a mARTIAN dIARY

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