Shyam Shankar was the guy who introduced me to Rock music. He was one of my most favourite seniors at college, in his third year when I joined college. Only Third years and Final years are allowed individual rooms and can have their own computers at our hostels. He used to listen to bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nirvana and Linkin Park, but with his tiny speakers, they sounded like hell to me!

He always used to notice my annoyance and would let me hear Lucky Ali or some other soft music for some time, but would switch back to Rock soon. Maybe he thought by making me listen to it again and again, he could force rock into me. But he didn’t succeed then.

Only an year and a half back, I bought a really got pair of head phones and started listening to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Soon after, I was listening to all sort of modern rock - Linkin Park, Creed, Lost Prophets, Cold Play, Avril Lavigne, Evanescence, U2, Greenday, Snow Patrol.

I was slowly starting to realize that I couldn’t stand pop anymore, which is exactly what Shyam had predicted. I used to really love pop when I was at school. Even during my first two years at college, I used to listen to a lot of The Corrs, Natalie Imbruglia, Spice Girls and others. But now, if I hear any western pop music, I’ll run as fast as I can from the place.

Then came the 90s bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam. And eventually, I started listening to classic rock. Since then, there has been no turning back.

Right now, Led Zeppelin are my all time favorites, and then I have monthly favourites. There have been so many bands classic and metal bands I’d find really impressive for a while then lose interest and find a different band. There have been several bands like Guns n Roses, Rammstien and others. But Evanescence and Metallica have been exceptions, because I’ve listened to them for more than a month because of the ultra heavy voices of the singers. And Metallica’s guitars may be distorted, but still they’re melodic. I’m listening to Metallica even now. As I type this, Metallica’s Nothing Else Matters is playing. This song has become another of my all time favourites. And Metallica too. I love their music, but hate the way they look.

I’m not sure if Shyam has too much time for rock these days. His work is like that. I had promised to call him more than a month back, but I haven’t done yet. He must be mad. I’ll give him a few Metallica discs when I meet him next. That should do the trick.

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 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!

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.

Wine Finally supports Winamp with Enhancer. The latest version of Wine, the Windows Emulator was launched a couple of days back and now u can run Winamp with Enhancer without any problems with installation or configuring. Ofcourse there are a few problems. The Media Library doesnt work, Modern skins dont work and a few other minor problems as can be seen from the screenshot below.

If you’re running Ubuntu or any other Debian based OS like Debian itself, here’s how you can install Wine 0.9.45:

• Goto System -> Administration -> Software Sources and choose the Third-Party Software tab.

• Now click the Add… button near the bottom left corner.

• Enter the following in the Apt-Line text box and click Add Source

deb http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt feisty main

• Click Add… once again, type the following and click Add Source

deb-src http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt feisty main

• Click Close to close the Software Sources dialog box and a dialog asking you to reload the software list appears. Click Reload.

• Goto System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager, search for Wine from the software list, and Mark it for installation by right-clicking the item. This installation will remove any previous versions of Wine that you might have.

• Now click Apply at the top of the SPM window to complete the installation.

• Once Wine is installed, you can install Winamp by double clicking on the Winamp installer .exe file.

• Make sure you deselect Modern skin support and Winamp Agent before starting the installation.

• When done, you can start winamp with the launcher on the desktop or by choosing Applications -> Wine -> Programs -> Winamp -> Winamp

• If, for some reason the launchers dont appear, you can create a launcher from the installed executable.
  • Goto your Home folder and press Ctrl+H to display hidden folders.
  • Open the .wine directory and follow this path: ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Winamp
  • In here, open winamp.exe to start. You can create a shortcut by right-clicking winamp.exe and choosing Make Link. You can copy the link to the desktop or to a panel.

Phew. That’s a long procedure. If only XMMS, Audacious, Beep or any of the Linux music players have a DSP plugin as good as Enhancer0.17, life would have been much easier!

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Tags: Wine0.9.45, Winamp, Linux, Ubuntu, Enhancer 0.17

A few days back, I happened to come across a really interesting and useful add-on for Firefox. It downloads videos or other embedded multimedia content from the website, directly to your hard disk, in FLV format. Click here to visit the download page.

Looks like the download-every-time-you-wanna-watch days are going to be long and past. But will they come out with some way to block add-ons like these? I don’t have the slightest idea..

Btw, if you have the Greasemonkey add-on installed, you can also check these two scripts. They add a ‘download this video’ link to any YouTube or Google Video video page.

Script 1 - For YouTube videos

Script 2 - For Google Video videos

As you would know, Greasemonkey scripts sure are much more convenient than any other add-on.