Sep 24, 2005

Half Life 2

Half Life 2. 99%. Will it run this time?

Like the lazy bum that I am, I refused to reinstall HL2 from my CDs when I reinstalled the OS. I’m trying to make do with the installation I had earlier and a Steam update. The problem is that there is some graphics issue and HL2 says it won’t run on pre-DirectX 7 hardware. Which is rather strange because I have a perfectly fine 5900.

Don’t worry if you don’t understand a word of this, it probably only means that you have a life.

Blogicide!

Veera is threatening blogicide! No great loss, one would say; but still… it’s not a very pleasant thing, is it?

His chief complaint, as is mine, is that nobody seems to read the blog. Is it because our blogs are simply not interesting? Not quite true, I’ve seen much worse blogs getting a lot of hits and comments. But come to think about it, there simply isn’t anything in either of our blogs  that would cause people to come back the next day or next week to check up on. For that matter there are very few blogs that I go back to read, the few that I do read regularly are of people I know personally.


Perhaps more regular updates would help, something like Windows patches?

Boulevard Of Broken Dreams

"Boulevard Of Broken Dreams"
(American Idiot, Green Day Lyrics)

I walk a lonely road
The only one that I have ever known
Don't know where it goes
But it's home to me and I walk alone

I walk this empty street
On the Boulevard of Broken Dreams
Where the city sleeps
and I'm the only one and I walk alone

My shadow's the only one that walks beside me
My shallow heart's the only thing that's beating
Sometimes I wish someone out there will find me
'Til then I walk alone
.
.
.

Sep 23, 2005

And keep away from the big black doggie!
I looove my mousie-wousie.
Poor little cute kitty.... Mmmmm... tasty!
Huh! You think you can get ME?

Sep 20, 2005

Sob.

I made a lengthy post via the Blogger plugin in Word. And now it's gone.. :(

Grrrr.

Why, oh why, must people try to make money out of EVERYthing? I refer to the comment spam phenomenon, of course.

On a related note, my forehead advertising space is free again. Interested people can leave a comment and quote their offer. Conditions apply. Void where prohibited by law.

Sep 19, 2005

Even more on camera phones

This article says that there is software in the works that will allow camera phones to be used as scanners, and along with basic OCR functions will allow text capture. "3 to 5 seconds" to capture an A4 sized page.

The world is changing faster than ever before...

Sep 18, 2005

Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Build a dock and a fishing boat and he...
Start of game
A bear. And a damsel in distress. Honest.
My town is right next to a puddle?!
The welcome screen.
Hm.... what to do? I only have a poor Athlon 2600+ to run this.
My first attempt at the download failed, the file was corrupted. This is where the unlimited part of the connection that I've been so keen about helped - I simply downloaded the file once more.

I have a fairly decent computer to run this on, but it looks like it's getting old now. High resolution, high quality and high frames rates - it's starting to get difficult to get all of these together. AOE3 runs just fine at the lower settings but obviously doesn't look as good as it is capable of.
Making use of my new unlimited broadband connection, I downloaded the AOE3 demo. All 360+ MB of it. If you don't know what AOE is all about and what the fuss about AOE3 is, you'll probably not like the next few posts :)

Sep 7, 2005

Broadband woes over?

Ditched DSL altogether.

That's right, I decided to go with hotwire (http://hotwireindia.com/) since a friend of mine in the same complex that I live in gave me good feedback about it. I've gone in for the nighttime unlimited pack, so my cribs about data transfer limits have been addressed. They do have alltime unlimited packs too, but since I'm not at home during working hours I won't really use the connection.

Installation was quick and painless. They run an ethernet cable to your home so no modem required. Everything was done in about half an hour. Haven't managed to test it out, since it's a nighttime pack and I got it installed in the morning. So it will only be tonight after 9p.m. that I really get to see how this thing works. It's a prepaid account and I have to call the provider up every month to pay for the next month. That's actually better than my earlier experiences of having to post a cheque to the provider which would be delayed and cause a lot of headache. Even better, I can change the pack from month to month without the hassle of filling out forms! In fact, I didn't have to fill out any papers for this connection; which is strange now that I think about it. I did get a receipt though, and all the filling out was online. Good! I liked it.

Now to get all my computers up to speed with the latest updates and antivirus signatures...

Sep 1, 2005

Camera phones, part 2

I went back to the rediff article on banning camera phones to see what people had written (there were exactly 0 comments when I first saw it). It was a big eye opener because there were people in support of the ban , even though their reasons were not quite clear.

But it was pretty obvious that a lot of the people responding were thinking in terms of the various video clips that have been floating around, apparently being forwarded via MMS. On a side node, I think the MMS service is too expensive. If I had a picture or a video clip that I wanted to share I'd do it through email.

Coming back to the comments on the article, I felt that these people were, in fact, in favour of banning cameras in phones altogether! Someone actually said camera phones are a threat to national security. He didn't elaborate though.

Perhaps it's not so much about the fact that a cellphone has an integrated camera, it's more about the camera being disguised. When you go around with a handycam, everyone knows that you're taking video shots. Soon everyone will know that if you go around with a cellphone with a lens, you're taking pictures or video.

All righty then, enough of ranting over cellphones. And Veera, the bike is black, as usual.

Electricity.

There's been something going on in this part of the universe that many of you might have missed. After all, it's local news.

What happened some weeks ago is that the local electricity companies in Delhi got the rates hiked by 10 percent. Which is something that seems to happen all the time, all over the place, in all industries. What is different is that this time the locals decided not to accept it. There was a big "grassroots" level movement and many RWAs (that's residents welfare associations) protested and decided to deduct 10% from their monthly bills before paying them.

Seeing the issue snowballing, the powers-that-be decided to roll the hike back. And they did this how? By issuing a subsidy to the power companies! So the taxpayer gets to pay for the electricity hike that the electricity user doesn't have to pay for.

I always thought that privatization was a good thing. That it would make companies more accountable to their customers and that they couldn't depend on the government to bail them out of problems caused due to their sheer lack of motivation. That's because I mistakenly assumed privatization = dismantling of monopoly. Clearly this is not the case. Competetion is good (for the consumer), regardless of who actually owns the company, as long as the same rules apply to all players.

When you are the only company that people can pay to provide them with electricity, why would you care that a big chunk of what you produce is lost to "transmission losses"?

Now, if only someone would look at the cable TV monopoly...