My Wierd Wired World

Today, I vacated the room that I’d been occupying in Begumpet for the past 11 months. I had stepped into that small rooms with my friend R on April 1st 2006 and exactly eleven months later, I cleared off. I’ve been house-hunting for quite a while now and though  it has been futile till now, I hope that we’ll strike something good pretty soon. Have now moved in with my folks, with whom I was staying prior to relocating to Begumpet. So its a sort of home-comng for me, considering the fact that much of my CAT-Prepping and Job-hunting were carried out from this very house. Feel sgood to be back here…but I sure do hope it is for a bref period of time……this interlude had better be a small one

Ever heard of the double in cricket? 100 Wickets and a 1000 runs and all such shtick! Well, the Wierd Wired World acheived a similar double today…..1000 Comments and 10000 Spam Comments reached on the same day

Thanks to the vistors for the former and thanks to Akismet for stopping all the latter.

P.S: I know this is a mundane off-topic post but just had to let it be known!

The Time: 6 AM on a saturday morning

The Place: Habsiguda X Roads

The Cause: A metal ad-board that is kept for dividing the bust-stop from the road

The actual event: I was pillion riding on a Pulsar dtsi…going along at a pretty moderate 60 kmph when suddenly this board appears outta nowehere and bam! both of us ram into that thing.

The Consequences: A sollen wrist fo my friend and a muscle-deep gash on my leg with an aded bonus of the silencer burning my calf.

The After-thoughts: We were pretty lucky there was no traffic behind us…..otherwise we would have been somewhere else right now!

The Rants: Why the hell these boards are kept smack in the middle of the road! Can’t they be kept a little to the side so that people going in the middle of the road can avoid them!

This saturday, one of by best friend and a long-standing roommate (3+ years in engineering and nearly an year while working) will be leaving the shores of the country onto the Queen’s kingdom. He’ll be slaving for the gori chamdis and will be hoping to make it big in the land of bacon-and-eggs! I wish him all the very best for his career and life out in England and sincerely hope that he will scale new heights of success in his work-life. He’s been waiting for this opportunity since a long time and now that he has finally got it, he’ll definitely make the most out of it. We’ve parted ways once before, when after a 3-year stay together while pursuing engineering he left to Bangalore and I chose to pitch camp in Hyderabad but back then I had the solace of knowing that he is back there and there was the assurance of meeting him once in a while. But now that he’s going so far, it somehow feels different. But life’s like that…we have to scale new peaks everyday in search for success and I am happy for him. Our group of friends had great plans about attending his grandiose wedding but all that seems like a far dream for now. Well, maybe not…I’m sure he’ll send us the flight tickets if he decides to get married in London

All the best ra…..

P.S: I was watching the episode of Friends yesterday where Joey leaves the apartment he shares with Chandler to live in a bigger & better place. Surely puts things in perspective….

Happened to chance upon this interesting bit of news on the web…it is an initiative taken by the students of my college - JITM. This news would make every JITMian proud.

A low cost solar powered battery charged LED Lanterns have been developed by the students of Jagannath Institute of Technology and Management (JITM), Orissa, in collaboration with the Engineers Without Borders (EWB) member students from University of Illinois.

This has been specially developed for the benefit of the off-grid villages.Briefing newsmen here on Tuesday, JITM Director (Research and Development) Dhanandra Kumar Mishra said that the students have fabricated 80 prototype lamps for trial in the villages close to the institute in south Orissa.

The new technology has the scope of improving the life of the poor, enhancing the quality of indoor air, decreasing global dependence on petroleum and making a significant step towards reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, he said.Mishra said that two billion people light their homes with oil lanterns producing a miniscule quantity of light, however, consuming an additional one-third of the total energy used globally for all electrical home lighting, besides contributing to increase in carbon dioxide and emission levels.

In a continuing trend, Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) have recently become more affordable and more power efficient. LEDs operate at low voltages, with incredible efficiency at very low power levels (currently over 30 lumens per watt).

The Solar LED lantern developed by the students of JITM has been designed as a prototype of kerosene lanterns with respect to its usefulness and light output, Mishra pointed out.The solar lantern has a light source with power consumption close to one watt.It would allow the use of a small photovoltaic panel to charge a 12 volt 1.2 to 1.5 amp-hour battery.

This design has the ability to focus light without reflectors, using only one third of the current, and has a resulting capacity to employ a 12-volt battery and photovoltaic cell.

A kerosene lantern costs Rs 200 with a durability of two and a half years and burns kerosene worth Rs 70 per month.However, the solar lantern has been made in such a way that it can last at least up to five years, with a battery replacement costing Rs 180 every 20 months, Mishra said.Hence, the long-term cost-of-ownership for the solar lantern may be estimated at 35 per cent less than that of a kerosene lantern, he claimed.

Source

मेरे अजीब- ओ -गरीब वएर्द दुनीया मैं आप्का स्वागत है !!

This was just a test Hindi post. Am checking if I remember hindi correctly from high school or not! I happened to chance upon this Hindi unicode generator that generates the hindi output for words typed in english. For some reason, I wasn’t able to generate the letters with an intermingled sounds…like kra or swa etc!

I’m not too much of a cricket fan but I do occasionally enjoy the odd match. I always support the side which plays well and for the Chappell-Hadlee series that was going on in New Zealand, I had predicted that NZ might win the series. And they did so in fantastic fashion! Whilst the first ODI was a tame affair wherein Australia’s inexperienced batting line-up collapsed rather tamely and New Zealand then won with 10 wickets to spare, the second match was a pulsating affair. Australia were rather confident after having scored 336 batting first, but the New Zealanders weren’t gonna give up and mounted a gallant chase - led by newcomers Fulton and Taylor - to ultimately win the match, and the series.

So when the third match started today, I was kinda thinking that the Aussies were gonna comeback with vengeance and try with all their might to win the last ODI and save some face. And this belief was strengthened further when Matthew Hayden slammed 181 runs in helping Australia mount a daunting total of 347. This was beyond NZ thought I. Little did I imagine that sport is as unpredictable as anything…….Powered by a pacy century from Craig McMillan and some fiesty batting and presence-of-mind from ‘keeper Brendon McCullum, New Zealanders surmounted the aussie total with 3 balls to spare!!!

The last two matches’ scorecards were testimonial to the fact that Cricket is indeed a batsman’s game…..Aus 336/4 lost to New Zealand 340/5 and Aus 346/5 lost to New Zealand 350/9

New Zealand win after chasing 347

Craig McMillan and Brendon McCullum blasted New Zealand to another massive run-chase as they negated Matthew Hayden’s 181 and inflicted a cleansweep on Australia at Hamilton. The home team flew to 350 on the back of McMillan’s 117 and his 165-run partnership with McCullum.

Source

I had some DVDs with some downloaded movies and serials on it which I had hoarded up for the day we would have a DVD ROM to play them. I do have a DVD player but thatz a generic DVD player and these DVD’s weren’t burned so as to play on them….but had only files-stored therein. Our wait for a DVD ROM ended finally yesterday when my roomie got his Toshiba Portege with a combo drive in it. but to our dismay, the files on the DVD were encoded in formats that no generally-found media player could play.

WinDVD, PowerDVD and Windows Media Player all came up cropper against those files which were with an unheard-of extensions - RMVD and MKV!!! We installed VLC Player and also tried our K-Lite Mega Codec pack but those files simply wouldn’t play. Google came to our rescue and we quickly realized that MKV was a proprietary MatroskaVideo and RMVB was actually Real Media Variable Bitrate. I d/l’ed the corresponding filters/codecs today and shall be trying again to play those elusive movies today!

Find the info about playing MKV files here and about playing RMVB files here. Many thanks to these uber-geeks.

Moral of the exercise: There’s more in the media world than meets the eye

Actually therez only one! To the right of the page, you’ll see a map of the place where I blog from. Actually its a well-known thing but I hoped that the Map would show the exact location and not the broader cityscape! The map…or MapKit is a WP plugin that I came to know about only yesterday. It was silently residing in the Presentations>Sidebar Plugins page and probably was an unannounced widget. Its homepage is Platial, though the actual maps are from Google Maps. On the platial site, one can zoom upto closer levels but this smaller map doesn’t allow one to do so. Also I am yet to fathom how one can add places onto the map.

*scratches head*

Cometh February 14th and half of the nation (err…atleast the younger half) goes into a tizzy! There’s a lotta brouhaha about lovers’ day and an equal amount of resentment from the purists and also the extremeists! What are my views, you may ask…..well, here are those partisan views.

V Day in Hyderabad may be low-key initially, but I’m sure the hep and cool hangout joints will be full of revellers and cosy couples in the evening. The buzz was clearly visible even in the searing heat at noon time where Hutch folks were criss-crossing the busy Punjagutta junction, distributing roses to couples. And then there were the hordes of baloon-sellers hoping to make a killing by selling heart-shaped baloons. Chocolate shops and gift shops would’ave run out of their goods I’m sure! Ditto for the greeting card establishments….everyone’s making a living outta it!

My date? Here she is….