The soundtrack to my dream...

... last night was Coldplay's "Don't Panic"

Hmm.

Long live the Laptop!

For months (nay, years!) I have been considering buying a new laptop. I just couldn't scrape up the money to do so. (Buying books, DVDs and eating out all the time coupled with a sucky pay will do that to you.)

After getting my back pay from my previous job and getting a better paid job, I finally could afford to buy a new laptop. But so many choices and decisions had to be made. It didn't help that I moved to a new city and so had to spend a lot of money on setting up home once more.

Once the bank account was looking healthier, I started looking around. When I saw an advertisement for the Sony Vaio CR series, I was quite taken with them. Since the price was just slightly above my budget, I decided I would buy one.

Random expenses cropped up and I kept putting off the purchase. Then I also read a lot of bad reviews for the computer online, besides which I had second thoughts about the lack of certain features like a graphics card with dedicated memory, the weight and size, etc. (Apparently, the present models have a graphics card, albeit an ATI one.)

Also, while the exterior of the laptop looked quite cool, I wasn't too happy with the keyboard, which looked a bit small (and too Apple-y!)

All of this coupled with the fact that I was a little uneasy about splurging so much money just to get a "cool" laptop, made me decide against a Sony.

Just then, someone pointed out the new XPS laptops from Dell and I fell in love immediately!

A fast processor, good graphics card, appropriate amounts of memory for Vista, good sized hard disk, a DVD writer and all of this in a light-weight machine that was just about 2kg.

When my brother told me he could get an employee discount at Dell, that just sealed the deal. But, I had to wait a couple of months more. A few mix ups with which bank account my money should be in to pay for the machine delayed the whole ordering process. And when I did finally place the order, the website told me the estimated delivery date was a month away!

But she's finally here. I received the laptop a full two weeks ahead of the "estimated" delivery date, much to my surprise and joy. She's been christened Zippy, a "cuter" name than the last laptop had.

While I did save on the laptop because of the discount, I've been a bit splurge happy since, buying a new USB flash drive to port a few things and a laser bluetooth mouse to accompany the laptop. Not to mention that I also bought a copy of Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars to play

Oh well, I shall just have to starve for the next couple of weeks!

Welcome Zippy, and here's to many great hours of games and blogging!

P.S. I bought the black one.

The Laptop is Dead!

My old, trusty laptop has been in use by me for over 5 years and is virtually falling apart. Poor Eurisco. That's what I called her, a HP Pavilion ze1210 I bought in 2002.

When I bought her, the AMD Athlon processor was cutting edge and people recommended it over Intel's then line of Pentiums and Celerons. She had 256MB of memory when about half that was standard on most desktops too! She wasn't lightweight, but since I just needed a computer to use at home, I didn't care too much. She still looks pretty stylish in this picture I found online, but if you saw her as she is now...

• A big gaping hole where the battery should be. After 2 and half years, the battery gave out and I never got around to buying a new one. So to lighten my load, I removed the battery from the slot.
• Two keys missing. In my zeal to clean the keys and under the keyboard, I managed to break the F1 and Enter keys.
• A broken hinge. The hinge on the right mysteriously cracked (I have no clue how!) and a small metal piece that held the screen up fell out. So for a long time I had to keep the screen at one particular angle to make sure it was upright, or else it would fall down flat. Oddly, the cold winter in Gurgaon seemed to have done something to the innards since the screen now stands at any angle.
• The CD-RW/DVD drive doesn't work anymore. In fact, it randomly clicks now and then in a vain effort to prove it's still alive. I have some success playing audio CDs, but nothing else works.
• The USB ports are worn from use, so using any USB accessories is a touch-and-go thing.
• And the biggest problem of them all, the port where the power cord plugs into the computer is loose, so that if I moved the laptop or jiggled the power cord, it would lose the connection (and since there is no battery, the laptop would go off.
• On the software side of things, newer apps were beginning to crawl. Firefox was so badly behaved on this laptop that I had taken to using IE7!

I spent many, many hours on this machine coding in Delphi, random browsing, and learned to play an RTS for the first time. Ended up playing hours and hours of Age of Empires II, Starcraft and Warcraft III

I discovered Firefox when it was still called Phoenix and then Firebird. Thunderbird when people still preferred Outlook Express. I used Kazaa (remember that?) when I was first introduced to P2P. And I made my first forays onto USENET posting, IRC (using mIRC) and introduced myself to Linux via Knoppix using Eurisco.

So long and thanks for all the memories! RIP, Eurisco.

Reboot

I'm considering doing a re-design of the blog. And this time I want to try and do everything myself (from making the tiny bullet gifs to the header image) except, I'm shit at design. So, any one want to give me a leg up? Ideas, maybe even a complete mock up would be appreciated. Don't worry about creating the CSS & HTML, I can do that myself. All I need is a image of what the design should be like. The banana bullets will probably stay. :)

Secondly, domains are so cheap now, I'm considering buying my own domain and pointing Google at it, so that I can then use all the new blogger features. The problem is oook.com is already taken. oookeeek.com is available though. Should I buy that one? Anyone got better suggestions? I need to keep it relatively close to the blog name which I don't want to change.

My first white hair...

... and it's on my chest.

I feel old.

My Googlewhack...

Sort of.

A Google search for "29 past my prime" (with the quote marks) turns up exactly one search result.

This blog!

Another day, another phone...

Ever since I lost my phone in July, I've been putting off buying a new one because of a financial crunch (thanks to crappy employers under-paying me and the bloody malaria!) I kept using my 3-year old LG with it's scratched body, non-functioning buttons and annoying interface!

Well, that LG finally breathed its last. It just switched itself off quietly and refused to come on again one morning. Typical. I was not ready to buy a new phone as yet but I had to spend on one now.

I had been lusting after the Sony Ericsson K810i. Mostly for its looks, but also for the decent 3.2MP camera it packed. It was more expensive than I wanted to spend, but I went ahead and bought it anyway. And I've never been happier about my phone!

It didn't take me long to install a few games, Opera Mini and the GMail app. Not to mention SSH! Bliss!

Quitting a job is so much trouble

I finally did it. Quit from my fun but under-paid and over-worked job. Obviously the employers didn't take it well. They'd just lost a guy that did all their donkey work for them without a complaint in the absence of any support team whatsoever. Desperate attempts were made to retain me (none of which involved a promotion, pay raise and support which would have actually worked.)

Instead I was threatened about how I was walking away from such a great deal and that I could have all the support I wanted in a month as long as I did the recruitment myself. (I'm sorry, what are HR departments for?) Wild promises were made about the future of the work I was doing and about the benefits of working for a "global" company with a "global" clientèle. Yeah right.

My decision was made for me the moment my paltry pay raise came in and when I was offered a far, far better paid job at another company. And so I leave one marketing agency to join an online portal to manage one of their verticals. A lot more responsibility although just for one site, but accompanied with a good support team to help me realise my ideas.

Careers Meme

From All The Pretty Words

I went over to Career Cruising and found that the login and password from Rebecca didn't work. A quick Google solved that problem and I found another login. And I proceeded to take the Career Matchmaker quiz.

Here are my results:

1. Website Designer
2. Foreign Language Instructor
3. ESL Teacher
4. Marine Biologist
5. Desktop Publisher
6. Zoologist
7. Fashion Designer
8. Cartoonist / Comic Illustrator
9. Computer Trainer
10. Animator
11. Multimedia Developer
12. Set Designer
13. Costume Designer
14. Professor
15. Taxidermist
16. Veterinarian
17. Botanist
18. Graphic Designer
19. Computer Animator
20. Artist
21. Biologist
22. Medical Illustrator
23. Corporate Trainer
24. Veterinary Technician
25. Music Teacher / Instructor
26. Industrial Designer
27. Animal Breeder
28. Craftsperson
29. Potter
30. Microbiologist
31. Video Game Developer
32. Coach
33. Interior Designer
34. Environmental Consultant
35. Pharmacologist
36. Special Effects Technician
37. Director of Photography
38. Makeup Artist
39. Sign Maker
40. Food Scientist

Foul air

Last week, I caught malaria. Damn you, Anopheles gambiae

I delayed going to a doctor by a couple of days and that led to the fever being so severe, I didn't eat much and was dehydrated by Saturday.

I was then rushed to hospital by friends (who wanted to smack me for being so stupid) and was put on a glucose iv drip.

I was also administered an anti-malarial through iv for 3 days.

Well, I'm out now, and back to work. My appetite is back to normal too. I now have to take a pill everyday for two weeks as part of what's called a "radical cure."

Lost phone

Earlier this week, I lost my phone. Yep, the same one I just bought a few months ago. :(

Which made me think, since all phones have a unique IMEI number, why isn't there some sort of national registry where I can lodge my IMEI number (after proving that I indeed purchased that phone.)

The purpose? All service providers in the country will be required to constantly check with this registry and search their networks for the phone with that IMEI number

They could then track the user of that phone and thus return the lost/stolen phone to its rightful owner!

Wishful thinking...

You reverse racist, you!

So I took this test which is apparently part of a Project Implicit at Harvard University

It is well known that people don't always 'speak their minds', and it is suspected that people don't always 'know their minds'. Understanding such divergences is important to scientific psychology.

This web site presents a method that demonstrates the conscious-unconscious divergences much more convincingly than has been possible with previous methods. This new method is called the Implicit Association Test, or IAT for short.

And my results were....

Click image for larger version

"Looking" Muslim

A funny thing happened to me on the way home yesterday. Well, it was not really funny, but I managed to laugh at it anyway.

I was taking the train back home and it was quite late (around 11:40pm.) I was also busy texting messages to a couple of friends with my cellphone while sitting at a window. The guy sitting next to me kept looking at me each time I removed my phone or looked at it. Apparently he was keeping a good watch on me, since even when he leaned back and shut his eyes and I removed the phone, he sat up very quickly and glanced at me again.

Terribly annoying but I guess tolerable. But not what he did next...

As the train neared my station, I picked up my umbrella which was beside me and got up to leave. The guy sits up, stares at me and then stares quickly at overhead luggage rack before settling back into his seat!

I couldn't help but to laugh out loud and shake my head, but it didn't seem to bother him much.

All of this reminds me of an exchange I had with an Indian when I was riding a bus in Michigan. Once again it was late at night and so we were the only two people on the bus. The conversation went roughly like this:

Him: "Are you a Pakistani?" (Yes, that was his opener)
Me: "Nope. I'm Indian"
Him: (after a pause) "But you're a Muslim, right?"
Me: (a little surprised) "Nope."

A long pause and then,

Him: "Ok."
Me: "Why do you ask? Is it because I have a beard?"
Him: "No! No! I just asked. It's not because you have a beard."

Once again I couldn't help but to smile at that.

Me meme

I read this meme over at All The Pretty Words and at vanlal's lj and decided to do it too. If nothing else, at least I'll learn something! :D

The Instructions:

1. Go to Wikipedia.
2. In the Search box, type your birth month and day (but not year).
3. List three events that happened on your birthday.
4. List two important birthdays and one interesting death.
5. Post it.

My birthday is on the 16th of September

Events:

• 1597 - Yi Sun-sin leads 12 ships of the Korean fleet against an invasion by 133 Japanese ships. The Koreans sink 31 enemy ships and force a Japanese retreat.
• 1941 - Concerned that Reza Pahlavi the Shah of Persia was about to align his petroleum-rich country with Germany during World War II, the United Kingdom and the USSR occupy Iran and forced him to resign in favor of his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
• 1956 - Play-Doh is introduced to the world

Births:

• 1893 - Albert Szent-Györgyi, Hungarian physiologist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1986)
• 1925 - B. B. King, American musician

Deaths:

• 1932 - Ronald Ross, English physician, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (b. 1857)

Anyone reading this, consider yourself tagged! (Oh and leave a comment with a link to your post please?)

If I'm a little bug-eyed...

...blame it on the movie marathon I did yesterday. I watched 3 movies at the cinema one after the other with just a break for lunch.

I started with Syriana at 11am. At first the quick cuts, the insane number of characters and information had me lost. But the story quickly came together (in my head, at least!) and I really liked the movie. By far the best movie I saw yesterday. The funniest bit was where they had these actors playing Pakistani immigrant workers in the gulf speaking such completely bad and stilted Hindustani. One of them had a terrible accent too!

After stuffing my face with pizza for lunch, I watched A History of Violence. I hadn't heard anything about this movie before save for the fact that Maria Bello was nominated for an Oscar. But when I saw the trailer last week, it seemed quite interesting and I decided I had to catch it. I wasn't disappointed. I quite liked the story and even Viggo Mortenson's acting. And hey, even the blockbuster fans will be happy with the slick (albeit few) action sequences.

The last movie I saw was Brokeback Mountain. I wasn't too keen on it since it seemed to be surrounded by hype and I hadn't really read anything that made me want to watch the movie. And well, as I thought, I didn't like it much. (You may flame me now! :p) It wasn't a terrible movie, but I didn't think it was anything great either! I liked the way the story was told, in little vingnettes stretching over the years and it was certainly a very picturesque movie. But gawd was it slow! And what's with everyone raving about what a great love story it is? This is two people cheating on their spouses and having sex with each other. Since when did that rate as an epic love story?

Anyway, this seems to be a great time for movies in Bombay. I'm planning on catching The Producers this weekend and Being Cyrus the next! :)

Wipe your feet, please.

I might as well have that written on my head the way people just walk all over me!

AAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGHH!

Sorry. Just needed to scream. I'll go back to being quiet now.

Writer's Block

I meant to write a real post, but forgot completely what it was about when I sat in front of the computer. The other real post I had an idea for my mind has gone blank on and so it remains a draft.

*sigh*

Anyway, I'm off to my parents' home for two weeks! Yay me! Time to spend lazing around the house and eating yummy food. Also a good time for me to catch up on reading. I've borrowed a couple of books from the British Library here and I have a pile of books that I bought the last time I was home sitting there waiting. I'm also looking foward to re-reading some of the comics that I had boxed away.

A few days early, but Happy Diwali, everyone! :)

You didn't need to know that...

...I'm writing this post 'cause I'm bored

...I'm also only writing it cause my friends, Ruchi and Vikram wrote something like this before.

...I'm going to be nasty and keep the "juicy" stuff for later in the list

...I've never wanted to be an "engine driver" that all boys seem to want to be at some point of time in their lives.

...I'm a bigger geek than you think I am. I'm quite likely more nerdy than you think I am!

...I've actually asked someone to marry me and then watched as she went off and married someone else!

...I've kissed another guy, albeit only on a dare. (And no we weren't drunk. Or at least, not drunk enough!)

...When I was a kid, I'd lie in bed thinking of what it would be like to be dead and buried and have maggots crawling through my body.

...I'm mostly egotistical, but sometimes egoistical.

...I cannot play chess to save my life.

...My parents didn't get cable TV until 2004 and I don't live with them anyway. So I grew up with the only option being Doordarshan. I've never watched much TV in my life and I'm still not tempted to.

...I used to spend huge amounts of time online and the only reason I don't anymore is that I can't afford broadband in India!

...the longest conversation I've had with someone lasted almost 6 hours. (Yes, I've seen Before Sunrise and Before Sunset too)

...If it wasn't apparently already, I like to talk, but I'm also a good listener.

...I've only ever tried marijuana. Three times. It didn't work even once. Damn!

...I never had a nickname in school or college. I made one up for myself. It didn't catch on. Don't ask.

...I think Terry Pratchett is one of the coolest writers alive. No wait, Neil Gaiman is... um, maybe Iain M Banks, well Douglas Adams is certainly the coolest writer dead, but that sounds morbid. Oh well.

...I love my parents to bits, but most times I get bored talking to them, so I really envy the people who can.

...I can't balance a two-wheeler.

...I fooled you about the "juicy" bits at the end. This is all there is. Until I can think of some more.