Sourabh’s blog

I have no idea how each sem just passes by. What is all the more interesting is how these exams and submissions stand right in front of you when you are least prepared. When they come, it is time to say good bye to everything for a couple of weeks. It is that time of the year again. So, fine, I have to study and take my mind out of the things I usually do. But life is never that simple.

Your relatives, your friends, everyone and even all important things just have to come up when your exams begin. The season is such, it is vacation time for most and here I’m making plans to actually study. But people around me take their vacations as national holidays.

And my laptop just has to die on me a week prior to the exam. I have wasted all my time (not) deciding for my next laptop. As days pass by, the frustration builds up. Two years ago, it was my parents who insisted that I should go for a laptop. Now, it is otherwise. I don’t blame them. What good is a computer which dies in just 2 years? I don’t really know what will I use next. Dell’s 3 year ‘Complete Cover’ is really the thing I should be looking for. With time not on my side, I will think about the laptop purchase after the exam.

Beginning from Monday, I don’t have a PC to work on. What am I gonna do, I have no clue.

Just testing the new theme for a change. I know a couple of people who would kill me if I revert back to Kubrick after this. But I just have to.. Kubrick rocks!

That says it all.

But since I feel so indebted to my blog, I will write a few more lines.

Everyone has just accepted to believe nothing on 1/4. Doesn’t matter if it’s the newspapers, press releases or Google pulling off a crazy service or product. Believe nothing, right? I don’t really give a damn about what date it is today for most days in the year, but I do make it a point to know when it is the first of April. Who wants to believe those crazy two or three ‘news’ before you realize you got tricked by a shenanigan. If you are in school, college or work as previous April Fools day of your life, you are habituated to those crazy pranks and the usual. Mostly the predictable stuff. But when it is a dull Sunday and you have nothing to do, throw in a April Fools day - it becomes very annoying.

Those breaking news on websites, SMSs, unexpected emails and messages on messengers are not even amusing. I would love to be called as a person with no sense of humor than to respond to those messages. What can I say - ‘Are you insane! This can’t be happening. Definitely this must be an April Fool’s day prank’ or ‘Thanks for letting me know. I will do my research and find truth in this regard. If it’s not, you tricked me and I am a retard’. And let me not even talk about those stuff with alerts saying - “THIS IS NOT AN APRIL FOOL’s DAY PRANK. WE ARE AS SERIOUS AS SERIOUS CAN BE’. Honestly, what does April Fool’s day stand for? Non-funny people to be funny, never mind for a single day? I don’t know.

If you want me to spell it out for you, I HATE this day. I never gave a damn about the World Shutdown Day on 24th March to experiment if one can live without computers for a single day. But had it been today on first of April, I would have loved to be part of the ‘experiment’ with a smiling face and non-abusive tongue. Damn!

After a month long fling with Windows Vista exploring what the next generation of Windows has in store for me and the bumpy, yet gratifying experience of backing up my data and uninstalling the darn OS somehow - I feel quite happy. The satisfaction and pleasure has nothing to do with the fact that how beautiful, brilliant and innovative Vista was but more from the fact that my laptop ran it just about fine(minus Aero). I couldn’t have asked for anything more from it (the laptop). Although the appreciation should be given to the scalability of Microsoft’s OS on old, aging and dying hardware but I find it easier and a lot soothing to give the credit to this two year old piece of mobile computing device with a 110 seconds battery life. During the uninstallation, my poor luck continued as I lost/damaged/misplaced the XP’s installation CDs. That meant running Ubuntu again, resorting to Automatix2, downloading all the packages to run you through the next couple of days without compromising anything - you know the drill.

It also means now I am back to Genuine Windows XP Professional, its classic theme, minimalistic looks and my beloved list of software applications that I so love to use. Title anyone?

Life is a bitch. The last few weeks have been really messy. From the post Christmas holidays till date, a lot of things have happened. Sadly, none of them have been pleasant. To ruin my online life, the internet connection has been miserable from the third week of December and it continues to be the same. I have reason to believe the power jack in my laptop has become faulty. The laptop switches to run on battery even when connected to AC power. So, currently I cannot use my laptop for more than 4 hours at a stretch. I get really annoyed and frustrated when anything happens to my laptop. This is the worst time to get a new laptop, so an upgrade is no longer an option. Whether I like it or not, I will have to wait till late May before I could start making plans of my next laptop. SantaRosa and Yokohama are still far, far away.

To add insult to injury, the ASUS CEO (Campus Elite Organisation) interview turned out to be a mere presentation given by them. The whole CEO thing has nothing to do with Computers, Hardware, Technology as you would associate with ASUS. Being a CEO, is what they claim to be MBA of the IT world - minus the degree. But, that is not something which I had in mind when I first appeared for the test. So, frankly speaking I don’t know what to do with it. I feel it would have been a lot better had I not cleared the test.

And well, it doesn’t stop there. To make things worse and cripple my mind with added tension, I received a series of legal notices from Tata Indicom Broadband for alleged non-payment of broadband bills. Although I have everything under the sun to prove the bills raised are completely BS, getting into a legal battle with Tata is something I don’t want to venture in. Although, they are have been ‘generous’ enough so far to accept there has been some error, I would prefer that things get solved out of the court.

As for academics, another semester passed by. So did the vacations. Its time to get back to college.

On brighter side of things, I enjoyed 24. I take this opportunity to thank Raj Anand for sending me the DVDs of all the seasons of 24, without which my holidays would have been very dull to say the least. I really thought I had seen them all - the action/adventure TV shows currently on air. But I was wrong. 24 is the most thrilling, action-adventure television series I have come across over the past 12 months or so. It beats the hell out of Prison Break, Lost, and other similar TV shows. 24 is all about Jack Bauer, a federal agent played by Kiefer Sutherland, saving the country from terrorist attacks. 24 takes continuous heart pounding action, plot twists, no filler, cliff hangers to the next level where you can always expect the unexpected. Really, not even once could I say for sure what the end would be. 24 follows a unique format where an entire season consists of 24 episodes, each episode comprising of a 1 hour of real time action. 5 Seasons, 120 Episodes, 43 minutes each, one after another, all with in a span of less than 10 days! Incidentally the day I finished Season 5 of 24, a few episodes of season 6 have been leaked on the internet. Co-incidence? May be. Nice show. Long live Kiefer Sutherland.

This post is dedicated to all those who have been bugging me for the dead blog. I hope this long post makes up for everything. You really have a lot of patience, if you have made it so far. Thanks and good bye.

This place right here is my blog. I am supposed to land here and see if things are going on well without issues, post some things just for the sanity sake and be cool about it. This is my first hit on the blog after two weeks. All thanks to the enormous spam.

The blog is cursed!

Breaking the curse…..

-x-x-x-x-x-x-

The blog is nearing the one year milestone. So has my laptop. It was exactly one year before I had got my laptop after being frustrated from the power fluctuations. I think it was one of my better decisions to use the laptop as a full fledged PC. I dont have any plans to work on a desktop system ever again.

Now that the laptop is one year old, it also means the end of the warranty period. It is surely not a good feeling to own a thing whose repairs can get quite costly if things go wrong. Luckily enough I have not faced any problems so far and managed to avoid any visits to the service center. And I only hope I never have to do that.

Over the year, blogging has been fun. Mostly it has been about the boring things going on in life, sharing things which I found cool and some not so cool, and ranting about things when they go wrong badly. That just sums it up and I wonder where would the blog lead to in the coming year.

For a long time, I had been thinking of using the default Kubrick theme to get a minimalist feel to the blog. What could have been better than the default Kubrick theme? The default colors combinations of the Kubrick theme were not too appealing for me. So I decided to tweak the colors here and there with my pathetic programming and photoshopping skills. Though the final result after an hour’s of hardwork is not something which I had in mind while making it. But as things turned out, its atleast a dark theme which I had my eye on. I know the colors are pretty messed up at a couple of places and its not that easy on the eyes either.

I would just like to stick with the messed up theme for a while just because its my first try. Please bear with it if you happened to land here!

This is in regard with a blog over at wordpress.com http://gaurish.wordpress.com. I noticed yesterday that this dude has completely ripped one of my blogpost and posted it there . What could be more silly than copying my very own About Me page!

It was all ok, probably a new blogger testing out something and getting a feel of what blogging is all about. But now I see him ripping blogposts from some other friends personal blogs - Batty and Andy (from the blogroll)

If you are reading this Gaurish, this is not the way…

I have been getting a lot of hits to my blog from Google with the search terms ‘Adil Riaz Shoubik parag‘, the IITK Students behind the DinBhar song . To know more about it, check this blogpost. So I just decided to check out the results for the same myself. I opened the link myself and to my surprise there was no result for my blog. This was when I used Opera for the search and it showed only 2 results. Now I fired the fox, with the same link and again there were two results which din show my blog in the search results. And then strangely when I opened that link in Internet Explorer, I noticed the difference. There were four search results this time around and the first one leading to my blog.

Whats up Google, another tech-explanation to this?

Hmmmm….