Daily Archive for January 20th, 2008

Protected: Yet another IIT article

Published on January 20, 2008 .0 Comments

Read in the news that Bihar’s ready to start it’s own IIT.

Article 1: Bihar’s long cherished dream [mutiny.in]

Quote: Ask any statistician he will tell you that Bihar’s literacy rate is perhaps one of the lowest in the country but what he will not tell you is that the how Bihari students have been topping in most of the competitive exams in the country. IIT-JEE or CAT , UPSC or Railways chances are that Bihari students will definitely figure in the merit list.

Personally, folks from Bihar have this special thing about them, so good for them and their IIT stature university. I also had a Bihari roommate for a year.

For the international readers of this website, an IIT, or an Indian Institute of Technology, is an elite university with very strict admission critera, and featured one of the world’s most difficult examination (which I and 1% of the people taking the test passed), so it’s a big deal, yet most of us, atleast me, don’t know exactly what we’re doing here.

Times of India: Bihar may get IIT this year (20th Jan 2008)

Rediscovering rammstein + more

Published on January 20, 2008 .0 Comments

After watching a rammstein concert video with a few friends a while back, I almost rediscovered a band which I stopped listening to a few years ago, and seriously wondered why.

Essentially Rammstein is a german industrial metal band [Wikipedia], who’s famous for their simplistic, yet extremely catchy songs with a very heavy and powerful bassline and pounding drums. Their songs are perfect headbanging material, and the vocalist, Till Linderman has a rough, deep, ,and heavy bass voice, which is one of the most recognizable voices in music today (with competition perhaps only from lemmy).

Their music is great, with five albums, and the old ones being absolute classics. Also they put on perhaps the best show ever. While most concerts are mostly the band playing, rammstein’s lead singer is a pyrotechnician, and the show has flamethrowers, burning gimmicks, fireworks, and other things that go “fuyer frie”.

At the end, this is great stuff, and i’ll listen to this for a while before going back to amon amarth.

Also I got a new motherboard and processor(intel core2duo) and a 19” monitor. They’re mostly from the winnings of the WBT contest, and the monitor was a gift from my parents .

So I could run crysis on my rig. It chugged along on ultra low graphics with no anti aliasing. Crysis was a nice game, but tried to go overboard with the graphics, but was fun to play for a while. I started having the strange problem with motion sickness if I played for more than half an hour, but that prevents me from playing too much, if the game was good enough.

Bottomline, crysis looks nice, but is mind bogglingly difficult even on normal settings, and took lots of planning to execute properly, but was strangely satisfying. I didn’t find the game dynamics that impressive, though everyone seems to be talking about it. It also did a Halo2 on the ending, which was just a nasty kick in the cojones.