Picnic at Karjat

Had a very tiring but awesome day! There is no way I can sit and write today about what I did. My legs are aching like crazy and I am super tired. I just wish I could sleep immediately. But can't :(

Anyways the thing is that we had our company picnic and we went to Karjat. Basically went and halted at a place called Prakruti Farms and from there trekked to see the Kondane caves (something like that). Shall put the details later. It rained throughout the day and I got drenched through it all. Believe me when I say it, spending the whole day in a pair of wet jeans is not fun. Not fun at all! But it was an experience anyhow :)

Played football in the rain and completely covered ourselves in the mud, mainly because we spent most of the time on the ground thanks to the continuous rain and the excessive amount of mud. We then went and cleaned ourselves in the baby pool (by the time we got cleaned up, the baby pool was more like a pond, muddy!). We then jumped into the swimming pool with t-shirt, jeans and everything. :P Spent sometime playing water polo with a football

Had an awesome lunch where Mihir and myself managed to eat chicken which we later realized was not for us but for another group :P Too late suckers!!! Good thing I had loaded my plate on the first go itself :D hehehehe!!!

We then played a lot of Table Tennis and had a pretty good time :) The evening got a little boring since we had all got very tired and we just wanted to get back home. My situation was little worse since I had not carried an extra pant and though I changed into a dry t-shirt, I had to continue sitting in my wet jeans :(

Reached back home at 9. Waiting for Dida to come now. Mom/Dad went to pick her from the airport. Will put up photos and write in more details tomorrow.

Goodnight!

Hogged! Totally hogged!! Its pretty late and I gotto get up early tomorrow. Its our company picnic to Karjat tomorrow and we are to leave by 7:30 am. Tomorrow is going to be one bloody packed day! So that's it from me today. Details tomorrow.


PS : Watched Angels and Demons again on TV. The dumb pricks deleted all the murder scenes and the death scenes. Whoever did it should be impaled. Watched G-Force. Cute movie. Gotto see it again.

blyaah - 2

Ok so I bunked work today. There were numerous things happening today. I was pissed of in the morning. Reasons :
1. My computer was acting like a jackass and not working.
2. Dad had taken over the laptop and had no intention of letting me use it.
3. As a direct result of the above 2 points I couldn't work on the shitty problem that I had written about yesterday and it kept doing a marathon in my head.
4. The APC guys (UPS wala) did not send me the contact details of their engineer.
5. Had to take mom shopping because she wanted to buy stuff for Dida, whose coming on saturday. I realized that the only way to get through it is if I acted as a Zombie and just kept driving wherever she said. Thats what I did. Extremely boring!

At one point I had decided to go to office, but the journey made me decide otherwise. Anyways it was pretty late and it wouldn't have helped going to office at that hour, given the fact that I wouldn't have wanted to miss my regular bus, given the rainy season.

Things picked up with the evening. Went and practiced dance in the evening. That warmed me up for the gym and then went and gym-ed for an hour. Now I know tomorrow I'll skip it again coz I got a dinner party to attend and the place where I am going, the aunty there cooks fabulous! So, the extra kasrat today would infact be balanced tomorrow.

No checked columns in my table :(

At times, a person tends to get so stuck with an idea that you do everything possible to make it work or get it to look like you want it to. That's what happened to me today at work. Working on a GUI in QT and what I required was a way to make the headers of a table checkable. Basically if a table has 3 columns, then the column header should be checkable. Checking it enables the column while unchecking it disables it. I searched, I tried, I tweaked, I read, I did everything possible but couldn't get it to work like that. I can create checked items in the cell area of the table but not in the headers. Damn! Apparently, as soon as a QTableWidgetItem is turned in to a header, its properties change x-( Trolltech (now Nokia) should look into this and make my life easier. Now I gotto think of some other way to basically get the concept working in some alternate way.

Finally gym-ed after a long time today. I have managed to lose my muscles, gain fat and yet hovered around the same overall weight. Shape has obviously changed. :( Now gotto burn my ass off and get back in shape before moving to Pune. I plan to involve myself in more sport activities once I am there. Lets see if that works out.

A Horror Films' summary

I love horror movies. Why? I do not know. Probably because of the testosterone rush I get. But I like the scary ones, the genuinely scary ghost movies. I am not a fan of cutting, slashing, gory ones. They just make me sick in the stomach. I prefer the thrillers with mystery in them. If I look back, I think I have always liked ghost stories and horror movies. As a kid, the stories I loved hearing  the most were stories involving ghosts, witches and demons. Once I caught on the habit of reading, I read as many ghost stories as I could lay my hands on. 


The horror movie addiction started in Kalimpong. During my stay at Tapoban, Miss Bose had just got hold of a VCR. The only 2 types of movies we watched were movies of Dev Anand and horror movies. I was in class 6 then. I watched Evil Dead and couldn't sleep for 2 nights. Scared the shit out of me. Unfortunately, living in a creepy place like Kalimpong doesn't help. And after watching such movies, when you need to leave your room in the cold and navigate to the toilet in the night (which was not attached to our Boy's Room), valor was the last thing on my mind. The easiest and the most logical was step out of the room, stand in the balcony, close your eyes (apparently ghosts don't bother you if you keep your eyes shut) and pee out :D So that's what I did after a horror movie session.


I watched "Friday the 13th", "Evil Dead", "Nightmare on Elm Street", "Child's Play" and numerous other movies during my stay there. Its been years since I have seen a horror movie that has really scared me. :( Pathetic! It was so much easier getting scared as a kid. I tried watching those gory movies viz, "Hostel", "Saw", etc. Only made me sick in the stomach. Didn't really scare me. Then tried the serial killer ones, "Scream", "I Know What You Did Last Summer", "Urban Legend", etc. BULLSHIT!!! Absolutely bullshit! "The Final Destination" series though was a little interesting.


From the classics, "Omen" never scared me :( "Exorcist" did! :D I also really liked "Exorcism of Emily Rose". If you have seen the hindi horror movie "1920". It had the scare-factor in it. Well shot movie, had a good story to it. "Sixth Sense" didn't work for me though loved "The Others". I think everyone should see it. Had an awesome story and the last part was so bloody shocking! 


Japanese guys are crazy about horror movies and some of the best ones are Japanese. Liked "The Ring" and "The Grudge". Preferred the original Japanese over the English versions. Also tried the psycho-thriller-horror types. Don't know what the fuss was about "Psycho". My dad still thinks that's one of the best horror films. "The Shining" was interesting. I liked "1408" too. And then I tried all the handycam horror movies. "Blair Witch Project" and "Paranormal Activity". The handycam did give a real feel to it, though the lack of a story really made it a little drab for me. I won't say I didn't like them. I would rather say they were different. :P

I really crave for a good horror film. I wish they would make one.

A programmer's guide to Decoding Life

The following name has been recurringly coming to my head for the past few weeks and seeing the way my blog has progressed, I think its more apt. So I am officially changing its name from "A programmer's guide to Life, Coding..." to "A programmer's guide to decoding Life".

My computer is really behaving very weirdly. It works when it lies flat on its side. Keeps shutting off when it is in its normal upright position. Bloody weird! So I have decided to keep it in its parallel-to-the-ground position :P

There are quite a few things I do which are a little strange or rather a little "what-the-hell" types. One of them is feeding birds in the morning. It's a result of something that someone had told mom, that I should do for my betterment. I dunno how far that has worked out but I guess feeding animals has never hurt anyone. So every morning I tear a chapatti into small pieces and scatter them outside my window. Initially it was just crows, but over time, the variety of birds have increased to crows, myna, sparrows and an occasional pigeon.

I really don't get much time to observe their feeding habits during weekdays but on weekends I spend sometime watching them. I have noticed that each of them have their own behavioral patterns. As far as noticeable intelligence is concerned, crows are at the top, followed by sparrows and myna. The dumbest of the lot are the pigeons. Stupid to the core. I think they have no brain. They are just stupidity encompassed in feathers that can fly. When you are being chased by a cat or a dog, fly dumass!! Don't run! But they are too stupid to actually figure out when they should fly and when they need to run. Anyways moving on to their behavior. The crows generally pick up the pieces and fly off. At times, they pick up a couple of pieces at one go. I have also noticed them putting the pieces in water at times when the chapatti is a little hard. I was very impressed :). The sparrows are fidgety little fellows. They keep hopping and moving while pecking at the pieces. They don't carry them but eat as much as they can. The mynas seem as if they are panic stricken. They are looking everywhere, pecking, looking again.

But the best part is that none of them try to push the other away. They seem pretty peaceful in each other's company and are not bothered about what the other is getting as long as they get some. Liked their way of life and coexistence with other competitive species :)

Expectations

My computer's gone cranky. I thought it just wanted a cleaning. But apparently that's not the case. Right now my CPU is lying flat on its side with its other side open taking half my table space. I thought it was a problem with the SMPS, so got a new one. That's not the case either. It's definitely got something to do with the power supply. That is what I am suspecting. I just hope nothing is wrong with the motherboard. Because that would mean a replacement and if I start replacing parts of it I'll end up upgrading to a new system, which currently is not something I am looking forward to.

During my college years, I had this calendar with witty sayings and cartoons illustrating them. One of them was, "Expect the worse and you'll always be pleasantly surprised". I tried that for a while, didn't work for me. I think it brings in negativity. You expect things not to happen and sometimes it ends up not happening. I think it plays opposite to the "always-think-positive" attitude. As it is, it's a bloody difficult job trying to keep the attitude, specially when you can't control things that depends on someone else. So that is where hope kicks in. You hope that things happen. But you can't expect negative things, cause then you can't hope for the best. I do not understand the concept of "Expect the worst and hope for the best". How? How can you hope when you expect the exact opposite to happen?

I think not expecting is a better option. It sounds as if you are being indifferent to the whole thing, but I think it is better than expecting things to happen and then feel bad about it if it doesn't. Or not expecting things and then feeling worse, thinking "I knew it wouldn't happen!". That's like reaffirming your negativity. Keeping it at the zero-level gives it a hope of moving into the positive quadrants and yet minimizes the effect of the negative quadrants. I am trying to attain that level of thought. Not an easy job. I remember, as a student, my Dad thought that I would get into the IITs. I didn't. Never felt the push of wanting to get in. Gave all the exams though. Then after graduation, Dad wanted me to do a MBA. Disappointed him in that too. My mom once told me, "Your Dad has a lot of expectations from you, do you plan to ruin them all?" I asked her, "Why does he expect things from me which do not align to what I want in my life?" Never really understood my Dad's point of view. I guess you tend to expect things from people you love, it's natural I guess. Funny thing is you get angry on them if it is not fulfilled.

If I define a "Expecter" (the one who is expecting) and an "Expectee" (from whom it is expected), then the situation sort of boils down to the following.

The Expecter expects from the Expectee because he loves him and finds it but obvious that the Expectee would do as wanted by the former. But then thats not what the latter has in his scheme of things, which obviously screws the whole situation. Now, repeated occurrence of this either leads to a rift between the two or the Expecter just stops expecting, reaches the zero level. Mostly as a defense mechanism and avoiding unnecessary disappointments. Worst is when there is a rift between the two and then the "no-expectation" happens. I think its better to get to the state right at the beginning. Avoids a lot of problems. :)