#nadirHASH

You tried to be the hero,
yes now you are a true hero.
I always considered you to be a bloke,
now my heart is all broke.
Hey Schumi why do you have to go...


So what if my limerick is crap. I am feeling terrible, i just can't imagine F1 without Schumi, all through my life - right from the time i started watching F1, i have found Schumi to be fighting for the title. I just am too disappointed to see him leave. The good thing is that he is not being kicked out like f*cking old JV, poor ol' Massa has found a real friend and a supporter in Schumi.

Opera comes wrapped in a pocket sized 5.9MB RPM for Mandriva (as compared to ~9MB tar.gz of firefox), the installation is as easy as it could get. The basic coniguration is easy as well - i imported my bookmarks from konqueror without any hassles and shifted them to my personal bar, just like i had them in my firefox. Opera is a highly customisable eye candy, its got great skinning feature, where you can browse and download new skins from the configuration window directly. The interface is clean and looks stunning when compared to Firefox. It definitely isn't for those who don't like GUIs very much. For such guys there is the feature that lets you save the current session, just in case of a power cut or any other interruption. Another contap feature is the thumbnailing of the tabs, to help you pinpoint your LJ from the 15 other tabs that you had already opened! Finally there are all those widgets, for example the Bittorrent widget, now i don't have to do much to download bit torrent files!

But then there have been some issues as well, i am not able to install flashplayer plugin, and unfortunately Y! and its affiliates don't support Opera which means i have to switch back to old Y! mail and stop using Flickr organiser tool.

Verdict : You have to use Opera to believe how good it is.

I am the biggest eejit of all time, why? Because six years after i started using the net, i committed the biggest blunder i could, i downloaded an effing beta meant for development purposes only. This is what happened to me after that.


PS: Opera Web Browser is not that bad afterall!

Beauty Curiosity killed the beast. Period

Talk of buying shoes, can we miss talking about the Three Stripes?


On Sunday i checked out three major showrooms - Nike, Adidas and RBK.

I started with Nike, it had kewl shoes, which were expensive but weren't overpriced unlike Reebok which had nothing but overpriced peices of shit. Finally i landed up at Adidas showroom, and walked out with a pair of these for dad.

I wanted to buy laceless shoes, but since Nike doesn't make them and as i conciously avoided buying another pair of Adidas, i bought these without any second thoughts.


So which one is your second most trusted/favorite brand when it comes to shoes?

UPDATE: Found out the model name of my shoes here!

Another day, another look. Here's my new and improved avatar. Playing with looks can be real fun!

Uploaded some old pics on my Flickr, each pic has its own story. These pics summarise the best holiday of my life. BTW, happy birthday to our king of Pop - MJ, may he continue to entertain us like he has done until now!

Where did the name come from and how do you pronounce it?
I don't really know how to pronounce it ;)
Negative Opus And Twisted Ultra Nuances

Njaard, how long does noatun take to compile?
Exodus: forever
Exodus: forever and a day, thanks to libtool


Noatun, is another media player for KDE. The good thing though is that it has 6 band equalizers (expandable to 14 band), just what i needed for my Creative Inspire. Getting the equalizer tweaks right is not a big deal, atleast not for me. Thanks to noatun, i discovered why they call Creative Inspire 2.1, the best sound system in its class!

***

Today i was introduced to Shoarma. Yeah, it really tastes s00per!

I was mid way through writing the biggest rant of my life on LJ, when something suddenly struck me, and i visited my Flickr, and i found out that this guy, blogged my latest photo. And talk about mood swings, i forgot all the crappiness, deleted my journal entry and started afresh with this one. Strange, how small things can change the way you behave. This month has been really strange one - this is only my third post of the month.

***

In the morning one of my childhood dreams came true. Some 10 years back when Denim AfterShave was launched, they gave a print ad wherein the Denim fragrance was enclosed, there was a circular window made of paper, which when peeled, would uncover a fragrant Denim logo. I fell completely in love with that fragrance. I wanted to own Denim. With time, i forgot about Denim AfterShave, till now i have used several aftershaves - Old Spice, Fa, Park Avenue. Latest being Park Avenue, but it turned out be the worst of all. This morning i noticed a Denim bottle in place of Park Avenue, i got so very excited, used it and fell in love once again with that awesome fragrance. Its the best aftershave i have ever used. w00t for Denim!

Its the age of betas. First it was Gmail and Flickr, fortunately Flickr moved on to a gamma upgrade. Then came Orkut, while the Gmail still remains in its beta. Now the latest to hit me is the Yahoo! mail Beta. I got an invite to use the beta on my malcolmfrink account, instead i used it to access my nadircruise account. I don't think i am ever going to use the Y! account as my primary mail. The beta is pretty slow on my 600MHz Athlon machine, makes my 256kbps net connection drag like a dial up connection. And i think Thunderbird does a good job in organising all the mails using my gmail account.

Among other things i watched Final Destination 1 and 2 back to back. The movies were good, though the second one felt like deja vu.

Life it seems has become useful once again.

Yesterday i tested the latest FM station launched in Delhi last week. Its called 95FM, and one of its punch lines says No ads, no talks, only hits for the hot city. The song selection is great, hit indian and english music, of varied genres. Finally there is this one radio station i can plug to round the clock and get what i want!

***

Everytime i went to the college office for some work, one fresher or the other would enquire if i was a new admission. WTF, i was too tired of telling them that i was 3 years senior. Today, i took the revenge, ragged half a dozen freshers. What fun. I have always enjoyed the ragging sessions, more so because i was never ragged. When i came in the college i wasn't new to JMI, being an internal candidate helped, i never had to follow the dress codes, my beard occasionally used to grow up in the first year and nobody would object.

Among other things, the studies started off too, fortunately its no more the usual boring stuff. Now there are a lot more interesting things to study - transducers, sensors, control systems, computer architecture et al.

My collection of Matrix screenies.

What if...

Lara Dutta married Brian Lara, she would become Lara Lara.

***

Load Programs became a reality, anybody would disappear for a day, and come back when people stopped bothering.

***

Rules could be bent and others broken. There would be no speed limits and all the traffic lights could be jumped.

***

There was no sine die. I would have been in the college studying like a nice kid.


PS: The college has reopened officially, the proctor has stepped down and sine die ended by VC, but the classes resume from Monday.

20Q is a real kewl game, while going through some pages about AI i found this game. Damn this 20Q is smart. Try to cheat and it'll tell the contradictions in your answers!

3 months back i got a haircut, i wasn't very happy with my new hairstyle, so i decided to skip two scheduled haircuts. Today the third month got completed, and a haircut was urgently needed. So i went up to the guy and gave him the regular instructions, and as always he looked a bit confused, fortunately that guy followed the instructions step by step, confirmed how i needed my hairstyle to be and boy i found my good ol' style back.

For past some days i have been forced to hook to Chirkut, it sucks so badly, unfortunately school friends don't actually know anything beyond it, no LJ nothing! Damn that Chirkut just doesn't have the privacy that i can enjoy on LJ, every other chirkut can peep into my scraps and whats going on between me and my friends!

Yeah ok so quite a lot has happened in the last few days. The results for 4th Sem are out, and so pappu has passed yet again. I hopped on to the Vespa after a gap of about 3 full months, the first ride after such a long gap felt good, really good! My skills on a two wheeler have improved a lot.


PS: Finally i discovered that pepperoni was not just another name of pepper! :)

My best day of the week has always been a Thursday. The reason was very simple, Thursdays meant the best cartoon shows on TV!

It used to start with Tailspin at 16.30hrs, Super Human Samurai at 17.00hrs, followed by Phantom 2040 at 17.30hrs, Boy Meets World at 18.00hrs(boy that guy Cory Mathews was so like me!), and finally Blossom at 18.30 hrs which was one of the favorite of Codie.

Then later Phantom 2040 got substituted by Duck Tails.


Which is your best day of the week?

Raw materials required:
Pizza base, mozarella cheese, one onion, one tomato, some cottage cheese, maggi tomato ketchup, Soy Day texturised soya flakes and other stuff for toppings.

The Recipie:

Preheat the oven at 200 degree Celcius, in the meantime chop the onion, tomato, cottage cheese and mushrooms (i never use them, though). Mark four quads of the pizza base using a knife, so that it becomes easy to cut when ready. Now spread a thick layer of Maggi tomato ketchup on the pizza base, and grate the mozarella cheese over it. Now add all the chopped vegetables. Toppings can be varied accordingly, the baked soya flakes taste really good and are natural source of protein too. Mozarella cheese can be avoided too, and substituted by one-two teaspoon of butter, but it should be added after sprinkling all the toppings.

Now, place the dish on a high rack and set the baking time from 13.5 minutes to anything around 22 minutes.

The ideal time setting for:
Soft Crust: 14 minutes
Medium Crust: 16 minutes
Hard crust: 19 minutes
Extra hard/Brown Crust: 22minutes

This is the pizza with soft crust baked for 14 minutes, and this one has a bit harder crust - baked for about 16 minutes.


PS: Damn my english is fast deteriorating, i am missing my english classes too much. I am forgetting the spellings too often. This way i'll have start once again with a Grammer Book and a dictionary by my side! I even forgot how to spell tomato!

100 days after i left the gym, i rejoined it yesterday, and boy i was able to do everything that i just couldn't do on the last day before leaving.

Started off with normal warm up : 5 minutes each on cycle(doing about a decent 20kmph with medium spring tension), twister and finally jogger. Then went on to some stomach exercise, did 30 horizontal situps in one go, 20 on the first incline, and another 20 on the next higher incline. Then was the time for mixed exercises, did 2 sets of 15 rep each on Chest Press, Shoulder Press, Butterfly, Front Press, Back Press before moving on to dumbells and some tricep excercise.

It took something about 50 minutes to do everything. And just as i ended up with the tricep exercise, i started feeling dizzy, went out inhaled fresh air, drank some water and was back to normal in a couple of minutes. Took a the usual walk back home, only to realise midway that i had developed some major cramps in my legs. I slowed down a bit, and somehow reached the building, just as i lifted my right leg to climb up the stairs the cramp worsened and just after taking some 15 steps up, i collapsed down on the floor, waited patiently for the cramps to subside. Fortunately my left leg came back to normal, but the right leg was still giving way too painful cramps. Somehow i got up and limped the remaining two and a half floors. Actually when i was getting up after doing the situps i twisted my right leg, and that is why the right leg developed cramps. My right leg still isn't in a very good shape, but i thik it'll be better as the day progresses.

My training is finally over, worked day and night to get the project report done. I am going to enjoy the next three days like mad. College starts monday, and as always i am very happy about going to college! And yes for the record my perl script is up and running, now there is a kewl memory utilization graph running on a critical server in iNOC. Yep, it wasn't a big deal, the code was small and simple, but at the end of the day, one feels happy to have done something useful for the organisation! Unfortunately i forgot to take screenies of those graphs. Lets see if i can get those graphs out somehow!