a mARTIAN dIARY

Finally it happened…I had been mulling over it for 3-4 months now…but today I took the step and got my own domain

www.martiangeek.com

Have got wordpress installed there just now….didnt take even 5 min then mention in the manual :P 

am looking at how to transfer this blog there… and also about the structure of the site

Will update with details and how I did it once its over

Cheers till then or better still…

c ya there…..

 
They say everything happens for a reason.

This was taken while I was coming back after a birthday treat from one of my colleagues. The 20 Km drive along the Mysore road was one of the best me and my bike have shared with speeds topping at 120km/hr.
The scenery was just mind blowing and fate played her golden card with a sudden shower out of nowhere forcing me take refuge at this roadside temple.

A golden moment in my life. 

Being an avid fan of the Die Hard series, I was pretty eager to watch Die Hard 4, but with the movie ticket cost’s rocketing in Bangalore, I had taken one look (multiple “one look”s actually) at my wallet and had condemned myself to occasional leering at the odd trailers of it that were coming on cable. But last weekend all my wasted saliva’s tryst with life finally got a meaning as my **dear** friend Mr N got me a DVD of the same from his boss. Thank you N, looking forward to more accomplishments from you, in your new role in life, as the giver of meaning to things of aforementioned ilk.

This is not a Movie review, rather an observation on some of the things I saw in the film. For the uninitiated, rather than me killing the suspense, I would like to give Wikipedia do the honors @ here
The “firesale” (no it’s not a sari sale) that the movie revolves around seems to be very scary. Scary like the “Calling-911(100)-and-no-one-ever-answering-!” type scary. But when my wandering mind tried to apply the condition to my own country, Scary is not exactly the picture that came to my mind.

Let’s assume Mr ABC wants to “unleash chaos” and tries to do a firesale in India. He would have to start with shutting down transportation, street signals, trains etc. Now in the movie when all lights are green at the junction, the cars come crashing in from all directions. But anyone who’s familiar with driving in Bangalore roads know that lights mean shit (for a lack of a better word) and thus trusts it as much as he trusts the Indian railways to be on time. So in that sense, even if the hackers were to hack in to any traffic light control systems (which I think are anyway closed circuit systems in India), it can only improve our current state of traffic. As with the railways, instead of making the trains run late, he will probably have to make the trains run on time, if anyone is to notice.

I can’t even begin to imagine how he would go about local law enforcement and government agencies. He would probably get so entangled running from one office to the other than he would give up terrorism and take up asceticism.

Finally if he is industrious enough to reach the last stage where the power grids are to be brought down, which was neatly executed by the sexy Chinese gal (now THIS phrase is going to get me a LOOOT of hits from Google ;)), the poor, but sexy nonetheless, terrorist having to go around the whole of the city manually trying to switch off leaky and humming old transformers, only to realize that they are broken anyway.

****NERDISH PJ WARNING****

Now to end this of with the worst PJ possible, we can draw an analogy from control systems. Let’s take the case of traffic lights, we could consider the US system as a open loop system and ours as a closed loop ( with negative feedback!!! ) Theirs can be compared to open loop since (from the movie I am led to believe) that they are a largely conformist set of people, who are too dependent on the “basic” amenities in life to work like clock work, of course such a generalization leaves a lot of room for debate, but that’s the picture the movie paints. So their system’s gain is precisely controlled by people and factors external to the system itself.

As from control system theory we can get higher gains (translated to more efficient traveling) than a closed loop system, but at a price of lesser stability. Now think of Indian drivers as a closed loop system with negative feedback, by nature even if the lights are green they see a mirror image of themselves in every other driver and manually make sure the road is clear before crossing. The gain obtained (the gain here being multiple things like time taken, efficiency of the system etc) here is much less, but as control systems theory promises us, it comes with higher stability.

So my prayers go out to any poor terrorist who’s planning to do firesale, hoping that he reads this and sticks to the other type of firesale (of sari’s).

So finally I have a laptop thanks to Mr S (I still haven’t paid him the money and am hoping that a favorable mention in my blog would get him to climb down on the price :P). Of course blogging is one of the 100-reasons-when-you-want-reason reasons behind my investment of such a substantial amount in a single nest BUT surely more than 90% of the time this laptop has been open a particular “SimCity” program has been running which would by some rather bizarre twist of fate be usually found in the “games” section of most software download sites ( By the way for people thinking isnt that game OLD? Please do not think that I have such anachronistic fetish, its just that it’s the only game that I like which I have been able to get running on this King of OS’s that is Wista).

BUT there is another less understood human emotion behind it too….the more primal one that urges me…..to now proudly say that I am a laptop owner!!

You might think what in that right? Well to explain the connotations in my mind behind that I would have to take you back to my 5th standard when I had just moved to back to Cochin and I was one of few people in my class without a telephone. At lunch, we used to gather around and sit in circles, conversing with each other, along with the secondary activity of filling your stomach. Conversation topics usually ranged from that 9th standard couple that used to come to you primary section during lunch hours for privacy (if only they knew >:-) ) to the latest actors/actresses (mostly the latter for us! :P) . THEN there used to be some privileged topics. Mistake me not my friend; this is precisely the place from which now popular privilege membership idea of a popular airline originated. (But what to do, being as naive as we were we forgot to patent it) These were topics that were not trivial like the love affair of some petty seniors, but were privileged since to talk about then you had to have some privileges. One of them was the “phone” topic. To illustrate, one of the typical “phone” topic conversation went like “Eda A, dont tell me the solution of the question right now, I am not in the mood. Do one thing, in the evening when I am in the mood I will tele”call” you up and then you can tell me.” Then as the rest of the people sitting in the lunch circle would wonder what to utter Mr A would say, “Sure, or better I will call you up in case you forget!”. And both of them would have a satisfied smirk on their face and start munching on their chapaties with renewed vigor

I would like to clarify that this writer is not some bitter guy, who couldn’t let his childhood “traumas” sink but largely as a guy who, looking back at it now , finds it really funny thining about all the time spent dreaming about the day he could “get” into the privileged phone class! Of course by the time it happened to him newer groups had emerged like “The cable group” , “The Computer Group” “The Engaged Group”  etc (And on these lines he predicts that laptops will go out of fashion in 2-3 months, if not less)

Even though I have come to terms with the silliness and pettiness of all this, such feelings ingrained into me at a “innocent” (Sacchhii!!!) age, find solace in deepest corners of my mind, and return to fore with a vengeance when ever such  milestones are reached.

Anyways coming back some of my key learning’s out of all this is

1)You never are going to use a laptop for “educational” purposes
2)Windoze Wista sucks
3)Windoze Wsita Sucks!
4)Windoze Wista SUCKS!!!
5)OK, maybe I suck at using windoze Wista!

By the way for the geek among you the configuration is 

• AMD Turion™ 64 X2 TL-58
• Built-in wireless 802.11b/g
• Burns DVDs and CDs
• 160GB hard drive
• 1GB of DDR2 memory
• Windows Vista Home Premium