iPod!

Finally, my much anticipated iPod dream has come true. And it's a pleasure to look at that sleek and black, chrome finished body of the iPod Classic. It's fully loaded with a 80GB capacity and a nice LCD screen to watch my fav videos and photos. Everything else is as usual as any other Apple product, so I don't think there would be any stress about all that, like MP3 quality and stuff...
Well, excuse me, coz I gotta spend some time with my new Gad here, so next post, next month...

Till then, enjoy these photos that show how my thing looks like... mind you, I took the photos at such a close range and in such a hurry that, they got kinda blurred... maybe the Classic wanted to appear classic on the photos..

Another small thing, would you mind reading the title of this blog like an ambigram (ie, by tilting your head 180 degrees??).

2-0

  That's definitely the score I will love to see anytime. That match between ManU and Chelsea was expected to be a thriller. They are 2 Championship winning teams. But somehow, Chelsea were down right from the beginning. They never really looked like scorers and ManU kept attacking and attacking and finally got the breakthrough with Carlos Tevez's first goal for his team. It was a delight to watch that diving header. Soon it was pretty obvious that Chelsea have given away the match to ManU. They just weren't attacking. Instead, they kept making more and more fouls on their side. In the end, Mikel got the red light for his harsh tackle and that totally destroyed Chelsea's already poor match. Their new manager, Avram Grant must have missed out on adding the fuel to the fire, coz it never burnt. At the close, ManU won a silly penalty appeal and made it 2-0. Enough to seal the match and enough for me to rejoice.

  Inspite of that, i feel a bit sorry for the Chelsea team, they must be really missing Jose Mourinho and his firey tactics. I hope it's not a slump for another 50 years! Chelsea woke up when Mourinho came and gave them the Title after 5 decades, and his departure shouldn't let Chelsea go back to sleep again. It spoils the fun element of the EPL.
  And look at Arsenal! While other teams are fighting for a win, the Gunners and cruising with 5-0 kinda victories. Looks like ManU and Arsenal are gonna have a pretty tough fight this season.
  Our EPL standings look like this at the moment.

Lambo's Lambs

I wouldn't call them lambs coz they are Bulls!!. But just to make that perfect title, i had to do it. Anyway, Automobili Lamborghini has stepped up their old Murcielago again and this time they came with a GT version. They are talking about some updated BF performance which has added a few more horses to the power. Nice pic they got here, and that is along with the design of their new Reventon. Looks a bit futuristic, let's see how far that gets real. They seem to be really trying to put everything under covers so that it springs at us suddenly, just like a Bull!

2008 Lamborghini Reventon



2007 Lamborghini Murcielago GT660

Touch iT. HEAR iT. SHARE iT.

  From the past few days, I have been searching extensively for something that would solve my audio blues. I have always been a die-hard listener of music and that is going a bit beyond my control now. I am getting desperate now. That 1 hour I spend in the college bus is a bumpy ride with nothing to feel other than the potholes and craters. If i had some music to add to that, my bumpy ride would get bearable. Well, I have found out a lot about these music players, especially the all-time favourite, the iPod. We all know about the heavily common Shuffle, or Nano or Classic or any other that i might have ignored. But what has struck me the most is the new iPod Touch. It has brought in some excitement and along with it, some curiosity.
  Well, i don't know if you want to call it the new revolution of iPod or a degeneration from the iPhone. For me, it's both. It is an upgrade and a downgrade at the same time. It looks very much like the iPhone, but is slimmer. It doesn't have the phone options like cam and stuff, concentrating on the audio part alone. But not entirely. It has a Safari Browser and Wi-Fi connection enabled, so that you can share your stuff. You got a 8GB or a 16GB option which gives you plenty of space but not as much as the 80GB or 160GB Classic. The interface is good but reviews have complained that the touch-screen is not as exciting as the iPhone and they have found flaws in the video colours. You gotta tilt your Touch away from your face to get those perfect colour tones. Different pieces have shown the same defect, so looks like the Touch comes with a tiny flaw. Its surely a great leap in the audio crazy world, but it certainly is not a lot better than the iPhone which comes at the same cost and more options, but with a reduction in storage space.

  For me, this sounds exciting but personally, I would not be having much of a chance to share stuff with others, so the Wi-Fi is only a show-off. The Wi-Fi stores and all that crap might be needed to download and that's hell of a pain more than downloading stuff simply from the computer. The internet browser looks fine, but I gotta find out more about it. Instead of all this, i would be very much satisfied to listen to my favourite tracks and watch my favourite videos and pics on the 6th Gen.. Classic stuff...

Take over the World, IndYEAH!!

  India has leaped suddenly. Amidst all the security issues and political issues, the field that's jumping ahead is the sporting field. How does it all happen suddenly??
  We have seen India get some recognition in the Soccer Arena finally after winning the Nehru Cup and then seen progress in Tennis, Hockey and other sports and now, after a long sleep, the cricketing world has woken up to new heights. Being a non-follower of cricket, I can't say how much India had gone ahead of other countries over the past years, but I know that they didn't do well in the recent World Cup at the West Indies. Now, at last, the young and energetic team has proved it's mettle by outplaying some of the best teams in the game and that too, in the new Twenty20 format. Looks like India is taking small but efficient steps towards all-round glory. Isn't it obvious that it should? We form 1/6th of the population and definitely, standing among the top is not a difficult task at all. Congratulations to the entire Indian Cricket Team, the Captain, Dhoni and a special one to Yuvraj Singh (for those lofty 6 6's in 6 balls - forgot that 666 strikes terror in the hearts of the English??) for bringing home the first Twenty20 WorldCup. Felt good to see that unnerving final end on a positive note for us...

Way to go !!

Ganpat all the way !!!

    It's happening live right now, guys on the street, totally gone crazy and wild. The drums are banging (couldn't use a word to fit the sound), and the people are dancing for those 250BPM rolls... the truck is loaded with Idols and people and the lighting is awesome. The light is being run by a generator which has been placed in an auto and the auto is running alongside the truck to keep the wires connected. Now, that's a hell of an arrangement. The music is blaring as I type now, and i can feel the excitement that the people down there feel.
    As this high adrenaline festival comes closer to the end, the security needs to be stepped up coz, we all know how many guys turn up for the Great Immersion. Well, let's hope everything goes safe this time. People die anyway, falling into water and drowning, but this time, the bombscare might get more people on their toes, ready to flee and spread havoc .....

Fiiiniiish !!!!!

       A temporary delight has just come underway, and i can rejoice the end of the first and second internals. It has come after a long wait and i don't know why we so eagerly wait for the exams to be over. Humans love to be tested by Nature and yet, hate to be tested by similar humans. Who the hell has the right to test others?? Nobody can be called perfect so that he can judge others. But if we don't wanna get chucked onto Mars or Pluto, we gotta follow a few things we hate to.
   Anyway the exam fuss is something i never understand. We hear of people coming close to nervous breakdowns and insomnia during exams. And here is me typing proudly saying i give a damn about all these things. For me it's just another day. But once the clock starts ticking in the exam-hall, the whole world is suddenly different and i am partially lost into whatever i am supposed to be thinking about. Well, i don't know if that's the right way to be or not to be, but now, I can turn my attention to other things in hand. The marks aren't great, so there's nothing much to rejoice about, but still, end of exams lightens the mood considerably well.

Fallout ! Chaos !

     2 days ago, everything felt perfect, and now, life seems to have fallen out of place. Things are happening at a chaotic pace and I am tried of it now. First, my hand in music is slapping me back and I am struggling to get along. The samples are not coming out right and the stuff we did earlier also feels bad now. It's kinda frustrating at this point. Maybe I must try out after i feel a bit better.
      My soccer days are coming out bad as well. Last 2 days have been horrible. Though I was able score and create chances, I feel like I just lost the most important match of my life. My stamina fell back suddenly and today I just couldn't force myself to play. I completely lost interest and didn't want to touch the ball. I hardly got a few touches today, and that proves it. I was sitting for most of the time and guys around me could see that I was lost somewhere else. I wish I were somewhere else. I wish I could forget that 1 hour of play...
     My college is also going way out of sync. I can't understand what's going on in class. And the lecturers keep repeating, "Is that Clear??". My head nods a "Yes" as if it were involuntary and not listening to my brain, 'cause my brain is saying something else. Control Systems has gone totally out of control and till I pull myself together, I am never going to get things done. Atleast, on the brighter side, I just got 19/20 in today's exam. Not the way to study, but a way to get along....
     I must put an end to this chaotic life and find some peace...

So, peace...

A blank post - For The Lost Soul ..

Piece of Mind

     I woke up to that sharp alarm of mine, only to realise that I am no more free to do what I want. College finally calls and it's one necessary evil. Shouldn't call it evil really, but after a long beautiful flight, it's painful to crashland to reality. Exams add the fuel to the already raging fire...
     Life changed over the holidays. It became customary to give a deep thought to everything. Now suddenly, things are moving very very fast, it's disorienting. I would just like to step out of the car and take a breath, but it's moving so fast, it'll kill me if i get out.
     With music, soccer, exams and college, all biting me at my heels, i can't keep up the pace. Maybe some peace of mind would do before i lose a piece of mind ...

Instincts work sometimes

      Yes they do. This is the last day of my precious holidays, and I must admit it started worse than I thought. We were supposed to be playing a Football match at Gymkhana grounds today, and right from the beginning, I had a bad feeling about this match. And some cruel thing with horns was mad with glee, trying to convince me that the match is a disaster. Well, the demon won today and he was rolling on the floor, laughing at me because I went for a match that would never happen. This being the last day, I wanted some final action before I would be back to banging my head to books and walls. All these days, my head was banging to soccerballs, and heavy metal..
      This is an early morning post, so my mind is fresh with oxygen and disappointment at the same time ... let the evil fade.. I'll come back.

This time, that year.

      Let's roll back in time and see what I was doing at this time last year, that is in 2006 September. Ah.. I just remembered. It was a holiday time, but where was I ?? What was I doing in college? Oh yeah. We were busy, and I mean it. We were damn busy, especially my friend (Natarajan) and I. We were organizing a so called National Level Technical Conference called AERODYNE '06. Let's get the details right.
     We started off exactly a month before, on August 10th, 2006, a day before my birthday. I still remember that day, when a sir came to our class and asked Natarajan to help him out with a certain Brochure he was making. It was looking horrible from my view, and I think Natarajan would agree with me. It was completely yellow and printed on very average paper. Natarajan immediately went for editing it, he suddenly came back to call me. I wondered why, and I found out why. We were actually designing all the artwork required for the conference, like posters, invitations, brochures, ads, etc. That was day 1 in Aerodyne and it went on through August, September and the saga finally ended when the conference ended on October 6th. The conference was a medium success and the part it lost out completely was on Lan Gaming, which was a total disappointment as Sudershan and Chakradhar spent so much time networking and getting the games installed on the lab systems. All other things which we organised like parachute design, aero-modeling and stuff, worked well, and we had some innovative competitors as well.
     The day it ended, I was completely dazed and felt like rejoicing. We stayed back in college and launched ourselves on Quake III, NFS, and stuff. Those 2 months of Aerodyne were really some time of my life, but I was made to repent all that because, we missed important classes and also exams. We were not given good internal marks inspite of our heavy efforts in making the conference a success story. Who in the world would come to college during the holidays, and on sundays, and stay back till 9PM during working days, work for hours on the computer, travel around, spend money, personally wrap invitations... phew! let me take a breath... Our internals let us down, and I even missed an important lab exam because of a football match at ICFAI Tech.
  This time, that year was bad, and though I did so many interesting things, I wish I don't get over involved in anything that would cast a shadow over my daily ongoings..

This pic shows the Aerodyne '06 team on October 6th, when the ordeal was finally over after working overtime for 2 months...

My day out

I spent another day of out home today, and thats Kalyan's house again. We continued our attempts to get a few songs in our grip. We are constantly improving but we are constantly ending up complicating the songs. We finally finished the full cover of Boulevard of Broken Dreams by Green Day after we recorded Nabeel's mesmerizing voice. One loose end tied up there, but we had to play What I've Done by Linkin Park and Toh Phir Aao from Awarapan. Toh Phir.. has been heavily edited and cut short to a Ballad/Rock Mix which ends up as a different version from 3 versions of the already edited song. Anyway, getting all the things right was a pain in the rear, and we had to call it quits as hunger came calling. Just a coupla days are left this vacation, and we haven't gone very far except learning a few things about music.
One thing I learnt, thanks to my experiments, was damping the guitar sound. I got it by mistake and I liked it. Suddenly, things started opening up and I realised how they get that particular damped sound in a few Hard Rock tracks. That's me and my music on this Friday of September. I am getting tired so fast, and I feel like listening to Wake Me Up When September Ends. Maybe, some good sleep will do.

Hobbies to die for !!

Something told me I must write, so I will.

To begin with, I must talk about that soccer match we had against, MGIT (Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Tech). It was pretty sudden, and I was told about it only yesterday, and I doubted if we can really do anything in the match. We went without practice for nearly 10 days, and the effect could be shown on the field. Anyway, prepared to face the worst, I took off. Some of the guys were looking huge and aggressive, and I started to think again. They are from MGIT, and I had a strange feeling they were gonna show us some real football. Match kicked off, though later than I wanted. As I expected, our ACE Untd was looking a bit Un-United today. We took a lot of time to get down into the game. The field was extremely slippery, fresh from dew, and the ball was skimming with lack of friction. Once we got the hang of it, the whole scene changed. The first real chance we got was when the defense left me out completely. (they are not from MRCET so they forgot to mark Johny!!) I got a good pass from yaseen, and aimed for the corner of the post. The wet ball got took too much swing onto it and curled towards the keeper and he managed to get a hand, but then, the silent hunter, chakradhar just had to nick the ball in to make it 1-0.
Till then we were beginning to feel we might falter, but the MGIT defense was surprisingly weak and their game was going out of shape. We were already playing one of our worst team tactics there, and were yet dominant. Soon, we were finding our feet and began moving around better. Yaseen missed a penalty, but within a minute managed to cover it by taking a weak shot and the slippery ball just sliding out of the GK's hands. We got one more goal from chakradhar after I gave him a dying pass from my weak left foot. He managed to convert that into a goal. 3-0 up, we were beginning to experiment. I moved right and yaseen came left. Faizan (happy birthday to you!), moved up from the defense. Srikar managed a cross from the right side, and yaseen sent the ball straight in. 4-0. We started getting confident now. All we had to do is concede no goals. Manish had to do atleast 2 good saves to keep us ticking. Half time came and I could see the disbelief in the MGIT players' faces. They surely wouldn't have expected such a shocker. Nor did we, come to that !!.
We changed from 4-3-3 to 4-4-2 in the second half and tried our luck. Playing from the left again, I was totally horrible. I slipped twice and lost control of the ball many times. Chakradhar noticed, and asked me to move right. Within a minute of that, I gave a great cross in, and saw Chakradhar unfold one of the best headers I ever saw live. It was easily Goal Of The Match, and he was Man Of The Match. He just completed his hat-trick. Funny thing is, all of Chakradhar's goals started from me. First a shot, then a pass, and then a cross. His part was nick, shot and header. Each time, we scored in a different way, and that added to the already elated spirits. We couldn't get any more in the second half and this was the second time we managed a 5-0 victory. We played 5 proper matches, and we scored (3+3+2+5+5=) 18 goals in them, letting in only 1. Even Manchester United would be extremely happy with such a result, judging by their horrible current form.
That was the match I wished would go on for ever. One hobby to die for ?? "Football". Bang comes the reply.

Within a few hours of the match I had to rush to Kalyan's place for another jam session. After a lot of analysis, we found certain faults in ourselves and went on. Near the end of the session, we got things into place, but postponed all our recording work to tomorrow. Hope it works out quickly. I was home by 2:30. Pretty quick session we had today. Music, the other hobby to die for!

Well all this hobby business has left me gasping for breath now, and right now, I am so unstable, I might fall before I complete this post! More to come when I wake up!

Indian Idiots

It is a record that we could complete a full song within few hours and perfect it. We managed to do the song Boulevard of Broken Dreams by Green Day. The drums and bass were setup in FL Studio, and the rest was our handiwork. Most of the guitarwork credit goes to Srikar and the recording and mixing to me. This one was done without the vocals to it as both of us are not really good singers. But within a few days, we might even get the vocals part done and complete the song properly. So, the song can be downloaded here - On Srikar's GooglePage. We made one or 2 changes after that, so the one that you might download is like a crude version. Listen and enjoy... fill the vocals yourself if you want.