Tip of the Day: DVD-Audio does not play on PC DVD-drives. So bring out the ashes and sack-clothes and repent, all ye sinners.

India’s first DVD-Audio title happens to be Boys. Fine, so I’ve heard Aiyyo, Love is Full of Pain from all five speakers. ( YUP! FIVE! The center speaker is ignored with stereo mixed tracks. ) But just for the heck of it, I decided to hear Vasundhara Das singing for me the way she sang in the studio. That’s what they say about DVD Audio, don’t they? The exact replica of a studio-recording, no compression, etc etc. (Funny, that’s what they said when cds came out the first time, exact replica and all) Anyways, I bought the DVD for 125 rupees. Even though it said “This item is not for sale” in bold on the cover. It also said – “This does not play in CD/VCD players”. Took it home, popped it in the drive, and waited, with bated breath and lustful ears, for the glorious Dolby Digital TM5.1 sound to strike my ears.

What struck my ears was 5 plus 1 speakers full of glorious static. That’s when I play it on the Creative Player. When I try the PowerDVD player, it gives me 5 plus 1 speakers of silence.

WAAAAH!

Warren Ellis, creator of Transmetropolitan has boarded LJ as mistersleepless. Seems he has decided to write a book in 60 entries on LJ.

And i thought I would be cutting down on my lj-addiction a little.

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.”