Author: oook

Firefox, the browser reloaded

Ok, sure, cheesy tagline… but the browser is far from cheesy!

For those who don’t know what the hell I’m talking about… it’s about Firefox 0.8, the next generation browser from mozilla.org Too many improvements and generally goodiness in it for me to list here, so instead, you can surf over to their website and read all about it there.

I’m no Bill-basher… in fact, I like and use a lot of MS products… but heck… I just like Firefox so much, I’m beginning to use it as my default browser and phasing out IE. Yay me!!

I’ve done my bit by adding a “Get Firefox” button in my nav bar on the right. Oh and btw, Firefox is the new name of Firebird.

Movies!

Believe it or not, I still haven’t got to watch “The Return of the King!” The thing is, I was in India for most of December and when I got back to the US, most people I know have already seen it and now I’m stuck with no company to go with!! 🙁

I did manage to see “Big Fish” and “Cold Mountain” recently and I quite like both of them.

Update: I did see “Return of the King” a few days after posting this, I just never got around to updating! That movie is amazing… I can’t wait to buy a box set of all three DVDs! 🙂

Back in the USA

Yes, yes, I know… It’s been almost two months since I posted here. Not like anyone is reading this actually. But whatever…

Well going from the comments I see, at least a couple of people are reading the blog and so I should be writing more often… if only not to disappoint the raving crowds of fans I have! 😉

So let me start it off with one really interesting site I came across today by my usual random “follow-links-everywhere” approach to surfing.

The Wooden Periodic Table Table is a site about, well, a wooden table… and it has every element of the periodic table. Piqued? Go ahead and take a look at the site. I guarantee you will spend quite a bit of time perusing it!

Thanksgiving and Anu’s visit

Anu came over to East Lansing to visit me on Thanksgiving day…. We spent the day just lazing about the house and then went in the evening to watch “Love Actually.” Which wasn’t too bad a movie…. And then for Thanksgiving dinner we went to… wait for it… yep, Pizza Hut!! Ok, not as exciting, but give us a break, we’re too lazy to cook and on Thanksgiving which restaurants are open for business?

We spent the rest of the evening drinking vodka and watching funny movies on DVD until we both fell asleep out of sheer exhaustion! 🙂

Friday, we took a bus to Ann Arbor and froze walking about that city’s streets looking for places to get dinner! It actually snowed and Anu got all excited about the first snow she’s seen in the States this year! We also ate for the first time at the Mongolian Barbecue and, boy, was it a great experience. Leave aside the the absolute coolness of watching your food grilled before you, but it actually tasted great! Of course, we had a couple of drinks to help the food along down… but I’m sure it would have tasted great otherwise too! 🙂

Saturday was almost completely a waste of time… I slept in until 2pm!!

We wandered around half starving until Anu dragged me into some place to eat. I was sure that if I had kept her from eating for a little while longer… she would have probably taken a bite out of my arm! 🙂

Shivanee visited that night and for lack of any thing else to do, we sat around playing scrabble, Phase 10 and drinking vodka!

After a cholesterol loaded breakfast on Sunday (4 eggs, 4 slices of bacon, ham, cheese and toast) we faffed around Ann Arbor some more. Anu splurged on a woolen hat for $50!

I was completely knocked out on the trip back to Lansing and just dozed away on the bus and just crashed on the bed when I got home. Phew!

First Snowfall

All day yesterday it snowed accompanied by gusty winds… boy was it chilly outside. So much so that I decided to just stay at home snuggled under a comforter!! Nice!

I finally got around to watching Suraj ka Satvan Ghoda and I quite liked the movie. Mostly for the story and the way it was weaved though I did feel it seemed to stretch a bit too long! In fact at 130 minutes or so, it’s on the shorter side of Indian films. But then again it doesn’t have any song and dance sequences. This film was Rajit Kapur’s debut and I think he does a pretty good job. Watching this also reminded me how hot Neena Gupta is!! 🙂

The big news on GNE, we finally got a few items yesterday! Yay!! All edible stuff. And we also now have stats like karma, mood, energy, tummy and xp. None of which really matter at the moment, but it’s fun to play around with it in anticipation. Stewart has promised more stuff by the end of this week, though with Thanksgiving coming up, I’m not sure if that will happen!

I also chatted with Priya on Yahoo! yesterday after donkey’s years! It was good to be able to speak with her after so long. She says she’s planning to come to the US in December or thereabouts. Not sure when, if ever, I can meet her in the US, but you never know. I keep telling myself, it’s just a matter of getting your own car and then you’ll be mobile around the US, but I don’t know. I just don’t seem to have enough free time to do all the wandering I want and the time I do get off, I laze about at home. New Year’s Resolution for 2004: Stop lazing about! hehehe…

RSS??

For all web-designers in India and people that live off news and feeds from the web, RSS might be a little hard to get used to. Yes, it’s the greatest thing since hyperlinks (or sliced bread, whichever way you see it) but… (aha, bet you saw that coming!) it’s also the acronym of a fundamentalist political organisation in India!

So, anyway… I just discovered RSS (the web version!) a few days ago… after puzzling over the XML links on the GNE discussion boards, I finally figured out what it was all about.

I downloaded this news aggregator and started playing about with it.

…. and I’m still playing…

A proper domain name for the blog

Finally the blog has a proper home… I used the free DynDNS redirection service to give my blog a home at oook.blogsite.org. I agree not the prettiest name, but it certainly a lot better than the old URL to my school space and besides which, now people reading my blog don’t have to know which school I go to! 🙂

Hopefully this is the first step in keeping this blog up-to-date on a more regular basis. (Fingers crossed and all that!)

Today was a boring and very very uneventful day… I spent most of it sleeping or chatting on GNE. I seem to be making a lot more friends there in spite of the fact that I can bore the hell out of anyone by my constant inane chat.. hehehe.

I actually took the trouble of cooking dinner tonight and then my flatmate comes home and cooks something again… It’s getting really bugging since he always seems to have a problem with my cooking and can’t stop telling the world what a great cook he is… It shouldn’t piss me off so much, but it does! oh, well…

I’ve still not gone shopping for my trip home… my usual procrastination in action again.

Sheeesh… I even put off watching movies. The DVD for Suraj Ka Satwan Ghoda is sitting on top of the player for the last three days!! I’ve always wanted to see this Benegal movie and now that it’s here, I just can’t seem to get the energy to watch it!

I also have a ton of papers to grade, dammit man, do some work!!

Ok, first step, I shall go to sleep now, so that I can wake up before noon tomorrow and get some work done!

Which Biological molecule are you?

Just found this quiz while reading fluorescence‘s blog.

Pretty nice… and here’s what I turned out to be…
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wait for it
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here it comes…
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Ta daaaaa!!

Water

You are water. You’re not really organic; you’re neither acidic nor basic, yet you’re an acid and a base at the same time. You’re strong willed and opinionated, but relaxed and ready to flow. So while you often seem worthless, without you, everything would just not work. People should definitely drink more of you every day.

Which Biological Molecule Are You?
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