staying.thoughts

sachinism, the current religion of the indi-net

Feb 24th

Posted by SEV in staying.thoughts

3 comments

Stuff that struck me while reading about Sachin Tendulkar’s nearly unbelievable* feat, most of which will be repeated everywhere I look over the next few days/weeks:

  • On this day 21 years ago He completed a 664-run partnership with Kambli. Twenty-f*ckin-one.
  • His 200 contained 25 boundaries (the most by a single batsman in an ODI till date) and 3 sixes. The entire RSA team innings (in reply) had 30 boundaries and 3 sixes.
  • He has scored 93 international centuries (combining test and ODI cricket) until today. There was a time when He decimated an Australian team for a whole summer (yes, the great Sharjah innings), which was when I started believing that He would score over a 100 centuries before He retired. That day is nigh.
  • His closest competitors today (in terms of statistics) have to currently make
    • Tests: 1588 runs to catch up His total of 13447, 8 centuries to catch up His total of 47.
    • ODIs: 4170 runs to catch up with 17598, 17 centuries to catch up with 46.
  • He made an impeccable, near-perfect 175 while chasing Australia in Hyderabad last year.. only to have the Indian team let Him down and choke once He was out. I remember defending him when people said that the innings was typical Tendulkar – the century was great, but no use if He never finishes what He starts. I wonder if.. somehow.. RSA had successfully chased 400 (they’ve done it before), how sweet would this 200 be for the ungrateful Indian cricket fan?
  • The fact that He does not make the ICC list of the best players of all-time in either Tests or ODIs has to now rank as one of the biggest egg-on-your-face (or idiotic) statements until date for the ICC. For a man who is redefining every batting record there is every time He takes guard, a man who has surpassed His contemporaries in both longevity and performance… I guess He doesn’t need the ranking to make His mark in cricket history.

I ask you, does He really have to worry about never lifting a World Cup on India’s behalf? Can we quit wondering aloud about His performance every time He doesn’t make a century?

Will we ever get over Him?

Side note: I noticed that the statistically top batsmen who are still playing cricket today are all 34+ (age in brackets): Jayasuriya (40), Ponting (35), Tendulkar (37), Gibbs (36), Kallis (34). This is to be expected, given the amount of cricket these people have played in their lifetime… but it appears the old guard is never going to make way for a new one.

*I say “nearly unbelievable”, because it is Sachin after all. One can believe that He can pull it off.**
**Yes, the capitalization of ‘H’ is intentional. God, after all.

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the year it all started changing

Dec 31st

Posted by SEV in staying.thoughts

5 comments

That sums up how I see 2009.

Consider if you will: Engagement. Proposal (to the missus, and to my PhD committee). Those each warrant as epochal all on their own.

They are overshadowed in my mind by what is to happen in 2010.. so this post may seem a little distracted.

I’ve seen “at the end of this decade” posts galore. Movies. Books. Events. Photos. Music. Acting. Games. Comics. You name it. Somehow this decade appears to need a lot of summing up. I had some things I wanted to sum up too.. all from my own point of view. I don’t know if I’ll ever get round to doing it.

My own current post remains to be about the year just past though. ‘Engagement’ and ‘Proposal’ do a fair job of summing it up majorly, as I’ve mentioned. Minorly… I actually have to go back to archives to see what “minor” events are there to talk about. This year saw a lot of me talking about how I have nothing to talk about. And that there are a lot of things I want to talk about, but am too lazy to blog about. I started talking more “tech” too – in fact, my frustration with my (nearly dead) HP laptop has been the cynosure of a lot of eyes recently.  I have learnt some degree of photography and I have to take it more seriously if I don’t want it to languish like so many other things (like this blog). I’ve written a lot more about movies than ever before. Pretty much summed up/reviewed/critiqued every movie I’ve seen this year. Which reminds me that ‘Paa’ is decent, ‘3 Idiots’ is fun and ‘Sherlock Holmes’ is awesome due to RDJ.

See what I mean?

Personally – there have been drastic changes. A lot of which have happened without me realizing it explicitly. Nothing for the bad, as a lot of them are due to the missus… but when I sit back and think about it now, it feels… strange. Awefome, but strange. I may have mentioned this before, but growing up is something I always thought happened like a superhero changing into his costume – some kind of illuminating flash, and you’re knowledgeable in some new way. It is almost wondrous to realize that you’ve learnt stuff without the flash of illuminating light, that you’ve grown up, that people see you as ‘grown up’. At least to some extent. I do still read comic books after all.

As said in my movie of the year (for which I have pretty much gotten the dialogue by rote): “Aife aife kaife kaife ho gaya…aur kaife kaife aife aife ho gaya.”

Have a good ‘un, all. A great ‘un lurks around the corner.

windows 7 – quirks, quips and quarks

Oct 20th

Posted by SEV in staying.thoughts

7 comments

So I finally moved to Windows 7 on one of the machines I use regularly. It wasn’t without its share of weird-ass issues – I don’t think any M$ OS can be without its quirks. Not issues/problems, mind you. Quirks. I will try to update this based on what else I figure out in the future as well. I’m not attempting a detailed critique of what its like, there are ton-loads of such reviews online (most comprehensively, here). I’m merely noting stuff that stood out to me, personally. I’ll try not to degenerate to ranting or raving about anything.

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i should just title this r.i.p. staying.cool

Sep 21st

Posted by SEV in staying.thoughts

4 comments

Among other things, the probability that random ideas pop into my head has dwindled down to zero. Which makes it a little hard to maintain a space that was somehow meant to ensure that I do not lose touch with writing. Now that I think about it, my blog will turn 5 in a month. And here I am writing about how I have nothing to write about – for the umpteenth time. There was meant to be some kind of weekly post thing going on here – which has not taken off. A large majority of posts since then have actually pretty much been mere placeholders. So I can see that my post-count is at a steady 6-8 posts a month.

I have been struggling to find a voice/tack for my blog in recent times. Indeed, going a little further back to the start of this year I see that most posts are either (1) updates about my life, highlighting what interesting things have happened to me recently, (2) movie reviews, (3) frustration at something techie, (4) non-posts lamenting the fact that – well – I have nothing to post about, (5) random news-links to fill up space, (6) recollection/memory posts. I’m pretty sure that if I continue down a little further back to a years’ worth of posts – I’ll pretty much find the same trend. I shouldn’t be very shocked – my blog has been degenerating for some time – but I am.

Yes, yes, this counts as a non-post as well.

This absolute lack of inspiration is scary. I had this page open for most of yesterday, and what I’m writing right now is the best I could come up with. Nothing else. Nada. I can see I have over 180 subscriptions in my Reader (comprising techie, movie, random, news, comment, photo, and digg feeds). None of them gave me requisite amounts of inspiration. Any thoughts I did have about posting on a topic ended in one of two thought processes: (1) Dammit, there are a crap-load of posts about it already, (2) I really don’t know enough to write about it. Yes, this is in spite of Reading about it.

Somehow I don’t feel like throwing in the towel just yet. I keep believing the fact that my blog has not been posted to in a while will eventually result my being shamed into sheer inspired genius. Even though what actually happens is that I end up writing an absolute pointless post like this one. All this Reading, and keeping in touch with current trends – and I have nothing to say about any of them beyond the 4 line comments I put up on Reader shared items. Apparently.

Maybe that is what my posts have to evolve into. Selected shared items from my Reader with my opinion/comments appended. Would keep my blog alive. And any random thoughts that do occur to me on the myriad things I Read about are blogged. Giving reason for this space to live. Maybe some of them will expand into proper “commentary” posts too.

Now that I think about it, that actually seems like a cool idea: Reader-blogging.

I have one other idea, which involves a little more effort on my part. We’ll see how it goes.

Update: Turns out Reader’s nifty ‘Send To:’ feature comes in handy for this kind of thing. Its way nicer than using Postie, mostly because stripping out all the Google Reader header/footer in an email is hard. Plus, links to the original article are better than full-text. My only issue: Reader defaults to using the feed link (based on Google’s feedproxy server mostly) or else a bit.ly link. Both of which seem suboptimal. But the ‘Press This‘ functionality means I can play with these things however I want. Lets see how it goes. Have to remember to use it now :)

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what is my super-power?

Aug 11th

Posted by SEV in staying.thoughts

7 comments

I’ve spoken more than once about my games while growing up. The cape on my shoulders: the flight, the jumping of buildings in a single bound. The vines: the jungles, the swinging and leaping through dense trees galore. The battle(s) with evil foes: the multiple times each one had to be beaten into submission. To the extent, the next time they returned I even had to show how the villains had came back. Detail was important. Swords, guns, bows/arrows, super-strength, death-defying stunts – they were enacted elaborately in my head.

Until someone entered the room.

Today I read comics. I follow multiple adventures at once: I resent the alien invasion of Earth, I remain on tenterhooks as Spidey figures out the dire plans of the next super-villain, I applaud the triumph of Batman over Darkseid (after a fashion anyway). I can live out my childhood fantasies in this world; I can hold onto ever-fading memories of a childhood game that always seem golden.

Until I close the book.

The struggle of a man to believe he matters, to believe he has super-powers and is therefore Special seems almost too real to be a movie. How many times must I have wished for one power? Forget the 40 that Superman has, or even the multitude of talent in Batman. I wanted one ability to mark me as Special. Super-speed, agility, brilliance, super-strength.. something. Funnily enough, that dream still remains. Deep, deep down inside. I want to believe I am amazingly different, amazingly gifted, unique in a way never seen before. We all probably do.

The truth is, with so many billions and billions of people on the planet, most of us can’t be unique or important in any meaningful way...We don’t have any magical powers, we don’t have any great battles to fight…We just have reality. – Les, Special (2006)

I still dream that I will do a crap-load of things that will make me really Special. They have less to do with super-strength and more to do with possibly achievable things – learn languages galore, learn martial arts, magic tricks, mastering esoteric subjects and so on. Some of these are mere approximations to what I have seen my “heroes” do in my own head, others motivated by more practical reasons, or even just because they are ‘cool’. Is that really what I should be aiming for?

Or should I ground myself in hard reality?

Maybe the ability to face reality is the only super-power we need.

It certainly seems to be the most difficult to acquire.

Based on watching ‘Special‘

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why you should never buy an HP laptop of any kind ever

Jul 10th

Posted by SEV in staying.shitty

16 comments

Once upon a time I bought a laptop.

[I know that start is not as great as 'Many many years ago, on a galaxy far far away..' but you can pretend those words appear on the line above if they mean that much to you.]

Anyway. A laptop. An HP dv2500t. Yes, the very same laptop that died on me a few days after my warranty expired.

We are getting ahead of ourselves. Let us return to the beginning of time when the laptop landed in my hands a second time. Yes, I know it is counter-intuitive to think of a ‘beginning of time’ and a ’second time’ simultaneously, but still. In short, HP screwed up the order the first time it shipped to me. So begins the tale of them screwing up. With a screw up.

Flashback to last year. A year of heating problems and over-heating…and my graphics card is shot. I am in the middle of a conference. I need it fixed ASAP. HP charges me $300 (which I now realize I could have invested in a nice efficient little netbook), and ships it back to me pretty quickly. Everything seems fine. A month later, the edge of the panel facing me comes loose from its fastening. Repeat call to HP. They blame it on me. I think it may be possible. I don’t want to spend on it. I live with it. Over-heating still exists. Oh well. Jinxed laptop and all that.

On this trip to India, I find another good laptop engineer. Who is cheap. Amazing how everything in the US costs 10 times as much compared to India. Said engineer tries his best to open the laptop, because I think a cleaning of my laptop is overdue due to the overheating problem yada yada yada. Eventually he decides to try it in his lab. Back at the lab, and an hour later, I get a call.

[E] “Boss, they’ve applied super-glue.”

[Me] “What? HP Support? No..no..not possible. International organization, quality standards, etc etc.”

[E] “Boss, these panels are welded shut to the base. Super-glue. I’ve put in a solvent. Its coming unstuck. I’m telling you. Super-glue.”

[Me] “Ok.. great.. whatever. Open it up, clean and get it back to me. I’ll take care of it.”

So, let me get this straight. HP did not respond to my complaints (apparently, “high-end graphics cards can get pretty hot, sir”) when I said my laptop was over-heating until… my warranty expired and my video card blew. Then they replaced the entire fucking motherboard (‘coz of their god-awesome architecture), couldn’t fix the panels back on correctly, and so used SUPERGLUE to fix it? (My engineer managed to do it just fine without superglue, btw). When it went back to overheating and the panel came loose.. somehow I am to blame. Now, why did the panel really come loose? Well, sometimes superglue doesn’t hold everything in place. Why does it still overheat? Lets see:

  1. One tiny laptop fan.
  2. One Core 2 Due CPU.
  3. One NVidia 8400M GS graphics card.
  4. One tiny fuckin’ air vent on one corner.

Putting (2) & (3) results in a crapload of heat. Adding (1) to the mix means very little is being cooled down. Adding (4) to the mix means the heat goes nowhere. Bravo for neglecting every single rule about computer architecture and heat dissipation, HP. Now for the rhetoric. Why does HP suck so? Don’t get me started.

Never buy an HP laptop ever again. That’s what I tell everyone. Even the random guy in the store who I see taking a slight interest in HP products. Every salesman I meet at an electronics store in any country. Please don’t buy HP. For the love of manufacturers that make products that actually work.

Please.

Sample crappy HP laptops: Link 1.Link 2

Update (11 Dec 2009): The damn thing has pretty much died. Information gleaned from various sources tells me (1) this nVidia chipset sucks ass, (2) HP does not know shit about heat design for high-end laptops. Having ripped mine apart, I can tell you that the GPU has some kind of rubber between it and the heatsink – instead of thermal paste. I’m just shocked it didn’t die on me earlier. Since this post is hit up a lot:

  • Service manual: http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c01035657.pdf
  • Disassembly: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=228268. Please note additional inputs from here as well. I will try to post an even more ‘for dummies’ version based on the notebookreview link (hey, I’m a dummy, I mucked up so many times on this thing too).
  • Complaints, solutions, complaints: Link 1 (to be contd.)

I will attempt to find out more about the copper-mod, and see what I can do. Keep updating as and when I know more.

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