arbitrary potter

this is an arbitrary post. basically nthng much happening. the sem is at the stage wherein life is kinda despondent. its the time when u’ve got stuff to do which u dont want to do, and the stuff u want to do is not fun to do.

ive got a project, some arbid assignments etc, but no mood to do any of that stuff

its usually fun playing cz / sweep / volleyball but there’s no fun in that nemore

of course today was the first time i stayed awake and listened in a class. and listened not just for 1/2 an hour but for a full solid 2 hrs …

a while back i read harry potter and the half blood prince.

that was the highpoint b/w this post and the last. rowling really did a brilliant job. the book’s dark and mysterious. really really nice read. keeps ppl guessing.

this seems like a bloody waste of a post but well i havent really got nething more useful to do so ….

PS – became a TA for ITWS 3

PS1 – installed FC4. FC4 rox, its real fast.

PS2 – chk out google homepages, nice …

gta, bloody monday and google

Disclaier – There may be a lot of spelling mistakes in the blog. y ‘M’ key is not working very well

so back in IIIT

actually been a while since i’ve been back. just been to doing other stuff that ive not posted.

GTA

The first 5 days went in GTA San Andreas. Now this is a game that you have got to play. I wrote some stuff about it earlier also but its just amazing. the stats factor (body fat, muscle, sex appeal, respect) adds a bit of RPG style into the game. The guns are nice and ur accuracy with the guns increases as you use them. The missions are nice and fun to do. They aren’t really tough until you get to the friggin flying school. That took me two bloody hours to do. Course the gae is huge and friggin impossible to finish. The vehicles are nice and the bikes simply rock. So if you havent played it yet you gotta try it. Its a really brilliant gae. Also there is a jet pack whcih simply rocks

BTW you can also go on dates and make girlfriends and stuff. And once u’ve taken them on enuf dates you can (to use “That 70’s show” lingo) do it with them. There has been a major controversy about a mod called “Hot Coffee”. The modder claims that by changing a bit in the game he was able to get the gae to show the characters actually having sex instead of just making suggestive noises and wiggling the camera around

HDD scare

July 11 2005. Bloody Monday. The black day for computer hardware in IIIT. It all started out like a normal day. Then I noticed my new 120 GB harddisk was working really slow. After poking around a little I found out that it was running in PIO mode (for the uninformed PIO mode is a way of transferring data from a device to memory and its really slow). I was outraged. A new 120 GB harddisk and its running so slow …

So I went into device manager to try and get it to get back to DMA (DMA is faster than PIO). But no, XP would not let the HDD go back to DMA. After a little googling around I found out that it was a feature of XP. Apparently if the HDD times out (the drive does not give the data in a certain time) more than 6 times XP progressively slows down the harddisk. So I fiddled with XP and forced the HDD to take on DMA. But each time the HDD wud go to DMA it would go back to PIO because of the timing out thing.

Now instead of being outraged I was worried sick. A new 120 GB HDD spoilt in less than a month. What the ****?? So took it to manish’s pc. There his PC refused to boot from my HDD (BSOD – Blue screen of Death). Then I tried booting from manish’s HDD. Guess what, another BSOD.

Went to Aziz room. Now his PC behaved and there were no Blue screens when we booted from there. So after 3 hours and a through chkdsk on my HDD the problem was found. There were bad clusters in C:\windows\dllcache\(some arbid dll) which was causing the problem. Happily, I went back to my room to play cz.

But that wasn’t the end of Bloody Monday. Manish’s pc refused to work. It would boot and after arbid amount of time automatically restart. So went back to manish’s room to see what to do. After a little fiddling about had absolutely no clue. We figured it was the SMPS. So right now, my pc is ok, but sadly manish waiting for a new SMPS from the bhumika guy.

Google stuff

Of course there is always some amount of randomm surfing in IIIT. Thats one of the advantages of broadband. So while roaming around found the following cool stuff

Montage-a-google
This little page here will take a search term and create a collage of the images which google image search returns. Pretty nifty.

Guess-the-google
This flash app by the same guy (Grant Robinson I think) will create a collage of images produced by a google image search on a specific word. Given the images you have to guess the search term. It may sound easy but believe me its pretty darn hard. After 12 games I had 0 correct guesses. Of course it doesn’t reveal the answer so it can get kinda frustating.

broadband (and happiness ??)

the irony of it.

the day before I am supposed to be leaving the MTNL broadband guy shows up and installs it. so now i got really fast access to the net, but since I am going back tomorrow it doesnt matter much. course all this can be attributed to MTNL’s speedy response. It took them just 17 days to set up the broadband thing.

anyway atleast its fast (and not very expensive):D

I was thinking and …

before going back home (at some pt of time in May) I said to myself, I am going to do the following things at home

(a) sleep close to 10 hrs a day
(b) eat
(c) do no work
(d) [other stuff I do not want to list]

now 5 weeks later after proudly having done everything on the above mentioned list (and more if I may add) I dont feel gr8. I mean I expected myself to feel really happy at having completed the goals I set for myself (for the first time). sadly I dont really feel happy. actually I am not sure as to exactly what I am feeling. Its a mixture of joy and sorrow. joy cause I’ll be going back to “freedom to do whatever I want”, CZ, friends etc. sorrow cause I’ll miss my family, my dog, good food, general lazing about etc.

so what do I learn from all of this?? happiness is not really related to accomplishing ur goals. you can actually not accomplish your goals and be very happy or accomplish your goals and not be happy.

basically life’s weird and full of mysteries