I got myself an Internet Connection at home two weeks ago. Sify Broadband – which was too slow, so on Friday I switched to Beam Cable. 850 Rs per month for unlimited access, fairly decent. Speeds are much much faster than those I got with Sify, which was 600 Rs per month.<\/p>\n
However, immediately after the cable guy came over and changed the IP settings and created the new login, the computer crashed. I am running Win2k SP4, and everytime I booted up, a blue screen would come up, showing some .sys file that failed during boot, and the computer would restart. Things would work perfectly if I removed the network cable. Tried messing around with the network card, moving it to a different PCI slot and reinstalling drivers, none of which worked. Went to sleep pretty puzzled, and mighty sozzled.<\/p>\n
Yesterday morning, I woke up, and remembered I had a personal firewall running, with its settings tuned to allow certain start-up events and disallowing others. Started computer with network cable detached, uninstalled firewall, restarted, reconnected cable. Voila, works perfectly now. <\/p>\n
So there you have it. My First Post from home. Hoo-ah!<\/p>\n
The first DVD set of Rurouni Kenshin<\/b> arrived on Friday, too, so no more cursing Customs and the Postal Service. Watched the first episode that night. Very cool, in fact better than what I had expected it to be. Just the right mixture of humour and action. And I saw a volume of Ken Akamatsu’s Nagima<\/b> at Walden yesterday, for 426 Rs. Also a graphic novel version of Kafka’s Metamorphosis<\/b>, by Peter Kuper, an irregular Mad artist. Prices are pretty high for both, so still undecided about whether or not I should buy them. <\/p>\n
A Little X-Rave:<\/i>
\nGenerally, I stay away from X-Men. With the exception of Ultimate X-Men<\/b>, I find the X-Universe very convoluted and badly-written, with too many characters that grimace and clench their teeth and do cool things just because they look cool. <\/p>\n
In recent times, there has been a buzz about Grant Morrison’s run on New X-Men<\/b>, and how his knockdown approach to the X-Story alienated many hardcore fans because of the changes he brought about, and of course, the general vein of weirdness running through the entire series. Now, Grant Morrison is a guy who falls squarely into the category of fans-turned-writers who create comics as an extension of their own interests. He is a practicising Magician, much like Alan Moore, and claims to have been abducted by aliens during a trip to, of all places, Kathmandu, though I personally think that was just an acid trip or something. He also claimed to increase sales of his Vertigo series Invisibles<\/b> by organising a mass-masturbatory experiment among its readers.<\/p>\n
Yesterday, I sat and read the first fourteen issues of Morrison’s X-Men run, and boy oh boy, was it fun or what! The Cyclops-Jean Grey equation is handled pretty well, Wolverine has, after a long long time, ceased sounding idiotic, the Beast reveals facts about his orientation, th island of Genosha, a mutant sanctuary, is annhilated by the sentinels. And homo sapiens<\/i> is about to be extinct in four generations. Plus a load of interesting new mutants – a new attitude-throwing Angel, the trying-to-fly-but-can’t Beak, and my personal favourite, the Stepford Cuckoos, five telekinetic proteges of Emma Frost who think dirty and sound angelic.<\/p>\n
The cycle was brilliant, with over-the-top cliffhangers and plot resolutions that only Morrison can think of. ( I mean it. Maybe Moore, Gaiman et al would come close, though) One issue involves Jean Grey and Emma Frost’s exploration of a comatose Professor Xavier’s mind. No words, except in one panel, the very last, that comes with a revelation, one that has been hinted at throughout the 22 pages, and you’re kind of expecting it, but it’s still shocking to see Jean actually say it out aloud.<\/p>\n
Cool, cool reading.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I got myself an Internet Connection at home two weeks ago. Sify Broadband – which was too slow, so on Friday I switched to Beam Cable. 850 Rs per month for unlimited access, fairly decent. Speeds are much much faster than those I got with Sify, which was 600 Rs per month. However, immediately after […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=510"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/510\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}