girl + linux/tech + floyd/rock/metal... + football/F1... = Anomaly

this post has genesis in the last.fm shout i received yesterday -
"u r full of anomalies.....first of all Pink Floyd is ur fav band and second u use amarok"

hmm...well this is not the first time 'm receiving such a comment, have received a fair amount of them in recent years...'n my reactions to them also have evolved over time, from initial outright denial to slow acceptance of the fact...

I would like to think there are more of my species 'n that the lesser numbers is 'coz the general male:female ratio is already so high... :) yeah i know guys out there are already saying wishful thinking...eh? :)
Well recently became a member of linuxchix, which is involved in increasing the number of girls using linux...so as an answer to one of the following shouts -
"well god should make more girls like you", i can say atleast one issue is getting addressed... :)

But as far as music is concerned 'm really not sure... :( Ofcourse i can go on 'n on abt the beauty of floydian music, but if the person doesn't like it, you can't do much about it can you...? 'coz myself have come across many guys who still listen to insipid boy/girl bands, overly commercialized, fed to masses hip-hop artists...so i don't think this can be generalized into a girls/guys thing....in a different vein, i think only a real connoisseur can appreciate the great stuff, so for other normal ppl, pink floyd will be just 'We don't need no education'....

'n sports...hmm...well honestly haven't come across many guys who follow football/tennis/F1, i think it would be fair to say cricket is pretty universally folllowed in India (i know, world famous in india types :D) regardless of asl...while trying to think of how to get women into sports, i was reminded of this sexist fark comment i had come across long time back..."Women learn to talk football so they can develop relationships with the dreamboats that populate sports bars"... :D he he...maybe thts ur solution...your propoganda may go something like imagine all da shy,good-looking,nerdy guys you can meet...darn tht previous sentence didn't come off well...infact it sounds down right crappy... :P Neways again remembered this brilliant write up i had read sometime back - The Nerd Handbook... i think you can pretty much base your stuff on that... :)

'n yea forgot 'Gaming'...that is the last frontier....as one of my friend remarked the other day - 'If only you gamed, you would be one of us!" But sadly i don't think i will ever cross it, somehow can't imagine myself sitting in front of comp and twiddling at buttons...infact when wii first came out, i thought now here's something i can start gaming with....well 'm still waiting to lay my hands on one... :(

Well on a serious note, don't think these can be generalized as a guy/girl thing...'coz among many of my male colleagues 'm the biggest tech/sports/music freak...
I feel generalizations most often give an exaggerated picture of how the things are...TOI is a classic example for this... take a topic , generalize on the extreme end to sensationalize ofcourse, there's no fun in medians is thr? and go on debating on it. Sometimes i wonder are they dumbing(i know thrz no such word) us down...or are we already so dumb?

Off topic - today just came across the new google talk gadget, you can emebed in your sites/blogs, allowing the visitors to directly chat with you, similar to meebo...but thn yea this is Google! :D :P Already embedded it in this blog but sadly it seems therez no chat log, i.e the chat session doesn't come in the gmail chat section...atleast not as yet... :)

Fat Free

This post is about an amusing incident that happened couple of hours ago. On my way back from work, i stopped over at foodworld to buy some essentials viz. Maggi 'n some chocs ( yep! they r quintessential for me :) )
Well so, I was at the billing counter when i saw this man in front of me with a big pack of Kellogs Chocos. Usually one can reasonably identify the crowd which buys such stuff, but this person nowhere looked like he belonged to one of them. It was the typical 'Blink' moment. For people who haven't read the book 'Blink', well it essentially means that your subconscious processes and arrives at conclusions much before your conscious mind kicks in. Well so in my case, my subconscious mind had already arrived at the conclusion that somehow the person and kellogs didn't fit. So one thought went like "Not bad, If people like them are buying Kellogs!" before it was rudely interrupted by another "Shame on you puthali, Don't prejudice based on appearances, appearances don't maketh the man". And so I silently stood, awaiting my turn. When the person suddenly asks the billing lady for 'Fat Free' which was written on the carton. I was about to laugh when the billing lady, whom i thought would clear the poor chap's misconception, called out to another girl in telugu: "This guy wants some fat free, check it out". Somehow tht laughter vanished and i just stood thr speechless...

Now while writing this, i was wondering how wonderful weird this place has become due to globalization 'n everything. Some english words, have just become an inseparable part of people's lives, even of those who don't know english. So, here was this billing girl, who knew only telugu and then there was the kannadiga, both of knew what 'Free'(an english word) meant in the sense of 'free soap, free battery...' but not 'Fat free' :) Well one can't blame them also, 'm here reminded of the famous Big B's dialogue from Namak Halaal, 'n 'm gonna promptly end this post with that :)

"You see sir, I can talk English, I can walk English, I can laugh English,
because English is a very funny language."

mp3splt

This is a real cool, nifty thing i came across yesterday. What happened was, yesterday was copying some of my muzak frm my dvd coll to HD, when i came across Johnny Cash's 'Man in Black' album and me thinks why not give it a spin, its been a long time. So i do just that, but then i see, the file is an album wrap! Now ppl will know tht its a Pain! First thing there's no easy way of jumping tracks and then couple tht with scrobbling screwups!
'M probably a bit like Monica(frm F.R.I.E.N.D.S,if you didn't get it) when it comes to ID3 tags. My fingers start itching, whenever i see a badly tagged mp3. I can't understand how some(probably most?) ppl don't seem to be bothered with badly tagged files! Correcting 'em will hardly take few minutes!
But 'm digressing here, this post is abt mp3splt. So yes, after coming across that, i started googling for some mp3 splitter. I remembered using one on windows ages back. Anyways landed up at this page. And was I in for a pleasant surprise! It fitted my requirement to a T!

-w "wrap mode" - used to split file created with mp3Wrap or AlbumWrap. This should have worked out perfectly for me but that would have been too perfect wouldn't it? It threw up some error saying the file is corrupt, /me guesses it might have been something to do with changing IDv3 tags.

Anyways later on i messed around for a lot of time with
-c "CDDB mode" - and man this would've been such an amazing feature, if only one can find proper CDDB files! And I realized what an hell CDDB file format is! Infact the first result in google tells that, type "CDDB file format" in google and check out the first result! If google doesn't revise/update its algorithm/page ranks, then you will land up here. :)

Finally i ended up using
-s "silent mode" option, which worked out pretty well.

Note: its 'mp3splt' and not 'mp3split', i wasted sometime while trying to d/w it, by overlooking this. :(

Adios

Blogger Label Search

Yesterday was playing around with my mindtrail blog, trying to add a 'notable posts' section. The idea was to add a label to the posts and just put up a link to the label search. Everything went fine but for two issues.

> Somehow when i did a search, not all posts with the label were appearing. Totally weird i know! Seemed to me like blogger had some issue with displaying more number of results. Anyways googled it, seeing if thr is already some known issue. The nice thing abt google is, you needn't have to go thru' the links, the answer is displayed on the search page itself(depends on how good your query is ofcourse ;) ). So without delving deeper tried doing "http://yourblog/search/label/?max-results=100 Is it as simple as that?" and it worked! Now 've no clue how or why it should make any difference.

> Second was, i did not want labels to be shown for each post. But somehow couldn't figure out how to do it. Probably because i still haven't upgraded the template of that blog and most of the probable solutions were related to new template mechanism.

Anyways talking about power of google search, was reminded of a very cool query hack which i use a lot these days. With the cricket season on, all one needs to do is type 'live cricket score' in one's FF google search box, and presto you get the latest score!

No need to go to any specific site and you escape the load times, plus for any onlooker, it just looks like any other google search page. :)

Slack!!!

yes, this post is frm my Slack 12! :D
Basically just now got two essentials working, in case you are wondering, da essentials are - Sound and Networking :)
And both required just one command to be run! :)
Well thanks to Suman, who told me to run 'alsaconf'! wonder why Slack doesn't do it by default, the way Suse does! anyways i didn't spend lot of time getting it to work, so its ok :)
'n as far as networking, well the problem was, i had skipped the networking setup during installation....yes, yes i know dumb of me, but yea after 3 installations 'n configurations, trying to resolve the lilo boot loader issue, i was bugged!
Anyways the problem, was me being brought up on suse yast, where its all just go click,click 'n you are done, i had no clue where to start in slack. Almost did Alt+F2 and Yast, before i realized 'm not on suse :) But thankfully came across 'netconfig' in some slack basics pdf, which did the trick! 'n here i am typing this post! :)
So there you go, now you know two very useful commands ! 'n btw yes 'm on KDE, will probably blog about my experiences with it soon...
until then
Adios

update -
Just now got scroll wheel working(yes, it doesn't work by default on slack), after li'l bit of googlin'. Steps to follow which i got from here -

For a 5 button mouse (2 buttons with a scroll wheel):

Option "Buttons" "5"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"

if your mouse protocol is set to
Option "Protocol" "PS/2"
or
Option "Protocol" "auto"
You may have to change it to:
Option "Protocol" "IMPS/2"
or
Option "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2"

In either case, once the changes are made, restart X to use your scroll wheel.

second update -
Somehow shutdown, never did a complete shutdown! So it was back to some more googlin' which landed me at the solution - adding 'acpi=force' at boot time. But then i had to hunt around for some time, trying to figure out how one makes lilo remember this option. Grub was so easy!!! it just let you add and save from boot screen itself! Anyways this is how one does it for lilo -

• vi /etc/lilo.conf
• go to linux section and type append = "acpi=force"
  
• save the file
• run 'lilo' as root
  

0096 2251 2110 8105

It all began with this sequence of numbers - "0096 2251 2110 8105". Now very few people will get it, 'n among that who would probably see this blogpost is '0' . So what is this number sequence anyway? It befuddled many my friends when i put this up as my status message on gtalk. Some responses i got -
A: Is this your old credit card number? but in ulta? :)
B: whr are you? (yea i don't know, which country can possibly have such number :) )
C: whats with that 0096 code?

D: you started drinking?
E: is that you credit card number?

Whereas a simple google would have given one the answer. The first result in google would tell you that it is the last line of 'Even Less' song by Porcupine Tree. Though it is people 's tendency to disbelieve even when something is in front of their eyes. :)

So yes, what's the significance of those numbers? If you proceeded after the first line you would have come across this -

It's the same number (0096 2251 2110 8105) as an E05 recording on the Conet Project discs (track 3, disc 1) by Irdial, all of which you can download for free here: http://irdial.hyperreal.org/"

But it was actually the second result which made me want to dig deep. Now me too had never heard of something like E05 recording or Conet Project. So imagine my surprise when i stumble on this wonderful world of Shortwave Numbers Stations - http://www.irdial.com/conet.htm
Seems like its straight out of some Ludlum's spy thriller. :)

The website says the TCP is currently out of stock, but you can access some of the recordings at
the Internet Archive. In case you didn't know abt Internet Archive before, check it out, it is one brilliant concept!

Now 'm just waiting to catch some shows on this. 'n yes do get and listen to 'Stupid Dream' by Porcupine Tree.

Uber Cool Light-Weight Nerd

when you have nothing else to write abt, you can always depend on above stuff to keep the blog alive :)

btw, 'Uber Cool Light-Weight Nerd', now thts a nice name, think it pretty much got-it right ;)