Musings – Abhay S. Kushwaha

One of the reasons I wasn’t actively blogging was the increased workload caused by failure of my primary 120G HDD that I use as my data storehouse in my PC. One day it was working fine, and suddenly the system blue-screened and WinXP told me it had done this to protect my data. Jokes aside about how ironic that was given the number of files I usually have open at any time (data that is gone forever), when I restarted my system, my trusty old BIOS told me that SMART predicted the HDD was going down.

I panicked. I simply took it off, and out of my system and like a good boy in an IT company told the tech support guy what had happened. He, of course, wanted to hook it back in and boot a few times to see if it was still ‘alive’. Anybody with even a little experience with tech support will know they don’t listen. Anybody who’s ever provided any tech support will know there’s no point in listening to the users (hearing and listening to are two different things!). So, after a few attempts, I put my foot down and told the guy there was way too much precious data in the HDD for me to lose because of his experiments. I was given a 40G drive from the office to back up ‘critical’ data. I sourced another 80G to back-up the ‘not-so-critical’ data. 😉 I had another 40G which is already full of ‘somewhat-critical’ data.

With all backups done, the 120G gone for replacement and the four HDDs hooked in, it looked funny. Here are the pics:

This is from the side.

This is from an angle.

Up close and personal.

Obviously, I did it myself with the tech support person giving me moral support whenever I would bump into him. I should’ve been fair and perhaps let him do everything like others though. I’m divided on that.

A few days later, the replacement drive came in. However I had enough work that I didn’t want to spend a few hours shuttling the drives, then data, and then drive letter associations in WinXP. But soon I did. And now I’m back to ‘normal’ (if there is such a thing).

Yes, I have 180G installed in my computer at office.
No, I don’t know what’s on the drives. It’s all encrypted and belongs to an imaginary friend I met on the Internet. 😉

So today I return to my blog and find 512 comments. These had accumulated in the last few days of my blogabsence. All SPAM. All deleted.

Can’t help but notice the coincidence of the number. For most part, I found it amusing (though the sheer amount of clicking required to get rid of all the messages did draw a groan from me), and some lame one-liners popped up immediately in the head (see the title for a sampling). People who frequent here (now isn’t that a laugh) will appreciate my decision not to put them here like this:

• Blah blah blah
• Yada yada yada
• …

And that, I couldn’t resist doing.

• Internet surfing will be tracked by the FBI with a non-intrusive method.
• Sing it to you
• Painting – Pure Talent
• SnowDays is my favourite. And a cousin called Snowflake Maker
• The Flathead Calendar 883
• Paint.Net – A MS Paint replacement developed in association with Microsoft in .NET.
• Google 2004 Zeitgeist
• Commercial Cat Cloning
• Windows XP 2 – The inside story
• Flash Games:
  • Season’s Beatings and the Trailer
  • Rubic’s Cube Game
  • Gigabyte-8Sigma Magic Pinball
  • Coca-Cola X-Mas Tournament
  • Snowpile Santa
  • Chairlift Snowball Throw
  • Speedy Santa

Going through my blog today, I noticed many of my posts are nothing but individual link dumps—suggesting a link blog. It’s not one and will never be.

Individual link posts are useless. They get lost in the clutter. Nobody remembers the posts, and the title/description used could be witty enough to be something that has nothing to do with the link content. They are hard to locate once they scroll off the main page. I see no reason to continue with this style compared to regular consolidated lists. The title is the same and you can easily search for all posts and in most cases, find the link quickly enough through a quick scan. They don’t clutter up your main blog and dilute it’s essence. Needless to say, both have their pros and cons but the above is said from my perspective in reference to my blog and I want to change the current style.

Thinking about it, I immediately remembered Alex’s Around The Web posts. Around The Web is probably just a collection of the miscellaneous things he must come across during the week that he thinks are interesting enough to share with us, the readers. Or, it could be something else. I never checked with him, so don’t know for sure. Irrespective, I have looked forward to these posts because I usually find some good links every week.

That is what I want to do—have regular link dump posts (not weekly like him because I simply won’t be able to do it that regularly initially). Knowing myself, I’ll probably have a comment or two for a few as well.

I have changed the title of my blog from mere “Musings” to “Musings – Abhay S. Kushwaha”.

Why?
This question will naturally follow. The reasoning is simple. There are thousands of blogs out there in the wild. I chose Musings as the name simply because it was what I intended this blog to be. However, as I explored the blogging world, I came across many other blogs that were named just that. My blog isn’t famous – yet. Today, I think not more than a handful people visit it regularly. But mere Musings doesn’t mean anything more to the general visitor. I needed to identify through the title who the blog belonged to. Musings, alright; but whose? needed to be answered.

The Process
The why had been rearing up its head every now and then in my thoughts. If you consider, there are but two options available: change the name completely to something really unique, or change the name slightly by adding something that will identify it with me. The former would have made sense if I was a name but I’m just another pack member. The only individuality I have is my full name. So the logical thing to do is to simply associate the current name with my name, and thus identify myself with the blog and the blog with me. This, I reasoned, would also not jar those who visit me regularly (thus ‘Musings – Abhay S. Kushwaha’ and not ‘Abhay S. Kushwaha – Musings’ too).

Now the name/blog should be slightly easier to spot in the lists of your favourite aggregator.

One thing that I’m finding increasingly happening on blogs and something I just don’t get is the need to make predictions. You go anywhere and somebody is either predicting or pointing to such a prediction either agreeing or disagreeing.

I call this The Soothsayer Effect.

But really, what’s the point? It’s so darned easy to predict something and I believe half the people are doing it just because they have an opinion. I wonder why they’re voicing their opinion and calling it a ‘prediction’. Hello? Can’t you just say “The way it’s going, I think…” or something to the effect. Prediction is something very different you know…

Or maybe I’m just dense. The point is: I just don’t get it. 😐

I came across GUIdebook in one of my random link-followings. This is a fascinating resource for anybody who’se interested in User Interfaces (like me).

A website dedicated to preserving and showcasing Graphical User Interfaces.

Tons of stuff in the archives — enough to keep anybody busy for hours on end when put to good use.

Man! This guy has serious time on his hands. He’s completed a seven feet high grandfather clock made entirely out of Lego blocks. 100% mechanical too.

The clock keeps accurate time, runs for 13+ hours before a weight reset is necessary, and all gears and such are 100% LEGO elements.

Lots of photos with closeups and comments. Nice stuff.

Ari sent me over to Yeti Sports. Amazing Flash online games. I love Orca-Slap best for the originality of idea though almost all of them are very fresh concepts. Snowboarding game is pretty cool too.

All of a sudden, I’m finding more and more people using the term ‘Bangalored’ to mean something that has been outsourced. Statements like “They’re Bangaloring it to Asia” and “More IT jobs are getting Bangalored to China than to India now”. Dunno who coined the term but it’s picking up fast.

Turns out (and I googled for it after writing the above paragraph), this term has been in use for quite some time. But the last 2-3 days, it’s been popping up left, right and centre. Another blogemenon (this one is supposed to mean a phenomenon related to blogging I believe)?

“Bangalored” — I find the term amusing.

Ferrari‘s pit in the 2005 F-1 season will have a few familiar faces. Familiar because they’ll be Indian. BBC reports that TATA has signed a deal with Ferrari to not only provide information technology services (through TCS) but also engineering services for the car itself! It this cool or what!?

Since this is a week old news, I’m sure everybody who has a blog knows by now that according to BBC, blog is the Word of the Year.

This is funny. Watch the video. Precious.

I’m getting way too many comment spams at the moment and am disabling the comments since I really don’t have the time to look into this. Probably on this Sunday or maybe next…

More patent insanity. This time it’s for landing pages that appear when users initially start their browser at public hotspots to enable them to log on, select items such as bandwidth and billing options, etc.

Recently Jim Rapoza also wrote about two stupid patents on eWeek as well.

This is getting pretty ridiculous.

My good friend Vinish is also a blogger now. Check out Vinish’s Blog.

The beta of the recently oft-spoken blogging tool by Microsoft is out and contains all the necessary features of a blog. The blogs look nice too so I guess MS scores on the looks department. But then, it appears it is noticeably slow for many users. Check it out. I’m stick with WP here of course.

Update: December 4
Boing Boing has this funny post on the word-filter being used on the service. With screenshots too. Must read.

Nokia, the world’s biggest mobile phone manufacturer, is to start making handsets in India.

I wonder if this means cheaper Nokia sets. 😉

Arstechnica gives a nice summary of an article in USA Today about an experiment involving ‘monitoring six “honeypot” computers for two weeks — set up to see what kind of malicious traffic they would attract.’

Less than four minutes from start of the test, an intruder breaks into Windows XP SP1.

Wow. Kids, start using a firewall right now if you aren’t already.

Read both the articles and you will learn a lot. Even if you thought you knew everything.

Found this slightly old news at /. about an article on German PC-Welt magazine report that Microsoft apparently used an illegal version of SoundForge 4.5 to edit the Wave files shipped with Windows Media Player.

You can check that yourself by opening any file in the [Windows location] \Help\Tours\WindowsMediaPlayer\Audio\Wav\ folder in notepad or other editors of your choice and looking at the last line. There you will find a reference to SoundForge 4.5 and also a user called ‘Deepz0ne’ who happens to be one of the founders of an audio software cracking group called Radium.

Exquisite!