January 23, 2008
Heath Ledger, the fellow who played The Joker in the latest Batman film has been found dead. Jesus that’s so sad, man. The inevitable facing-off-with-Batman jokes aside, it’s weird that people can die of an overdose of pills that were prescribed to them. I mean, is the normal dosage so close to the dangerous dose that it’s easy to kill yourself by taking too much? This explains that article I read a couple of days ago in some national medical journal about hundreds of thousands of people being admitted to hospital in the US because of incidents related to their being treated for something else in the first place. There was a reference to Israeli studies that showed that mortality rates dropped at a hospital during a doctor’s strike or something like that. Madness.
Posted by roshan.george under Health, Movies | Comments (9)
January 19, 2008
They got them in the Bilkis Bano case. Finally. I know it takes time, but 6 years is long and if we think it isn’t then there’s something wrong with the system. I hope those psychopaths get put behind bars for ever. Sadly the guys who incited them will probably get away. Such is life, we must feed on the small fish sometimes.
Posted by roshan.george under India, Politics, Society | Comments (1)
January 19, 2008
You know, we wish each other on all sorts of occasions, sometimes we call up a friend after a long while just to wish them on the beginning of a New Year. We do all of this because we care, or that’s the idea anyway. But tell me something, does it still show that you care if you replace that phone call with an automated calling machine that just calls each number in your phone book and says, “Happy New Year, X, I wish you a prosperous new year, and hope that you’ll enjoy yourself.” Man, that would suck. How different is this?
Of course I have to admit, it’s better than nothing. At least you get some greetings instead of none from people who you’re not likely to meet. Incidentally, guys, you’re all engineers you know, you’re all taught how to program in a hundred different languages, I don’t get why you don’t edit those scripts so that they stop appending the advertisement at the bottom. I mean, it’s trivial.
Posted by roshan.george under Friends, Internet, Orkut | Comments (10)
January 19, 2008
Pipe pointed these out to me. They’re hilarious! I never thought you could ever have fun reading the Classifieds but Deccan Chronicle has managed to break the stereotype once more. Let’s see what they advertise:
- Male Gorgeous: Male to Male only. Head to Toe complete relaxation body massage, Hygienic North, South India masseurs anytime.
- Body Massage: Male to Male (Hotels/Doorstep). Complete Relaxation. Good Looking Guys. High Profile. Only Male Service.
- Mohini Friendship Club: Hi profile male/female contact for nice, real friendship (for earning).
There are hundreds more of these Friendship Clubs, each of them offering nice, sober friendships (for earning) and many more massage parlours all offering exclusive male-to-male massage only from hygienic, good looking guys to relieve tension. Ha ha, yeah right.
Posted by roshan.george under Madras, Reading | Comments (9)
January 17, 2008
I stay in the college residential halls for a couple of hours and have lunch sometimes. Last time I was in Selaiyur Hall, having nothing to do I snapped a couple of shots of college. The camera on the phone is funny and has some funny settings, if you don’t change the default you’ll get pictures that look like the aliens are landing. Yes I just ran a script to resize some of them and then resized and put the rest in last, it shows doesn’t it? :D Design was never my forte.
Anyway, the point is, it’s a pretty nice looking college.
Posted by roshan.george under College, Madras, Photos | Comments (20)
January 16, 2008
Wow…
I’m no Apple fan, but jesus, they make some beautiful stuff. Slightly less powerful than my current laptop and infinitely smaller for just 30,000 bucks more. I wouldn’t buy it even if I had the money and nothing to spend it on: stuff like this tends to break easy and I prefer rugged machines, but I can’t deny that it looks amazing. I wish I had 802.11n though.
In other news, I finally managed to move the old computer to the router and set it up as a headless server. It’s just sitting there, doing nothing at the moment but I plan on using it to download all my torrents and stuff. It’s got one non-working CD-ROM drive, so if you want to have a look at it you can. Also, keep away from Intex and Zebronics, they still fake ethernet cards claiming to be RTL8139D that are actually Silan Microsystems 92031. You can get them working properly with a little effort though. Such is life.
And Sun took over MySql? Interesting development.
EDIT:
And for the guy who came here searching for the driver for that NIC: Silan Microsystems Driver for Windows XP. You can also use it with ndiswrapper if you so wish. Have fun.
Posted by roshan.george under Tech, Yay | Comments (3)
January 15, 2008
This Sunday, me and the family went for a play by Basheer performed by Perch at the Museum Theatre. Apparently my granddad used to tell my father Basheer’s stuff all the time, so the parents were rather enthusiastic about the whole thing. Pipe and Bikram were there too - gone out of their minds. Anyway, the show was actually pretty damn good, and remarkably low priced for such a nice job. The play itself is really nice, I wonder how much I’ve missed out from not reading Malayalam literature. That’s why it’s useful to know people like Samyuktha who’ll tell you about stuff like this and not reserve tickets when you ask for them :P
It was lots of fun and it had all sorts of memorable characters and the like, and though in the beginning it seemed a bit forced, after a while everyone just slipped into their parts and it went off really well. There were some nice bits where they came to the audience and played around with a few of the front seat people, having a little fun at their expense. Yep, it’s worth watching but unfortunately Sunday was their last show. You can, however, watch next week’s play Sangathi Arinhya: Same group, same time, same place. And yes, don’t worry, it’s in English.
Posted by roshan.george under Art, College, Friends, Madras, Theatre | Comments (4)
January 15, 2008
There was that huge controversy over Harbhajan Singh making racist comments about Andrew Symonds, it was all over the news, and edged out ethnic violence in Kenya, Intel’s war with the OLPC, and the near end of the high definition format wars. Quite strange really that Indians are so untouched by ‘monkey‘ but so outraged at ‘poppadam‘, it has to be something to do with the religion and Hanuman and stuff like that. One would think that the people who find it offensive if people of another religion visit their places of worship would be the first to stand up against racial comments. Odd that, I didn’t see any of that.
Cricket Itself
It’s a boring game, really, and not particularly exciting except for the last few minutes but people still play large sums of money simply to have the chance to sit under the hot sun along with other sweaty tired people like them and talk about how advanced their nation is because they’re good at cricket. Perhaps, it’s the whole thing about cricket being a gentleman’s game. Or perhaps not. It isn’t. Not to the wildest imagination. It is a violent game, filled with unsportsmanlike behaviour, lies, cheating and a stupid adherence to so-called tradition to the detriment of fair play. Even worse, it has never been a gentleman’s game at any point of time when it was played between countries. Really, even under the watchful eye of the cliché police one is forced to quote George Orwell. Get over it, cricketers, you’re no gentlemen.
Racism
A touchy thing, racism, and one that Indians are not amateurs at. We’re professional bigots, talking about the stupid dalits, evilly reproducing people from other religions who hope to take over India, white men who defile our temples, heck we’re Masters of the Art. However, I doubt Harbhajan Singh intended to make a racial slur. As Pipe pointed out, he probably said “Teri maa ki…” :D
Well, okay, maybe not, but one has to stop and think: are words like ‘poppadom’ and ‘monkey’ really so offensive? I mean look at them - one is a food item, the other is an animal. Here we are, the most intelligent species on this planet and we spend our time calling each other the names of food items and animals and then we let our tribal blood boil and unleash modern-day animal screams. Douglas Adams was right about the dolphins.
I used to be a great subscriber to this anti-racism business, before I realised how stupid it is. I am now an anti-bigot, too much anti-racism is fluff that covers up real events. And words… words… words are just that, words — they don’t hurt you unless they’re from someone you care for, they don’t kill you or maim you and they don’t rip out your soul. Harassment’s a different issue, bullying’s something else: If someone comes up to you every day and puts you down, it’s not the fact that that person uses particular words that’s bad for you, it’s the fact that it is repetitive harassment. That sort of stuff can hurt people, really, reduce productivity, and drive them to feeling unappreciated and depressed. If a bunch of white kids pick on a black kid because he’s black the real offence is in the fact that they’re picking on the kid, the colour of his skin is less important. Think people, grow thicker skins not heads.
Posted by roshan.george under Confusion, Disasters, India, Politics, Rant, Sport | Comments (3)
January 13, 2008
Yay! I’ve got a whole week’s worth of holidays coming up, courtesy of it being Pongal for a few days. That’s one thing I love about India, there are always festivals for you to have holidays on. Of course, one thing I hate about India is the number of festivals involving a noisy bunch of people breaking melons on the roads and then proceeding to slip and crack their skulls on the same mashed melons a couple of days later. Like one of Pipe’s acquaintances said, “Why are they wasting vegetables?”
Anyway, what’s new is I’ll be posting much fewer ads after this last one because I can’t bear the sight of looking at the index page so full of that stuff. So another month and it’ll be clean all over again. It didn’t help that Google’s latest update sent my PageRank back down to 2 so I won’t get that many ads to post either. That’s a good thing, I suppose.
Posted by roshan.george under College, Internet, Madras, Yay | Comments (29)
January 12, 2008
Sometimes, when you want someone else to look at your blog but not see posts belonging to one category. Try the following link to my blog index for instance: George Files without Ads or Friends. You should see my index page without posts that belong to the Ads or Friends category. This is rather useful if you want people to just see certain posts of your blog and you have lots of categories. Just put it as a space separated list in the cat variable.
Here’s an example of a link:
http://blog.arjie.com/index.php?cat=-37%20-29
The %20 is a space, and the numbers 37 and 29 are the category ids for the categories that I don’t want to include. If you use the numbers without the - sign in front of them only those categories will be displayed.
Posted by roshan.george under Internet, Tech | Comments (0)
