Monthly Archive for September, 2006

I’m going on vacation for the weekend. So for all the two of you actually following the blog, there’ll be nothing for the weekend(unless the place has net access) I’m going to some relaxing place in mysore.

There’s always google news if you’re looking for something to read

Wrote a page on the kind of music I like. I had this in my head for quite a while now, but I finally sat down and wrote it,

Somehow I feel that firefox is one of the most overrated products in the world. In fact, though I have been using the browser for a considerable amount of time, I?m not one of it?s biggest fans. I initially was big with the opera browser and was using it back from when it was ad-supported. Back then I had a problem because firefox wasn?t working for some reason and kept crashing. Opera was good with tons of features and it started the tabbed browsing thing out. When firefox started out, it struggled for a good market share, and it copied almost all the features from opera and added one ? ability to have extensions, courtesy, an open API. But still I run firefox with absolutely no extensions.

Now opera had all it?s original trademark fetures, tab management, bookmark management, an integrated rss reader, everything, mouse gestures?And all of this from the very beginning. The sucky part is that the system wasn?t open source and it initially wasn?t free. But I see a drift of market share into opera again. For starters, I tried firefox rc1 2.0, and it sucked, there was practically nothing new. Except for the spellcheck which was pretty nice but it became annoying at the forum and blog posting. Internet Explorer 7 release candidates looks awesome and real tempting but there?s nothing on it for linux.

Problems in opera: 1. Opera rocks, but it needs a few more plugins. The widgets are cute, but simply not enough. 2. Opera breaks with ajax a bit. I?m hoping they?ll fix it soon. Like the chat in gmail doesen?t work, along with some other gmail.

Cool things about opera: 1. It renders better for me than firefox. It fetches the text and loads accordingly, though there?s no css then, it allows people like me with almost dialup speeds to get some pretty decent surfing. 2. the editing works better with the crash recovery and session saving features that are native to opera and can be accomplished with extensions in firefox. 3. Voice support, this is supercool 4. It just looks and feels a little more better, mainly the default setup is really non-windows. 5. It has been around for while.

More on this later. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(browser)

For some reason or another, whenever I travel from kharagpur to bangalore, something always goes horribly wrong. I’ve done it all, got conned at railway station, lost wallet with photo id 10 minutes before having to get on the flight and they wouldn’t let me on without photo id and unable to get any trains, getting suspected of smuggling a cpu, almost having my 14000 rs graphics card detained at the airport because they thought I was gonna stab people with it, and there was once when I (not accidentally, could’ve happened to anyone) got on the wrong train and had to jump off a moving train at the next station.

Well, not this time, I thought. This time, I was going to travel hassle free and with no problems. I checked, double checked everything. I had everything I could need. I reached the station on time. Nothing wrong till now, comfortable ride on the cycle rickshaw, and got a train ticket for calcutta. The train came on time at 1:30 and left on time. Strange… Nothing’s gone wrong yet. And I reach on time, there’s no big delay. Very strange… The travel god must have something real bad up his sleeve. As anyone who’s travelled by a local train from kgp to cal knows, it’s a trecharous and horrible experience. All the loud annoying people and the strange smells, the bad seating and legspace and yeech. Thankfully I just plugged my cd player in my ear and survived the trip.

I was literally shaking in fear. Something really bad might go wrong. There are two hours left before the flight leaves. While trying to catch a taxi, some local told me there’s a terrible jam and it’ll take atleast 2 hours to reach the airport. I knew it! I knew it! and given with no choice, I got into the taxi and to my “dismay” reached the airport in an hour.

For the security check there was a mile-long line… the travel god didn’t let me down(or up or whatever) but my cd player came to the rescue again. I started Dream Theater’s “Six degrees of inner turbulence” whent i got into line and by the time it was done, it was my turn (note that the song was 45 minutes long). I hadn’t eaten lunch or breakfast and I was hungry so I bought a cup of coffee, and the shit had no sugar in it. I managed to gulp it down making extremely disturbing faces as I did so, and got on the plane.

The flight was delayed by an hour but eventually it reached more or less on time. And it’s official, plane food sucks almost as bad as mess food. The food was just plain sucky. And the coffee was black and way too strong. Finally I reached and nothing was wrong at the end of it, and I thought to myself “I did all that preperation and worrying and anxiety for nothing”

The travel god had pwned me after all.

Inside Joke Warning

Dr. Evil is back.
That’s all for now.

Now Playing: Children of Bodom – Follow the Reaper