I was participating in this coding competition at Empower.IT. My day turned out to be quite eventful after the contest, and by the end of the day, I had won a Transcend T.sonic 610 MP3 player! I don’t think I can write about all of that right now, but I will write about this day sometime.

And I know an mp3 player is that big and that I missed a real opportunity to get a laptop, but its a start. A very late start. Maybe I’ll participate in Yahoo code events after college, but I sure will do somewhere. Its fun getting things for free!

And, the mp3 player works great. The rock equalizer preset is good in particular. The first song I copied to the player was Lisa Stansfield‘s Treat me like a woman. Its heaven to listen to it!

I’m at Einstein Engineering College now. Some 100 km away from my college. It’s an event called Empower.IT, organized by ELCOT, a government body dedicated to the cause of improving the quality of man power in the southern districts of Tamil Nadu.

Its huge here. There are more than 10 thousand people inside the campus, and there are loads of stalls and showcases. And talks by the industry hotshots, and ofcourse competitions.

Among the showcases is this cool internet cafe with Wireless Connectivity sponsored by Tulip IT Services, Chennai. And it rocks! There must be atleast a 100 computers here, all great looking Dell N-Series, all brought here by ELCOT. And all of them run SUSE Enterprise Linux! The’ve got some motivation!

I’ve just got the results for the preliminary round of the coding event. I’ve been short listed, and the real event starts in a while. I’l get a laptop if I come first. I have to rush now. I’m running a bit too high on adrinalin right now, I guess.

I was traveling in a bus with my brother in Chennai when I firstsaw an aol.in hoarding. I thought it was stupid for America Online to use the .in TLD and decided I would never try aol.in! This was almost six months back.

Since then, I have been ignoring so many ultra-cool TV commercials that I started to get sick! I was really impressed. I knew that Yahoo does some advertising, but I never expected AOL to embark on an advertising campaign that’s this mad!

I started to have second thoughts about my decision, when this really good ad showed up on India Today. That had done the job. I decided to try it and signed into aol.in, and got the first blow. It was build with asp, which is something I have a strong dislike towards. Next, it was taking an unusually long time to load on my linux box. And once it had loaded, the interface wasn’t fast enough! I didn’t want to know anything more.

Their advertising campaign was too good, but I should have known better. I shall stay with Gmail until the day Firefox gets a good email-client addon.

(1) Ricky Ponting – (THE TRULY GENUINE CRICKETER OF THE CRICKET ERA AND WHOSE INTEGRITY SHOULD NOT BE DOUBTED) should be considered as the FOURTH UMPIRE. As per the new rules, FOURTH UMPIRE decision is final and will over ride any decisions taken by any other umpires. ON-FIELD umpires can seek the assistance of RICKY PONTING even if he is not on the field. This rule is to be made, so that every team should understand the importance of the FOURTH UMPIRE.

(2) While AUSTRALIAN TEAM is bowling, If the ball flies anywhere close to the AUSTRALIAN FIELDER(WITHIN 5 metre distance), the batsman is to be considered OUT irrelevant of whether the catch was taken cleanly or grassed. Any decision for further clarification should be seeked from the FOURTH UMPIRE. This is made to ensure that the cricket is played with SPORTIVE SPIRIT by all the teams.

(3) While BATTING, AUSTRALIAN players will wait for the ON-FIELD UMPIRE decisions only (even if the catch goes to the FIFTH SLIP as the ball might not have touched the bat). Each AUSTRALIAN batsman has to be out FOUR TIMES (minimum) before he can return to the pavilion. In case of THE CRICKETER WITH INTEGRITY, this can be higher.

(4) UMPIRES should consider a huge bonus if an AUSTRALIAN player scores a century. Any wrong decisions can be ignored as they will be paid huge bonus and will receive the backing of the AUSTRALIAN team and board.

(5) All AUSTRALIAN players are eligible to keep commenting about all players on the field and the OPPONENT TEAM should never comment as they will be spoiling the spirit of the AUSTRALIAN team. Any comments made in any other language are to be considered as RACIALISM only.

(6) MATCH REFREE decisions will be taken purely on the AUSTRALIAN TEAM advices only. Player views from the other teams decisions will not be considered for hearing. MATCH REFREES are to be given huge bonus if this rule is implemented.

(7) NO VISITING TEAM should plan to win in AUSTRALIA. This is to ensure that the sportive spirit of CRICKET is maintained.

(8) THE MOST IMPORTANT RULE: If any bowler gets RICKY PONTING – “THE UNDISPUTED CRICKETER WITH INTEGTIRY IN THE GAME OF CRICKET” more than twice in a series, he will be banned for the REST OF THE SERIES. This is to ensure that the best batsman/Captain will be played to break records and create history in the game of CRICKET.

These rules will clarify better to the all the teams VISITING AUSTRALIA.

I downloaded a new porn video yesterday, and as it turned out, I ended up enjoying the music much better than the video. I’ve never seen porn with such good music as the background full of guitars and drums and a few artificial sounds. I’ve listened to a lot of guitar sounds, and this one seems to be particularly good.

I ripped the music from the video and I’m putting it here. If anyone could help me identify the artists, I would be really happy to hear from you!

Life would be heaven if all the porn in the world has such morale boosting music!

I don’t understand why all of them have to do this at the same time. This is the second highly awaited movie in an year with a 60s story line, a bloody commercial motive and with loads of crap anyone can write about for a lifetime. Maybe its because I’ve never watched dramas of the 60s that I’m not able to like any of these. But still, I liked the 60s look of Soha Ali Khan.

Yeah, I like comedies very much. And I don’t like drama much either. But I don’t usually get annoyed at them like this! And this is the second annoying-hindi-drama in a row for me after Om Shanthi Om. Atleast that was a really good laugh! Here’s the story in a non-fictional form:

There is this womanizer superstar, and the star aspirant girl who falls for him and later realizes that she was betrayed. She meets a writer and falls in love with him instead. They try to get married, but his friend and her manager ruins it. The writer becomes a director and asks the heroine to act in his movie which she refuses. So he hires someone else and makes a master piece of a flop. The heroine goes to work with the womanizer hero again. The writer gets annoyed and leaves for London. Meanwhile, the heroine becomes an alcoholic and is diagnosed to have a hole in the heart. Hero comes back after a while makes a movie on his life with the old superstar, the heroine, which becomes a hit. The heroine goes on to die an year later and he becomes a big director.

Now, if they thought it would be nice to change the villain into a good guy towards the end, that is acceptable. But, among other things, the hero’s friend becoming stupid and they having to kill her is really annoying. Anyway, they’ve managed to make one difference by making her death look less touchy by not showing her dieing. Maybe they want to show that heroines can be killed without affecting people’s emotions, but when they havn’t managed to do that, there is no point at all in killing her, as the movie is completely commercial in all other aspects.

The cinematography is good. It was what gave me the patience to watch the movie. There was a shortage of expressions on Soha Ali Khan’s face in several scenes, and those on Shiney Ahuja’s face were strangely similar to those on all his other movies. Other than these, the direction is quite acceptable. The story was bad, but the producers wanted to make money without risking anything. So that is acceptable too.

But personally I would say that crying over one’s own issues would relieve pain better than this.

Among all the characters in the Harry Potter series, the one I fancied the most was Nymphadora Tonks. That’s mostly because of her bright pink hair, and her tendency to knock things over. Too bad Rowling had to kill her.

Now I was watching this music video Hot by Avril Lavigne. And I felt a strange similarity between the Avril in the video and Tonks. Maybe its only because of the some pink hair and the wand-like stick that she has in the video. Was Avril really inspired by Tonks? Here’s a screenshot:

By the way, I love the way the song starts. Only the first two lines.

My father says he doesn’t believe in making resolutions. As for me, I just havn’t bothered to make any. But still 2007 was good for me. I don’t remember too many bad things fr0m 2007 and I’m grateful for that. Infact, 2007 was the year when I got my first job!

Anyway,  I thought I’l make a small resolution for 2008. A simple one too. By the end of the year, I’l have added atleast 250 more posts to this blog.

I hope this year turns out to be better than the previous one. Maybe it will. Because even-numbered-years have always been good for me.

And Happy New Year to everyone! Have a great year ahead!