Yesterday was a bad, bad, bad day. Big-time cold. Pop-a-grenade-in-your-teeth-and-chew headache. A steadily approaching build release date. Everytime I tried to sleep, (emphasis on “try to”, I would see pschedelic colours everytime I closed my eyes.) there would be a phone-call from the office, saying “This is not working”, or “When are you coming in?”. Aiyyo! Am on sick-leave, forgoshsakes!

Got back to the office today, coughing and moaning. ( OK, am not feeling that bad now, but garnering sympathy helps. :-) Checked out the stuff that had gone wrong. Tchah! All moronic stuff. I had made a template change of a time-out value from milliseconds to minutes, and the appropriate code changes to go with it. Unfortunately, the default values in the config-file were still set to 120000. Which got multiplied by 60000 in the code, when initialised. Which returned a negative value. Which led to an IllegalArgumentException. My fault, yeah, definitely. I had made the value changes inside my template, but had checked in a different file. Gah! Double Gah! And a resounding Tchah!

There was a sale on in Crossword, Lifestyle on Wednesday. And an incredibly dumb sale, IMHO. They were selling Tolkien, Pratchett, Arthur C Clarke, Asimov books for 60 rupees each. Including the Hobbit graphic novel, illustrated by David Wenzel. Loads of Simpsons Trade Paperback collections ( the Bongo comics issues). The Hitchhikers’ Guide To The Galaxy comicbook. All sixty each. By some freakin’ miracle, I was in Crossword half an hour after the sale began. ( Lunchtime, and I decided to go for a routine Lifestyle tour ) A couple of quick phonecalls, and the sale was over. Well, sort of. There were still some Yoga, Feng Shui, Reiki books lying around ,also some Personality-boosting stuff, and loads of dictionaries. Hope some moronus religiosa picks them up.

Rishi is giving me a treat. Heh heh heh.

A new month. So one more trip to Best Book Stall becomes mandatory.

I am morphing into a freak. I know it. At least I am a freak with self-realization. That’s the brighter side of it. My parents keep telling me to save some money. I seriously don’t want to, not right now. As soon as I start saving, it means my life is heading towards that inevitable “Indian” future – secure, well-to-do, routine. Which is not exactly what I have in mind for myself.

Best laid plans, huh?

There is, or rather, there might be, this alternate source of income I have found for myself. At least, I hope it turns out that way. Fingers crossed.

Terminator 3 has been so royally dissed by everyone. Except maybe Times of India, and who believes those old fogies anyway? Just one of those slam-bang-poof Summer Blockbusters, with no storyline and lots of explosions and good ol’ Ah-nold with his good ol’ stony face.

Hey, I liked it. Not all of it, but yeah, I liked the premise. I liked the idea of John Connor being a whiny loser, and I liked Arnie’s dialogues(Reminded me that Hemant Birje could have made it big in Hollywood). The explosions were neat, too. I hope they mass-manufacture Kristina Lokken lookalike Terminatrixes in the future.

Funnily, the idea of a lethal female Terminatrix goes back a long way. 1990, to be precise, when Alex Ross, painter and graphic artist extraordinaire brought out Terminator: The Burning Earth, a five issue comic-book series. This told the story of the final fight, John Connor and his rebel army’s last stand against Skynet. The computer is about to launch a final nuke assault on an already-ravaged human race, this time to make sure that there are no survivors, and Connor has to fight his way through a Terminator-guarded mountain to the computer’s core and shut it down. Of course, the Terminators, even though female, had none of the morph capabilities shown in the second movie; they were Arnie-standard bots, although more dangerous. Maybe because it’s harder to hit a beautiful female wearing sunglasses than a muscular ex-Mr Universe wearing similar sunglasses. Poor, puny humans.

No mind-elevating storyline, this. But what struck me ( and in all likelihood, anyone who read this comic) was the art. Lavishly painted, presenting a bleak, sunless future. I had not seen any of the movies until then, and when I finally did, it was kind of an anticlimax. Because the future is not shown, it’s only Sarah and John in the present, and just one Terminator. Sigh! I was better off reading the comic over and over again.

Terminator: Burning Earth covers…long time to load

Type “www.google.com” on your browser.

What happens? Does everybody see the word “angrezi” on the screen, or am I hallucinating?

More fun! Click on the third link to the right of the search field.

“Google grahprishtha, sandeshon evam buttonon ko Pasand dwara apni bhasha me sthir karen.”

I have been reading, I have been playing Grand Theft Auto 3 every night until 1 AM. Vineet comes in pretty late from the office, and I have to stay awake to open the door when the bell rings. ( Abhishek is getting married, so he’s leaving. Vineet’s moving in with us ) Or maybe I just love the game too much. GTA2 rocked, but the view ( topside) was a bummer. GTA3 takes the same concept a little further. You’re a goon who has to rise up the crime ladder by working on “missions” for different gangs. The missions are wacky – supplying fresh (female) meat to a police ball, escorting a Mafia hitman as he goes about extracting protection money from laundry shops( and later, whacking laundry trucks, when they refuse to pay.) delivering a rival gang’s hitman to the car-crusher. I have completed 7 out of 75 missions, so a long, long way to go, pardner.

I have also discovered that Enter The Matrix: the game does not play on my system. It requires a graphics card. Wish-list updated accordingly. The latest Tomb Raider game makes Lara look real cute!!!!!

Finished reading Neil Gaiman/Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens and Jamyang Norbu’s “The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes”. Both pretty much red-heat reads.

Good Omens: Really funny ( as the reviewer says “it reads like heaven, and you will laugh like hell ) Pokes fun at God, the Voice of God, the Antichrist, angels, assorted dukes of Hell, the four Horsemen of the apocalypse, publishing trends of the sixteenth century, witch-hunting, Atlanteans, Tibetans, and other strange species ( which includes “Americans”) The book is all about the End of the World, the big row on Meggido, only that the End comes from a small village in England named Lower Tadfield, where a boy named Adam Young lives with his family and a dog (very imaginatively) named Dog. The latter happens to be a hell-hound (who’s tempted from his duties by dogly desires, chief among them being chasing cats. ) And Adam, of course, is the Antichrist.

There are times when the humour gets repetitive, especially in the conversations among the kids, all precocious and William-like, something I thought went out of style in the 1950’s.

Mandala of Sherlock Holmes: Bought this quite sometime back, Vasu did a Mandala on it for 2 ( or was it 3?) months. ( note: To do a Mandala – To abscond with unread book for undefined period of time. ) Highpoints: faithful reinterpretation of Sigerson’s exploits in Thibet and India, ably narrated by Hurree Chatterjee, MA, FRCS, OBE. Quaint language, major attention to details, especially aspects of Tibetan history and mythology. Low points: 10 pages of the book were blank!!! Just when the story starts getting interesting…..something wrong with the publication. And yes, the climax requires you to stretch your imagination quite a bit.

Google is getting interesting, day by day. Led me here. Among other things ( ahem), this contains Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, which I had been looking for in the first place. Couple of Umberto Eco books, Clifford Stoll’s The Cuckoo’s Egg, and a number of assorted oddities. Worth a look.

Other good things: Darna Manaa Hai. Toy Story reprise. (Thanks, psasidhar). More stuff at Best Book Stall. Junoon. (the band, not the TV series, thanks.)

My arrfangroups account was crammed with messages, because I had neglected to open that account for about a month. And this being peak-Boys time, seems there was an average of 30 mails per day. Half of them saying “Boyz rockssss” or “Boyz is gonna change the face of TFM” and other such inanities. ( Every true fan seems to be referring to Boys as Boyz) The other half chipping in with random “waah-waah!”s and anguished pleas of “wen is Boyz cd coming out plzzzzzzzz????!?!??!!!!”. yeah, all this hoopla even before the album came out.

On the interesting side, there was this nice discussion that started here ( follow the thread) and subsequently here. This level-headed ( compared to the other acid-spitting exchanges that happen here, yes) argument started because some fans who are personally acquainted with ARR went ahead and got a number of Boys mp3 songs removed from different sites. This brought about a series of mails on why ARR’s music needs to be made more available, and whether mp3s are eating away at a lucrative TFM market.

In fact, I read a lot of these mails since morning ( work a little less, heh ), and instead of having lunch downstairs, I went over to Needs, bought some Alu parathas and a Frooti, and walked home. Switched on the computer and had a breezy lunch with Dating playing loudly. Very satisfying! I need to try that again sometime.

Tip of the day: Shun pirated DVDs. I tried renting a DVD yesterday ( Star Wars IV: A New Hope). The sound was pathetic. It was a laser disc print, and claimed to have 5.1 enhanced Dolby sound. The only sound I could hear was a constant hiss in the rear speakers, and some mumbling in the front, and the subwoofer would start rumbling everytime a spaceship came onscreen, or a lightsaber was turned on. By the time it ended, I felt like I was in an 80’s video game. Cheesy movie, really. The light-saber duel between Vader and Kenobi looks pathetic now…..both of them look so theatrical, waving their sabers, held tightly with both hands. I paid fifty rupees to watch this . Ugh! Never again!

And somehow I got this idea of sitting down and ripping the DVD to my hard disk. Seven test runs of 2 minutes each, to check for picture quality and finding the optimal compression settings for the audio. Decided on a 3 GB rip ( I could always compress it more later, using VirtualDub) Click. Save as AVI. Go back to Terry Pratchett/Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens, and watch the rip going by. An hour later, with the status report showing 42% over, the lights went out. Powercut! Gah!

Realization of the day: DivX movies are better borrowed than created.