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.

I have got some extremely sad news for people who loved Tom Hanks’ Carl Hanratty character in Catch Me If You Can: the movie. And that includes me, too.

Continue reading →

Oh great! It’s becoming so much easier to get pirated software and cracks over the net, even without P2P. My office does not allow any of those, so I am a laggard when it comes to the kaZaa revolution. But I just randomly searched today for this sequencing software called Fruity Loops, and Lo! Google comes up with crack sites by the dozen. When all I was looking for was the demo version.

Or maybe the software itself is very crack-able. I dunno.

Gallopin Gooseberries after a long time. Used to go there so often two months ago that the manager would personally hold the door open for us. Of course, they still recognise me, but the food doesn’t seem that good anymore.

Bala came over on Sunday and gave me four DivX rips – The Last Temptation of Christ, Trainspotting, Memento, and Taxi Driver. I am not watching the first two until I read the books. Sasi came yesterday, and after a bit of indecision about what to watch, we decided to see The Seven Samurai. Finished the first cd and decided that it was too late for a weeknight to sit and finish two more cds. ( yes, the movie is three cds long)

I have become so good with the Rail-gun (timing, aim and maneuverability) that I think the ‘bots consciously try to keep me from getting to it. ( Conscious Quake 3 bots. What a laugh! ) The world’s an arena, Horatio, and all of us merely bots. Stop that, Willy, you are throwing soil all over me.

There are these two beautiful albums Chandru gave me today. One’s Japanese melodies by Yo-Yo Ma ( on the cello) and a Japanese orchestra. And the other is an album by James Galway, Molly Mason and James Unger, which is mostly Irish music. I never knew Galway played the flute so beautifully. And the guitar sometimes sounds like you are playing a violin with your fingers instead of the bow, which gives a non-echoing plink. It gets better when the Mandolin, fiddle and the flute play together. Brilliant albums, both.

The stuff I got on Saturday, from the Best Book Stall. I admit I went a little out-of-breath. But yeah, I was in control. Got only the stuff I really wanted. Really.

All these were for 75 rupees each.

Saturday Swag