Power Cut

Power cuts can get really long around here. The last one was longer than usual. The local electricity board told me that power was shut down for maintenance purposes in my area. Looking outside my window, I saw a few electricians servicing the transformer.



A little while later, they're still there:



They're taking an awfully long time:



And they finally get down from there, to eat:



And then they leave. But the power didn't come back. It did eventually, about an hour after those chaps left.

And College Life has been updated, after a month.

7 Songs

No, it's not a sequel/prequel to 9 songs. JJ tagged me, again. Apart from wanting this blog to be filled with such filler posts, he also wants to know the music I've been listening to, I think.

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they a’re any good, but they must be songs you a’re really enjoying now. Post these instructions in your blog along with your seven songs. Then tag seven other people to see what they a’re listening to.

So, here goes:

Daft Punk - One More Time
Parlour Steps - Hero/Villian
Arcade Fire - Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)
Mogwai - Golden Porsche
The Decemberists - The Mariner's Revenge Song
Belle and Sebastian - For the Price of a Cup of Tea
Jethro Tull - Bouree

Right, I've got to catch the college bus in a few more minutes so here's who's being tagged, quickly:

Antickpix
Hobbes
Rads
Sandeep
TSB
Nikhil
Hannah

Best. Confirmation email. Ever.

I had decided quite some time back that if I ever got enough bob into my PayPal account, the first thing I'd do with it is get myself more music. Having obtained the necessary dough recently, I spent two days looking for music worth paying for at CD Baby. I ended up buying three albums (Hey, there was a sale). The next day, I get this email from them:

Your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CDs and polished them to make sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CDs into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved 'Bon Voyage!' to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Monday, February 13th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as "Customer of the Year". We're all exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

The kings of sweet-talking.

For the record, this post does not have a single letter typed using a physical keyboard. My keyboard's screwed.. Every key. I'm using the On-Screen Keyboard. Yes, the one in which you click letters instead of typing them.

Sickish

For a change, college had nothing to do with me having a bad week. I was riddled with what the good doctor tells me was acute sinusitis. I realized that you're better off staying at the hostel instead of coming home when you're down with something like acute sinusitis. Even if there's a holiday. Especially if you're gonna be home alone. But I realized all that a bit too late. I was already home.

My eating habits didn't help either. I was (and still am) running on a bread diet. Pizzas, burgers, doughnuts, croissants, muffins, and the occasional white bread and naan. I didn't mind, but it was kind of difficult to go as far as the nearest Hot Breads outlet to get some of these, what with my head hurting with every step I took, and me accidentally stepping on the paws of street dogs. Well, one street dog, which was sleeping before I disturbed it, and didn't seem to be bothered enough to start chasing me.

I still managed to catch a movie on Republic Day. Rang De Basanti; it was a friend's treat. It was alright, I suppose. Good fun. What wasn't fun was what happened after the movie. The friend said there was a dinner treat too, which was fantastic, but that left me in the middle of nowhere at midnight, trying to find a bus home. And buses don't run at midnight. Even at the biggest bus terminus in Asia. I resigned to spending a fortune on an auto to get home, eventually.

Oh yeah, this new design is number... Number... Well, I've lost count. Come to think of it, I never kept count. What started out to look great turned into this piece of junk before your eyes. Ah well.

Oh joy.

College starts again tomorrow. That means staying at the hostel again. Isn't that wonderful?

Here's a little something for you tech buffs out there... Bothack. You could say it's sort of an alternative to Lifehacker, but there's more to it. Apart from the usual 'latest technology' bit, they've also got the latest on tech fests in India and around the rest of the world as well. I'm glad somebody finally took the initiative to do this. What's more, they've got solutions to those agonizing problems you often face if you're a Linux newbie. I remember facing a problem similar to the one outlined here, about a year back (not on Suse, though. I was using Ubuntu). Solved that one after a lot of digging around on the net. Don't miss this one, folks.

30 minutes or free?

Pizza Corner came first. 39 minutes or free, they said. But they were always on time.

Domino's Pizza came next, and they had this weird offer that if the pizza ain't delivered in 30 minutes, you get 50% off on the next pizza you order from them.

And then came the glorious Pizza Hut, who had the habit of delivering pizzas quite late. Enjoyed many a free pizza, at least in the beginning, when they said "30 minutes or free". Then it became "30-40 minutes or free". And then just "30-40 minutes". And today, they said, "Thank you for ordering, your pizza will be delivered as soon as possible". Sigh...

You can puke later.

One of the things I dislike about staying alone at home is cleaning up after I've eaten. Sometimes I forget to do away with the leftovers. They just lie on the table for a few days till I notice that the house stinks. That's how I spotted this:


That's rice, cooked and kept in a "microwave-safe" bowl, left unattended for nearly a week. If you're feeling sick after looking at the full size image, be grateful you didn't have to smell it.


UPDATE: Two days afterward, the nasty odour still continued to exist, only a bit more fruity now. The rice was only a partial contributor to it. I found the primary cause - a bag of overripe bananas infested by unidentifiable flying insects.