Quickie question: What is the difference between an oil barrel and a beer barrel?

Quickie answer to Quickie question: A beer barrel holds 31 gallons, and a barrel of oil holds 42 gallons.

Quickie answer to Quickie question, Beatzo version: Beer barrels hold beer, Oil barrels hold oil. D-uh!

In other words, the monthly K-Circle League quiz at St Francis saw Moi and Banana Singh get massacred beyond belief. Man, am I out of touch. Or was it the questions? Nope, I was out of touch, no second thoughts. A visual of Agatha Christie, I know it’s her, but no, I have to say it’s Dame Barbara Cartland. I don’t recognise Aung San Suu Ki. I don’t recognise Brigitte Bardot. I don’t know which company Dr Evil invested money in, in the Austin Powers movie. I suck.

Well, that was that.

Anyone who plays the “Surface Tension” level in Half-Life without getting his nerves shredded to pieces deserves to be called God. No, make that GOD in caps and bold.

Discovery of the day: I am a masochist. I met Vasu in the morning, learnt from him that Cradle 2 The Grave is lousy as hell, and just to learn how lousy a movie can get, I went right ahead and saw the movie. No, correction, I went right ahead and tried to see the movie. Jeezusmommawottapeesashite!!!! The only things I could make out included random usage of the word “stones”, “Taiwan”, “momma”, “mahn”, and a load of swish-thump-grunt sequences (Jet Li movie, boss, what else do you expect?)in Dolby. Walked out during the intermission, cos the Matrix Reloaded trailers and the X-Men 2 trailers got shown. Paisa vasool! I think I need to google search and figure out WHY the movie is called “Cradle 2 The Grave”, though. Might make a nice quiz question.

Hung around at Walden for sometime in the morning. Read half of Batman:Dark Victory there. The TPB is on sale for 800 Rupees. Must get it included in next month’s budget. Also, the Enter The Matrix game is out! Control, beatzo!

“Guns, lots of guns.” Wheeeeeeeee!!!!!!!

On an afterthought, here’s something I just dug out:
I know you’re out there. I can feel you now.
I know that you’re afraid… afraid of us.
You’re afraid of change. I don’t know the future.
I didn’t come here to tell you how this
is going to end. I came here to tell how
it’s going to begin. I’m going to hang up this
phone, and then show these people what
you don’t want them to see. I’m going to show
them a world without you. A world without
rules or controls, borders or boundaries.
A world where anything is possible. Where
we go from there is a choice I leave to you.

We wait and hope.

V-Day!!!!!! Congratulations, beatzo! No bugs.

I bought a new mouse, and 40 blank cds. Mega-fraggidalistic-burn session to follow.

Playing Half-life again reminds me of how much I enjoyed the game the first time. I still am. Everything, right from the storyline – a healthy mixture of a sci-fi thriller and a Conspiracy theory nightmare, the characters – bumbling scientists and helpful Security guards, the enemies – scary jumpaliens – creepy crawly critters who would take away Gordon’s health if they touched him, acid-spitting raptors, and then, the soldiers – a major gaming experience…. Me and Priom had played Half-Life:Day One, the extended demo version together. The frustration we had, midway through the game, when Gordon manages to get inside a bunker, after having escaped from aliens galore and regiments of soldiers, and then a door suddenly opens, with soldiers being aero-dropped from a helicopter, all with guns blazing, and then the screen goes dark. “To be continued” slowly scrolls across.

*Groan*
Not fair!!!!

Priom went home for the Hols, and he bought the game there in Bangladesh, and tried to play it by himself. Got stuck at a point. Brought it over when hwe came back, and in two weeks, yours truly had completed the game. Priom, the asshole, still thinks I used a walkthrough. Bah!

The game has some amazing moments. One of the toughest moments involves a three headed monster that hears your steps, (it’s blind) as you pass by, and one strike, you are chopped salami. So you have to crouch and pass by, climb three levels, sometimes use grenades to distract its hearing when it gets too close. The monster is HUGE, actually, it can reach you at any point of the three levels of the tower. The slower you are, the lesser the chances are of its hearing you.

Then there is the point where you find ninja-like assassins after you. You hear the pitter-patter of footsteps, and suddenly they fire at you, and vanish immediately. The fun part comes when you’ve somehow managed to dispatch them. Open the surface access gate. Go in, slowly. The lights go off. Sounds of a scuffle. You are a prisoner.

The way the whole story builds up, a mysterious man with a briefcase making brief appearances, with you unable to hit him or talk to him…..the AI of the soldiers, the claustrophobic arena that is the Black Mesa complex – Half-Life is something that’s always gonna be close to my heart.

The storyline of the game, incidentally, was written by a certain Marc Laidlaw.

The only other full FPS I played after HL, i guess, was Half-Life: Blue Shift, and Max Payne. Blue Shift was too short, and Payne was deadly!

Hot news: HL2 is coming in September. This is what a PC World reporter, who played some of the demo code, has to say – “… Words failed me. My body felt exhausted as I relaxed my taut muscles,drained from the tension of watching a game which is re-writing the rule book and making a mockery out of every other first-person shooter I’ve ever seen. If you don’t believe me, buy a ticket to E3, and find out for yourself. One things for sure though, come September, the world of gaming will change forever, and just like four years ago, its Valve that is showing us the way. With 40 hours of gameplay promised, its going to be one hell of a ride. All of a sudden, September seems like a very, very long way away …”

Hoo- ah!

One major problem I have with my new room is, there’s no sunlight in the mornings. The past three days, I have been waking up at 9 AM. Of course, I have been sleeping late, too, but that’s natural. In the previous house, there was no freakin way I would stay asleep after 7. And now this…..the brighter side is, this means I don’t have insomnia. Which, incidentally, scares me a lot. Getting insomnia, I mean. Try reading Stephen King’s book. Gave me the creeps when I read it in the First year, all that talk about seeing colours and loops on your head and weird short men with scissors…..

Today was kinda bad. I had thought the Loadbalaner was up and running – it better, after so much of slogging that went into the build. And today afternoon, I kinda decided to slip out early, have some sleep ( did someone mention “insomnia” just now? ), and go off to K-Circle, where I was supposed to conduct a quiz.

Kela!!!!!

SOme minor glitch in displaying a page. Or so I thought. The guy who found the bug said it was a Web-module problem. So I pushed off. Went to sleep. Half an hour later, the phone rings. My boss. “Problem, man. Come on over”. Who be I to refuse? Came back. No POST requests going through. InterruptedIOExceptions. Yeah, I had checked it only with GET requests. Mumble mumble mumble. To work, sonny boy.

Missed the quiz. But ok, the fix is done.

Pre-weekend blues again. WHAT do I do? Stay put at home and read? Or go splurge on a new mouse for home so that I can complete Half-life in peace? Or just sleep?

Something’s terribly wrong. The Ocean of Notions is being poisoned, and this means that all Stories, and the Art of Storytelling are drying up in the land of Gup. Things do not bode well for our storyteller Rashid Khalifa, who is losiing the Gift of the Gab, and his son Haroun has to come to the rescue. He has to journey to the perilous land of shadows and silence, the land of Chup, and stop the evil Khattam-Shud.

Somehow, the storyline sounds familiar, eh?

Been ages since I finished a book that made me sit back and grin, grin and grin more.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories, by Salman Rushdie. Nostalgia time: Target magazine gave a brilliant review of the book, once upon a time. (I dunno why, but I pity the kids of today, they don’t have a magazine that grows along with them. Target and me, we were born just a year apart, and we stayed together until I was fifteen and an atrocity named “Teens Today” hit the stands. Egad!) But of course, the thought of finding the book in Guwahati was, simply put, ha-ha-ha. Saw the book for the first time in Calcutta, but of course, it was a hardcover version, and well out of my budget.

Then, when I was in the third year, 33Man tapofied the book from this store in Chennai. But no, I wasn’t in the mood for a “happy” book just then, so I decided to skip it.

Last week, I found the hardcover at dear ol’ MR Book Stall.

Finished it in one sitting. Finished it two days ago, in fact.

The smile never leaves my face.

Haroun Khalifa. Rashid Khalifa. The orbitting-earth-at-the-speed-of-light moon of Kahani. Princess Bat-Cheat, whose singing sends shivers down every spine, and her suitor Prince Bol. Iff, the water-genie and Butt, the hoopoe, Haroun’s friends and companions on his journey. Goopy and Bagha, the two fishes who always speak in rhyme (and who come to the rescue every time).

This seems like a book tailor-made for Indian children, with puns and in-jokes galore in Hindi. At the same time, I couldn’t help but notice all the satirical connotations – the powere of Free Speech and Democracy over a society where communication is strictly regulated.

Russian children’s books, that were published by Raduga and Mir publishers once upon a time, had this same effect on me, I enjoyed reading them SO much, inspite of the Socialist overtones….some of them were SO blatant. But what the heck? They made me laugh, and I can still go back to them and bust my guts with laughter.

Thank you, Haroun, and thank you, Mr Rushdie.

By the way, did you know what makes Kahani go around the earth so fast? Pssst, it’s something called P2C2E. Short for “Process Too Complicated To Explain”.

A year of “professional” life. Aaaaaah! How can I thank you, O beloved Company I work for? You gave me so much of good things, so many interesting people, a truly engaging environment to work in, and of course, a nice salary. Thank you, thank you, thank you, for making May 8, 2002 to May 8, 2003 one of the best years of my life. And I promise I will check-in a perfect Loadbalancer by Tuesday.

Debug-time!!! The most perfect excuse I can give is – “There ain’t no such thing as perfect code. It’s all illusion!”. The concept of Maya happens to be a standing joke amongst us server-engineers. “Sab Maya hai, bhai!” – when the build fails. Used to crack me up every time I heard it being said aloud. Now it’s my turn to say the same stuff to the QA gang.

eBay Time!!!! Thanks to the one and only 2fargon, I am now the proud possessor of — Mind-boggling long list of comics