Category Archives: Random

So what’s new

So what’s new?

I have not yet upgraded my MacbookPro to make it the dream machine I want without hurting my pocket as much. FYI, my pockets aren’t that deep yet. Never mind, I’m still looking for that well-wisher who can get me the required hardware.

Manchester United won the Premier League (#20) thanks to a hat-trick from RVP (#20). It was a good first half, and I felt bad for Rafael because he didn’t get to net a second stunner goal, which would have been very similar to this one here.

We are shifting to a new residence in this god-damned city. The address is ____, uh sorry were you interested in partying at my place? Buzz off! Not happening. Because parties are so 2010. I’m older now, more mature, more sensible, and yada yada. Cut the crap! Actually, I’m broke. Maybe later, I would love to have you around.

My job doesn’t suck. Nnuf said!

Iron Man 3 sucked. I think people need to understand that a superhero movie needs a super-hero in a costume saving the planet or whatever, not a super-sucker in a costume trying to save his lass.

I am a sucker for awesome typography and good design. And I’ve been trying to get my blog look in a particular way that I would love. As of now, I’ve chosen this Twenty Thirteen theme by the guys at Automattic. It’s a great theme. Looks clean, has good seriffonts, isn’t messy with sidebars, is responsive, and  is a single-column layout. Not perfect, but sweet! #YouKnowWhatIMean. I’ve been thinking of self-hosting the blog, but I have filed it under low-priority because there are way too many things going on in life which need attention.

Talking about attention, I would rather have HTC pay some attention to marketing the HTC One. In spite of the fact that, the One is an awesome creation in terms of design, HTC seems to be playing too much of a nice guy in this race for smartphone market share dominance. Samsung has done a good job marketing its Galaxy series in India. There are discounts, cash-backs, free storage and/or flip-covers, and any random offer you can think of. Plus, there is the fact that the Galaxy S4 can pretty much fetch the cola from the fridge for you. It is that feature rich. So much for redundancy and bloatware.

Marco Arment  sold Instapaper. Yahoo bought Summly. Google bought Wavii. One of my best friends will soon be a proud owner of a brand-new LGGoogle Nexus 4. And I need to buy a couple of shorts for the Gurgaon summers.

Logging out now.

Upgrading the machine

There comes a time when old seems slow, new seems ruthlessly fast and horribly expensive. Not much you can do about it, but I am thinking of engaging the dark side to upgrade my Macbook Pro through some DIY.

I have owned a Macbook Pro since 2009 and it still kicks ass maybe because it hasn’t had to deal with any major processing aside from an infrequent need for gaming. It runs Mountain Lion (briefly Ubuntu Quantal Quetzal), has 4GB of RAM and a 2.26GHz processor (C2D). The two complaints I have against it are its hard drive – mere 160GB – and its boot-time – 33s. A lower memory means frequent deletion of hard drive space. And that means a limited on-the-drive music collection plus those occasionally loud, fan-spin noises.

There have been about four revisions to the MBP line-up since my mid 2009 machine. I definitely don’t intend to let go of my machine simply because this is my first laptop and it has served me well. It still does! Since buying a new MBP is out of question, I have decided to rip apart my machine and upgrade it myself.

So, this is what I am thinking:

As of now, both these purchases combined are going to cost me approx. Rs. 8000/- more in India. And that is a big price if you earn as much as I do and as timely as I do!

And, here’s the plan:

  • Ask a friend (or a friend’s friend) who is dropping by India to get the components from the US – if you can help me here, well and good. Else, I’ll go figure.
  • Once I have the components, one trip to the Nehru the Places can land me with some neat, shiny tools for the handy-work
  • Upgrading the machine would be cake walk. I know!

But, here’s the question:

  • Anybody know someone who has upgraded the RAM and HD of their laptop (PC/Mac) without upgrading the processor?
  • The above upgrades would definitely improve performance. But, would those upgrades be worthwhile if I am not upgrading the processor (it’s a Core2Duo 2.26GHz)?

Any help/advice would be deeply rewardedappreciated. If you have nothing to add, stick around for a month and I’ll definitely post something about the machine upgrade.

in a dream

The jeans that never was

When I was in school, I’m guessing in the 5th or 6th standard, there was the case of this lost jeans, a case I could never really figure out. And I don’t know why that bloody event comes to my mind now, when I hardly care about the jeans I wear.

What happened (or not happened) is that my parents had bought me a jeans. And it was a really weird-ass coloured jeans – something like an algae green mixed with blue or something, grotesque in short. Actually, I don’t even remember the colour as much as I do this incident. But I know, for sure, that the colour was fucking weird. Like even in those juvenile days, who the fuck wore an algae colored jeans, I must have thought!

Now, my parents have always been very sensitive to my choice. Either they know I’ll like something they want to buy for me or they don’t. When they do, they buy that something and when they don’t they don’t buy that something because I don’t use that something if I don’t like that something. These choice-paradigms have led to far too many ego-centric tug-of-wars/tugs-of-war. And they happen till date (I’m 27 now!) and I love them for that.

Back to the jeans, I recollect in my memory that I hadn’t liked the jeans initially. So off went the jeans into the darkest corners of the kapaat (cupboard in Marathi), away from my sight. And I had forgotten about the jeans for a long time, I remember. But then, sometime later, I changed my mind towards that colour. Maybe because I saw someone else flaunt that jeans or maybe because I overheard my parents discussing whom to pass over the jeans to since I wouldn’t be interested in wearing their hand-picked, love-emboldened jeans and my brother was too young to be wearing jeans at all. Both reasons seem plausible if I am to believe that I have myself figured out, which I haven’t.

And then, I decided to come out at my parents and tell them that I wanted that new jeans. That I wanted to accept that lovingly bought gift. My parents (mostly mom, the one with whom I had these stupid discussions) denied everything I just told you in the previous paragraphs.

They denied the jeans’ existence. They denied my rejection of the colour. They denied any discussion. To persuade me into believing that there was never any such incident, they asked me to describe the jeans. When I did, they assured me that they would have never bought such a stupid jeans for me. Forget that, they hadn’t even discussed anything remotely close to passing over the jeans to some cousin after my refusal to accept. I was asked to search the kapaat, and the divan-bed. Obviously, I couldn’t find anything. And sometimes when I have recollected that incident, I have tried extracting the truth from my parents.

Today, I remember this incident with much less doubt. I have long accepted that maybe it was just a bad dream, and that maybe I was too small to understand the concept of a bad dream. Maybe woke up from my dream and just chose to extend the dream into reality. The last time I thought about this incident must have been when I was with my previous employer in Gurgaon.

It’s not for nothing that we cherish the childhood and wish those days came back. The days when you could get away with stupid shit like that. The days when you could hold your parents responsible for your mistakes, and continue to live your life. When you didn’t care if you were being fanatic about something or just plain dumb. Those were the days when you had zero liability – not even to yourself. Your conscience was the one part in your mind which urged you to push your mom for ice-cream on the way to school. Most of all, those were the days which your parents made special for you no matter how big an arse you must have been.

Image credit: http://www.inadreammovie.com/

via Topin10.com

The social media vortex…

… sucks the concentration out of you and infuses you with as much procrastinating elements. Not that you don’t enjoy the social interactions. Those friends, those profile pictures, those wedding albums, those torrential downloads, those interesting videos on YouTube, those rude yet funny tweets, those song recommendations by a friend, those Oscar nominated movies, those recently pirated TV shows. But to what end?

How many times have you just begun studying, reading, or working on a particular task but ended up on Twitter or Facebook or the-social-forum-next-door? Well, I started writing this post the moment I realized that I had ended up watching a video, on YouTube, which was recommended to me after I had watched a video posted/RTed by someone I follow on Twitter, which was opened to check the ‘recommended accounts’ by Twitter’s auto-generated, algorithm-following, account mailed to me on my Blackberry, which I had opened to switch it to silent mode just so that I won’t be disturbed while studying. Fuck, I’m starting my studies now.

First post blah blah

This is a first post by a first-time blogger. So, I might not be able to write a lot because I couldn’t drill down to any specific topic. All that I am going to do in this post is go on and on about some blah things from yada yada.

Let’s start with why am I here, on a blogging platform. 1) I like the idea of having my own personal space and being able to rant, complain, opine, etc.; 2) I want to be able to ‘write’ because I think I would think better only if I could write better; 3) I want to know if I make sense, if not, then why. So basically trying to fire random bullets and see what lives; 4) I am bad at remembering things (I, sometimes, forgot to brush in the morning!) and in general, I prefer noting stuff down as notes, events or reminders; and finally 5) I have had enough of this whole lazy-life, doing-nothing-constructive routine which I hope to change, just one bit.

Many a times, I have bored myself thinking about the monotonousness of the life that we live. Not in terms of days being the same all over, year after year. Not in terms of career aspirations nor in terms of goal attainment. But in terms of a general way of life. In terms of an hourly predictability. Don’t we want to live in surprises and act as if we are being led by some heavenly might. Life does call for some randomness; like a randomly arranged road trip to Dharamsala or a randomly organized cocktail party with random friends from office. It does give us a surprise adrenaline rush, right?

You see, randomness brings along with it a great sense of adventure. A feeling of unpredictability. But not carelessness. A sense of not knowing what is next, however patiently waiting for it to crawl upon you. Not knowing when the fall awaits nor knowing when someone is going to punch you. It is the thin line between being thoughtful and being thoughtless. As random and as un-predictable as the blinking of our eyes. It’ll either make you cautious or it’ll make you indifferent. But it’ll surely make life hell lotta fun. Many like it that way. Some live that way. Exactly how Arun Verma became Mr. India in the movie ‘Mr. India’. Such kick-ass fun, innit?

To elaborate on the kind of life I dread, let’s pick up Mr. Superhero. I have idolized many superheroes in my childhood & teenage, but now I have moved on beyond these superhero dreams (actually not yet! Just last week I bought two tees – Batman and Superman). Many of us worship Batman more than Superman or Spiderman. Most frequent reasons are here. I have another reason for preferring the Dark Knight. Spiderman and Superman both can sense danger and hence, out of some self-taught sense of righteousness, they have to run for the rescue of the human-being in danger. I mean, how un-private can life be for them! (I read somewhere that people who are absolutely punctual must have an awful sex life) In contrast, remember how Batman can only come to the rescue if he sees the Bat-beam in the sky and that too at night; other times being those when he knows that someone is in danger. So basically, he still has a peaceful day to live his life the way he wants it to be.  For the unpredictability part, The Joker completes that inadequacy in Batman’s life, doesn’t he! The Joker doesn’t want to save the world and run around in tight lycra pants. He, on the other hand, lives the perfect life. Unpredictably mad and random! In fact, in many episodes of this series, the Joker is shown as being the perfect villain. One who inspires, one who competes and one who strives to make the hero more perfect. Nevertheless, I came across this awesome repertoire of brilliant Batman graphics. Check them out!

I don’t think my first post really signifies anything beyond it being a first post. I am sure that most of you readers can spot the amateur OR level 1 state of the above post. But, don’t judge me and yeah, I am open to suggestions or comments.