With so many photos, I had no option but to write them onto a DVD. Unfortunately I couldn’t find the trusted moser baer dvds. So bought a couple of “Amigo” dvds, and wrote all the photos onto it. A friend warned that those are unreliable dvds. But I ignored him, thinking i’ll just copy them to my hard disk.If the DVD lasted for a couple of days, then it would have served its purpose… so I thought.

Wrote the dvd in the evening, packed my bags, boarded the train, and within 12 hours, I was in Bangalore.

The first thing I wanted to do was to copy those photos on to my hard disk. I put the DVD in… the drive light started flashing… the hum of the motor spinning… and to my horror – the blank explorer window! Not a single photo visible.

And so, started the search for a recovery tool.

Downloaded Copy Cat, Anyreader, ISO Buster, ISO Puzzle, Bad Copy Pro, DVD Data Rescue, CD Recovery Toolbox and Power CD DVD Recovery. Out of these, only  Power CD DVD Recovery seemed to read the disk. After scanning for 6 hours (Yes thats right SIX), it listed 525 photos. I estimated that there would be atleast 800 photos. But recovering 500+ out of 800 wasn’t so bad at all. Started the recovery process which took another 2 hours to complete. In the end, it recovered 367 photos properly. The rest were all messed up

Learnt a very important in this ordeal : ALWAYS, Always use good optical media for storage.

At times I dream about the warm sun on my face, cool wind in my hair, fresh morning air to breath, the chirping of birds and a pristine lake to take a dip in! As I lay dreaming again, I realized – Its about time I drag my lazy ass out of the house!

Last June, when I visited Dharwad, I went on a cycling trip with my friend. It was one of the best experience I have had till date. After that trip, we had talked about exploring the Sahyadri Ghats ( Western Ghats ) further. I suddenly remembered that conversation, and immediately called Rahul.

When I called him, to my surprise, he brought up the topic before I even had a chance!

We talked at length as to how we should go about exploring the ghats. We considered going on bikes! But it seemed a tad too risky. Cycling is another option we are still considering. But trekking seems to be the best way to explore…

So as of now, this is the plan.

Take a train from Dharwad to Castle Rock. From there trek to Dandeli. Spend the night at the forest guest house. Go around supa dam the next morning, and head to Anshi National Park in the afternoon. Spend the night there in the tents! Now, Anshi National is an amazing place. Lots of trails, hills and brooks. Want to get up early in the morning, and walk around the park, and find a nice lake or a stream by afternoon. I really want to spend a few hours doing absolutely nothing! Just want to lay in the grass, while the birds chirp away, to try and clear my mind of the millions of thoughts that haunt me.

Found quite a few interesting trails:

Hitch a ride back to Dharwad in the evening, or the next morning.

Hopefully by the end of this 3 day adventure, my mind would be clearer, and I would be able to focus on the multitude of important things at hand!

To manage my precious movie collection, I wrote a small program (windows) to store the movie titles i had, and also the dvd number of the movie, so that I could easily keep track of the movies, and find it easily.

Download it!

P.S: The database file is a plain text file located at “%appdata%\MovieDB\movies.db”

Screenshots:

Adding a new movie

Viewing movie collection.

Got acquainted with a lot of seniors during mukthi 7.04, got my first job at IBM, made a decent amount of money wining competitions in various fest, became the chairman of IEEE MSRIT Student Branch, cousins got married, went on an amazing cycling trip, got another job at Symbian, organized an inter-collegiate tech fest – aavishkaar, made new friends, started learning to play the guitar, finally we all went on a class trip and got suspended as a result

But I am also very, very confused as to what I should do next… I feel as if there is something missing in my life

There is a lot to look forward to in 2008. I’ll be an computer science engineer! Will start working – most probably at Symbian. Should be an interesting year…

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Title: Young and pretty lady wishes to marry a rich guy. Fantastic reply from a financial person

A young and pretty lady posted this on a popular forum:

Title: What should I do to marry a rich guy?

I’m going to be honest of what I’m going to say here. I’m 25 this year. I’m very pretty, have style and good taste. I wish to marry a guy with $500k annual salary or above. You might say that I’m greedy, but an annual salary of $1M is considered only as middle class in New York. My requirement is not high. Is there anyone in this forum who has an income of $500k annual salary? Are you all married? I wanted to ask: what should I do to marry rich persons like you? Among those I’ve dated, the richest is $250k annual income, and it seems that this is my upper limit. If someone is going to move into high cost residential area on the west of New York City Garden (?), $250k annual income is not enough.

I’m here humbly to ask a few questions:

1) Where do most rich bachelors hang out? (Please list down the names and addresses of bars, restaurant, gym)
2) Which age group should I target?
3) Why most wives of the riches is only average-looking? I’ve met a few girls who doesn’t have looks and are not interesting, but they are able to marry rich guys
4) How do you decide who can be your wife, and who can only be your girlfriend? (my target now is to get married)

Ms. Pretty

**************

Here’s a reply from a Wall Street Financial guy:

Dear Ms. Pretty,

I have read your post with great interest. Guess there are lots of girls out there who have similar questions like yours. Please allow me to analyze your situation as a professional investor. My annual income is more than $500k, which meets your requirement, so I hope everyone believes that I’m not wasting time here.

From the standpoint of a business person, it is a bad decision to marry you. The answer is very simple, so let me explain. Put the details aside, what you’re trying to do is an exchange of ‘beauty’ and ‘money’: Person A provides beauty, and Person B pays for it, fair and square. However, there’s a deadly problem here, your beauty will fade, but my money will not be gone without any good reason. The fact is, my income might increase from year to year, but you can’t be prettier year after year. Hence from the viewpoint of economics, I am an appreciation asset, and you are a depreciation asset. It’s not just normal depreciation, but exponential depreciation. If that is your only asset, your value will be much worried 10 years later.

By the terms we use in Wall Street, every trading has a position, dating with you is also a ‘trading position’. If the trade value dropped we will sell it and it is not a good idea to keep it for long term, same goes with the marriage that you wanted. It might be cruel to say this, but in order to make a wiser decision any assets with great depreciation value will be sold or ‘leased’. Anyone with over $500k annual income is not a fool; we would only date you, but will not marry you. I would advice that you forget looking for any clues to marry a rich guy. And by the way, you could make yourself to become a rich person with $500k annual income. This has better chance than finding a rich fool.

Hope this reply helps. If you are interested in ‘leasing’ services, do contact me.

signed, J.P. Morgan

But how many of us have stepped out of the cities, and traveled the countryside, especially during the monsoons?

I happened to do just that this year. Had been to Dharwad during july this year. I lived in this town for almost 16 years, but never really explored it. After spending a day at my grand parents house, I got really bored. Then at 10 in the night, it suddenly hit me! I used to cycle a lot when I was a kid. So, I called up a school friend, Rahul, and we decided to cycle the next morning. It had been raining heavily for the past few days, and so he was a bit skeptical about the whole idea.

I woke up at 6 in the morning to a slight drizzle. We met up at around 7, still not sure where we’d be going. Rahul suggested that we should go towards Haliyal. And so, we set out…

Now, Dharwad, as most people are blissfully unaware is at the foothills of the western ghats in North Karnataka. It rains like crazy there during the monsoons. And after a week of almost non-stop rains, like a divine intervention, it stopped raining on the day we decided to go cycling.

Our initial plan was to cycle for a couple of hours, relive the good old days, and catchup on each others lives. During that cycling trip, i ended up discovering how beautiful our country really is!

Here are some pics to prove it!

Isn’t it amazing?

Well… we cycled about 40 kilometers to a small town called Haliyal. On the way we drank tea at a small tea shop in the middle of a forest (the road passes through the forest), which I always wanted to do!

It took us about four hours to cycle 40 km. We were tired. So, we found a transport rickshaw to haul our cycles back to Dharwad! It was exhausting, but an amazing adventure! Only if we take a break from the so called city life once in a while to explore our country, will we truly learn to appreciate it. It has permanently changed the way I look at my hometown, and my country. Truly, India is Incredible!

I used to be quite indifferent, when it came to the choice between Linux and Windows. Afterall, both were free

But after I installed Ubuntu 6.10, things changed, and how! I could do almost everything I did on Windows, and I had a multitude of choice for doing those things. But somehow i didn’t quite like the looks of Gnome. I tried a few themes, but none were good enough, untill i discovered this theme called Moomex. Got new icon set, called nuoveXT 2. Now my desktop looks just Amazing!

Now there was just one more thing I wanted – A music player.

Rhythmbox – The default player that comes with Ubuntu was ok. Lots of features and plugins. But somehow, it just doesn’t feel right. I still don’t know whats wrong with it!

And so, the quest began! Days of googling, reading reviews, and trying out the ones that looked promising. Got Beep Media Player – Looks like winamp. A decent player, but difficult to organize music. Then I shifted over to BMPx – A _VERY_ unstable Rhythmbox clone. Next came Songbird - Didn’t quite like the interface. Amarok – KDE SUCKS ( atleast 3.x ). Though its packed with cool features, i don’t use is as its built on top of qt, which looks _very_ ugly. Maybe i’ll give it a shot once i install kde 4.

Banshee ROCKS! After trying so many players, i finally found a player that suits my needs! Banshee has all the features that i need. Very easy to search songs in the library, Last.fm autoscrobbler, with song and similar artist suggestions, cover art and lyrics plugin!

Check it out.. http://banshee-project.org/Main_Page ( works only on linux, though i have read that someone has hacked it to run on windows )

And this is how it looks..

Neat, huh?

And that quote is probably the most laughed upon, for we all know that the world today remotely resembles the world of 1899. Everyone believes that there are still a lot of things that still need to be invented – probably the list is endless.

Even I’d like to believe that the world is yet to see many amazing things. And not just believe, i’d love to come up with few things of my own . But is FRUSTRATING

These amazing ideas keep coming to me… and with full enthusiasm I sit and work out the details. But disappointment is just one google search away! For everything I have ever ever thought of has already been implemented by someone else.

Today was especially infuriating. A few days ago, I had this brilliant idea of classifying songs based on the “mood” of the song. Its quite difficult to do, as its _very_ complex to write a software that can interpret the meanings of the songs. My idea was to just gauge the mood of the song by the tone its music.

But today, I discovered something, that does precisely that. Its called the Moodbar.

How I wish I had been born about 25 years ago!

A recap in a recap ( woah.. reminds me of a simpsons episode ) – This year I was elected as the chairman of IEEE Student branch in our college!

Back to just the recap

We had the fest on 12th and 13th September 2007, which was a huge success!

Organizing this tech fest was one of the biggest and the most challenging thing i have done. EVER! Meeting new people, motivating them work, coming up with a contingency plan for everything, and finally the thrill of accomplishing something that is bigger than individuals! To sum up, It was one heck of an experience!

Ok, back to the euphoria!

Got a job in IBM GBS and a better one in Symbian!

So, atleast i’ll have something to do after i get out of college