staying.cool

so, on a dreary sunday night, i decided to upgrade my wordpress. given the message on the header that i needed to do this ASAP, and that the fantastico doesn’t put it up for another 20 days, i looked in on WPAU. nice plugin install, nice step-by-step upgrading, upgrade database.. and re-login.. and boom! i cannot login. no matter what. my backups zips are apparently corrupted, and there is no mention of such an error on any page i google.

then starts hell. no login works, no login recovery works, the blog randomly kills itself and throws 401 and 402 errors, i get very very frustrated. the mySQL database decides to show me that there is no ‘users’ field (as per the error log). my provider has no clue. this keeps on until 1pm today, when i post on the wordpress forums. i await a solution. i work.

i try again.

…and it works. for no apparent reason, everything is functioning. the plugin matter-of-factly informs me that the upgrade did not complete thoroughly last time, do i want to do it again?

i create my all-important xml backup. then the database backup. i have everything, i can recover if it dies on me.

re-try.

…and it works. perfectly. i re-login. i see an updated dashboard. a little slow, but it catches up. k2 breaks, until i upgrade it too. the blog is alive, and i have no idea why it decided to kill itself for 16 hours. abs. no clue at all. somehow everything is working, i see ‘2.5.1′ in the footer in my dashboard, and i realize just how much this space means to me. hell, i pissed myself off majorly trying to make it come back to life.

i do not know the moral of this post, except that blogs should not mean so damn much. but somehow this one does. to me.

and at the end of it, i have no idea what major improvement 2.5.1 has given me over 2.5. no idea at all.

and i still don’t know why i went crazy either. ah, mystery.

i lay my head back.. further, further.. and all at once, i feel the water soaking the back of my head. lower and lower, now it covers my ears. meanwhile, my legs move to get me afloat in the water; and before i know it i’m on my back floating down the swimming pool.

i stare at the blue ceiling passing overhead, my hands and legs moving lazily, slowly.. keeping me moving, keeping me floating. the world is mute, sounds do not percolate through the water to my ears. i vaguely note a swishing sounds.. some experimentation soon tells me that it is me.

my eyes peer through goggles, i continue to examine a nondescript ceiling, my body remains afloat as it has been trained for the last 18 years. my eyes glaze over as i continue to move down the pool. thoughts unbidden come to me. the first thought is that i should write about this feeling of calm that floating down the pool always gives me. the second is whether i’m gonna bang my head against the wall of the pool. i dare not change position, i don’t want to lose this tranquility. there are days when i crave it, the absolute silence, and the sheer contrast it usually has to the sounds of the swimming pool.

swimming is one of the few activities that i can enjoy physically, knowing that i am halfway decent at it. when i first hit the pool after a long time, i realized just how much i had missed it. and just how out of shape i had managed to get. i’m a long way from that day now, but i’m not regular enough for my own good.

‘uuuu, meee aurrr ahhummm’ warbles vishal bharadwaj, as silky white words flash up on the screen.

trying to read them is pointless, there exists a world of wisdom here that requires true genius to initiate; much less understand. as a simple example, ‘doctors bhi toh mobile patient ki stomach mein chod dete hai. lekin uske baad woh kutta unke peeche bhaagta rehta hai.’ (in reference to the iconic hutch ad). and then of course, sequences involving seduction at a time of strife, and naked walks at a time of dance.

a ton-load of reviews exist deriding the cinematic tastes of raja sen and taran adarsh: people who seem to enjoy the raping of perfectly decent hollywood-inspired ideas. granted, the source material here is classic bollywood fare - poor guy, rich girl, war, love, reunion in the rain, and a final twist that can be seen halfway into the movie. the current iteration of this idea somehow manages to take out the semblance of logic maintained in the original, the decent acting, the casting, the focus… and replace it with everything that could possibly grate on you. flashback: check. song in flashback: check. flashback in flashback: check. attempt at non-linearity: check. song nearing finale: check.

i personally believe that the movie was an attempt at a sci-fi movie, which people seem to have mistaken for romance. at some point far, far in future we have a cruise going towards mars. old man and woman meet at table, old man tries to hit on old woman by telling her a poignant story of love lost and found. then of course, we realise that the people they are talking about are real people from earth, but from 50 years previously. in an effort to never lose the love of his life, our hero constructed cyborg clones of himself and the missus who regale in the soppy tale of love everyday… forever and ever. the ship runs on the energy generated by the construct in repeating the story over and over.

indian cinema is going the next step though: we are now buying the rights to the movies we copy. at least we’re learning to be honest about it.

i need to watch one more such movie. the inspiration will overflow.

i have decided that i’m going to blog about my not blogging for a while, every few blog posts.

this is the first of these.

start unnecessary commentary. i have not been blogging for a while. the blog is dying. etcetera. i really need to blog more. etcetera. i may have time now. i will try to post more. end commentary. go back to ignoring blog, reader and wonder whether people will tire of reading this stuff.

end.

sitting outside on a sunny spring day, with a crapload of stuff to eventually get done. and doing none of it. this is the life. rahman plays away to glory, there is a reason that he alone occupies pride of hard drive space on my laptop. the cars pace by.. in the absence of a bombay traffic light, this is the best i can do. there is a faint chill in the air, just enough to tell me that summer is not completely here yet. a cup of tea or coffee would complement my life currently to perfection, but the effort involved doesn’t seem worth it.

my google reader cup has overfloweth beyond the brim, over the edge of the table, and way into the hall. with probably close to 3000 items to eventually get through.. i can foresee a lot of reading to do. these are updates that are nearly 45 days old.. time is a commodity that is in scarce availability today. this is in sharp contrast to my life as it stood 2 years ago, a recent perusal of the archives reminded me very bitingly about the way the day was spent. a couch, a laptop, a browser window. possibly things were to be done, i had decided that life needed to stop a while. possibly not the best decision, or the best time in my life, but i get the feeling that that break did more good than bad. it is something i need to do soon, get out of frickin’ jersey… and relax.

google went ballistic on the 1st. but then so has woot, xkcd, thinkgeek, bbc news/the telegraph and nasa. maybe even microsoft ?

ah, april 1st. the famed prankster would be pleased. any guesses who that is ?