happy halloween

Happy halloween everyone! Yeah! Its kushal's birthday again! If you don't know what halloween is, lemme explain. Many years ago, on 31st october, a demon child named tonu a.k.a. kushal was born. And the people were so terrified of him, that to this day, people dress up in scary costumes to in remembrance of that unholy day. That's halloween in a nutshell.

So, I got myself a nice costume last night. Its a mask that bleeds and just a black robe like the one from the villain of scream or scary movie. I was first thinking I'd go dressed as some indian god, nick suggested ganesh. He said he even had a elephant trunk and ears...but not here today; Back at his home in london. So that was scrapped. I figured I'd like to go as avatar ang. The last airbender. But his costume would be little complex. Plus, this one was a really nice deal. Now I'm planning to wear that and go trick or treating tonight. I hope I get lots and lots of candy! Then I won't have to buy groceries for another week!

Actually, I did buy groceries last night, and I had a proper breakfast after a really long time! cereal and milk. Yum. And for lunch, I had chicken curry and rice that sandeep's uncle made. it was amazing! even while I was outside decorating the front of the house for halloween, I could smell it and I was getting hungrier by the second! Well, now that I'm satisfied, I feel like taking a nap before I go trick or treating!

Yay! for external hard drive

I finally talked to dad, and told him about the refund and that I was buying an external hard drive for backup purposes. He didn't really object to it... much. So now I want to post a kind of review/my experiences with the hard drive post.

I first decided to mount the harddrive on its stand and use it vertically. I slid in the stand, and tightened it using the hex key that was provided with it. First thing I notice as it starts running is that there is a loud resonating hum. I grab the hard drive with my hands, and it minimizes. I figure I didn't tighten the hex screw tight enough. So I stop it, and turn it upside down, tighten it, and start it up again! Not very noisy at all! My cd drive makes more noise than that!

But then comes the backing up. I decide to try and use the backing up utility provided in the package to completely copy my home folder. some 54 gigs of information! And as I let it run, I now notice the clicking noise that the hard drive head makes as its fetching and writing data. Damn! this thing is REALLY annoyingly loud! So I decide to make a youtube video about it. But the youtube video doesn't gather much views maybe because of bad tagging...

But nevermind that, next thing on my mind was to try and run it horizontally and see if the clicking noise of the drive head minimizes. I stick the rubber pegs that came with the hard drive onto the side of the enclosure. and lay it on the table. I start it up, and even when I'm not really doing anything with the data on the hard drive, the clicking noise is distractingly audible. So I guess I'll just put it back on its stand and DEAL WITH IT!

Sushi anyone?

Tonight, I had another weird dream! I am gonna be leaving for my workshop soon so I'll just tell ya guys the dream real quick.

I was in a japanese...no, I want to saay 'oriental' restaurant, eating some really weird things. But not weird as in gross or disgusting. I liked everything I was eating. Just that I don't know what they were. No, not sushi. The whole dining table was full of other delicasies. So, I like the food so much, that I want to compliment the chef...or something like that.

Then this really beautiful girl comes and stands next to me, turns out she's the chef! I am mesmerised! I kinda tell her to make something even more 'special' for me now. And suddenly, its like the camera pans around my dining table, and I find out that the cooking station is right behind me. Like it is usually in many japanese restaurants.

They're called open kitchen restaurants. you can see the chef making what you ordered. I've never been to one for real, only seen them on tv. I suppose they are really expensive..? I'm getting kinda sidetracked here. okay, getting back to the dream!

And then, the thing starts transforming from a very professional restaurant kitchen to a home kitchen! What!!!! Now she's in my house cooking for me? Could this really happen? I wonder what it means. (I know what the dream means, I'm not an idiot. I found a girl at a restaurant, she's a chef, I got together with her! Yeah! 'married her'; if you want.) But is this a sign saying that I should look out for a girl who can really cook? or does this just mean I should go to a japanese restaurant tonight? what do you think?

Camping part two

This place reserved for my camping post.

Numero uno. First day of camping

I have finally caught up with the world, had my rest, and have enough time to type up a new blog entry! I had news to catch up with, emails to read, discussions to reply to and funny videos to watch. Well, the last part wasn't entirely necessary, but made my time more enjoyable. ;)

My arms and legs are acing really bad. I guess three days was just the right time for us to be there. And as soon as the next day rolled around, my body started showing signs of fatigue. I haven't been moving much past couple of hours. Its almost as if I have had a little paralysis. But it is all worth it. That's how much fun it was. The first day we were there, we just put up our tents, the tarp, and made a fire. We had hamburgers for dinner, and we sat around the fire talking. we were nicely joking and laughing when this guy came and told us to keep it down. What a bummer! Even the park ranger came and talked to us, gave us the bullshit bout there being an older clintele around the park these days and we would be first given a warning and then kicked out if they complained about the noise levels again. Although that didn't stop us from having fun, we could have done without those restrictions and would have totally loved to freak out.

Chris ali the student union president, told us about one of his own camping story when the person on the other side kept complaining about them even though they weren't doing anything wrong. And in the end, as you'd expect, chris and his friends were asked to leave. And just before leaving, he went up to this gy who kept complaining and said

"you didn't want us here in the first place did you?"

"If you didn't do anything wrong already, you were gonna do something sooner or later!"

"I'm sure you've done some crazy shit when you were younger, and that's why you expect us to be like that. But you know what? we're better than that. We're more responsible than you ever were."

And that story was really inspiring. I'm not sure its true, but I believe it could happen.

We were talking what this could have been about, (the complaining) and guessed it was probably because of the language and words we used in our jokes. The husband was probably laughing his ass off, And the wife was the one who's like "that's inappropriate!" smacks him in the head and says "do something about it." LOL. gotta love nothing fights. hehe.

In case you didn't get it, its a reference to one of the jokes dane cook makes in his cd retaliation which we listened to on our way to the pinery. We had a dvd player in the rental van, so we were like "we'll watch a movie!" but since no one had a dvd, we just listened to dane cook. He's a silly bastard! Oh I gotta download more of his stuff.

The what-who-where?

Big Announcement: I'm going camping tomorrow! And won't be back till wednesday. So I figure this is the right time for an update.

Yesterday, I left for the workshop in a hurry. Vironica bought me a coffee from tim hortons and a muffin(yum) And then I got on the train. And after sitting there calmly sipping my hot coffee for a few minutes, my heart starts pounding really hard. RELAX! I'm not having a heart attack. It was the horror of realising that I didn't bring my wallet with me today! I was constantly thinking what I'm gonna do to get to St. Claire west. I remembered that just before leaving, I had put some change that was lying on the table, in my pocket. But that was just a dollar and 6 cents. If I had cellphone service, I could have called up someone from the workshop to ask if they could come get me. But I had surrendered my cellphone a long time ago.

So when I got to the subway station, I was ready. I was prepared. I had been mentally practicing a dialogue that I would say to the people and then they would either help me out or I'd just go ask the next person. But once I was down there, it was like I had come to some other dimension. Everyone seemed just so far away. So unapproachable. It was like everyone is going in super fast forward and I'm in slow motion. But I got over my hesitation. I saw a guy fumbling with a lot of coins. I went over and told him I lost my wallet and I needed to get to st claire west. He gave me about 15 cents and just walked away. I stood there, looking around..."what now?!" I saw a kid about 15 I'd say. I asked him if he could help me out with the rest of the money. I now needed 1.55 He had wrappers/packs of coins in his jacket pocket. He said this was going to take some time. He opened 'em up and gave me the rest of the money. YAY! I thanked him over and over again. Even when we got down in the station. He was going to eglington west. (Yeah,he said his name is michael.) We travelled in the same compartment, and I just said 'have a nice day' right before I departed at st claire west.

I told about it to gerard and he asked "did you get the guy's address?" I said "no, I didn't" He said that he'd have gotten down his address and mailed him back the money. Oh I would have loved to do that. And it would have been really great. But what if after taking his address down, I never got around to sending him money? I'm not saying I'm not gonna want to send him money just what if I loose his address or the postal department refuses to deliver coins... or just the letter gets misplaced or lost. He would be really disappointed then and be like "he lied. He was never going to send me the money I should have known it!" So I just think I did the appropriate thing. Let me know if you think otherwise.

Then today, I found out its dussera, so I talked to a couple people, wished them happy dussera. And wishing to you guys too. *_* Suju was online, I talked to her for a really long time. What was really interesting was that she brought up a little sms I had sent her way back in october last year.

'boo'

Yes that's all I sent her. You're going 'what?!!' AHEM! let me explain. There's a really funny story behind it that suju told me, as I had forgotten. And just to show how much I really appreciate that, and how much I enjoyed nostalgiating over it, I'm gonna make the whole blog post about our text messages and the memories from the days in India. I had already done a couple blog posts about smses in the past. So what will make this one more interesting is if I don't look into any of those or my cellphone message history, and just try and recall bits and pieces of sentiness and funniness.

Well, first this one that suju reminded me about. We(me and sumit) were in college, and sujata, the lzy bum, was staying at home. And we really wanted her to come. (Our days were incomplete without bugging sujata to death) So we started texting her, asking her to come to college. But when she refused, we tried the most common persuasive technique in the old book: threatening to carry out a life threatening, (FATAL) act of violence on oneself and not expecting to survive. But she wasn't the kind who'd relent. (think suicide bomber from al quaeida) So she said "alright, go ahead!" And then we smsed her back, alright, see you in heaven. And she, not taking us even a little seriously, said "theek hai. wahan mil ke bhoot bhoot khelenge.(oki.we'll get together and play 'ghost')"

And finally, I sent her 'boo!'

Moving on.... I had this habit of sometimes forwarding the message to many people at a time. Sometimes it was intentional, like talking about a prank I was gonna play on someone and sending it to the 'subject' him/her-self. Just as an experiment to see if they still play along or call my bluff immediately. But this one time, I sent a message about sahil to pranav's phone.
The back story:
Sahil had just gotten a cheap sms plan and was spamming messages to everyone. Including myself. Now when I recieve this friendship full, friendly, loving, etc. etc. sms from sahil after Ages, I think he's upto something. So My habit was reporting everything that's going on to my friends. Like keep a constant conversation going. So I sent pranav the following

"Sahil just sent me a unusually friendly sms. Something's up. He wants something from me."

And the next thing I know, I get a text from sahil again that read "If you don't want to recieve my smses, then tell me! why are you 'gossiping' to pranav about it?"

I just went huh what? Did I just accidentally also forward this to sahil? Oh how dumb could I be!!! Later when I talked to pranav, he said that sahil had his cellphone. And he read pranav's smses. Damn! Oh well...

By now, I'm dying to go through the REALLY REALLY old smses that I had sent and recieved. But I'm finding a way to control myself. Plus, I don't even have the really really old text messages. Like the ones I sent and recieved during the first month of college. Oh hey! I just remembered another one!

This was at the beginning of the class decoration contest. I had pranav's number by now, and we were communicating frequently enough. And in class, when we met the other girls and talked to them for the first time, he took down everyone's numbers to keep in touch with regarding the class decoration progress. Then that day, back home, me and pranav were talking about the ideas that everyone had put forward and which ones we could go ahead with. I think it was one of shruti's ideas that I wanted to talk about, but I didn't remember her name. I was (and perhaps still am) really terrible at remembering people's names I've just met. So I text pranav.

"the girl...whatever her name is... was talking about...."

LOL you catch my drift?

And the sms didn't end there. Pranav had to bring that up in class in front of shruti! Oh man that was embarassing. But really really funny now that I look back on it. aaaahhhh good days. good days.

Where art thou mine enthusiasm

Yeah, its been a while. I was spending my days in peace and happiness over the last 8 days. Enjoying and frolicking away since my previous post, but eventually, I broke down. I came running back to my abode and I admit I need help.

Last night, even though I had finally paid off the debt, gave the 700 dollars to vironica, and given 210 dollars to oliver to get me an external hard drive, I was mulling over something. But I don't know what. I don't believe there was something to mull over! I had been living with the guilt of loosing her bike for so long, and now I had made it up to her. She was going to go buy the new bike sometime soon. And if the weather permits, maybe I could take it out for a ride too. Plus, real soon, I was going to get the firewire 800 harddrive I had been lusting over for so long! Oliver is going to buy it in new yourk and bring it back here during the reading week.

Also, Leopard is going to come out on 26th and I will start using time machine and everything. I will first backup all my data on one partition on the external drive, then format my laptop, and install leopard on a clean slate! then keep my itunes library on the external drive and keep the laptop hard drive free for my applications. Its gonna be really sweet indeed! But even thinking about all that is not cheering me up. I'm just so LOST. I finished my stupid chicken nuggets dinner but was still lingering around flipping channels. Decided I've had enough, walked to the phone.

Looked at the time in my watch, and dialed pranav's number. I figured he'd either be sleeping or getting ready to go to college. The phone rang for quite some time, I realized he must be on his bike, heading to college. And indeed he was. I said I'd call him back some other time. I wasn't disappointed. Infact, just listening to his voice made me smile. I was feeling better for a while now. But I still wanted to talk to someone. I went upstairs and went online, but no one else was there. I waited for some time, then went to bed.

The morning was just as rushed as usual. 8 am class. I was late again! We did get our drawings from the class back, FINALLY! But we didn't get the self portrait assignments back! Oh How I wish I just got it back already! Another disappointment. Nothing I'd really like to say about the digital media lab class either! I was really hungry but I didn't bring my wallet today. So I just had to hold my hunger till I was back home.

I walked home and had a banana and some other snack. Vironica was to leave for philip's place in a while. She asked if I wanted to come. I guess she figured I needed some fresh air or a change of environment. But I said I'll pass. This is just not my day is it? And I've been sitting here since. Just pushing myself to finish this entry, let it all out. But I don't think its helping. I guess I'll just take a nap now.