Falling short of adjectives..

1000 hrs IST. It was a live 'telecast'. Pallavi and I were all ears and looking intently at the screen. The radiologist took a while to adjust the zoom level and setup an appropriate viewing angle. After 60 odd seconds, tears welled up in my eyes. Tears of joy, of course.

We were viewing the sonogram of our fetus, aged approximately 13 weeks. At that age, we could clearly see a very cute little nose and small lips. The head was about half the length of the fetus body size. This changes as the baby grows, we were told. As the radiologist moved the transducer (probe), we could see the remainder of the fetus. And as I saw the cardiac activity (heart beats), my heart skipped a beat. The heartbeat rate was visibly fast, approximated at 168 bpm! Almost twice than the average adult heartbeat rate. And then we focussed on the petite fingers - oh so sweet :)

I was trying to store as much of the video as I could in my permanent storage, since we wouldn't be able to lay our hands on the film (neither the video nor any image).

Putting very simply, it's one of the best things that has happened to me.

Got a Compaq Presario C797VU today. Installed Fedora Core 9 (Sulphur). Installation was a breeze, everything was just fine till I realised that configuring the onboard wireless device wasn't going to be easy.

Read up a lot of forums, did a lot of jazz, played around with the system, and what you need to do is the following:

1) Identify current kernelversion, identify exact wireless card model
# uname -r
# lspci | grep Atheros
2) Download package kernel-devel matching current kernelversion [kernel-devel-$(uname -r).rpm] using rpmfind.net (do not use yum install!)
3) Install package kernel-devel downloaded from rpmfind.net
# rpm -ivh kernel-devel-$(uname -r).rpm
4) Download madwifi drivers (latest stable version) from madwifi.org
5) Build madwifi drivers [assume drivers are downloaded to ./madwifi directory]
# cd madwifi
# make
# make install
# modprobe ath_pci
# modprobe ath_hal
6) Confirm that system recognises your wireless device
# iwconfig | egrep 'ath|wifi'
You're ath0 device is the one you're concerned with.
7) Configure your wireless device settings using GUI or any suitable way
8) You're done!

Just do it!

For reference sake, tech specs:

Laptop: NB Compaq Presario C700 series
Model: C797VU
CPU: intel Core 2 Duo Processor 2 Ghz (2 MB L2 Cache)
FSB: 667 Mhz
RAM: 2 GB DDR-II (1 GB default, I ordered an additional 1 GB)
Wireless: Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01)

committing a crime on behalf of bhajji..

sequence of events (sydney test, india versus australia, day 5, jan 06 2008)

bhajji pats brett lee on his bum for some reason.
brett lee doesnt care, symonds gets agitated (ever tried patting someone on their bum while a monkey is watching?)

symonds walks up to bhajji.
symonds: "what did you just do? dont you know how to play cricket?"
bhajji: "shut-up oye."

symonds: "any punjabi knows how to play cricket."
bhajji: "oye chup oye. teri maa ki.."

symonds: "hang on, did you just say 'monkey'?"
bhajji: "shit man. sachin paaji!"

(symonds approaches umpire mark benson while bhajji calls sachin and expresses fear that symonds understands punjabi.)

sachin: "well.. why, what happened?"
bhajji: "maine symonds nu kahaan teri 'maa ki..' usko samaj mein aa gaya sachin paaji, gaya umpire ke paas. kya karun?"

sachin: "oye dont worry oye, he thought you called him a 'monkey'!"
bhajji: (smiles) "haan phir theek hain.."

mark benson: (covering his mouth fearing lip readers) "harbhajan, symonds says you just called him a 'monkey'. is that true?"
bhajji: (heaving a sigh of relief): "yes, yes. just a 'monkey'. nothing else"

mark benson: "i will be complaining against you to the match referee."
bhajji: "oye sachin paaji!"

and eventually, the 3 match ban is handed over to bhajji!

Download your favourite Youtube/Google videos..

Always wanted to download those YouTube/Google videos? Here's how you can do that without the help of any application that requires installation:

1. Go to youtube / google videos site.
2. Search your favorite video.
3. Copy the main URL (from browser URL window) of the video.
4. Go to http://www.vixy.net
5. Paste the copied URL into the URL input box on the site.
6. Select your favorite video format (avi, 3gp etc).
7. Click on 'Start'.
This will convert your video from .flv format (used by youtube)
to the format you have chosen and will provide you a link
to the converted file.
8. Click on the link to download the video

The formats also include the iPod video format! That means iPod users like me dont have to process them through another round of conversion! Yippee..

Porok - The XBOX 360 Commercial..

XBOX 360 was launched quite sometime back, and in India, the first commercial that was aired, was in my opinion, an advertising masterpiece. At least for its time, it certainly was. The advertisement has nothing nerdy in it, no technical jargon; in fact nothing fancy about it.

The entire advertisement is setup in a village. All through the advertisement, you'll see and hear people talking about 'Porok', which is a sport played in rural India, wherein one has to take the stance of a fighter cock, and butt the opponent out of the circle in order to win the game. As the advertisement moves on, they've shown how 'Porok' becomes popular in a village, the noteworthy point being the rate at which its popularity soars.

The advertisement creators thought that 'Porok' was so weird and wonderful that they took this sport and blew it out of proportion (as you'll see in the advertisement) to denote the power of gaming.

Another interesting thing is that the language spoken by the villagers is a mix of a variety of Indian native languages, which kept me guessing for a long time. Many friends made a lot of claims - none of them turned out to be true. We eliminated a lot of languages that we knew ourselves, but India, having a considerable number of states, each of which has its own language, makes it difficult to say which is the one being spoken. The subtitles do the job though of conveying the meaning of whatever gibberish one can hear in the background.

The advertisement ends with the tagline "game on", which is the XBOX 360 tagline, and the last line spoken before the tagline, actually translates to "Porok afternoon cock horn, eunuch inside big bangle insect".

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Advertisement details and credits
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Product:

• XBOX

Title:

• Porok

Agency:

• MTV India

Creatives:

• Cyrus Oshidar (Executive Creative Director)

• K. M. Ayappa (Copywriter)

• Mahendra Bhatula (Copywriter)

• Hiren Kapadia (Agency Producer)

Director(s):

• Mahendra Bhatula

• K. M. Ayappa

Prod. Co:

• MTV India

Country:

• India

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

game on!

Not even insane!

Little Susie was playing with Little Marla. Suddenly Little Marla started to laugh at Little Susie who began to sing very loudly. Listening at Little Susie sing, Little Marla came towards her, slapped her hard till Little Susie cried. And then Little Marla laughed and went home. Little Susan who was watching all this from her park bench, suddenly fell off and died. It was then that Little Susie ate the candy which transformed her into a frog. And she couldn't have been anything else but a frog. That is the only thing that happened on Good Friday.

Illiteration..

Constant consonant cannot
Create casual coherency
Clicking camera causes
Content characterisation
Confessedly?

Caesar ceased conquering
Citizens crucified Christ
Could Cartman confuse Counsellor
Can coupled consonants
Correspond?

Cut crap - catch cocaine
Code company - cease illiteration.