ReallyCoolDude's journal

After hours of research on Dish vs Cable, and weighing all options for and against buying a dish antenna, I took a decision.

I am a proud owner of a Dish Antenna now. The technician came and installed the Dish today morning :-) Woohooo! And, needless to say, I am not disappointed. The quality is good. I will be saving a lot of money, as compared to Cable, and I can watch the Cricket World Cup! The only downside of owning a Dish is if anything goes wrong, the cost of labour is pretty huge. Well, I am sincerely hoping that nothing goes wrong. Unless, some tornado or some bad storm hits my city, I think the dish should be okay.

Wow! Now, I must get myself prepared to have just a couple of hours of sleep everyday for the next 1.5 months. There are 54 matches (8 hours long) starting at 1:15 in the night, everyday, starting from this Sunday. And, I hope that India does perform as it is expected from them. I am so excited! I still can't believe I am a Satellite dish owner!

Past week was a roller-coaster ride for me. It all began with a big bang! I came to office on Monday and found myself without internet connection! The SQLWorm virus had affected my office too. Then came Tuesday, and then Wednesday, and so on. The days kept on coming and going, and the system administrators could not correct the problem. Life without internet for 4 days was unthinkable. I have got so used to the comforts of life. I could not be productive at all. Internet is like morning coffee to me now. I could not get my mind to think, I could not sleep properly in nights. I just could not get energized to do anything! My gosh! I have to get myself out of this addiction. But how?

OTOH, my other office called up, and wanted me to come and work at two offices from now on. I had to make 2 trips to the other office after my normal office hours, and then since the company is currently low on infrastructure, they asked me if I can use my personal laptop for their official work. I said yes, and off went my linux and Win98 partitions. I tried installing Windows 2000 professional on my laptop (on my own). I am not a hardware person, and my CD Drive was not working, which led me to enormous problems while installing the Win2K version. Somehow I got past all the hurdles, installed Win2K, also installed .NET (which is a pain BTW, it takes approximately 4 hours to install .NET).

Soon I realized that .NET won't work with just 128 MB RAM. It requires at least 256 MB RAM. My laptop is pretty old now, I have ordered an upgrade on the memory from Dell, I should get it today or tomorrow. And, now my laptop is working like a charm. But, all the installations, and burning CDs (for keeping a copy of the software installed on my machine) made me perfect my insomnia. I have become an expert now. I can sleep at 5:00 or 6:00 AM now, and still reach office at my usual time (which of course is very late - around 10:30AM). I almost dozed off while coming to office last Friday). This insomnia is going to come very handy when the Cricket World Cup starts in 4 days from now. Most of the matches are going to start at 1:00AM and will end by 9:00AM. Most probably I should be able to catch my sleep at the office :-). That is, if I get to buy the Dish antenna. It is going to be pretty costly. The dish will cost around $150 and then the Cricket Matches will be $300. My wife and my parents don't want me to spend so much money. Even I don't want to spend it, but then the World Cup happens only once in 4 years.

The coming week is going to be interesting in another way. I have ordered a wireless router, and a wireless card, and will make my home completely wireless. Hope this transition goes smooth! Wish me luck!

I have never considered myself a religious person. I don't even know what Hinduism stands for. Basically, the scientific mind in me tries to question everything, and I refuse to believe the gods that us Hindus worship. I am not a regular visitor to temple too. I don't believe in God's existence too. I have strongly believed that all religions serve just one purpose - divide people.

Well, for some reason, I tried to research more on my religion on the net, and for the past few days, my findings on Hinduism have startled me. I am surprised to learn many things about my religion that I didn't know. I think, I am slowly turning to a path of no return, I am beginning to feel a sense of pride of being called a Hindu (though, from whatever knowledge I have gained so far, I can not be called a Hindu, unless I follow certain things).

So, my quest begins...

Some questions which I had in my mind before starting my quest began are as follows:-

Q. What is the concept of God in Hinduism? Is Hindu religion monothiestic or polythiestic?
Q. Who founded Hinduism, and what is the history of this religion?
Q. What are the essential elements of being a Hindu?
Q. Why are most Hindus vegetarians? Why do we consider beef eating as the ultimate sin?

To be frank, the answers I found on the internet are astounding! They have just raised a lot of questions, and I am not disappointed at all. I will try posting the answers to the above questions sometime later, when I have done some more research. Please ignore any of my topics titled "My quest to learn Hinduism" if you are not interested in knowing anything about any other religion. Since, this is something not many people might want to know, I will refrain from posting it in the "Philosophy" forum or any other forum, and will post it in my journal only.

This post was edited by ReallyCoolDude on Jan 24, 2003.

This week started off in a pretty lousy way. My mother left for India. It was a great trip. We had a lot of fun together. And, I miss her. My daughter misses her too, as yesterday, and the day before that, she was looking around the whole house, searching for her grandma. It was a good bonding-trip for both my wife and my mom. I am hoping she can come back by April (when my daughter will be 1 year old), and stay with us for at least 6 months!

Yesterday was a pretty scary day at the office! Our office is in the second floor. The first floor houses other offices. At 8:00AM a guy came into the building, his wife worked in one of the offices in the first floor. He just exchanged some calm words with her, and then calmly took out a gun, and shot her multiple times! He then coolly walked out of the building, and in the parking lot, shot himself! It is so scary! Luckily, I always come late to the office! Phew!

Also, a major tension got over! Our competitors have done such a lousy job that their project got scrapped today! That means that I don't have to start looking for a job soon. And, I can continue working at the current place at least till August! Wow! What a news!

Scene 1

It was a scary night. The helicopter had just left the airbase. There were just three people in it, including the pilot. It was an urgent mission. One of the helicopters had gone down in bad weather at almost 20,000 feet in the Himalayas, around 50 feet from the China border. This was not a rescue mission though. The other pilot had been safely brought back to the airbase by another helicopter. But, this mission was to bring back the equipment and the broken machinery of the other helicopter that was still lying at that altitude. The crew had to reach the debris ASAP, and retrieve everything they could, and they had to do it before the Chinese reach it.

By dawn they had reached the place, and had located the debris. They made the helicopter land near to the site, and assessed the damage. Most parts of the helicopter were intact. It was decided to tie up the pieces together and let them hang from the helicopter. It was a MI-8 and could handle a lot of weight. The crew would just take off from there and directly land at the airbase, which was around 1000 miles from Kiraang.

The temperatures at this altitude were around –50 degrees Celsius during the day, in nights it was much colder then that. Gattoo, Raj the pilot, and the Kuttu the Squadern Leader gathered the pieces, and with the help of some ropes tied everything together. Everything looked fine, and they started back for the airbase.

Scene 2

Meanwhile, at home Malti was feeling very uncomfortable, and was unable to catch any sleep. Ever since Gattoo had left for the office, she was feeling that way. She still remembered the moment when Gattoo had started to take his dinner, when he got the call from the airbase to reach immediately for this urgent mission. He left the food in between, which is supposed to be a bad omen. She was worried and nervous, and was just hoping that he comes back safely by morning.

She just looked at her 5-year-old son once, and gave him a kiss on the forehead. She then went to the prayer room, and lit up a candle. She spent the whole night at the prayer room.

To be continued...

This post was edited by ReallyCoolDude on Jan 15, 2003.

I spent almost 16 hours yesterday trying to write a CD. Through my laptop which has a Windows 98 installed I had no problems writing the CD via the NTI CD Maker 2000 software. I then had to make a couple of Audio CDs, but through my desktop, which has a Win XP installed on it. The NTI CD Maker 2000 software worked fine with it, and within minutes I had the 2 CDs ready.

But, the tide was going to turn soon. The main reason why I sat down to burn the CD was so that I can copy all the photographs that I have taken of my daughter growing up, and present that CD to my mom, who BTW, is going back to India on Wednesday. So, after the software worked fine on the Win XP machine for Audio CDs, I tried it for burning a Data CD, and that was why I had to spend so much time! There was some problem or other, and the software kept on failing everytime. It was a frustrating experience. 3 of my CDs got wasted because of this. I kept on trying as I was under the impression that it might be due to some other problem (the error message was data error).

Finally, at 1:00 in the night it struck me that it could be due to the software. Then I searched on the net for some free CD writing software that I could use to write the CD (which I couldn't find). By 1:15 I had found a discussion forum in which someone had asked the same question. And, hence I found out that, Win XP has a built-in CD Writing software (Apparantly, licensed from Roxio), which I had absolutely no idea of!

I immediately gave it a try, and voila! By 2:00 I had 2 CDs ready each with around 550MB of data in it. Windows Ruulz! OOooppss! What did I just say? But I got to admit, it was a lousy interface, but it got the work done! And, yes, I reached office late as usual!