Sourabh’s blog

Things are happening at such a fast pace around me, I feel I’m missing a lot. I don’t want Aussies to win the World Cup again. That is just so dominating. Ban them till the next World Cup, I say. Let us bring some competition in the game.

The recent price cuts on the Intel Core 2 Duo processors is so tempting. The laptop, laptop/PC, PC, laptop… dilemma continues. Moreover, the sodding exams just don’t end. I don’t get any time to think anymore. My next exam is on Monday and it is really the moment of truth that I’ve been long waiting for. DSS is just not my cup of tea! I hope I just pass through it, barely works for me!

Laptoplogic.com now gets a dedicated shopping website in the form of LogicBuy.com I wish them good luck for the same.

This weekend would be very very dull for me. I will try to study as much as I can to get the Holy 4/10 in DSS! Design of Steel Structures, I will never forget what a PIA you’ve been.

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!

It is not everyday that I feel like making a blog entry, so I plan to make the most of this attempt. What follows next are serious views and true happenings posted in an extremely modest, visually unappealing with no sarcastic undertones whatsoever. You have been warned.

It would be customary for me to mention what I have been doing all this while. Frankly nothing. In other things I have successfully managed to stay away from computers for major parts of the last couple of weeks. I considered myself fortunate if I managed to get more than 3 hours of internet and my laptop each day. Power cuts and frequent internet disconnections have helped me in more ways than one for all of this and then some.

My laptop won’t last more than a few months now. So it’s TIME.

I have lost track of all the TV shows that I so loved watching. But the good thing with tv-shows is that, watching them in a heap - back2back - uninterrupted manner is the best way to watch them.

I have set aside some money to get me a nice gadget. In all probability, it would be a decent digicam. Speaking of gadgets, my dad will soon get an iPod with a voice recorder or an iPod along with a dictaphone. How cool is that?

Cricket World Cup 2007 - Nothing seems to be right with it. May be it’s just me, but this has to be one of the most lackluster cricketing events in the recent past. In my opinion, West Indies was a big mistake for the venue. A crowd of 2k in an India game? I seriously think I am right this time. I don’t really care if India makes it to Super Eights or not. I cannot see them winning six in a row matches with the top teams from other groups. That would really be asking for a lot, if you ask me. If they have to go down in the pre-semifinal stages, might as well go down being sorry from the round matches.

Reliance cellphone network is just pathetic. I don’t get half the phone calls due to prevalent network problems. It reports out of coverage area, even when it shows the maximum 5 bars in network strength. Ditching the old 99000 number is the only alternative. But a major part of me doesn’t want to go through the tough ordeal of informing everyone about the number change.

Well to add more, I really appreciate how ASUS goes about with their notebooks. They have been working closely with both the hardware and software industry to incorporate the latest technologies in their notebooks and the result is more than visible. Head over here Affordable Gaming Notebooks competing with the Alienwares and likes, Ultimate ultra-portables giving Thinkpads a run for their money, Desktop Replacements with all the HD DVD and Blu-Ray Jazz, The SideShow W5Fe and ofcourse the ASUS Lamborghini notebooks. Too bad that ASUS has got their act all wrong for their notebook pricing in India.

It is 3:30 AM, Good night.

Wow. All paragraphs would make good individual blog posts. Nice work, Sourabh.

Check out this amazing work done in Photoshop. I can only appreciate the skills of the guy who did this. Fantastic stuff done in less than 3 hours. This has to be one of the better things I have seen on youtube. Enough of the BS, here is the real deal:

Really awesome, 10/10!

If you are wondering who that is in the video, he is John Locke from Lost. Great character in the show played by Terry O’Quinn. I really wonder what Terry would have to say after watching such a freakin fantastic thing dedicated to him.

Oh boy, I am so screwed!

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.

Want some extra cash pronto? Sell your CPU cycles. This is really as insane as it gets.

An Italian programmer has launched a service that may eventually pay PC users who rent out their systems to supercomputer-like distributed computing projects.

CPUShare allows home users to profit from the significant power of their hardware that otherwise would be wasted every day.

In the CPUShare system, sellers will post asking bids on how much they want for their spare processor cycles, while buyers will put out bids on what they’ll pay.

Go here and see the real deal

Who wants to put their download rig up for grabs?

This is the worst thing that could happen. µTorrent was one of the very few applications that I actually liked and found it to be perfect for its intended purpose. No non-sense, just worked with minimum system resources. I found it to be the best torrent client out of the contemporaries on the Windows Platform.

Now I don’t really have any hope with the further development of utorrent to become any better. I won’t go ranting about how BT inc will screw utorrent up. A week back, BT inc. signed a deal with Paramount, Lionsgate, Twentieth Century Fox, MTV networks and Warner Bros. Home Entertainment to launch a paid torrent video store for people to pay and download these stuff. So this deal really means utorrent will go in a step forward to create built-in protection measures against illegal sharing of files. DRM! I don’t think there is anything worth on torrents exclusively except pirated movies, music, softwares, etc…

So, when things go awry with utorrent - BitComet would be the only option. I just can’t take this, because I loved utorrent. What next - Adobe buying FoxIt?