in the Indian population, and they believe they can win them over by granting them reservations. Arjun Singh openly admitted to introducing the reservation solely for the sake Rahul Gandhi and to increase his popularity. I am astonished that no media channel seems to have elevated that statement. I am not just blaming the congress party; but there was not a single political party which opposed the bill, not even the BJP, all because everyone is afraid of losing their votes.

Its not only the politicians and their parties, its also the people, if the people were wise and voted for the best government based solely on what the government is willing to do for every citizen in the country, no one would have cared about the reservations. People are always preoccupied with their own interests. They vote for a party only if the party promises to give them something, like reservations for their caste/religion, etc. We are the ones who elect, and if we ourselves are biased and greedy, why should we expect the politicians to be fair and clean?

The Da-Vinci Code, an amazing book. As all of you know, its latest form is a Tom Hanks starring movie. I just confirmed some questions relating to the movie.

• Where was this movie made? – The USA


• Who starred in the movie and who were responsible for the making? – Prolly US or UK citizens.


• Where was this movie 1st released? – The USA.

The USA is a Christian majority country and I also believe there were numerous Christians involved in the making of that movie. Over that there are millions of Christians who watched that movie around the world, let it be Europe or the Americas. They all don’t seem to have a problem with the movie. But when it was about to be released here, a country where Christians are considered a minority group (no offence), everyone has a problem with the movie. They make a big deal; involved the censor board, the Supreme Court (WTF!! Who involves the Supreme Court, the highest authority, for a movie which isn’t even made here?) and politicians to make noise over nothing. There are only two logical explanations to elucidate this behavior, either they are nuts or this is an elaborate publicity stunt for the movie. Whatever the reason the may be, using religion in this fashion is immoral!

Politicians can get so confused at times that they don’t even know what is written in the constitution! After the TDP (Telugu Desam Party) was overthrown by the Congress, here in Andhra Pradesh, the Congress was being blamed for not fulfilling the promises they made before the elections (Free electricity being one, its been two years and I think they are yet to implement it). So to somehow nullify that, they introduced reservations for the Muslims at UG level, both medicine and Engineering streams. Unfortunately for them, the bill was struck down by the High Court, stating that India is a secular country and reservations based on religion are against the Constitution. A disgraceful experience, and yet they are still so blatant that they are taking it up again in the Supreme Court. Why all this? Muslims constitute another handful of the population in the state.

Reservations are deadly, if once approved, no one will ever have the guts or the balls to get rid of them. And if at all they do get rid of them, I guarantee that the party wouldn’t be elected again for at least the next 15 years.

The vote is so powerful that it makes politicians go haywire for it, and yet people have absolutely no idea how powerful their vote is and what difference it can make. People forego their vote just for the sake of miniscule privileges. It is like giving away a Vienetta Ice-cream in exchange for a lollypop.

Hippies!