Blink
What a sight to see
Streaks of bright yellow set in clear blue
An infinite universe of hue

In between the words
Lies a heart, troublesomely
Desp’rate to be found

What if it doesn’t work out—









And what if it does?

Will you search through the loamy earth for me?
Climb through the briar and bramble
Will you swim through the briny sea for me?
Roll along the ocean’s floor?

—there are so many of them.

A half-unformed thought
The middle of a story
A vivid mem’ry

From one of the rooms, Feist could be heard singing:

Neglect does not imply abandonment, or so I tell myself. To wit, I’ve updated some things around here:

In between the words
Lies a heart, perilously
Will it be found out?

Derfi di hebe
Nur ganz fin
Derfi di hebe
Nur no eimal
Derfi di hebe
Ich bin ellei
Derfi di hebe
Esch’s verbi

I got introduced to spoken word poetry with this video:

was
an old man
patient, kind
boxes of records strewn
all around the tiny room
framed photos on the walls
the smell of smoke
tapping his foot to the music
as I sat
and listened.

For sale: bluetooth headset, never worn. Bought September 2019.

What of all those hearts that humans use
What of all those misread cues
And all the junk you cast off in your wake
Should tear yourself away for your own sake

But tonight there is no such thing as you
There is no such thing as you
Because tonight there is no such thing as you
There is no such thing as you

Quiet I said
You move too much
Jumping like a nervous child

In 2019, fueled by my excitement at having Finally Moved to Europe, I traveled a lot. Perhaps a little too much in retrospect (but also not enough – there’s so many places!). On one such trip, I spied this book at an airport:

And all those times
Why were you thinking
That distant look
Eyes gazing afar
Into another place that

Moin from the rainy city of Hamburg, Germany’s bastion of the north where I have now been for more than two years! (two years?! When did that even happen?)

Retreat
Recover
Reset

I recently discovered Johnny Flynn’s music and I’ve been listening to it on regular repeat ever since. His songs have a folksy/indie vibe with a vocal melody that I always fail to predict (although that may well be down to my lack of a musical ear!). The lyrics are often surprisingly poetic with lots of imagery – for instance, here’s the first verse of Hard Road:

It was not too long ago that I had pretty much never tasted coffee, especially not in its black variety. I remember sipping a suspicious mouthful and nearly gagging: ugh, it’s so bitter! How can you like it? (“Pair it with cheesecake!” was the reply, which I grudgingly acknowledged to be a rather good idea).

Remember that dream of places and faces
Leaves that moved with the breeze
A word that went unheard
Sparks from a fire that rose higher
And the stream of icy cold water that washed it all away?

You have arrived at Helsinki airport.

I’ve been doing a fair bit of shell-scripting recently, mostly of the data munging variety for some of my side projects. I quite enjoy working with command line tools, but dealing with structured data (JSON) isn’t too pleasant. jq is nice but it defines a DSL that I’ve never found intuitive except for simple tasks.

I just got back from a two week vacation, and this is the luggage I took:

It’s been nearly five years since my visit, yet I remember the day I spent in Vilnius as clearly as if it had been only five weeks ago. Though Vilnius was not originally on my Places to See in Europe list (mostly because I didn’t know about it), when I saw the price of the flights there from Trondheim (60 NOK!) and found out that Lithuanian is one of the oldest living languages, the linguist in me could not resist.

I shiver, instinctively wrapping my arms around around myself. Where’s the tissue?

Note: I wrote a version of this for a company blog last year but I’m publishing it here too, both for posterity as well as to reference in some future posts I’ve planned.

It’s the job that’s never started that takes longest to finish.

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Updating my homepage the other day made me realise once again how terrible I really am at writing about myself, at least in the direct manner that an ‘about me’ feature generally demands. I eventually managed to put some words together but that got me thinking – I’ve never done a tag on this blog before. Yes, never. I avoided that boat entirely in blogging’s heyday, and of course things are lot different now. After a lot of googling (sadly, the word “tag” is kinda overloaded), I found one that seemed like a good one to begin with. Here goes:

Monday night a few weeks ago found me mashing my keyboard in frustration. I had spent most of the day trying to figure out how to build a dead simple web service in Java. I knew how to do it in Node.js, in Python, in Ruby, in Go, and in Clojure. I even knew how to write a complex API using gRPC and Protocol buffers in Java. A simple web API, however, was proving to be a different story altogether.

2016 started in Kyoto, Japan. I rarely celebrate New Year at all so a cozy home-made Japanese dinner with our AirBnB host who tried to get us to sample all the alcohol she owned from various parts of the country despite our half-hearted protests (“we have a train to catch early in the morning!”) was a perfect way to celebrate. The entire trip was great; a full post about it is in order.

Christmas, it seems, is a time for rearranging furniture, buying new furniture, and enjoying music whilst sitting on said furniture.

Batam was supposed to be Cambodia. Or Laos. Or even Vietnam. But if you plan to travel during a public holiday in Singapore, you can’t leave such decisions to the last minute – or even a month before the last minute. So Batam it was.

One thing I miss about working at Autodesk (yeah, that happened) is playing table tennis regularly. I used to play a fair bit when I was in school but almost entirely stopped during the four years of university. I’ve been trying to join some table tennis meetups recently (Meetup is awesome in that regard), but it has been pretty sporadic so far.

The longer I go without writing posting on my blog, the more uncomfortable I begin to feel. Perhaps it’s all the idea debt in my head, or it’s something more. I don’t know.

It was with great purpose that I packed my suitcases when I left Delhi last summer. They were heavy not with food as is customary, but with a collection of books that would have long been gathering dust (had they not been kept inside a closed bookshelf). University life, you see, had not been at all kind to the first “official” pastime I ever had.

Thanks to the infectious film-buffiness of G, I have probably watched more movies in the cinema in the last year (including an unplanned viewing of Fantastic Four in Taipei thanks to a raging typhoon outside) than in the last decade. I now know which cinema chain in Singapore has the best hotdogs (Cathay), the longest advertisements (Golden Village at twenty five minutes of pre-movie ads), and the easiest online booking experience.

What are words?

Back in the Exun days, I went for my first web designing competition with DJ. It was a Saturday morning and we had to design a promo page for Windows Vista. I fired up Photoshop (this surprises some people, perhaps because ‘web design’ has very little to do with the words ‘photo’ and ‘shopping’), did some funky things to a sample image they gave us, created some glass-styled elements (I had just learnt how to – they were all the rage those days), whipped up some HTML, and we were done. An hour or so later, we were enjoying the sweet taste of victory.

No, I absolutely insist that I haven’t been living under a rock. What’s that? Why haven’t I written anything in the last six months, you ask? Why, the very suggestion is preposterous! Of course I’ve written things! I wrote messages, and emails … oh all right. I’m just nitpicking as usual – you should know by now!

Please hold on while I conduct an experiment.

Ten days isn’t a terribly long time, but this feels like an eternity. You see, I’m not used to being away from you. Other than that period not too long ago, we’ve seen each other nearly every day since we first met!

The other day, I woke up in my NTU room in sunny SG, all ready for an interview later that afternoon. Taking the CR-R bus past NIE to the LWN bus stop made me realise it was a little too sunny though, a fact underscored by my progressively soaking shirt. I had originally planned to travel by the MRT, but while sitting in SBS Transit’s bus 179 and passing by the SCBE, RTP, WKWSCI, HSS and other buildings, I decided instead to head to JP. Reaching there, I made a beeline for G2K and bought another shirt (or two, actually, thanks to a sale and my dearth of fitted shirts).

Three years and a week ago (it’s been three years?!), I saw one of my favourite bands live. I had started listening to them when I was fifteen (thanks to a newspaper supplement and a friend on a bus), but I only dreamt of ever seeing them for real. Then the impossible happened – they came to India, twice. And I missed both those times, thanks to that period of tedious rote learning and furious scribbling otherwise known as exams.

Strange, more beautiful music. Headphones are nice, but speakers are just something else.

Koss Porta Pro headphones – that was the combined result of a quest for sonic satisfaction, a pair of rather shallow pockets, and the lack of my own room to play loud music in. These headphones are usually described as both inexpensive and far exceeding the value of the rectangular sheets of paper they’re often exchanged for. Unfortunately, Singapore’s habitual marking up of electronic goods all but struck off inexpensive from the description, and the realisation that I prefer room-filling speakers as opposed to head-filling earphones made me refrain from buying them when I first heard of them a few years ago.

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with weary feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.
—J R R Tolkien

Out of breath and time, Alessio and I sprinted towards the bus on the other side of the road. That is to say that I, with what can only be a rather Indian obliviousness to zebra crossings, cut across the middle of the road, while Alessio patiently waited for vehicles to pass by.

Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory and Meteora are so good. They bring back many memories – the first audio CD I owned, the start of discovering the heavier side of music, arguing whether In the End was better than Somewhere I Belong way back in class six, the first time I obsessively read liner notes and lyrics (hah iTunes, there are some things you can never match!), drawing the LP logo during the Computers class in school…

The words… they refuse to appear!

Baffling or plain peculiar things observed over six months in a different continent (in no particular order):

A dreary evening.

…I’m in Norway.

As it turns out, a whole year is a tad too long to be away from home for. I landed in Delhi last night (“Twenty two degrees on a winter night?!” and “Immigration officials in India are mean to foreigners”), made my way out of the airport without any incident (quite unlike last year, when I was asked for a bribe by the customs official at the Green Channel while he dipped his moustache in tea), found my sister and dad at the gate and talked non-stop to them on the way home (between mouthfulls of Dairy Milk, that is), hugged my mom at the door (who thankfully forgot to ask who brought the luggage up the four flights of stairs), and proceeded to peer around the drawing room to see if anything had changed (“Where’s the TV gone?!”).

1. All the people I want to, no need to talk to. Some conversations are way overdue.
2. Red Cross AGM report.
3. Stupid IA log book. (We have to write a log book?! It’s like being in school, sheesh)
4. CSC301 Programming Languages past-year paper solution, which I so wisely gave my name for solving.
5. All the open tabs on my browser that I want to read.
6. The new Artemis Fowl! Why are books so expensive abroad?
7. New blog. Well technically, new home for this blog. And bye bye, Blogger.
8. Work.
9. Weekends are too short.
10. Regularity is simultaneously helpful and mundane. And tiring.
11. A lot of pending blog posts.
12. Worrying about sleeping on time is rather depressing.
13. #1 is actually on my mind quite a bit, I realize.
14. So is all the Red Cross related stuff.
15. Gah!

I’m not much of a gamer (unless you count occasional bouts of Quake III, Portal or Counter Strike), but I do own one of those oldfangled handheld consoles, i.e., the PlayStation Portable. It was my eternal seventh-grade dream to own a GameBoy Advance; I finally realized it three years ago by buying a PSP instead and promptly spent the subsequent three years not purchasing a single game for the platform.

Back! I shall be! No, I am.

Scene: G-Max Reverse Bungee at Clarke Quay.
Yours truly and two friends securely strapped in, equal parts excited and nervous.

For ten days! Via a fourteen-hour bus journey. Yes, your eyes are not in fact deceiving you.

What do we have here? Exams around the corner + a bored yours truly who doesn’t want to study, of course.

Hall 13 Production!

And I’m back in sunny oh-my-god-it’s-like-living-in-a-waterfall rainy Singapore with more than a week of college shamelessly waving me goodbye. What with college starting, the helplessly annoying course registration procedure, a Sumo wrestler-load of Red Cross work, casting calls for Hall 13’s Production, being stranded in a remote industrial area of Singapore, the dramatic first batch outing of the new year, and all those small but add-to-the-list-of-things-you-ended-up-thinking-about things, it’s a flaming miracle that my head is still intact. Thankfully, a couple of holidays for the Chinese New Year (rabbits!) are coming up, but nowadays even holidays think that it’s their prerogative to be not devoid of work.

Whoa there. You’re kidding right? Of course you are! Because if Week 12 is starting (the entire semester here is divided into numbered weeks), it means I’ve been in Singapore for more than 13 weeks, and 13 weeks is a little over 3 months and 3 months is … well, impossible. I mean, okay, I know I’ve been here at least a month, but come on, three? I don’t think so.

…I’m in Singapore.

There you stand, eyes closed, completely still. A bright morning sun shines on you from behind. A hint of a breeze tickles the tips of your ears. The smell of pine needles and grass. The soft sound of water running over pebbles.

I have a strong strange feeling that this list should be somewhat longer, but oh well, this will have to do.

Sometime last week, my internet stopped working in the middle of the night. Apparently the phone was dead. You know why? Because someone, in a stroke of genius, decided that it would be a rather neat idea to walk off with MTNL’s telephone cables. Yes, seriously, telephone cables which – of all things – I have no idea why anyone would bother to steal. Maybe it was to prove that telephones cannot in fact work without them. We knew that already, thank you very much.

It’s just one of Those Days, you know?

Last week (or the week before, or perhaps the week before that) I decided to go to one of the malls near my house, because (a) I hadn’t been there for some time (the fact that I’ve never been to the mall right beside this one is irrelevant), and (b) I wanted to buy something.

For too long now,
There were secrets in my mind
For too long now,
There were things I should have said;
In the darkness,
I was stumbling for the door
To find a reason,
To find the time, the place, the hour

Waiting for the winter sun
And the cold light of day
The misty ghosts of childhood fears,
The pressure is building
And I can’t stay away;

I throw myself into the sea
Release the wave,
Let it wash over me
To face the fear
I once believed
The tears of the dragon
For you and for me

Where I was,
I had wings that couldn’t fly
Where I was,
I had tears I couldn’t cry
My emotions
Frozen in an icy lake
I couldn’t feel them,
Until the ice began to break

I have no power over this
You know I’m afraid;
The walls I built are crumbling
The water is moving
I’m slipping away</em>

I throw myself into the sea
Release the wave,
Let it wash over me
To face the fear
I once believed
The tears of the dragon
For you and for me

Slowly I awake,
Slowly I rise,
The walls I built are crumbling
The water is moving
I’m slipping away</em>

I throw myself into the sea
Release the wave,
Let it wash over me
To face the fear
I once believed
The tears of the dragon
For you and for me.

—Bruce Dickinson, Tears of the Dragon

I really really really really don’t like being sick.

It’s 39 degrees.
In March.
Thirty nine degrees. In March.
What is happening?!

Remember those Java classes I took once upon a time? Of course you do(n’t).

Pretty things do not happen.

He stood motionless, staring at the blank wall.

With that — and my love for the The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes — put out of the way, I have to (no, really) say that Sherlock Holmes turned out to be a pretty great movie. It’s true that they pretty much reinvented every character — heck they have Irene Adler in it, as a femme fatale and Holmes’ love interest (Sherlock Holmes in love?) — but it still has more than its fair share of ‘Oooh’s and ‘Aaah’s.

So I finally, finally, finally went and got my Learner’s License. (From the Vasant Vihar RTO. Which says it’s open on weekdays till 1 pm, except not really.) You have to go to this counter-thingy inside the gate which has “Learner’s License” written above it in large, not-so-friendly letters (although that could just be my imagination and their rain-washed character). There’s a guy sitting there eating biscuits and drinking tea, on finishing which, he’ll say that there are only ten minutes before the counter closes. You simultaneously stare at your watch and all the people in the queue in front of you (tricky, btw) while wondering whether the guy sniffling and coughing behind you has swine flu or not. If you eventually reach the counter, the guy will glance through your form, circle a few things (which can be disconcerting for those who aren’t used to Physics teachers circling lab experiment readings), ask you to sign in a dozen places, and also casually mention that those sweet biskuts get stuck in his teeth. Incidentally, mentioning that he may have cavities is rather futile. Oh and for the residence proof, though the passport is — in His own (translated) words — “the quintessential age and residence proof”, take it only if you want to field requests for taking him along on your next trip abroad.

I know that. In all probability, so do you. But surely that can’t be the reason why I’ve started noticing this time lag between sight and sound while watching just about any video? First it was reserved to YouTube videos mostly, but now I notice it with TV shows too.

So I’m taking these Java classes.

I went to Pune! For a holiday. I mean, okay, Switzerland would’ve been much better, but still. And it’s funny how I always write Pune but read it in my head as Poona.

You can credit that three-week drought to my general laziness and a lack of any Grand Blogging Ideas. Incidentally, there seems to be a real drought waiting to happen, thanks to the monsoon’s complete refusal to making its presence felt. Perhaps somebody should get hold of that Rain God chap from Hitchhiker’s. Heat, of course, means power cuts, and power cuts mean heat, which in turn exponentially increases my inertia of rest. We got a new inverter recently since the old one was on its deathbed. Unfortunately, the new one is more like a power-crazy megalomaniac — it seizes every opportunity to switch itself on and pretends it can’t tell the difference between the electricity fluctuating and actually going away. Or at least, it did, until the repairguy came, gave it a look that probably turned the acid in its batteries to water and then walked off. It’s been most well-behaved since then.

Last night I finally went for the Iron Maiden concert. I didn’t enjoy it that much actually: for some reason, the audience was made to sit on chairs (there were chairs!) and the crowd was quite unenthusiastic — no one was singing and only a few of them picked up after I started …

It’s like a dream come true - NADAL lost. On clay. In the French Open. In the fourth round. Nadal lost, did I mention? Yes, Nadal. It’s like so ZOMGWOW! =D If Federer still somehow manages to make a hames of it when Nadal has been ever so nice to have handed him the keys, then as one of my friends said, he probably doesn’t deserve it anyway :P. He hasn’t been playing all that well and nearly gave us a scare in his five-setter today. Oh! that reminds me, check out this awesome video of Federer playing air guitar (well, kind of).

Blogger has been very annoying lately. It dislikes my commenting on other people’s blogs, it dislikes my trying to complete my template - it even tries to stop me from posting! First I thought it was because of the internet - which had been acting up (surprise!) - but that got okay. It’s still astonishingly slow though. Why can’t there be broadband which is fast, reliable and inexpensive (simultaneously)?

In yet another unexpected (or largely so, I’m sure) turn of events, I’m back! It feels really odd to be writing a blog post after so long - my last post was more than (zomg!) nine months ago! As surprising as it might not be, a lot of stuff has happened since that fateful day. However, unlike previous times, I’m not going to make any promises of some day being able to write all about it :P.

…I’m on a hiatus. An extended one. But not forever.

I’m not, [UPDATE: Oops … I meant to say ‘unlike’ and not ‘like’. Silly me.] like unlike many people I know, some kind of anti-Microsoft person (in general). But stuff like this (almost) makes me flip over to the Other Side.

1. I have exams - in approximately 14 hours. And I’ve realised that no matter how much time I get to prepare, I always end up studying till the last minute. Sheesh.

How would you like to be a part of setting a Guinness World Record? It isn’t even difficult - you don’t even need to get off this chair you’re sitting on :). All you have to do is download Firefox 3 on Tuesday, June 17, 2008 and help set the record for Most Software Downloaded in 24 hours.

Federer lost. Old news, I know, and already blogger about by most people, but I just couldn’t help saying it. It’s not as if I didn’t expect it, seeing Nadal’s superior form throughout the French Open, but 6-0? And the match wasn’t even fun.

Woot! I finally, finally, finally have unlimited internet! :D After nearly 3 years of having to labour under the strain of a 400 MB connection, this feels pretty amazing. Granted, the new plan is somewhat slower, but I do think I can bear it :). Now I don’t have to keep worrying every time I click a download link and I won’t need to scratch my head in puzzlement when Dad shows me the previous month’s phone bill.

Okay, nearly four-and-a-half-months later, I’m back! :D And you shake your collective heads and think, “Ha, this guy isn’t going to last a week.” Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever gone so long without posting on my blog (a month seems to be the previous record - now broken by a hopefully insurmountably wide margin). I was still in class 11 when I last posted … then so many things happened, almost at the same time and I got so busy that I thought I’d post everything together … later. And yes, that’s an excuse :). But seriously, it’s a vicious cycle - a whole lot of stuff happens because of which I think I’ll post all about everything later, but later more things happen, so later gets even later and later (or umm … even later?) I realize that there are so many things to post that I kind of white-out and don’t feel like posting anything and then later after that I decide I should but then I don’t, and then - and then … well, you get the picture.

First of all, here’s wishing all of you a very happy New Year! May this year bring you joy, success, health, happiness and basically everything you want it to :).

I can't believe the news today
I can't close my eyes
And make it go away
How long...How long must we sing this song?

And it's true we are immune
When fact is fiction and TV reality
And today the millions cry
We eat and drink while tomorrow they die
- Sunday Bloody Sunday, U2

More pain and misery in the history of mankind
Sometimes it seems more like
The blind leading the blind
It brings upon us more of famine, death and war
You know religion has a lot to answer for

And all because of it you’d think
That we would learn
But still the body count the city fires burn
Somewhere there's someone dying
In a foreign land
Meanwhile the world is crying stupidity of man
Tell me why, tell me why...
- For the Greater Good of God, Iron Maiden

Why can't we treat our fellow men
With more respect and a shake of their hands
But anger and loathing is rife
The death on all sides is
becoming a way of life

But some are just not wanting peace
Their whole life is death and misery
The only thing that they know
Fight fire with fire life is cheap

But if they do stop to think
That man is teetering right on the brink
But do you think that they care
They benefit from death and pain and despair
- The Legacy, Iron Maiden

The world is a dangerous place to live, not just because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.
- Albert Einstein

From the Reader’s Digest:

Every year, the organizers of the Bulwer-Lytton prize based at San Jose University, California, invite entrants from around the world to come up with terrible opening sentences to imaginary novels. Here are some of this year's best efforts:

Danny, the little Grizzly cub, frolicked in the tall grass on this sunny Spring morning, his mother keeping a watchful eye as she chewed on a piece of a hiker they had encountered the day before.

And this year's winner: Gerald began--but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them "permanently" meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash--to pee.

I like the Reader’s Digest. Besides liberal doses of humour, it also had great articles - from people’s experiences to real-life dramas. The tagline pretty much sums it up - ‘Stories about life, Advice about living’. In fact, I’d recommend that you go and get it now.



[To read the rest of the funnily terrible opening sentences, visit: http://www.sjsu.edu/depts/english/2007.htm]

I was going to title this post something entirely different, but then, after Friday actually came in all its uneventfulness, I decided not to. It was, I can definitely say, one of the lousiest days of school ever. By lousy, I guess I just mean boring. Nothing happened. At all. We had only one teaching period, and while that is normally a good thing, since I didn’t end up doing anything fun anyway, it wasn’t really.

Then I was called for this Japanese trip thing, but I can’t go because my passport’s expired and I suppose it won’t be ready in time (the teacher wasn’t even prepared to accept anyone without a valid passport). I got pretty bugged because of this because I’ve really wanted to go to Japan for a long time.

I also started reading iWoz. Somehow, all the non-fiction books I read (and I really don’t read much non-fiction) always end up being tech-related … well, almost always. But this one is quite interesting and it’s definitely a welcome break from the Wheel of Time series. Not that I don’t like WoT, but after 10 books and somewhere around 7,000 pages, there comes a point where you start looking for a change. For most people, the point comes a lot sooner though. Actually, most people get scared when they see the number of books in the series and the size of each. I mean, what I’ve read so far (and I haven’t finished the series, by the way) is 7 times The Lord of the Rings! And people say that book is fat!

:D
:(

Iron Maiden’s coming to India AGAIN! And they’re coming in February (or March) AGAIN!

Well, it’s been another terribly loong time, something I seem to be getting quite good at. Sometimes I think I should announce a hiatus, but I end up thinking that I might as well write an all-out post - but I somehow never quite end up getting there.

The problem with writing a post after such a long time is that I have absolutely NO idea where to start. I’ll simply compromise by posting parts of what I intended to earlier, and then some more.

So anyway, I’ve made some small changes around here, such as, bringing the links back. They’re now updated and contain most of the blogs that I read. If, by any chance, I’ve forgotten to add yours truly, do tell me. And I’ve also added the links of photoblogs and comic blogs.

Chalo then, more later (Now that I come to think of it, I had to say something about Harry Potter).

By the way, here is an interestingly weird something I found:

I hope the scoreboard’s lying. I really hope so.
I’m looking at it online and it says 0-4 for the 4th set.

0-4!!!


0-4!!

Federer let Nadal break him twice in the fourth set!? Twice!!


All hell breaks loose

I know, another rather long hiatus, partly due to my Mumbai trip, and partly for no reason at all ;) . Another post describing my (very) (un)memorable trip is due, but here’s what just happened:

So, I was watching TV, when all of a sudden, the channels start showing a lot of disturbance. I wait a few seconds, because I think I know what’s going on and, sure enough, a few seconds later my Tata Sky pops up with this:

Update: Sorry, guys, the images weren’t displaying - it’s fixed now.

When Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was to be released, there were loads of such rumours about the last two books floating about. Let’s see what’s come true so far, and what’s left to be known. [Stuff in gray is what’s already come true, stuff in blue is what I’d like to know, and stuff in red is what I think is unlikely. Stuff in black: no comments :) ]

Update: The comments got turned off somehow. Don’t ask me.

Another really long, really abrupt pause (if I can use that here). The board exams came and went and in a few days, the results (yikes) will be coming out. Okay, so just checked the CBSE Results site and class 12 results are out on the 25th! So ours couldn’t be more’n a couple of days away (relatively speaking, that is)!!!

What else? Hmm, nm as I would say if I were chatting right now. Which by the way, I’m not. I’ve somehow lost that oh-so-much interest that I used to have. That could, of course, be because I don’t have Adium.

Oh btw, I have succeeded in relocating my blog (which you must’ve realised if you’re here). Hope the new URL is easier to remember…
And, for those of you who were subscribing to my feed, it’s (duh) changed. I’m also not using Blogger’s feed thingy anymore. So the new URL is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/sahil. Syndicate now!

Anyway.
So, hmm, I can’t remember what else I’ve been doing all this while, because it has been sooo loong. I’ve realised that the only time I feel like writing a blog post, is when I’m not on the computer…weird. Maybe I should get me a laptop.

G2G.

More about everything later.

It’s been really long since I’ve known this - just never got around to posting about it (especially since it wasn’t exactly good news from my point of view). Anyway, ladies and gentlemen, for those of you didn’t know, Eddie is coming to India!

It was just recently that I was wondering - without much hope - how cool it would be if Iron Maiden came to India (without much hope because when you live here, you don’t dream that such things could actually happen). And then, when I came to know that they were coming, I got all excited, but then I saw this:

Wheeew!

Perfect.

So, we (finally) had our Exun Farewell today in Nirulas (Chanakya). It was rather good - there were more people than last year (although that’s probably because we have more members now). Here’s a (random) list of much of what happened:

1) Kartikeya and I were the only two (of around ten, officially) tenthies present
2) When we arrived (Karky and I) we found loads of people standing outside under the (wrong) impression that sir hadn’t arrived
3) Aditya Jain’s driver had him and many of the juniors gallavanting to god-knows-where till they finally succeeded in reaching [the correct branch of] Nirulas
4) Mohit sported a really cool haircut
5) Sid (one of the twelfthies, ie, one of the people for whom the farewell was being held) completely forgot about the farewell
6) We had pizza. Lots of it. Around 20 I think.
7) Karky got terrrorized by Gudi and Mohit
8) Sauce, mustard and chilli flakes got put into a total of three coke glasses (as opposed to one, last year)
9) The juniors actually said that it tasted nice
10) We took photos (obviously!)

______

* Well, it might just be that sauce is miscible in Coke, whereas mustard isn’t, but who cares?

Wow, that was one helluva long time. And I was getting soo irritated by the ‘Merry Christmas’ smiling at me every time I arrived here. Well, then … it having been so long and all, I decided to write a post about most of what’s been happening (which isn’t much, by the way).

2007 - the new year and everything - was kicked off in one of the most enchanting ways possible by [ahem] the pre-board exams†. Legend has it that these are actually tougher than the [shudder] boards, and I don’t think we’ll be disappointed, although some people still managed to do [really] well. To top it all off, I also missed two of my exams (English and Science), which was one of the prominent reasons that lead to the increased wastefulness of January. Even when the pre-boards finished, there wasn’t that much end-of-the-exams-let’s-party joy because the day after the following day, we had our Maths [shudder] Board Exam Practical. And the SSt Project Viva. And the Computer Board Exam Practical. And the Science one, too. (Obviously not all on the same day).

But even then all this might have finished by the 24th. Except that on the 27th, we had this Aptitude Test in our school for selecting people for IIT (and Medical) coaching classes. And that wasn’t the end of it either. After that, I still had to give the pre-board papers I missed (both of them). And so it went on till 2nd February, leaving exactly one month (or, as I like to think of it, 28 days) for the Boards.

* Sigh *

Okay, first of all, here’s wishing everyone a very Merry Christmas.

Okay, so that was one huge hiatus.
So much has been happening, and I haven’t written for so long, I feel rather bad about it.

We had EXUN 2006 and then DPSMUN (well, there was a difference of a whole month, but what can I say), both of which deserve their own posts, which I’ll get around to doing sometime…

And then, when I got into this mood of writing on my blog, I fell sick, which is becoming quite a feature of December, and - consequentially - something I’m getting terrifically bugged about. I’ve just about recovered and I’m doubly put off about that.

Plus, our pre-boards are coming and I’m sunk worse than a hundred-tonne lead sphere tied to another hundred-tonne lead sphere tossed from somewhere high up into the Pacific. So you can count me as triply put-off.

By the way, I saw this message when I opened my Blogger Dashboard today, which means I’m allowed to switch to Blogger Beta (at last), and I’ll be doing that soon, which also means this template will probably crash. You can expect it to have already happened, coz I’m gonna do it as soon as I press publish.

Okay, so this isn’t quite everything I wanted to say about Artemis Fowl: The Lost Colony - in all probability, I still am going to say a lot more about it sometime soon. I just guessed that not quite everyone I knew who likes the series had read the latest book.
Well, anyway, I bought the hardcover version of the book which, when I bought it, was the only one that existed here. It looks really nice with its silver cover and red-lettering. The back cover doesn’t really tell you much - but what you do notice is that Eoin Colfer’s finally realised that no one who doesn’t know him well can get his name right (and probably, many people who do know him well can’t get it either). So the book’s cover mentions twice that ‘Eoin’ is pronounced as ‘Owen’ with one of the mentions also carrying the comment ‘Not as difficult as it looks, is it?’

I really like surprise holidays. Simply because you get to know just a few hours before that “school’s gonna be closed tomorrow”. And especially in this case, the school actually sent us e-mails to inform us about the holiday. Sweet!

Excerpts:

Well, I seriously never expected that I’d not post for over a month! But, I dunno, we had exams and all, and for some reason, although I did come on the computer, I neither felt like chatting, nor posting on my blog for some reason.

Anyway, the exams were okay, not by far the best (or even close to it) that I’ve ever given, but who cares? I mean, it ain’t even getting added anywhere. These exams were also the ones during which I slept the latest (I sleep late at night rather than get up early in the morning). And surprisingly, my maths exam went off quite well. Our teacher corrected the papers even before the exams finished.

So, not many people did not know that there was an Apple event on 12 September where they were going to release some exciting new products, of which the iMac Core 2 Duo was not a part.

Well, in our school at any rate, German is supposed to be the easiest third- and therefore, second-language that one can take. Me, I disagree. And so would any other tenthy or ninthy. Honestly, if German can be said to be easy, it’s only because the level of German in our school is really low – which means that an eigthy knows about as much German as an eight-year old German. And anyway, German was only scoring (was because it isn’t scoring any more) because the syllabus wasn’t much, the paper wasn’t long and one didn’t study in each and every German class.

Now, German is exceedingly tough. As a language, at any rate, it seems to me to be loads more complex (as I’ve already mentioned before). And the papers no longer seem to be too short. See, normally, a German test can be completed in 20 minutes and an exam in, say, around half an hour to 45 minutes. But on Monday (last Monday, that is) we had this special German test which took a whopping one hour to complete (which, in case you haven’t noticed, is even more than the time taken to complete an exam). And, of course, the marks we got were inversely proportional to the time taken to complete the paper. The paper consisted of 3 essays and 2 comprehension passages. Questions in the comprehension passage all had answers of 2 lines, and were all of 3-4 marks each!

So, we had this Poetry Recitation competition in our school today, and I participated in it (albeit I hadn’t really any choice). It was, let me tell you, unbelievably stupid. For one thing, the theme was “Seasons” (though that’s not the stupid bit) and rules like the time limit were told to us two periods before the competition (that’s not the stupid bit either). The stupid bit starts when I tell you that no one was allowed to take the paper with the poem written on it up onstage for some absurd reason that if you take the paper you’ll keep looking into it and so you won’t manage to have proper expressions.

Well, this is just to say that I’m working on it (again) after a long break. So you might see some odd stuff going on - try to ignore it for a while, okay?

I like this! See for the site statistics for this blog, I’m using Google Analytics because I got an invitation from them (I applied for it). Anyway, so here’s what I see in the browsers being used by visitors to this site:

This is the second time I’m typing this whole thing out. Really, it’s too much. The electricity has gone for over 3 hours today. It goes each and every time when I have time to do something on the computer. And of course, the UPS can only show it’s total lack of being uninterrupted…

No, it’s just too bad. You know, just a few days after I first saw Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, I got to know that a sequel was being made. And of course, I decided that time only that I must see it.

Then later I came to know that it was being released on July 5, except it came here only 2 weeks late. Well, anyway, ever since then I’ve been wanting to see it, and somehow or the other, I don’t seem to get the chance. Either dad’s to busy, or I have to go for a competition, or my sister’s got some work, or there’s no time…well, you get the gist.

Argh!

And you thought this blog was already dead.

No, really! This is definitely the limit! For, let me see, four days now, I have been unable to visit any blogspot.com blog! This has, you know, been highly irritating, ‘cause I can’t see my own blog and neither can I go to others - and even the feeds don’t work. Till today, I didn’t know why this was happening - I thought that maybe it was some problem with the blogspot servers or something…

But the real reason (or what seems to be the real reason) is dumb - just plain dumb. It seems that the Ministry of Communication of the Government of India has banned all these blogs, for some unknown reason. So, because of said unknown reason, all of us innocent people have to be denied the pleasure of visiting blogs!

Me, I don’t believe in astrology, no sir. Probably for the main reason that astrologers are hardly ever right, like in this example: An astrologer said that Brazil was going to win the World Cup, and, of course, when Brazil went for a six, he must’ve felt really stupid. So here’s the pithy way in which he tries to defend himself, “Well, you know, my prediction that Brazil would win the Cup was made just for fun, it wasn’t based on any theory as such.” Really!
So, well, going by all this, you can’t really blame me when - weeks ago - Mars came close to Saturn for the first time in ever so many years, and astrologers said that the World Cup would have an unlikely winner. Slowly, of course, this began to come true as Brazil lost. But, even then, I couldn’t have imagined that Italy would take away the cup. Sad…even till the final, I was rooting for France.
Then of course, Zizou had to go and start headbutting people. I mean, he really shouldn’t have lost control like that - if he’d been there, France might just have won the Cup (though there’s no saying about that - Buffon’s a good goal keeper). Still, Zidane did at least win the Golden Ball.

Another ‘inhuman’ post, I guess.
Anyway, I subscribe to the Artemis Fowl newsletter, you know (or is that the Eoin Colfer newsletter?). So, it was said that the fifth Artemis Fowl is being released in September. Well, it seems that they’ve preponed it, so now it’s releasing on August 3. Which, by the way, is really very good.

Check out the newsletter here.

Well, as Diggi says, 8-bit games are fun. I mean, all right, forget the graphics, but there really is something catchy about them. I’m really not going to start harping on about 8-bit games, whatever you need to know can be found out here.
What I did want to say is that some time ago, I found loads of these games on my computer. Their average size being no more than 250 KB (yes, kilobytes :D ), I’ve decided that if you want them, you’ve only got to ask. Here’s a complete list of all the ones I have:

//Updated and edited

Did you really think that I would waste my time writing “Windows Live Messenger” in the title? :D
Well, so MSN Messenger 7.5’s replacement has been released today. And with a new name - Windows Live Messenger. “This is the same Messenger you know and love, only better,” says Microsoft. I wanted to try it out.
I knew that it was being released today, so I headed off to the download site to get it. And god! it was one heck of a download at 14.6 MB!! I mean, v7.5 was no more than 8 megs, but fourteen! Anyhow, with a not-so-very slow ADSL connection, it downloaded pretty fast, starting at this speed:

The fifth book in the series due to release in September!

So, finally, I’ve succumbed to my wish of having a personal blog. I mean to say, I’m part of a team blog too, but, like you know, there are some things which one can’t go about writing on a blog like that. Well, for your information, this ain’t my first personal blog either, but it is the one I intend to continue with (unlike the other ones I ditched :D ).
Normally, a person would put some stuff about himself in a first post, but I hate “About Me”s so I’m not gonna do it. I just can never think of something to say for a thing like that (see my profile to get what I mean :) ).

So keep checking for updates - Subscribe to my feed (the link is in the sidebar too)
The design of this blog I’ve made myself, but it isn’t even near completion - I’m feeling a bit lazy as of now - I guess I’ll complete it sometime soon. The shoutbox needs to be done, the item page stuff needs to be changed, etc, etc……