Post DP thoughts

Well, what new do I have to report here? Err….ummm…well, nothing much actually. The mid semester exam results are out and I have scored my highest in midsems since my first semester.

My lap is raped (again). So am doing some repair works here and there. The battery gives charge for maximum of 45 minutes even when all I am doing is reading an e book. So it is time to get that changed. The lappy has got so pathetically slow that it sometimes takes 20 seconds to just open Winamp. This calls for another format (sigh).

Life in college is difficult without a computer (these days) and it is even more difficult without a decently sized hard disk. So I need an external hard disk. Someone here was saying that 160GB hard disk was available for close to 2.5K. Thats dirt cheap man…

I have almost ditched the plan to go to US for higher studies. I say almost. There are still some universities that I may apply to. But I am getting very late in applying so god knows vats gonna happen.

The placement treat is scheduled for day after tomorrow. All the bastards here will booze like it is their last day on this earth and non boozers like me will get to watch a circus for free (well, sort of).

The weather is getting colder everyday. Will have to get a new jacket asap. Else me raped.

Changed blog template (again). Hope this one stays for sometime.

Read Wheel of Time (again). Every new reading makes the book a little better. Some characters are starting to stand out. Mat Cauthon is just AWESOME. And the female characters are as bitchy as ever. no…they are in fact more bitchy. I also read 'Kite Runner' by Khaled Houssini (hope I spelt him right). Brilliant work…the way he captures emotion with words…never seen anything like it before. Am now reading 'Napoleon' by Emil Ludwig.

After a long time of searching, I finally found the starting tune of 'Lonely Planet', which used to be aired on Discovery Channel. Brilliant tune…

Lemme go back to my comp repairing…

Back Home.

Am doing this from a net cafe. I hate updating the blog from anywhere except my lappy. Well, that will have to wait till I get back to coll.

Gave my TOEFL. Nothing remarkable happened and so i am not wasting anymore time on it.

Went to grandma’s place. In the car. With my mother on the non-driver’s seat. This is one of the most difficult things to do in this world. I understand the finer points of multitasking at times like these. I have to watch the road, the other vehicles, my own vehicle, the pedestrians, all the while keeping up with amma’s non-stop talk of approaching dangers. I don’t mind when she talks normal talk, you know, like the weather and stuff. But no, she can never do that can she? She concentrates more on the road than i do. She gets the feeling that she is the only one in the car who is watching the road and the rest are just sleeping. She sees a bus coming 200 metres away and she screams at me and asks me to brake. She sees a car behind me, she asks me to move aside and let it overtake me. She sees a pedestrian, she tenses up like a mother leopard when she senses danger to her cubs. She always sits with her hand on her cheek like it is a long prolonged scream. And she breathes so deeply that i get the feeling that she just came out of a roller coaster ride. Well, agreed that i have a little bit of roadrage and am a little rash. But, come on, who dosen’t like a little bit of speed? Anyway, it aint like i am taking sharp turnings at 100 kmph or anything. Mothers….great mysteries of the universe…

The TV is not working. Not that i miss it or anything, but it is one of the small pleasures of life: siting in front of the TV with legs up on the stand and the remote in hand.

Back home, one of the first things that hit you is the humidity. After living in the drier parts of the country for most of the last year, the sudden change when one comes back home is just shocking. Every time I come back home for summer, for the first 3 days or so, i sweat like a pig. I sweat when i am just reading a book, i sweat when i am watching TV. Even the fan at full speed dosen’t help. I remember once when i took a bath, i started sweating by the time i finished towelling.

Am leavin for coll in 3 days. Over and out for now.

Note: Was trying out some new templates the last couple of weeks. Finally found something i am happy with. Hope i stay hapy with it.

Insane Service

This happened a couple of weeks ago. As my laptop was in a really bad state, I sent the following email to Acer Support.

Hi

I am a student doing my graduation. i had bought my Acer Laptop last November. one thing i started to notice from the onset is that the keys of the keyboard get jammed every now and them. The ‘Enter’ key had got so badly jammed that during my vain attempts to repair it, the whole key broke off. I took it to an Acer Service center and they said that the whole keyboard has to be replaced and said that it would cost around Rs 2,400+VAT.
So i decided to go along without repairing since the amount of money seemed unreasonable. Recently, my backspace key has also showed the same jamming problem. Does this have any solution? Can’t the individual key be changed? Will it really cost Rs 2,400 + to get a new laptop keyboard fitted???
also, i have plans to upgrade my laptop. can you tell me the cost required to upgrade 512 MB DDR2 RAM and 60 GB ATA HDD to
1)1 GB RAM and 100 GB HDD and
2)2 GB RAM and 120 GB HDD.

Model No:Aspire 5101ANWLMi

Expecting a swift reply, thanking you in advance

Yours Sincerely,
XXXXXX

Check out the reply I got 3 days later.

Dear XXXXXX,

Thank you for mailing us ,

Please contact our support toll free # 1800-116677 from BSNL or MTNL landline numbers with information such as serial number and problem description, and the agent will try to resolve the problem over phone after validating the warranty of the notebook or log the call.

Alternatively you can also reach the toll free call center by SMS service @ 0-9901676677 and can send the SMS with the information such as notebook serial number, customer name and the problem description. The call center will get back to the customer with in 1-2 hour.

Thanks & Rgds
Sudhin

Unbelievable. Thats what I call SUCKY BITCHY Service. And then when I call the customer care number, a recorded voice of this lady comes on line and in a cheerful voice that they are very sorry and cant help me now coz customer care works only between 9am and 6 pm. WTF?!!!

Neways, GRE is on the 15th. So expect no more posts till I reach Bangalore at least. Oh ya, forgot to tell. My travel plans are a little wierd.

14th – Leave for Kolkata – give GRE on the 15th and stuff

15th – Leave for B’lore at night.

17th – Reach B’lore in the morning.

18th – Leave for home in the evening.

So expect the next update sometime around 17-18th.
Adieu and goodbye.

PS: Seems like Arsenal are really owning the EPL. Shows that Arsenal is a force to be reckoned with even in the absence of Henry and Viera. GO GUNNERS!!!

Red Eye and the accompanied Mr.Frustration

So for the past few days, I am Red Eye. Not some freaking fantasy character, but a victim of Conjunctivitis. It is so fukin frustrating. Every morning I wake up and there is this film over my eye and I feel like I am seeing through a mist. Then I check in the mirror and see that5 there is some secretion in my eye. So I remove it with my hankie and lo, within 2 minutes, the hankie is covered with ants who seem to love it. AAARRRRGGGGHHHHH!!! I HATE ANTS. First they finish off all my biscuits (which I hide from my friends). Then they start walking around on my bed like it is their kingdom. Then they start infiltrating my jeans and now this.

There is a song that a friend of mine keeps singing. It goes like…

God, why did you make this world?

Making is ok, but why did you make it this way?

Even that is fine, but why did you make _____?

You can fill whatever you want in that blank. Usually for us, it is someone else’s name or our prof’s name or our department etc etc.

Back to conjunctivitis, seems like it is taking the form of an epidemic. Already 3 from my class are under the clutches of the evil Red Eye. Hopefully, wont trouble many more.

Am getting inputs that I should be more funny and stuff in the blog…..wtf? Blog is a spelling mistake according to OpenOffice. Reminds me of MS Office where Zune was a spelling error.

Right now am in the mood to take a stick and beat up every person I meet ijn the hostel to pulp and see their brain and blood mixture flowing along the corridor. Am also feeling like breaking my table (leaving my lappy safe of corz) and then just exploding. Am also really tempted to break my USB keyboard into many many tiny fragments and try to figure out if there is a diode in this thing. And my bed is in a perpetual mess. Frustration seeps out of my pores. Wonder this is how Voldemort felt when he had Harry in front of him…..

Success? Not Interested

Sudden thought: what is it to become successful? And after all thew hard work that u out in, is it actually worth it?

What I mean to ask u is that after being insanely successful your whole life, are u going to look back and savour it? Are u going to look back and see all the other people that u had to squash to get onto the top? Are u going to look back on the ‘mediocre’ ones and gloat?

Lets do some calvination now. When in doubt, just change the perspective and look at things from the cosmic point of view. Lets say u had a really successful life. U had ladies chasing after u (or guys), u had money coming to u from all quarters, u had great life, more success, people actually came from far away places just to shake your hand, reporters would chase u halfway across town just to get a single photo and stuff. From the cosmic point of view, is any of it going to matter?

Fine…forget the cosmic view and stuff. What is it that man ultimately desires? Money? Power? Prestige? Fame? Hmmm…let me think…..ah yes….. happiness. The one thing for which man strives all his life. We start with education from out 4^th year of life (nowadays we begin even sooner) and then study continuously for 14 more years and then enter college and then spend 3-4 more years till we finally get a job. Of course, when we are in school, we do not know why we are doing school. All we know is that if we don’t get good grades and stuff, our parents will scold us and the teachers will blast us to outer space. So we slog. Without knowing why. Then we reach college and hopefully attain a level of maturity. So now we know why we are in college: so that we get a good job. why do we need a job? So that we get money. why do we need money? So that we can support ourselves, find ourselves mates and have a family blah blah blah. In the end, we are doing what we are doing to attain happiness. All those bloody inspirational speakers (if u ask me, they are the biggest losers in life) having screwed their own lives, and are trying to make a living by telling other people how to ‘be successful). But then they don’t tell anyone why one should be successful. They don’t tell anyone that successful person is a happy person or more importantly, a happy person is a successful person. So those bastards tell us that we should do this and that to be successful in out careers and lives. We should believe in ourselves and shit and more bullshit and even more bullshit and so on and so forth.

So I am asking, what is wrong in being mediocre? What is the problem with it? A very large percentage of the world population falls in the mediocre category but when they are told that they are mediocre, they don’t like it and take it as some insult. If someone were to tell me that I am a very mediocre man, I would reply “So? Tell me something I don’t know.”

i don’t want to be successful. I just want to be happy. I want to be among my books, in a beautiful home of mine surrounded by beautiful vegetation, at some place close to my parent’s home (so that i can go over and have food). I need a computer and a broadband collection and some games. Not asking for much am I?

Till now, in all my visions of the future, I have seen only me and no one else. No family, no kids and nothing of that sort. As my father once said, “When a man marries, he is lifting a huge rock from the roadside onto his head”. Well, weightlifting is really not my game…so am pretty happy with my present visions of the future.

Blog Cleanup and Updation

I have made some serious changes in the blog structure. A section has been removes and some new ones have been added. These changes follow a template change which I did a few days ago. The lists titled “My Books…”, “My Games…”, and “My Music…” are by no means complete and the entries are arranged alphabetically, not by preference. Also added a section called “Why Am I doing this” which explains my funda about a blog. Looks a little better now doesn’t it?

I noticed something just now. Blogspot does not allow many fonts does it? When I posted this post directly from Blogspot instead of emailing it (as I usually do), the font was totally different. So, I have copied whatever I wrote to OpenOffice and made the font right and am now reposting from there. Too much bother man…

Onam

Day before yesterday (1^st Oct), we celebrated Onam here at Sukesh Sir’s house. As the 4^th years, we were the guests of honour (supposed to be anyway). It was a very different one, our first one without the 2k3 batch. But then the excitement was no less anyway. So the day before the day before yesterday, we were at Suku’s cutting up the vegetables and preparing everything for the next day’s feast. As this is an all boy’s job (the cutting goes to late night and so the girls don’t come) all of us guys had lots of fun. Singing, dancing, shouting, screaming, making fun of everyone….it was heaven. Nikki from the 2k3 batch was also there. On the day of the celebration, all the guys were supposed to be at Suku’s house by 7. i was the first from 2k4 and i was there at 8:30. the others came at 9:30. bastards they were since even after they came, they were just standing by the side and shouting instructions (like they always do, nothing new there). Soon enough the Aviyal was done, the Sambhar was done and the major thing, the Rice was on its way to completion. However some mistakes in estimation of cooking time made the rice sort of squeamy by the time it got done. But even then it was good (it had to be since we cooked it). After the feast, there were the cultural events by the juniors and we, as the seniors, got to watch it and enjoyed howling and shouting at the performers.

Alas, as all good things have to get finished, so did this. I reached my room, tired but very very happy at 1:00 in the night. And this is my first entry of the new month. See ya later.