Telephone behind a glass partition

Book Meme

November 12th, 2008 Roshan

He had just finished, and had put the packet in his pocket, when in the court below resounded the cry:… - Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky.
I’ve been reading this book for a while now, and it is depressing. I don’t think I’m going to finish it. How did it all start? Well, one day I told myself, “I shall no longer be ignorant of English literature, I shall read The Classics”. Well here I am, with a Classic, and it’s goddamn depressing.

Saw this on the blog of Jono Bacon of Jokosher fame. Because it’s so cool, I’m going to share:

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Pick the closest book, not your favourite. C. & P. was nearly edged out by my cousin’s Engineering Mathematics. Close one.

As revenge for previous acts, and just because I want to hate on some people, I demand that everyone do this.

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It’s a bird, it’s a plane,

June 25th, 2008 Roshan

Someone on digg linked to this incredible artist who posts on Flickr under the name The Searcher. I just can’t stop browsing through his work, the words accompanying the painting as much a part of the entire artwork as the drawings.

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Din Din Wo

May 6th, 2008 Roshan

Posts like this are probably a reasonable indicator of how much productive activity I’m currently engaged in. I picked this game up from Chitra the Physicist, and it’s loads of fun, and considering my predilection for letting machines tell me The Truth, I couldn’t resist. The way it works is you put your playlist on shuffle and then hit next for each question, the song’s name being your answer. So here we go:

• If someone says “is this okay?” You say? - Never Been (Joe Savini). Ha ha, that is such an apt answer I can’t even say anything.
• What would best describe your personality? - Windy Town (Rod Stewart). Hey! That’s not funny.
• What do you like in a guy/girl? - Drive (Incubus). Ah, that’s interesting.
• How do you feel today? - For Yasgur’s Farm (Mountain). I’m sure there’s some really deep meaning to that but for the life of me, I can’t figure out just how I’d feel for Yasgur’s Farm..
• What is your life’s purpose? - All I want to do is make love to you (Heart). Ouch, some things are better kept private. I knew I should have put off ripping that old Top Rock CD till after I was done.
• What is your motto? - Paranoid eyes (Pink Floyd). It’s always a bad idea to ask The Final Cut a question, the answer is always freaking depressing.
• What do your friends think of you? - Brain Damage (Pink Floyd). Shit, when this came up I laughed out so loud my brother came in with that contemptuous look of his and the very next thought that crossed my mind was, “No one’s going to believe you.” so I hit next and I got Come Together (Aerosmith). I think I’ll go with the first one.
• What do you think of your parents? - Strip the Soul (Porcupine Tree). Ha ha ha, so unfair. Of all the people, my parents. Ha ha ha. Poor people, all that effort and they get this. Ha ha ha.
• What do you think about very often? - Joan Crawford (Blue Öyster Cult). Okay, I would just like to go on record saying that this is definitely not true. I didn’t even know of her till I first heard this song. Makes me wonder at the accuracy of this whole thing. Quite simply, “I did not think of that woman.”
• What is 2+2? - Can’t stop (Red Hot Chili Peppers). That doesn’t make any sense whatsoever, but By The Way was a reasonable album even if I liked only a few songs. If anyone wants to gift me something, Stadium Arcadium would be nice.
• What do you think of your best friend? - Obscured by clouds (Pink Floyd). Ha ha ha, ha ha. You know what this means. My friends, always seeing castles in the purple (hazy) sky.
• What do you think of the person you like? - Cheap Day Return (Jethro Tull). It’s not true! I swear! I’m sorry, it wasn’t me! And neither is that bit about Joan Crawford. Ha ha, cheap day return.
• What is your life story? - Child in Time (Deep Purple). That’s touching. Really, you don’t know how much it means to me. “See the blind man, shooting at the world.”
• What do you want to be when you grow up? - Mudmen (Pink Floyd). Okay, now this is getting embarrassing. I’ll leave that band out the next time this happens.
• What do you think when you see the person you like? - Hymn 43 (Jethro Tull). WHAT?! NO! Interesting coincidence that both similar questions got answers from the same album.
• What do your parents think of you? - Sound of pain (Vitor Cunha). That’s it, they deserve what they got for that previous question about them.
• What will you dance to at your wedding? - Goodbye Cruel World (Pink Floyd). Ha ha, this is such a perfect bachelor joke. Ha ha, if someone does actually play this song at my wedding, I swear…
• What will they play at your funeral? - Anytime (McAuley Schenker Group). Wow, thanks all of you. I’ll just have you know that I’ll be pissing on your bloody heads from Heaven.
• What is your hobby/interest? - Come out and play (Offspring). Wow, not true. I’m so sedentary I’m sometimes marked on maps of Madras.
• What is your biggest secret? - Round and Round (Beats working). That’s not a secret, everyone knows the time I did that.
• What do you think of your friends? - The Fletcher Memorial Home (Pink Floyd). That’s for you, you overgrown infants, a place of your own.
• What should you post this as? - Din Din Wo (Habib Koité). Cute, ‘Little Child’.

Not bad, not bad at all. Maybe there is something to this, it could be a worthwhile successor to the Calculator Of Truth, though I suspect that Windows Media Player isn’t too random with its shuffle.

Disclaimer:
I have a limited digital playlist, I bet it would’ve been totally weird if I could’ve included the cassette collection.

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Terrorists in our backyard

May 3rd, 2008 Roshan

Marc has previously posted on his blog in support of terrorists and delinquents like Anonymous. It’s only fair to point out how dangerous these people really are:

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Amie Street - Again

April 22nd, 2008 Roshan

I lost my old account details from more than a year and a half ago, so I have a new account there. Since it’s got that new fangled social networking thing going, here’s where you can choose to add me as a ‘friend’.
The way it works is that the most popular songs on the site cost something like 98¢ while songs that have just been added to the site are free. If I’d been in the US, Whitesnake’s latest album Good to be Bad would’ve been free. Ah, well. Here are the albums I got:

• Crazy World - Joe Savini
• Gangrene - Gangrene
• self titled - censored
• There’s something about Huckleberry’s music in Derail and Tragicomic that makes me miss Trichy loads. Sadly both those albums were only released to the US.
• I already have Us Against The Crown from State Radio, which is one awesome rock/reggae band.

While I’m talking in disjoint sentences like this I might as well mention the other music that’s caught my attention lately:

• Din Din Wo - Habib Koité and Bamada
  If anyone sees a place I can buy Muso Ko, let me know. I suddenly have a thing for Malian music. It came with Vista along with a bunch of other songs.
• Blue Öyster Cult - I’m crazy about this band’s music. Especially Astronomy, Burning for you, Joan Crawford and the old favourite (Don’t Fear) The Reaper.

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Airtel much faster than usual?

February 15th, 2008 Roshan

I once complained about Airtel, and what a bad experience getting a connection was, but once you’ve got the connection it’s perfectly alright and pretty reliable. I’d signed up for a 256kbps unlimited plan, and today when I was downloading java and tomcat off the ubuntu servers, I got the following readout:
Fetched 51.6MB in 12m5s (71.1kB/s)
Watching the stuff download and timing it, it was correct. I was getting 11 MB every 4 minutes. That’s more than twice the rated speed. I hope this isn’t some glitch in the system, maybe they’re just giving us a look at how faster connections are so that we’ll be tempted to upgrade. I must say that I am. The worst, of course, would be if they’ve accidentally switched us onto another plan with a bandwidth limit. I hate those, you have to keep track of how much bandwidth you use, the Internet shouldn’t be like that. Always on, ready to do what you want at a reasonable pace.

Marc claims that they must be stress-testing their connections, or perhaps letting people have extra bandwidth. That’s an interesting idea and he came up with an even better one — They’re showing off, ‘putting scene’ :D If so I hope they keep having excess space in their tubes :)

It’s still going on, I downloaded the Java SDK at 200 kB/s and now my upgrades are going at anything between 70-100kB/s.

UPDATE: As of now (8:40 IST), the connection is back to rated speed. It was fun to play with some high capacity though. My router mysteriously restarted just before I noticed that speed was back to normal. I hope the two things aren’t related.

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