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.

‘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 last posted on march 20th, according to the post below. which makes it nearly 9 days since i came up with anything to put on here. including tiny tid-bits about the porn stars around us; or maybe the fact that i got something new. which reminds me that i got my second transformer recently, i now own both bumblebee and skyblast. not that that had anythign to do with trying to make up content for this post. as you can imagine, i’m pretty stoked about the fact that the transformer can actually convert into the robot.

the question is still what to make of this current post. in other news, i have managed to watch ‘race’, as well follow the beautiful number of messages on the rediff message boards about the review written. including comments about the reviewer’s antecedants, as well as about the sheer brilliance of the movie. which has kinda been missed by me. its a pretty straightforward movie to follow, once you realise that no-one in the movie really cares about it in the first place. the directors, of course, care least of all… including conveniently forgetting the lack of script, point, twists or anything that could possibly construe making it worthwhile. don’t ask me why i was watching it in the first place. such is life.

my flickr has been suffering, with over a 1000 photos in india alone, and not one of them making the album… simply due to lack of time. its a little frustrating to have a hobby and not be able to develop it the way i want to. i’m not sure why, the lack of a time table is probably playing a larger role than i deem to acquiesce to. this has obviously carried over into this space, i don’t like that this is happening with me.

seeing as i have managed to make a post about the lack of a title, about the lack of so many other things, its fitting that the post lacks a conclusion.

to the guy who tried to kill my site/blog:

you managed to send 250 spam messages in 2 hours. you managed to load up the server on which my blog sits, and screw with its usage enough that my provider had to shut down my blog. you managed to fuck around enough with my site that i couldn’t do anything with it - and even now am facing mysql issues.

you really are a bastard. a black hole ip too ? smart. fucker.

and thanks to ukhost4u. you guys rock !

not the show, the people.

a PSP ! these guys are beautiful.

as a side note, on my 25th birthday i’ve received candy, comics and a PSP. i guess i’m not growing up. and been stunned to silence twice.  the other time… i’ll think about telling you guys about it

[via cracked.com]

Retired porn star Asia Carrera, real name Jessica Steinhauser, is a bit of a legend in the porn industry. With 36-26-36 measurements, she performed in a jaw-dropping 400 hundred films in her career and exchanged an unthinkable amount of bodily fluids. She calls herself “the nerd of porn,” and we assumed it was some kind of in-joke, until we saw her credentials. Here is somebody who studied piano as a child and by the age of 14 was playing in Carnegie Hall.At 16, she went to Japan and taught English classes. She was a state spelling champ, in the National Mathematics League, a Spanish National Honor Society member, placing in National Geography, Language and Math Olympiads, and is a member of Mensa. That got her a free ride to Rutgers, where she double-majored in business and Japanese. This naturally inspired her to change her first name to Asia and become an entrepreneur in America’s fastest growing business. Her geek hallmark, however, is her love of LAN parties and Unreal Tournament (handle: megabitchgoddess).

and of course:

Dolph Lundgren was an almost-superstar back in the ’80s, having played comic hero The Punisher (1989 version) and even He-Man (1987). But, his greatest acting accomplishments is beating Apollo Creed into something resembling grape jelly and inspiring the greatest Rocky montage of all fucking time. The man reportedly has an IQ of 160. He graduated from the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, got his master’s in chemical engineering, then was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to MIT. After just two weeks of that, his superhuman intellect allowed him to calculate that a life spent inventing life-saving chemicals would mathematically contain less awesome than one movie spent playing He-Man. Hey, did we mention that he speaks five languages (French, Swedish, German, English and Italian)? Or, that he’s a Pentathlon Team Leader and a former Ranger? And a third-degree black belt?

jesus christ. but, i need to look up some ms. carrera now…

update: then i read this [rebutted here], and greatbong’s deconstruction of a now infamous sydney test, and i wonder…  will there really be any effect at the end of it all? or will a team that has been hounded its opponents into handing it the cup just be allowed to bully its way up the pyramid that is world cricket?
oh, and mr. symonds? tere maa ki..