lol @ pizza hut

Went out to pizza hut for the iftaar meal thingie yesterday. They have replaced the traditional onion capsicum tomato pizza with a onion paneer pizza. Pretty decent. Took some snaps …

Identify the bugger in the photo below

A weird looking bus

The underside of pizza hut’s lamps

Sign outside pizza hut’s washroom (This one takes the cake)

All in all lol @ pizza hut.

Started watching OTH today. Pretty decent. Definately watchable.

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PS – Exams over

PS1 – 100 million in 47700 secs

PS2 – Must do BTP

PS3 – Dota / CS / FiFa rather boring.

Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventures

This is a god-awful movie. Its billed to be a comedy. However, it comes nowhere close to being funny. Its got a ludicrous plot and the acting is so pathetic that my dog would howl when he saw the film. Of course, given the title and the cast you’d presume that its going to be shitty.

Keanu Reeves proves once again that he cant act. All he can do is go like “heeeee” (<insert appropriate Keanu Reeves looking like jackass face here>). The only film he was good in was the Matrix. Of course those had excellent stories.

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PS – LP done. _||_ to everyone who wanted to do problems at 2100 hours.

PS1 – Have cold / cough and all the crap associated with it.

PS2 – Nothing to do except BTP for which I have to go to lab …

PS3 – The award for the highest density of smileys in a page goes to VBH (sorry sagar but he deserves it … post after post has an average of 25 – 40 smileys).

GSE

Just a quick note. Saw the Green Street Hooligans. Unbelievable film. Seriously, I did not even know that something like that even existed.

Wow

Wooster and the Weird Whacky Woohoos

Prof(o)undity is overrated very soon, they are over used and become half ass cliches. -Arun “Wooster” Balakrishnan

The title for this post is kinda over-explanatory. For those (this I presume is the entire english speaking junta) who do not know what a woohoo is, its like a weird and whacky idea.

What has Wooster got to do with any of this?

Absolutely Nothing.

Why is Wooster’s name here?

Well, it goes like this. Before GRE I wrote a post wrt VBH. Wooster was kinda like “Sigh, people get famous for all sorts of things“. In a subsequent conversation on Yahoo, when we were discussing strategies for attempting the GRE, Wooster was like quotation this, and quotation that and so on. Besides, the main reason is that Wooster starts with a W, it complements the WWW quite well.

************DISCLAIMER***************

Some warcraft knowledge may help. Also, you must know what flubber is..

*************************************

So onto these weird whacky woohoos

Occasionally, I get weird ideas. Especially when I am in the wing upstairs. Most of these ideas have to do with the very fabric of matter and space time.

I wish I was made of flubber … that’d totally rock. Superelastic collisions … the ability to morph from one form to another … and going boing-boing-boing just for the heck of it. WooHoo.

I’d really like to be able to blink.Not “blink” blink but blink as in close my eyes and instantly teleport anywhere. Think of all the time saved. Hell, if I could blink far away, I’d blink home, eat dinner and come back .

I want glasses with wipers on them. So that when it is raining and there are drops of water on the lenses, the wipers would automatically clean them. Thus, instead of having fuzzy, droplet infested vision, I’d be able to see things clearly.

I’d also like to have an extra eye. Probably on the top of my head. I havent quite figured out why yet.

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PS – Yeah, One of the crappy posts. Maybe its due to Wooster’s influence.

PS1 – DF will be back very soon.

PS2 – I love the new schedule (post-GRE) fundays.

PS3 – These are a sample of some of the better woohoos …

The maiming and mutilation of the malignant bottle green moth

The 19th of September, a bad day for bottle green moths and a very good one for the sadistic son of a whatchamacallit who programmed the GRE testing software.

The day before GRE – Monday

On Sunday, 2 days before GRE, I had done virtually nothing productive. The low point of the day had been loosing like crap to Yaar. The high point being Didier Drogba’s goal against Liverpool. Anyway, I had a lot of words in my head. It was like close your eyes and there’d be words (I wish I could draw).

Anyway, Manish incessantly large amount of studying had pretty much everyone on their nerves. Besides he had been getting consistently high scores. Very high scores. And do not take this in any negative connotation, when I say very, what I actually mean is very very very high scores.(Yes. This is indeed the last jibe at Manish wrt GRE).

On the day before GRE, I had pretty much decided that I would not study too much. I wrote a few practice tests. Was reasonably happy at the fact that if I got the score that I’d been averaging I’d be pretty happy (I just reread the sentence. WTF. Yeah, read the last sentence again). Anyhoo, all things aside did nothing much the whole day. Other than

FIFA – Wherein yaar was hammered 3-0 by yours truly. 10 minutes after a sordid, moribund first half, Van Nistelrooy scored. A brilliant through pass by Louis Saha found him unmarked just outside the Real Madrid goal. And he took a stunning shot straight into the top right corner. Rooney then added insult to injury by scoring from a similar position just 10 minutes later. And Real Madrid could not quite cope with that. The icing on the cake was Nistelrooy slotting in a penalty in the 80th minute when a Real Madrid defender committed an atrocious challenge in the box.

IHQ – InterHouse Quiz. After three years, me, fauji and arun made it to the finals. Not that we had tried any time. Each year, whenever the IHQ competition mail would come, we would sedulously go and write the prelims. This time we qualified. Of course, I used to be a way better quizzer before I came here (all the computers have sollied my brain). Anyhoo, It started off badly by GS picking us number 6, just after Supreeth’s team. Cutting a long story short we surprisingly got 3rd place … surprisingly because we made a few careless errors towards the end.

The night before GRE

The plan had been to play dota after quiz. However, due to it being pretty late, I figured I’d go to sleep. That is when “the maiming and mutilation of the malignant bottle green moth” took place. Well, not a moth in so many words, it was a caterpillar. I have no idea about its malignanceishness (yeah yeah, blogger’s licence). However, it was definately mutilated and it was definately bottle green.

Now, before you get any weird ideas that lead to me being a mutilator of bottle green moths let me explain. I do not like any insects (I use the word like in the strongest sense of the word dislike). So, I figured, the fastest way to kill it would be to drop the spare SMPS that’s lying around. (For those of you who are wondering why I have spare SMPS’s lying around there are a couple of posts that say so). I picked up the SMPS, took aim and missed hit. Well, not so much as missed as the stupid thing moving at the last second and me hitting the bottom half of it.

Anyhoo, it was not a pretty sight. Now my room had the guts of a dead insect, broken pieces of mirror, a ton of dirt, reddish brown shoes, a heap of unwashed clothes all lying on the floor.

I went to sleep. Could not exactly goto sleep. My heartbeat was 120ish. (I just counted 120 beats. Could not see the time because the lights were out and I was trying to sleep). For the first time, before an exam, I felt scared. I also felt underprepared. I also felt overconfident. Then the logician and rationalist in me went what the ****? You cant feel all that at the same time you jack***. Its a contradiction in terms.

While this tete-a-tete or me-vs-me was going on, time was flying by.  By the time I fell asleep it must have been two.

The day of GRE

This is for another post.

The day after GRE

Well, today I woke up with one thing in mind. Have fun. Oh and clean the room. So now, I sit in a nice clean room, no idea about what I should think about my GRE scores. Also, I am wondering whether VBH is going to immolate himself by stepping into a burning pyre or putting kerosene and setting it alight. I mean, I gotta figure out whether I need a bucket of water of a bucket of sand before going and telling him the score. (Yeah, I aint putting the score up here ).

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PS – holy hell, how did I write such a long post?

PS1 – Flock is nice for writing posts

PS2 – Must do BTP

PS3 – Must play all new games on LAN

PS4 – Hopefully WLAN better with new room arrangement.

PS5 – Next post definately Wooster and the Weird Wacky Woohoos

technorati tags:GRE, BC

El Stupido GRE and VBH

I used to believe in transitivity but now I am not that sure.

Still in GRE prep mode. Gave a practice test the other day. Needless to say, that I will not bore you with the score. Manish still in “rock” GRE mode.

In other news, played FIFA and lost to Yaar. There is something very wierd about FIFA. I beat Yaar. Yaar beats Peesu. I and Peesu usually tie and it goes to penalties and he has all the luck. (I am hoping that all this luck will be there on the GRE day). The odd thing is that Neeraj mostly manages to beat me. Oh and Peesu thrashes Neeraj. I used to believe in transitivity but now I am not that sure.

Going back to the expectable discourse on luck. IMHO, you have a finite quantity of luck in a year. And you can ask God for it once in a while. Its kind of like a RFC except instead of comments its luck. So its an RFL. Anyway, lets just say that I have RFL’d for all the luck I presume that I have saved up over the last three years.

Oh yeah and VBH . (And I have not misspelled OBH! ). I was going to start the daily GRE prep. Then VBH messages me on yahoo. Conversations with VBH are usually enlightening. Excellent, Top notch random stuff. Anyway, he was made privy to the information cited in the second paragraph. So, suffice to say that now I have to have a bucket of water handy when I tell him my GRE score. Mostly, the reason for this post is VBH. He was noted as saying that posting is like playing with words. Which is increasing vocab. Which is GRE.

The perspicacious reader may have noticed the absence of the moribund tone prevelant in the last few posts. (Note to self – Do not change from first person to second and a half person forms of speech in the middle of a post). (Second note to self – Do not write such long asides). The reason (inane as it may seem) is related to a lady. (I am going to throw a bucket of ice cold water at chaps who think they got something to poke ridicule at me with – specifically VBH, MPJ, SRM, GNT). The lady is luck Its like JUP said, if you get Hamstring:enervate:: What the **** are you going to do?. Hence the second paragraph on the most unexplained but crucial phenomenon for a successful enterprise.

3 more days to go
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PS – Yeah there are PS’s

PS1 – If you dont know GNT – its in the comments

PS2 – Must start now.

PS3 – I had breakfast. A nice breakfast. V. cheerful right now.

PS4 – Anyone who finds grammatical / spelling / <any other damn errors> in the post should leave a comment like nice peaceful people instead of bashing me up like rustic barbarous hooliganish jerks.

PS5 – Barring untoward incidents the next post will be on Weird Whacky Woohoos

technorati tags:BC, Philosophy, GRE

Wireless LAN : How to prove that it sucks

We all know that WLAN is sucking. There may be reasons (valid / invalid) but I somehow feel that the concerned authorities still feel that it is not “their” problem, or it isn’t slow enough to be a “major” problem yet. (Logically that could be the only explanation that accounts for the inaction – assuming that the “concerned” people are rational hbs). .NB -> hb = human being

How to benchmark WLAN’s performance

Lets make a utility. That sits in the system tray. It monitors the AP you are connected to, your signal strength, your ping time to 200 and your packet loss. Let this utility upload the data to some server. Or a webservice running on a server. We can make the methods of this web-service public.

Then, we would have some data to show that wireless actually sucks and sucks enough for the “concerned” people to do something about it.

Technically, since we all feel that it sucks, the “concerened” authorities should write this. Anyhoo, if for some reason they are reluctant then let my gre finish. I will write this utility. Or if someone wants to write it please do go ahead.

The Fervent Fervour has Fled

Sunday

Finished C. Finished M. Even E was conquered. There were casualties. I seemed to have forgotten bits and pieces of P, chunks of R had just fallen out of my mind. Was this a sign of things to come , I wondered?

Monday

I had already accepted that I may keep forgetting a lot. of the stuff I try to remember. It was more about having an idea … a rough idea (would scabrous work here?) . The only issue was that if in GRE I know that I have seen this word before, how the heck is it going to help? Manish’s strategium is top-notch I feel. All he does is remembers prefixes, suffixes and roots and other ingredients in the entire word building scheme. Then, you ask him a word, say corpulent he will go like con + orp + ulent => some crap about some other crap => lot more crap about lot of other crap => fat.

There are some words that just stick. Stuff like marboreal, you pretty much remember. Stuff like NonPareil, you can pretty much guess. There are some words that can naturally be associated with stuff. (Anything related to showoff / OA / double dealing treacheary is easy to remember thanks to MPJ) The problem occurs when there are words like ex*******ate. (the **** do not represent an expletive, they are mere wildcards). Anyway, doing F really took a heckuva lot of work. Work in the sense, you’d think you are done, go for a stroll, do bc, play some fifa, come back and have a dekko, and lo and behold, you dont know foment or factious.

Tuesday

Given that I had done just two alphabets yesterday. Actually, yesterday had started off well, with D and F going down before lunch. However, there was a BTP report, sleep, OS correction, DOTA etc interfering with the gre. Anyhoo, I did L and N before lunch. (did, in the loosest sense of the word, with about 30-40% retention). I tried to do T. Alas, the fervent fervour had fled. So, took a break, wrote cog sci report, slept. Thought I’d give T another shot. I failed absolutely apocalyptically abysmally. So, I switched over to some more smaller, easier alphabets. H, was a breeze(ish). There were few I did not know. They however were not conducive to rattofication. Anyway, dhakka maar ke G aur H to ho gaye.

The current state is ABJKQTUVWXYZ to go. The current plan is to try to remember as many while forgetting as few.

7 more days to go

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PS – this post will not be graced with PS’s

the quintessential quagmirish quandary

Saturday

Gre approaching near. Very few wordlists done. I was kinda worried. So, in the morning, I began with a fresh resolve to do a few wordlists (bhatti a lot of words). Did not help at all. All that was happening was that I was unable to focus. Unable to concentrate. My mind kept shifting from topic to topic. I was wondering why the bloody **** am I doing this. Do I really want to do an MS / PhD? I got 10 days to GRE and am nowhere close to knowing the wordlists. Manish is already done with all of them and in revision mode. Mostly, I felt extremely discouraged. The whole morning went thinking like this.

Then in the afternoon I tried again. Again the same frigging problem. I was so screwed up that I was even wandering about the hostel, aimlessy, wondering why the f**k am I even bothered. So I went down to Peesu Wing. The plan was simple. I was going to use a technique I’ve often used to make me do something I dont like. I do something totally useless (like play games, do bc, orkut, blogging, in general waste time) so that I can guilt myself into doing something I dislike. After two hours of FIFA, when I came back, I was still in the same fucked up state. Unable to focus / remember. Always wondering, what is the point of giving GRE. That was when I posted the rap on The Quintessential Quagmirish Quandary.

Anyway, the most interesting part of the day was coming up. I went swimming. Had fun. Then went to canteen to eat. PKV was there. There was a “discussion” on a certain Dharmpajji (no offence meant) who had come to campus. I came back to the room. Went up to Sriram wing to find Tipo / Manish doing the entire gre bit, asking each other questions. Was feeling reasonably dejected at this point (more at not knowing why I was studying for GRE rather than that I had not done anything useful the entire day).

Despondent, I came back to the room. Saw cars again (FYI – I really like the race in Cars). Was actually empathizing with Lightning McQueen when he is unable to focus during the big race. Then Mac said the “Find the groove that works for you kid and lets win this race” dialog. And I figure that kinda changed everything. I tried to read again and this time it fit. And goodness gracious me, I was able to read. I finished P, R, S.

Now, I am not the guy who would be able to bhatti / mug up very well (the guy you are looking for is Aziz who is the best at rattofication). Honestly, I have never been good at it. And yet I found myself memorizing mesmerizing words. All the doubts about why I was giving GRE and all, were pushed back – unanswered. All I was doing was remembering the stupid ass words. Went to sleep feeling happy. Was actually slightly worried that I may relapse into the old early morning state of feeling like crap. Oh and FYI, the feeling of thinking about a word, thinking that you have forgotten the meaning, then just getting the meaning before you look it up is like wow. (Yeah, the effect of remembering all those words is not clearly visible here).

Sunday

Woke up. Felt like, lets do this. Also felt a little aware that I may not have the same streak as yesterday. May just go back to the constant wondering. So, started off with I. Manish calls and says lets study together. On his advice did C. Then I. Now I finished M. Looking to do E before dinner. So far so good. I have a reasonable plan now.

This is a parable. There is a moral here. Its very simple. Its on the tip of my tongue. (Yeah, i figure you have noticed the hedging and are like “Out with it already”. Actually I was sure of the moral when I started the post. Cant recall it now). BTW, I just realized that I am starting to forget some of the words. Mostly I guess thats coz you cant push too much into the brain. Its kinda like, you keep pushing from one end and stuff will come out of the other. (No pun intended).

Any-hoo, the plan now is to do E and T. Revise the rest before sleeping. And revise again tomorrow in the morning. And see how many I have forgotten. (Already am afraid of inordinate, peremptory, portend etc…). And see how long this streak continues.

Just 9 more days to freedom
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PS – one of the most profound posts on this blog. So if you have any sarcastic / cynical / strident / stritcturish comments please do go ahead and post them.

gre

this is a rap – (random arbid post).

—– begin ——-
memorizing mesmerizing words
the quintessential quagmirish quandary
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