The Quarter of Vacations

When I began this quarter I had a very arduous task on my hands - I had 50 vacations left and only 30 could be carried forward to the next year. So I had to take 20 days off work or lose my vacations. Surprising it was a difficult choice and I chose to go with taking 20 days off. That combined with our annual offsite (powered and sponsored by Google) made this quarter (Oct - Dec 2009) the quarter of vacations!

First up was the vacation to go home (Chennai) for my dad's 60th birthday. Had a lot of fun with parents and we went to an auspicious temple to celebrate 60 years of dad's wonderful and eventful life. It was during this vacation that I realized that it was okay for me to take a vacation from work. Nothing stopped working and my team mate Harshitha was easily able to hold the fort down while I was gone. Armed with this new knowledge, I boldly stepped into a territory I had never dared to enter before - a vacation that was going to last more than a week! More on that later ..

After the nice vacation home, there was another break for the Google offsite - this time we were going to Malaysia! To call the offsite awesome, would not do it justice. We got to see the Patronas twin towers, dine in the revolving restaurant, visit Genting Highlands (for a change I won some money in a casino there) and hit a lot of theme parks and clubs. I had a lot of fun and it just added more reason to make this the quarter of vacations.

When Mr. D0d0 had completed his transition to Dr. D0d0, he finally came out of his cocoon and recommended that we visit Rajasthan - the land of the Kings. I instantly loved the idea and we planned out the trip to be immediately after my Malaysia offsite. The trip lasted 10 days and I got to meet Dilip, Khurana, Harsha and Rishabh. We visited Jaipur (wannabe pink city), Udaipur (full of lakes), Jaisalmer (land of deserts and my personal favorite of the trip) and Jodhpur (wannabe blue city). No matter where we went, the food was mind blowing and I had ~7 meals every day! For a more detailed catalogue of our trip you can read Rama's post. The general culture in Rajasthan was very laid back and relaxed and I found it soothing after being used to the busy and fast paced life in Hyderabad.

Even after the massive vacation to Rajasthan, I still had 3 days of vacation left. What better time to take it than for New Years? And what better place to spend New Years than with your loving parents? Yes folks, for the final vacation in this quarter, I will be in Chennai and I will be celebrating the advent of the new year with my parents. I have now started liking vacations (I have no idea what was so scary about them that I never bothered to take a long one since joining Google!) and am looking forward to this one.

Wish you all a happy new year! And three cheers for this wonderful quarter of vacations! (Hip hip .. hooray)*3!

A gentleman's agreement .. huzzah!

Long time no post! My excuse? - I had blogger's block!

Whats been up with me you ask? I lost a lot of weight and became fit. Most people couldn't believe it. Now they call me a college kid .. school kid coming in a close second :). Here is a recent pic of me.

In other news, I learnt how to ride a bike (finally!). Its a lot of fun though I'm still figuring out riding in traffic conditions. Also playing Street Fighter IV. Its a very nice game and I'm slowly but surely getting better at it :)

Whats up with all these social networking sites? Now I'm really confused what to use .. twitter? blogger? facebook? orkut? wave?? (those are the only few I have accounts on). Why give the user so many options? Why not just make life simple for the average internet user (not that I'm an average internet user ..)? Its all so confusing .. which is why I stopped socializing on the internet :)

Oh god .. I feel the block coming back again .. can't think of anything more to write! So I'll quickly finish off with a couple of more news - I bought a house (a studio apartment) in Guruvayur and I am going to be an uncle soon (mid 2010)! Oh .. and congrats to Dr. d0d0! Hoping to meet him soon .. ciao ..

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Grrrrrrr .. somehow feel like I'm leaving something unfinished. Don't feel like signing off yet .. so I'm going to play a game .. going to list 3 facts about myself .. only 1 of them is true .. leave your guesses in comments if you find time -

1) In whole of college my lowest grade was a B

2) I was on live television

3) I had a 100% attendance record in school between 6th and 10th std

The title has nothing to do with the post whatsoever. Guess you must've figured it out by now. Title is just a phrase from the series How I Met Your Mother that I liked :)

O, thou truly are awesome Ubuntu!

So finally as I posted earlier I decided to buy a PC. Kiki and I went to the place in Secunderabad and ended up buying PCs with the exact same configuration!
Pentium dual core 2.5ghz (sucks), 4gb ram, 250gb HDD, nvidia nforce 780i motherboard, xfx nvidia 8800gt graphics card, samsun 20" lcd monitor, dvd combo drive, microsoft keyboard and mouse. It cost like 39k totally and inside by cabinet there are 5 fans! Here's a pic for the ub3r nerds -

Pretty cool huh? Anyways, I installed an original copy of WinXP SP2 on it and then updated it to sp3 and patched it completely. Played most of my games (NFS Undercover, Fifa 09, Prince of Persia etc) on it. Finally I got bored of looking at windows and decided to install linux (did I mention the first thing I downloaded on my new PC was ubuntu iso?). Thanks to Praveen, I got a CD and burnt the image and booted it up using CD. The installation was really fast but I had some trouble getting my graphics card to be recognized. After installing some restricted drivers this was the result -

manikandan@chaosnet:~$ glxinfo | grep render
direct rendering: Yes
OpenGL renderer string: GeForce 8800 GT/PCI/SSE2

W00000t! It recognized my graphics card. From here on installing eye candy was child's play. After only about half an hour, this was what I had -

<-- My desktop

<-- 3D window switcher

<-- Wobbly: Makes windows wobble when you drag them








<-- Ripple effect: Water ripples on the desktop








<-- Blur effect: Adds motion blur to all actions









I know a lot of these are just eye candy and have got nothing to do with performance, but they look pretty cool :D. There are a lot more effects (one of them is an effect which turns your desktop into a 3d cube) but only a video can do justice to them I'm too lazy to make a video now. For those interested I used compiz fusion on top of gnome. I hope I made at least a few of you jealous :)

Time for a PC?

Working for Google has its advantages. Everyone gets a laptop and that has prevented me from buying a PC till now. However, I am fed up of having to play all the games I buy (yes, I BUY games) on a crappy graphics card with uber low graphics settings. It does not give me the proper gaming experience that I love. I think the collection of games I have (maybe i'll list it in another post) deserves better. Its kinda like watching a movie at home vs in a theatre. If the movie itself is terrible it wont make a difference, but if the movie is a decent one then I think watching it in theatre gives you a better experience.
So here I am, wondering if its worth buying a PC. Not only will I be able to play most games with awesome graphics, I can also use it to create stuff that will be mine alone (apparently if I use Google property to create something then that something belongs to Google). I've actually been thinking about it for sometime now, and I've already decided my graphics card is going to be either a GeForce 8800GT or a GeForce 9800GT. I talked (read emailed) with Rao (yes, I still talk with a few people from my batch in college once in a while) and he said both are good choices (If anyone knows a better choice in the price range of 8k - 10k please do let me know). The rest of the stuff is still undecided. Should I go for a motherboard with SLI or not? Is it worth buying a UPS? How much RAM should I buy? Should I buy RAM with SLI support? etc etc etc. Well, if I do buy a PC, I am definitely going to write about it! Later d00ds ..

Prince of Persia

Before I start, I want to warn everyone that there will be lots of spoilers here. If you haven't played the game and want to, then please do that first and then come back here.
This game was costlier than the other games i've bought and I had seen some demo videos of the game. Initially I was skeptical about the idea of a "companion" throughout the game. I thought it would be very annoying and the only other time it worked was in Half Life 2 - Episode 2 (Alyx is with you always). However the Ubisoft developers have done an awesome job with this game and they got it just right. It is a work of art.
A princess named Elika accompanies you throughout the game. Not only does she save your ass all the time, she also helps the prince use magical things and you kinda grow to like her a lot. The prince keeps flirting with her towards the end, and there are lots of hints that he is actually falling in love with her. I really liked the way they "implemented" her. She is one of my all time favorite NPC (non playing character).
The main storyline of the game is something like this - a dark god has been set free and you try to imprison him along with Elika. Later you find out that the storyline is a bit more twisted. Elika actually dies and her father, unable to bear her death, makes a deal with the dark god. He agrees to set the god free in exchange for her life. This is what grants her all the magical abilities. Once you have healed all the lands surrounding you and you have had the "boss" fight, Elika is forced to give up her life to imprison the god again. The prince then gets a revelation and he sets the dark god free in exchange for her life (again), bringing you back to square one :)
Even though it may sound frustrating, at the end when I was forced to undo whatever I did throughout the game just to bring Elika back to life, I did it in a heartbeat. As I played the game, I grew very fond of her character and when they killed her I was like nooooooooooooooo .. however, I somehow knew the game wasn't over and I continued playing and I was more than happy to release the dark god to bring her back to life again :)
Coming to actual game play, the platforming part of the game is great. The prince is very agile and using Elika's magic you do some really funky stuff. However, the fights are very limited and you only fight one monster at a time. There is no "entering a room and being ambushed by 10 monsters". However, every monster is tough and they actually become tougher as you go through the game. You can perform combos (using Elika's magic attack, your sword attack and your gauntlet attack). If the monster realizes that you are over using Elika's attack, it morphs to a form where it is not affected by her magic attacks. Similarly with sword attacks. This way, its really hard for the fights to get boring, and you have to know a lot of moves (you cannot use a single move over and over again to defeat the enemy). You can also talk with Elika during the game, and sometimes their dialogue exchange is funny.
The game also gave me a great emotional experience. I actually felt sad when they killed Elika, and I had mixed feelings at the very end of the game. I was happy she was alive again, a little frustrated that all my effort during the game went to waste and angry that there was no closure. Clearly, the ending leads to a sequel (Ubisoft announced this series will also be a trilogy) and I was kind of left wanting more.
Overall it was a great buy and I'm a little sad that its over. Maybe i'll play through it again (just for kicks!).

N "V'z ernyyl ernyyl oberq" cbfg

I am going to type this post wihtout using backspace . basically because I cant use it. I ended up pouring coffee on my laptop and now the backspace key doesnt work (neither does delete!)
So please bear with me

What have I been upto? Mostly working .. a bit of fun here and there. Going to Las Vegas this weekend .. last time I went there I lost a lot of money (about enough to pay for 2 Ipos Ipod* touches). This time I'm going to win all that back :D. Also this time I've decided to give poker a try. Other than that, here are a few fun facts that i've learnt -

Hardest puzzle i've ever solved - www.notpron.com
(grrr .. forgot to ad a http:// in front)

Easiest way to "spend" time: http://www.digg.com (better use reader!)

Best time to post: When you are so bored that you have seen all episodes of all tvs hows .. tv shows*, most of the new movies and finished playing all your games!

Favourite reply to "hey" or "hi": sup

Easiest way to figure out what th e title is: http://www.rot13.com

Wow, I made it through the post without too many mistakes! Now going into sleep mode .. cant continue typing ...... must sleep ................... office tomorrow ..............grrrrrrrrrrrr

Achooo!

Cough cough .. dust dust .. achooo ..
Aah .. there .. good as new .. well not really!

A great man once said -
If you do not post often enough, your blog will collect dust and will be lost forever.
Proved him wrong didn't I?

What have I been up to these last 1-2 years?

- Visited Mountain View (CA) a couple of time - US is a very nice place, but it can get kind of lonely there
- Wasted my entire time over a game called Diablo II - well, I wouldn't exactly call it wasted. I had fun with it, but I think its time to grow up now
- Part of my life not dominated by Diablo has been taken up by foosball and pool (my friend and I even won the foosball championship in all of Hyd-engineering)
- Started preparing for GRE - successfully completed one wordlist in over 3 months now. My dad is so proud of me!
- Attending weddings all the time - it seems all the people in Hyderabad engineering in Google have decided that this year is _THE_ time to get married.

Now that i've quit Diablo, I seem to have infinite free time. I pinged Rama for the first time in many many years (I heard he's giving a party to his friends for this), just finished setting up my Google reader and also found time to post! w00t!

Something significant I noticed in my last post - I seem to have a habit of dropping all the vowels in every word. I remember making a concious effort to stop this habit and I like it much better this way (easier on those automated ocr-word whatever scripts too!)

New vocabulary - owned/pwned, gg (godly good; as in he's a gg player), gibz (give), sux0rz (sucks; like h4x0r), ezpk (easy kill like in cs or quake or diablo)

Favourite word - blah

IPL is good