the road to oblivion

Please note – you may want to read the PS's first. 

oblivion – The condition or state of being forgotten or unknown

oblivion – The absence of awareness

oblivion – "The elder scrolls", a computer game.

this post describes a herculean effort to get the above mentioned game to work.

Actors 

• me
• shamanth
• mahesh
• arun
• anand
• manish
• monga
• peesu
• t3
• aziz

The hardware

• one ATI Radeon 9800
• one 512 MB RAM chip
• one 80 GB External HDD
• one SMPS
• one 40 GB Seagate HDD

The story

Chaos got oblivion. Now, if you read the reviews or have seen the screenshots you would know that it was one of the most anticipated rpg's of the year. (and based on the 20 odd hours that I have played it definately deserves its 9.3 rating). 

So, initially thought that the game would run in the lab. Downloaded it and tried there, ran at one fps. Realized we need better hardware. Also realized that no "one" one has good enough hardware save for peesu. 

Came up with a plan. Put my graphics card (one ATI Radeon 9800), anand's RAM (one 512 MB chip) into Shamanth's PC. (Those of you who dont know shamanth please check here. ) (I had to take my card out of manish's pc for that …)

Now we had to transfer four gigabytes over wireless LAN. Since I had already copied the game to my PC (over SMB not DC++) I moved the harddisk there. Copied game there. Started oblivion.

The first glitch – The game would freeze after the first cutscene. So, figured we would install from the CD and try. Borrowed an external 80 gig hdd from Arun. Took it to Mahesh's room. (incidentally, you can learn about them both here). Wired LAN rocks, copied 4 GB to Mahesh's HDD. Tried copying to Arun's external harddisk.

The second glitch – Windows said "Not enough free space". So made some space. Now the drive has 8GB of space. It still wont copy 4GB of an iso. Then realized … its a stupid ass FAT32 filesystem. wont support a file larger than 4GB. Chopped up the file and copied to HDD. Then copied to Shamanths PC. (incidentally had another random argument with aziz).
The era of bliss – So shamanth and I started playing the game. It was going good except that shamanth was becoming extremely possessive and not wanting to share … grrr … However, it seems that the universe is conspiring against the game.

The third glitch – Shamanths SMPS blows up. And I mean literally blows up, with a white spark and stuff like that. His room loses power. Takes another one day to repair. At this time, the prudent thing to do would have been investigate why this happened. However, we moved my SMPS to his PC and started playing. We played for like 60 hours (sham 40, me about 20 – I still dont know why he was cribbing). Laughed a little at peesu who was sucking at gaining levels (mostly bcoz he was doing yucky quests). T3 and monga also got enthralled by the game.

The fourth glitch – Now after so many hours you'd think that  everything would keep going fine. Sadly, something started to overheat. Either my card / or shamanths CPU.

The current scenario – We decided to stop playing because sooner or later some hardware was going to go kaput. My SMPS and card are with me, my PC is working. 
Sham's pc is totally useless i.e. w/o smps and RAM.

The bottomline – No clear way of playing oblivion in the near future.

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PS – "STATUTARY WARNING" This post is a description of the pain in getting oblivion to work. Mostly, I expect that you would not care and feel bored after reading it.   

PS1 – have been thinking abt BTP and what to do and how to do

PS2 – will goto pt from the first of MAY 

PS3 – GRE classes are boring

PS4 – I am going to flunk at GRE

PS5 – C++ rocks, inheritance rocks, source control rocks.

PS6 – SE is important – atleast the bit about writing clear code and not screwing up source control. 

an awesome post

check it out …

http://www.4guysfromviewpoint.com/?p=76

found it on stumble …

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bad_Jokes_and_Other_Deleted_Nonsense/ASCII_cows

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:The_original_Bad_Jokes_and_Other_Deleted_Nonsense 

-there are a lot of vella ppl on the net 

tags

nothing much to do except work. cant play oblivion because sham's pc is acting up. so thought I'd write some tags …

1. Were you named after someone??

Lord Vishnu … from the Bhagwad Gita

2. Do you wish on stars?

course, cant hurt can it ??

3. When did you last cry? 

dunno, must have been a very log time ago

4. Do you like your handwriting?

Its a little untidy but I can write really really fast, so yeah i like it

5. What is your favourite meat?

im veg

6. What is your most embarrassing CD on your shelf?

dont have CD's, only mp3's

7. If you were another person, would YOU be friends with you? 

hell yeah!! I would really understand me

8. Are you a daredevil? 

yes and no

9. How do you release anger?

dont release it. just keep it bottled up inside … hehe … just kidding … mostly i play or work when i am really angry … hasnt happened in a long time

10. Where is your second home?

obh 192

11. Do you trust others easily? 

if by others its the general junta then probably no … but friends, yeah

12. What was your favourite toy(s) as a child?

lego, hot wheels

13. What class in school/college do you think is totally useless?

the ones that seem useless like moral science etc … are good for goofing off. the ones that are useful like the studies stuff seem useless at the time

14. Do you use sarcasm a lot? 

do I have to answer that?

15. Have you ever been in a mosh pit? 

**bulb**

16. What do you look for in a girl? 

pretty, smart, and adjectives similar to those

17. Would you bungee jump?

if there was a rope …

18. Do you untie your shoes when you take them off? 

no

19. What’s your favourite ice cream? 

mango / vanilla / chocolate / pista … basically i like ice cream

20. What are your favourite colours? 

blue / black

21. What are your least favourite things?

right now, due to dfa's pc i'd say overheating computer components

22. How many people do you have a crush on right now?

ask them …

23. Who do you miss most right now?

dog

24. What are you listening to right now?

the sound of the cooler …

25. If you were a crayon, what colour would you be?

bluish black

26. What is the weather like right now?

hot

27. Last person you talked to on the phone?

school friend

28. The “first” thing you notice about the opposite sex?

the person

29. Do you like the person who sent you this?

baba – nice guy / spawn – needs ass kicked at cs

30. How are you today?

feeling angry at overheating computer components preventing me from playing oblivion

31. Favourite non alcoholic drink?

mango shake 

32. Favourite alcoholic drink?

dont drink alcohol

33. Natural hair colour?

black

34. Eye colour?

black

35. Wear contacts? 

nope … glasses

36. Siblings? 

little sister

37. Favourite month?

march / april when its not too hot and not too cold .

38. Favourite food? 

bah .. dont ask me this

39. Favourite day of the year?

whenever exams end … mostly because ppl will have no ethical / conscientious reasons to not play then

40. Have you ever been too shy to ask someone out?

no

41. Scary movies or happy endings?

as long as the movie is not a jackass type movie 

42. Summer or winter?

summer

43. Holi or Diwali? 

both

44. Do you like your name?

hell yeah … who are the jackasses who dont like it?

45. What book/magazine are you reading?

none …

46. What’s on your mouse pad?

my leg is temporarily serving as my mousepad

47. What did you watch on TV last night?

scrubs ?? assuming that means what show did you watch last …

48. Favourite Smell? 

food

49. Have you ever regretted breaking up with someone?

hmm …

50. Most tiresome thing you’ve ever experienced/done? 

sitting in a very very very very slow 7 seater which had 12 people on a hot afternoon with a driver who was trying to fit in 10 more … grr …

I tag …

sid

vishnu

trappi

manish

…

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PS – blogged after a long time

PS1 – coming up soon "The road to oblivion"

PS2 – there is nothing to do here except btp … 

oblivion

this is not a review

i cant even write a review yet. have only managed to play the game at less than one fps.

really, after the insanely long wait, not being able to play the game because of lack of hardware sucks.

so, anyone interested in temporarily giving me a computer w/o graphics card and harddisks please lemme know, i really want to play this game.

oh, and at the present moment i really envy all of cvit for their awesome machines :grrr:

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ps – not seeing v. for vendetta anytime soon.

ps1 – have resolved to write more

ps2 – have a good amount of work – even after exams

ps3 – i want to go home

ps4 – geyes rocks 

the exams

now that the exams are over, its a time to look back …

(:woah: wtf ?? is what the general reader would be thinking)

i have my reasons. you see, these set of exams have been the weirdest ones I have given in IIIT.

usually exams come and exams go … no problems, no damage done etc etc etc …

this time however it was different. it started with sts, wherein i did something that i thought i could never do. I wrote 11 additionals. And I realized that there are nearly 10 million ways your hand can hurt after that. Of course the last 3-4 sheets came out very neat because my hand was hurting so bad I had to write slow. (I wrote the first 5-6 addtionals in the first 1.5 hrs …). Anyway, acc to fauji the record for highest additionals was 10 by Jayaram, which I beat (alongwith Hariveer, Jaiswal and Sanchit I belieive).

Then was software engineering. It was going to be shitty, that I knew. The second case came, the one i did not do. So I am drawing a UML diagram when I come up with a brilliant architecture. Seriously, at that point I thought I had aced the exam. So I start to modify my UML diagram. It starts looking like crap. I try to repair what I have done. Its looking worse. I start getting frustrated. I end up writing one test case, one diagram for sequencing and angry at having been asked 15 marks worth of processes when I have NOT, i repeat NOT read processes at all. When you’ve got an idea, when you are in an enlightened state you definately do not want to feel frustoo. Screws up the enlightenment. Net result – one screwed up answer sheet, real ugly … and hoping for a miracle (i.e. someone actually understands what I have written, calls me in to explain and I get an A for my awesome design).

Finally there was WDM. Another subject which I was like urghhh … too much to read … too many distractions. And the question paper blew us all away. I was just staring, looking at the dumbass paper of some inspiration. Wondering why on earth someone would buy a red domestic SUV and who on earth cares about the recommendation of movies based on test and training data and other ….

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PS – sorry for lack of formatting, wordpress is not letting me format the post. too tired to look into it now

PS1 – oblivion is here

PS2 – kirtiman failed to save us … even after 20 people were imploring him on yahoo to go out there and “Just do IT” … for the batch …

PS3 – sorry for the rotten standard of “la langue de’la anglais”. Its because of seeing the shittiest film called ’stealth’

PS4 – DC reached some 7.* TB. will put a nice proper post on that.

PS5 – if you have not read the post, I completely sympathise. but trust me its not one of the regular bc / cs / games / linux posts.

brb

bored, really bored

ok, now that ive given away the punch line …

there is nothing fun to do.

i dont feel like studying at all. its too hot to sleep before 0100. i dont wake up before 12 because there is nothing to do. If you like waking up before 12 please add a comment.

technically, i should be scared stiff and studying fourteen hours a day (specifically after last semester's performance). however, even halley going to library and reading is not enough motivation to start on that arduous path. (how do you spell arduous????).

i am also playing in a hap-hazard way. not like proper playing because we are struggling to get the numbers required to play. (cant blame anyone because others have exams).

in other news, tipo and I have to show bunglebot today. in what we hope will be the end of the robotics project saga. (bunglebot will be available for sale next year at a modest price of Rs. 300 :p). yeah, i know, the last set of words delimited by "full stops" does not qualify in any way to be a sentence. . If any of you feel that that qualified to be a sentence please create a comment.

still in other news – manish jain started a blog. unbelievable isn't it. clearly shows that a lot of people resort to blogging because they are bored right out of their skulls (pun intended and if you get it please acknowledge the subtleity in the comments). of course manish has only registered, has not yet made the first post.

therefore let me cordially invite one and all to a "default" session so that we can kickstart his blog. literally.

oblivion is out. struggling to get the game to IIIT. therefore, if anyone can download the game please please do download it. it seems to be an awesome game and there are a lot of ppl here who want to play it. (this is addressed to all ppl from ug2 who download stuff … ).

and also, ive been told that "Anna" is coming back to the OC in 321. wahoo, really looking forward to that. All those who liked Anna, please say so in the comments.

oh, and a treat for anyone who manages to convince the dumb stadium guys to get a swimming coach. i really want to go swimming. All those who like going swimming please express your views in the comments.

sriram rocked in se roleplay.

there was going to be a section on tipo but he said no …

and if you think this post was a lot more about getting comments then please leave a comment.
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PS – there are no PS's. treat all of this post as a PS