About Thor and Laptops

What does Thor, the Norse god of lightning, have in common with laptops? Or Zeus, or Jupiter or Leir for that matter, who are his Greek, Roman and Celtic counterparts respectively. To answer the question, nothing, at least not apparently, until I delve into the story of my laptop and how it can be related to any of the above mythological deities.

As a manager at P&G, I, on joining the company, was given a brand new standard issue HP laptop. The laptop with bare minimum specs is good enough for reading and sending emails and running Microsoft Office, which is what you mostly do as a manager but given my rather geeky disposition, and my technical job descroption, was no way capable of simultaneously handling at least 20 windows for at least 20 hours a day on an everyday basis (Yes, yes, I admit, I sleep with my laptop, and that too switched on). Needless to say the poor thing started to give up in this already losing battle some 14 months into its operational life. And that's when i decided to get it sup-ed up. Major changes: hard disk from 40GB to 80 GB and RAM from 512 MB to 1.5GB. It feels awesome ^_^

However I was not satisfied with just 'back end' changes, and bothered by the fact that my laptop looked EXACTLY like at least 50 other laptops in the office (people who know me will understand my utter need to personalise EVERYTHING that i own), I wondered if I could do something about its rather drab exterior. Since the laptop is legally still a property of P&G, and under warranty from HP, which goes void if I mess with the paint job itself, I settled for a 'sticker job', i.e. drawn and painted on paper, cut out, then glued to the laptop lid, which can easily be peeled off later when the time comes to part my ways with it. This obviously brought me to the question of what exactly to put on it. Buoy-ed up that I was with the very perceptible increase in my laptop's performance, I settled for two lightening bolts, slanting inwards at the tip, in silver to go with the matte gray original color of the machine. Thus further excited, I discussed the idea with a few of my good friends, namely Saady, I-T and Basimio (their blogs are listed under More Blabbers). Got an excited thumbs up from all of them. I-T went on to Christian the 're-born' laptop "Thor's Laptop" or "Zeus' Laptop". And there you have it.

Bringing the idea to execution took another 2-3 weeks since I was traveling as well as very busy with work. Also a minor tragedy dampened the euphoria a little. I finally managed to put the lightning bolts in place on a Sunday, and the next day I had to turn my laptop in and move to a temporary laptop because I was for a few days having serious heating problems which had started to affect the hard disk. However not to be mowed down, I managed on getting the hard disk, RAM and keyboard of my old machine inserted into the replacement machine. The DVD drive and battery were already from my old machine as this one didn't have em. That took care of the interior, and left the sticker-work on the lid of the machine i was giving away. I therefore pestered our local support person till he called the vendor and I got the entire screen switched between the two laptops ... hehe. So now I'm a rather happy camper, with a machine that performs at least 20 hours a day, 7 days a week, and had a custom paint job too!

Obviously this post would be incomplete without the pictures, which I've naturally added. No comments on the dirty room!

my laptop proudly sitting at its rightful place on my bed. Usually its turned around
but here it's posing for the picture ;)

Shimmery silver thanks to fabric paint on paper. Glows in bright light.

Sadness Prevails

Happy Ramadan all you observing Muslims out there, today was the 3rd Ramadan - 1428 Hijri, in Pakistan. Another half an hour to Iftari and another day gone, mercifully rather quickly. Its Sunday and as usual I'm confined to my room, sitting in my bed, stuck to my laptop, playing with everything that can be played with via the internet.

I miss my mom's Iftari, or even the one I used to make myself last year. Now thanks to a busted fridge, a flatmate you hate (and vice versa), no car, and no friends who would like to break their fast with you, my definition of Iftari has come down to dates, water, a pack of lays and uhmm a peach (till stocks last). Then i'll pray, sleep and wake up and order a 6" Subway I guess *sigh* The stuff above accumulated over a few chance visits to the proximity of grocery stores. Karachi is not a place where you can walk to your nearest shop alone, on foot. Its too damn unfriendly for that. I know I wouldn't have hung on if not for a job I really really really like and uhmm yea thats about it.

As for the flatmate we used to be on good enough terms till about 2 months ago, thats when all hell broke lose, had an argument with my flatmate, and sadly she stooped to the level of verbal violence that I can never even imagine stooping to in about a six hundred billion years. The reason?! Me not helping her with getting the fridge fixed. Hell, I didn't want to tell her I was so depressed I couldn't even find the energy to feed myself 5 days outta 7 in a week let alone be bothered about whether the fridge is working or not. Again, my work life is great, its just my personal one thats screwed up! Last year I made both of us sehri and iftari, since my flatmate's culinary skills are very limited, and for some reason NEVER rubbed it in, but my flatmate makes a point of hurling at me, everything that she has done and I haven't ... and oh of course since she moved to Karachi first and had already bought the fridge and the TV and the microwave and such, its obviously 'hers' hence now off-limits to me.

The silver lining? Well I'm praying more regularly, more regularly than I have in more than a year, I hope I stick to it. I'm working and uhmm updating my blog, if that counts as a silver lining.

Adios all, 10 mins to go, I'll go wash my dates and slice my peach.

For those who find some terms up there unfamiliar:

Sehri: the meal taken before the fast. It must be taken before dawn.
Iftari: the meal taken when the fast is broken. Taken at sundown.

Celebrating 2+ years of the Blabbering Wombat!

After knocking about for more than two years, an entire year out of which the allegedly 'blabbering' wombat was utterly silent, I decided to give my blog a new look, or a partial new look anyway. Since i can't seem to find the time or the patience to write the entire page from scratch, I resorted to switching to the new 'widget' based template that has been around for at least a few months. But since I was always partial to the design / layout of my old template, I've pretty much stuck to that, though played quite a bit with the colors and obviously, I'm widget-ed ;)

I must admit the new blogger makes editing your template and layout immensely easier. Instead of looking for the right spot in reams and reams of HTML code to insert that additional line, you now just add 'page elements', drag & drop it to the desired place in your blog and thats about it! Everything is a few clickety-clicks and a lil tap-tapping away! and NOW if you want that additional lil tweak, you can *still* go into the HTML of your layout and add that additional line. hehe. (though an easier way to do it is to add an HTML/javascript widget)

In the coming weeks, expect a few more changes till this latest interest wears off and I sink back to the relative laziness of the marsupial that lends its name to my utterings.

As for posts, I have two in the pipeline, one of them is on Chinchillas, though if I were you, I won't bank on the Chinchillas bit ;)

Here's a rather disappointing wiki entry on widgets: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUI_widget

Easter Eggs for the Deviant Mind!

No i'm not talking about this:



Recently while googling and wiki-ing (which happen to be my favourite pastimes), I stumbled upon the wiki site for easter eggs, the virtual one that is. To define it for the sake of my less aware audience:

"A virtual Easter egg is a hidden message or feature in an object such as a movie, book, CD, DVD, computer program or video game. The term draws a parallel with the custom of the easter egg hunt observed in many western nations. In computer programming, the underlying motivation is often to put an individual, almost artistic touch on an intellectual product which is by its nature standardised and functional"

The site goes on to give examples of many famous easter eggs, such as the flight simulator in MS excel 97 and pinball in MS Word 97. Apparently Microsoft ends up with more than its fair share of smart ass developers. Easter eggs are apparently found in hardware as well such as entire circuits etched on the circuit board that only serve to fulfill the designer's sense of personalization. My favourites are:

• Debian GNU/Linux package tool apt-get has an Easter egg involving an ASCII cow when variants on "apt-get moo" are typed into the shell.

• In The Mathwork's MATLAB the why command provides succinct random answers to almost any question.

 % why
 % because the not very smart system engineer insisted on it

(something I'll definitely try if I manage to move my lazy ass and turn on my desktop which has two different versions of MATLAB installed on it)

• Perhaps the most famous example of a hardware Easter egg is in the HP ScanJet 5P, where the device will play the Ode to Joy or Fur Elise by varying the stepper motor speed if users power the device up with the scan button depressed. (I mean el oh el! some funky techie man, making your stepper motors literally SING! I remember when i spent some three weeks in my 5th semester trying to make two stupid stone age stepper motors turn so i could run a robotic mouse!)

Obviously many of us remember playing with the mIRC "about" icon that smiled and said 'what?' when you right clicked on it and the *pichkoui* sound when you clicked on Khaled Merdem Bey's nose in the about box and oh of course the stuffed alligator picture that appeared in place of Merdem Bey's when you typed 'arnobie' while the about box was open .... BUT armed with the knowledge above, I absolutely had to embark on a search for easter eggs in modern software. Microsoft apparently has removed almost all easter eggs in its software as it is not a very encouraged practice anymore. Anyway after going through quite a number of sites these are my top picks:

Head Banging Llama's in Winamp 5+ (modern skin only):

"Winamp really whips the llama's ass" .... it makes them head bang too! This is how to do it:

Run Winamp 5 or higher in modern skin and then expand the main window till you see the beat visualizer.

Keeping Shift+Alt+Ctrl pressed click over the dot in the dead center of the beat visualizer. See the red dot in the image below:

And there you go you have your llama's ... headbanging with the beat! Brilliant!



Tetris in uTorrent

All you leechers out there, here's something to do while you sit and stare at your torrents download:

Go to help -> about uTorrent. This is what an 'innocent' help box looks like:

*pssst* clicking on the uTorrent logo in the about box plays the snazzy THX sound.

Now press Ctrl+T to transform this useless appendage to one of the most addictive games ever invented. Play on! (press P to pause). Oh and it even remembers your highest score!




Obviously all proprietary material mentioned in this post is copyright of its respective owners. (I think thats the appropriate disclaimer).

Here's the link to the wiki site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_egg_(virtual)

Happy easter egg hunting y'all! Drop me a comment/leave a message on GoogleTalk if you come across something interesting! :)