The Curse of the Gravel Machine

Trudging through college life, we come across several obnoxious myths, stories and legends belonging to our college. One such legend I came across is that my college is a cursed one. The curse is that the moment it stops constructing something new, building a new annexe block, pulling down a perfectly nice place and building another... the moment it stops constructing... It will cease to exist! Just like that. God's WILL.

Obviously its obnoxious and untrue, or so we'd hope as long as we're here. But the construction bug has bitten my college since before the guards were toddlers (or so they say), and you're bound to collect different proportions of sand, cement and pebbles in your slippers depending on which path you take across the hostel campus.

Oh and I'm on a break from blogging, which is an odd statement to make since I blog in intervals of decades anyway. I'm also on a break from nosy-technical-fun-&-games since there are a couple of exciting new projects I and my friends have embarked upon which is taking up all my time.

Cheers
Shashank

All I wish is “A Nice Cup of Tea and a Sit Down”…

Ahh.. what a wish, I really wish I could do that for a couple of days more, like I’ve been doing for the past 12 days of my vacation.

I just hit upon this site (nicecupofteaandasitdown.com). I really like their mission statement, really can relate spiritually to them:

Our Mission Statement:

Well I think we should all sit down and have a nice cup of tea, and some biscuits, nice ones mind you. Oh and some cake would be nice as well. Lovely.

What a beautiful concept! This is the reason why the Internet still remains sane today…

Take a look at the site: OPEN SESAME!

Shashank

PS: This might make you hungry.

I love keyboards… I hate people

God bless keyboards, especially at times when the mice decide to go on a hunger strike. I’m sick and tired of wireless mice, and am half inclined to walk right tomorrow and purchase an ordinary optical mouse. The problem is that its far and I’m too lazy to do that as such. :-/

Its been exactly just a week since I replaced the old mouse batteries with brand new ones, and bam! they’re already dead! My mouse has stopped working right in the middle of the night at 12:29 am, when there is no chance that I can go around the house and humbly beg someone to lend me a battery, nor run out of the house and purchase some. And I was just beginning to get cosy with my work.

Damn! Today’s been a miserable day, loads of work planned, and almost none achieved. Overslept as usual.. had planned to wake up at atleast 10am for a change, woke up at 12:30pm. So then I thought, “Such is life”, and started up my system and began designing the new website of my college’s IEEE chapter (I’m its Secretary BTW), and Bang! at 1pm the power fails. With no signs of it returning anytime soon, I grumbled at the interruption of my once-in-a-lifetime, finally-sat-down-to-do-it, just-when-I-was-getting-warmed-into-the-subject initiative of my website, and decided to sit down and paint something instead! Yeah, as in real paint and paintbrush etc, which is something I managed to do atleast for a while, before I dropped off to sleep right there holding the paintbrush.

When I woke up a few hours later, I discovered that the power had returned, and therefore sat down to work again (after removing those wierd paint daubs on my clothes from that paintbrush I took to sleep with), when that stupid UPS repair fellow came. Another 2 hours wasted on that. Clock struck 8pm, and I desperately sat down to do some work atleast, when my sis called up and asked me to help her fix her system via phone and Yahoo chat. Grrr.. it was 9.30 before both of us ran out of patience and went off our own respective ways. Next, dinner and the usual running around the house insanely, before I finally managed to sit peacefully at 11pm (while that UPS fellow, and my sister, and the rest of humanity slept cosily in their respective homes) and worked for an hour or so, before my MOUSE IN A SUPREME BURST OF IRRITATING GAS……. DIED! Bah!

I’m going off to sleep like the rest of the the irritating world.
Good night.

GOing in Boeing...

Just recounting some experiences of yesterday morning.. when I was fooling around inside the New Delhi Indira Gandhi International Airport, and I ran into some unexpected expected trouble. :-)

Before anything, I must complain about the names that our airlines have been taking.. we started out with Indian Airlines and Air India. Now we have Spice, Deccan Airlines, Indian, Jet Airways, Kingfisher airways, Go Airlines, IndiGo Airlines, and whatnot.

Predictions for the next few airlines: Jet -> AirJet, TailJet, Jet-on-the-left-wing, Jet-on-the-right-wing, Cinnamnon Airlines, RedChilli, GreenChilli, Go -> GetLost, Exit Airlines, Jump-out-of-the-plane Airlines, and what not..

Anyway.. First of all, I "unconciously" skipped the luggage X-Ray, and full credit to our Indian Government that I did not get lynched by CIA-lookalike Men in Blacks. I was politely told by the check-in staff to get the X-ray done and then return. Great! It already felt wierd.. everybody was polite to the point of exhaustion... all these guys were really out to please everyone, can't figure out what everybody was so happy about. Anyway, X-ray done (needless to mention that it was inside a small cramped enclosure inside a HUGE HUGE hall [with those wierd Police DO-NOT-CROSS tapes enclosing the four sides] ), and I obviously found it hard to steer the trolley outside that HUGE 8x8 ft enclosure-inside-the-HUGE-HUGE-hall. So I was trying to exit when the X-ray guy caught my eye (or my hair which nowadays protects my eyes), and asked my to X-ray my bag (very politely of course). I said, "I have to Go to get my check-in done", and he politely shouted above the din, "You travelling by "Go Airlines"? This is not the X-ray for Go Airlines!".. and I tried to convince him that I wasn't travelling by "Go" airlines, I was merely GOing to the check-in counter. Only me pulling out my SpiceJet ticket convinced him of my honesty.. which left him wondering why I claimed to be travelling by Go Airlines earlier. Honestly...

Delhi being Delhi, I had to wait in a very LONG queues, find space in the lobby just to exist, and then catch the Bus to the plane a.l.a. DTC city buses.. stamping on others and trying to find space, yet again, just to exist.

Plane was uneventful, except that I accidentally kept pressing the "Assistance required" button each time I wanted to switch on the Light switch.. which led to the airhostesses finally giving up on me, tired of walking upto me and politely asking me for the nth time if I needed help, only to found out that I had a bad sense of button-direction. :-) I must mention though, the AirHostesses could do with a little less make-up.. they look so 'white' that they remind me of Ozzy Osbourne in his concerts.

Rest of the journey from Bangalore to Vellore (in train now) passed uneventfully too, except I kept getting woken up in the train that by adventurous cockroaches that crawled up my sleeve or worse, my pant. Lots of fun...

I know, the worst sort of thing to keep the blog active is to post the description of a journey, rather than some philosophical Point-of-View which will cause even serene white-haired wise old men to jump out of their skins uttering "Blasphemy!". Really cheap trick I know..

So here I pronounce my philosophical, anatomical and spiritual Point-of-View: Michael Jackson is a man.