This vacation is coming to a close. In 2 days it will be back to the grinding wheel. I also have to worry about my placements now.

I eat my words when I said earlier this vacation sucks. This is one of the best - nothing but eating and sleeping all day with browsing the internet all night. When you have the whole night left to yourself, you discover many things; I saw a blog (long discontinued) by someone from my Alma Mater (Anna University). http://sree_lakshmi.blogspot.com Anyone know her? It was nice reading about assessments, Techofes,RCC, RCC annex, AVRC and stuff like coming late to class because some idiot is visiting Raj Bhavan and traffic gets held up.

Germans are top dogs of engineering, really, http://www.recorderrace.org People make vehicles out of their (old?) cassette players and race them! They are not made by engineers, but mostly by ordinary people!! It is said that India has the largest engineering talent pool, but why don't we have something like this?

Free Press

After the internet, ask people for money for anything they can get for free, a blackmarket bigger than the original will quickly come up. Put something across free access and an easier path will open up, just like water just flows around obstacles. A lot of times, I have been received links for newspaper articles by email only to find out that a 'registration' is required. The registration itself is not bad, but telling it is just an irritant and it takes the precious few minutes that I have of internet time. If you are going to let me view them for free, why not just let them free, instead of bringing up a 'login' page? I have registered in so many news sites that it is very difficult to keep track of all logins and passwords, unless they are all the same. To overcome this and to prevent any new registration, there is this nifty website called bugmenot.com

Many kind souls have 'donated' login/password combinations for many sites, including the ones I frequent, like nytimes.com, latimes.com, etc. The main page says '38125 sites liberated', 'tell everybody you know'. I have given a few too.

One question though, will the passwords be safe? The internet being filled with lowlifes, will they let the passwords remain?

USA Military Aid to Pakistan

Before and during the US Presidential Elections, all the right-wing buck futters all supported Bush saying that he is better for India than a democratic president. They said, a republican president will support only India and will put pressure on Pakistan to stop infiltration. That will never happen. Not only was Pakistan made its major non-NATO ally, it is now being rewarded with US$ 1.3 Billion including 8 P-3C Orion aeroplanes. They have also asked for 2000 TOW-2A missiles, and 6 Phalanx systems for their warships and they will definitely get it, along with the F16 jets pending. So, can we expect terrorism to increase in the Kashmir Valley? or will it be a big war?

Joshua Kucera wrote it all so well.

Bill Clinton (a democrat) only raised his eyebrows against pakistan during the Kargil War, but Richard Nixon (a republican) was ready to send the US 7th Fleet to help Pakistan during the 1971 war. Yeah, republicans always liked India.

Easter Egg

There is this nice software called YBook from spacejock.com which enables reading html and text files like paperback books. When you open a file in it, it shows the current process it is doing, like, 'removing html tags', 'converting tabs'. One of the status messages is 'Pondering the meaning of life'. You can see it when you open a sufficiently big file. Does it qualify as an easter egg?

This Sucks

It is just the first day of the vacations and it already sucks. Woke
up late at 11 am, 2 pm and 5 pm. Everytime I found that I had missed
breakfast or lunch. Had I decided to go home instead of staying back,
food would have been prepared and kept on the kitchen counter. Or, I
could go to Pizza hut or Marrybrown or some other nice place, or
atleast to my aunt's place for variety. I am lonely here and going to
sleep hungry (boohoo). Must take advantage of all the free time and do
something fruitful.