Footage of the Sun

A few days back, I saw the movie "Sphere". I'd read the novel by Michael Crichton a few years back. What prompted me to pick this DVD, was "Dustin Hoffman". I was greatly impressed by his performance in "Rain Man". And "Samuel L. Jackson".

Anyway, since i knew the story and neither the special effects nor sharon stone's appearences were impressive, i managed to finish the movie in one sitting. 2 days later, i picked up my Camcorder and set out to walk near the Dubai Creek at around 5 in the morning. It was then, that i witnessed this .. the rising golden sphere.

The sun rose from behind a skyscraper. I was looking through my cam's LCD , yes, it might have hurt the CCDs.. but nevertheless, i could see a perfect sphere! Coincide with the monologue from Sphere... (Vaguely recollected from my memory as) ... "Its a perfect sphere! An undoubted way of declaring supremacy (by the aliens)"!

What was interesting was, i couldnt look at the sun directly, all i could see was an an omlette like figure in the sky, slowing rising. But through the camera, my lord! It was beautiful... It was perfect! that sight kept me happy till afternoon :-)

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Ramadan (Saint Hunger)

In other news, Ramadan has officially commenced. It has kick started quite a few erratic behaviours .. from external people and internal organs (mainly Mr. stomach). Work hours have reduced to "9 AM to 3 PM". Also , the attendance at the local mosque has atleast quadrupled. All this in a matter of 24 hours. H & I have dropped the idea of going around interviewing people asking simple questions like "What is Islam" , owing to our own safety. I will update more about this soon. (Yeah, i know zeus dont like this :-). Bear with me, fellow bloggers.

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Life, In General

The propeller shaft of life has been fitted with an auxillary rocket booster, and the myriad colors of hopes , aspirations, worries, depression, money and brain busting thoughts continue to foray deep into my mind. I promise to blog whatever I can, even if its slightly unsettling , or plain boring to all of you. Buddies, really I miss you all!

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Desktop

I bought a humble desktop. After a SEk750i and a Panasonic GS400, it had to be a desktop! Laptops were overruled quite early in the decision making process , since i needed raw number crunching power (read that as video encoding). This sets my yearly indulgence at the magical figure of the minimum indian taxable income. Here's the detailed conf.

Intel E6300 Core 2 Duo 1.83 Ghz, Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 Motherboad, Corsair 1GB DDR2-533 Mhz memory, MSI-Nvidia-7300GS 256 MB GPU, 160 GB Seagate SATA-2. Logitech Keyboard, mouse, LG 16x DVD-Writer, Gigabyte Casing with 300 W PS. + 2nd hand Viewsonic 17" CRT. (ouch! my eyes hurt). (Total cost : Around 40k INR). My last PC purchase was PII-350Mhz with 128MB Ram and 10GB HDD for 32k INR in the hostel :-)

Doesnt such a system deserve some real tough work to do. Sucker is lying idle. Ha ha .. Installed Vista (wow), reinstalled XP(after some spyware kept open a persistant connection to somewhere on the internet), updated M/B and gpu BIOS. Did some movie capturing, encoding, yup, its fast :-).
Cannot install any of the Linux flavours available now, because of some hardware architecture change ? Read about it here ... So, for the time being i am happy with Cygwin and sometimes puppy linux.

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