Caesarean Rhapsody

Been a long time since anything geeky made its way onto the blog. So here’s something that has bugged me all week. I’m sure it has had at least a few of you pulling at your hair.

Some days back I upgraded to Winamp 5.5. But in a day of use, I saw that Google Talk doesn’t quite like the new interfaces in this version. When you switch the status to “Show current music track” the GTalk window freezes, never to return to stability. There’s no option other than closing and restarting GTalk. But the internet threw up an easy fix to this.

Step 1: Go to the Winamp directory, which is usually C:\Program Files\Winamp\

Step 2: In Windows Explorer, select Tools->Folder Options->View Tab and uncheck the “Hide extensions for known file types” and click Ok.

Step 3: Now create an empty file (Right click -> New -> Text document), so the default file name would be “New Text Document.txt”.

Step4: Rename the above file to “winamp.m3u” and save.

Step5: Close Winamp and Google Talk. Now open the apps again and voila, your music track should show up in GTalk without any problems.

Last evening I finally went and bought groceries. It usually takes me between a half hour to 3 hours depending on my list and I am usually happy at the end of it. Yesterday’s venture left me a bit sad and more agitated.

One of the items I buy almost every week is murukku. Unfortunately that’s all the fried stuff I can consume these days. But I have it at home without fail. As I passed thru the aisles putting things into the cart I noticed the shelf with all the namkeen stuff. I picked up a packet and turned it around to see the date of manufacture. And there it was … the reason for my melancholy (I am not exaggerating) for more than 12 hours now.

Just above the packaging information was the postal address of the manufacturer. It ended “… Chennai, Tamil Nadu, South India … ” I shrugged and laughed to myself for a moment. Then the smile waned and I just kept staring at it weirdly.

I have fought the thought all night, but it just keeps haunting me. I came to Bangalore thinking ‘I am just relocating to another part of my country’. When I look at people on the road, at work, at pubs or in cinema halls I think of them as my countrymen not as madrasis or any other derogatory term. But yesterday’s jolt makes me wonder if they think of me as a fellow Indian or just some outsider from slightly up north trying to invade “South India”, whatever heck that term means. To me it’s as meaningless as North India. Did we suddenly become a continent?

I want to ask these people a question. Doesn’t your conscience hurt you when you make money selling your products in northern markets? If tomorrow you need blood, will you refuse someone’s offer just because he is from up north? If you are being mugged, would you refuse to seek help from the only other person on the street just because he doesn’t speak your language?

One thing’s for sure. I’m not buying that brand of murukku anymore.

Everyone’s acquainted with the adage that “The crime is not stealing but getting caught”. If success were equal to the number of times people get fooled by someone, Microsoft would have been “the” most successful software maker around. First Windows ME and now Vista. Not to mention Live Spaces, whose presence was more like that of a gnat on a military radar.

Now Microsoft tried their best to look cool with this video made for their Marketing team, but look what the outcome was! Here’s Bruce ServicePack and the Vista Street band. This is probably the worst video I’ve seen … ever! Supremely haggau!

“Abbas-Mastan ki har movie mein ek particular scene dekhne ko milta hain. Apna phone uthaiye aur mujhe bataiye ki woh kaunsa scene hain. Type kijiye v-o-t-e, vote followed by your answer aur bhej dijiye 57575 par aur aap jeet sakte hain couples ticket iss week ki blockbuster movie Race ke liye.”, said the RJ on Radio Mirchi, an FM station that is evidence enough to settle a lawsuit against lack of exposure to International music in Pune.

The fact that Abbas-Mastan have made movies with less of a story than George W. Bush has about in his days in Vietnam, and that the answer to the above question is that “a central character always pops a bottle of champagne” should have triggered my better judgment to prevent me from going to the movie hall last night. But I did and man did I regret it!

Frigid actresses in skimpy clothing, frozen-to-the-core actors, a plot that the “great” Joginder will probably throw in the trashcan, songs that can be passed off as Christmas carols sung on acid, and acting skills that make Liza Minelli look like Meryl Streep make this an absolute tear jerker … for those who spent money watching it, of course!

Gramps used to say “Don’t fix it if it isn’t broken.” Those words shaped me. Today, as I complete 3 years in the IT industry, I am changing this maxim to reflect how things have changed around me. The adage now reads “Don’t fix anything”. “Why?” you ask. Here’s the rationale from an engineers point of view:

1. People (including you) will eventually learn to live with the broken “it”. They might even come up with ingenious ways to workaround the fault.
2. The odds, that the “it” in question may be obsolete by the time you fix it up, are very high these days.
3. And if you think like a free software loyalist … Someone else will fix “it” for you.