Best Birthday Presents Everrr!!!

A week ahead of my birthday, I had no clue how I was gonna spend my birthday. My plan was to take a day off, grab some beer and sit at a beach all day with couple of friends. Just to avoid the limelight in the office. But my dad called me a day ahead of the weekend before my birthday and tells me that he's booked ticket in the next bus to Chennai. My first reaction was "OK, that way I'm surely gonna avoid the limelight". Got my leave sanctioned for a week, next morning packed my bags, errr.. dumped/stuffed my clothes into my backpack, got the ticket printed out, status message updated in Facebook and boarded the bus that evening.

Generally speaking, I like traveling long distances in bus. But when the driver thinks he is Michael Schumacher and is driving through ghat road after sunset, well, lets just say I was on the verge of throwing up. Reached Bangalore and had some tea in a small glass that looked more like tequila shots in terms of size. I wondered if I should drink it like a tea or just shoot. Bus started unusually late from Bangalore and once we made it into Tamil Nadu, BAAAAM, the bus tyre exploded. Seriously, how often does that happen? It wasn't a regular puncher. The side of the tyre just exploded. I was glad getting my super numb ass out the bus and felt the Chennai heat get to me. Felt like I'm in Narnia kind of shit. One moment I'm all chilled out in the nice A/C bus, I step out of the door, and behold, FLAMETHROWERS. Chennai is freakin' hot. First couple of days in Chennai was very typical. Went out to meet friends and stuff had pizza at Domino's Doomino's. Went to Anna Nagar park and saw some cheer girls cheer-up-girls. :P God, kaka and his vocabulary.EPIC. On the night before my birthday I was to the terrace talking to my friend on phone and my dad tells me to come down. My parents along with my granny, uncle and aunt are there with a cake.And I was like "heyyy, surprise party. Pretty cool". Singing, cake cutting, smearing on face and all the regular stuff happened. But here's the best part. My dad brings out a tiny box. By the shape of the box i guessed it was a watch, 'cause my mom just bought a watch recently and the box it came in, was the the same exact shape. I opened it anyway and out comes.......wait for it........bike key. My face literally went like :D. My dad closed my eyes and took me out and i see a brand spanking new Apache waiting. I just couldn't wait to get my hands on it. I press the key in, turn the ignition ON and I see the beast wake up. The Display lights up and the tach needle takes a full twist. That was the most beautiful mechanical motion I'd seen in a while. The engine note was a pure melody. Took it for a shot spin. Next couple of days, it was just me and her. But damn the Chennai traffic, it was mostly stop and go. But yeah, I was in a way happy that I didn't taste the real deal yet, 'cause I'll be riding the bike in Goa's usually-trafficless-road. I left to Goa Last Saturday and reached here this Sunday. Will be getting the bike the coming weekend. Today I'll be going out to get a nice white helmet to go with the bike :D and a pair of gloves. More pics sometime soon :)

UPDATE:
 This post has been lying around in my draft for few days now. And ya, got my helmet. :D..(and a balaclava) and ya, got my bike too :D :D :D.. But I'm gonna have to wait for another month to get my license. :(  Gonna have to maintain a low profile till then ;)


amor y paz :)

Paneer Tikka Masala gone Paneer and some brown liquid.(With a star like thing on top, god only knows what)

Here's a quick post. I transferred lot of my pics on phone that has been there for like forever, onto my laptop. Browsing through the pictures, I came across one of the picture and I thought I should make a post about It.

So, I've been telling my friend about how I'm cooking in my apartment and stuffs that I make for dinner. She gave me this 'supposedly' simple recipe for Paneer Tikka Masala. I'm guessing, because I partially convinced her that I was good at cooking?!? (holy crap!!! I'm in some deep shit now :P). And there we were, me and my roommate, cooking paneer tikka masala. I'm no foodie. I mostly avoid the menu at the restaurants and let others order. I just go with the flow when it comes to food. So I have no idea if I have ever even seen or tasted Paneer Tikka Masala before, but I was very sure about one thing. What we made that night, it definitely wasn't paneer tikka masala. Here's a pic. I don't even remember what that star kind of thing on top is. But I remember putting A LOT of violet color food coloring on the paneer :P :P. I expected the whole dish to turn out violet. My roomie was like "Already we have no clue what we are doing. Adhula idhu vera ya. Nadathhu da nadathhu. Innaiki night saapta maadhri dhaan". We did eat that night and the best part, instead of eating with chapatis, we ate that with rice. How bad is that. Taste wise, putting it delicately, we didn't have to throw it away.

Anyway, its good to know that there are people who care about you. Thanks for the recipe Sush :).

PS: There's another post lying around in my drafts. Let me see if I can find some time to edit and post that sometime real soon.

amor y paz :)

No place like 127.0.0.1

So ya, went home for a week this Jan (or Feb) i guess. God, had an awesome time. One of my cousin got married. And for some reason I couldn't swallow the fact that he was actually getting married. 'Cause he was one of the few 'cousins' I've actually been close with since childhood and suddenly him turning into a 'husband' was kind of had to swallow. But whatever you know, I'm happy for them. They used to be high school sweet hearts and I've read somewhere that only 3 out of 10 high school couples ever get married. So, I'm glad they made it. :).

besides that, got to hang out with my best friends. A lot. Did lots of crazy stuffs that we used to do. Got kicked out a bar for not being 21 yet (to the waiter who denied us beer: few more days sonofabitch, few more days..). Went to anna nagar park and Kaka helped a random female playing hide n seek and forced her to say thank you :P.. Photography session in public restroom. Some amazing conversation with Nari. Checked our heights and weights for free.  Went for hard disk shopping. Kaka bargaining with the shopkeeper was the best. Hahhahaha. He was pissed to a level that when we left the shop he said "aduthha vaati ivana kootiktu varaadhiinga sir"..LOLLL.. So ya, lots of crazy stuff. Damn, Its only when you go away you realize how much you love home. Hence the title "No place like 127.0.0.1".

Amor y paz!!! :)

Rise from the Ashes

I thought of naming this post as "I'm baaaaack".. but i figured this one sounds much cooler :P . I know, I know, my bad.

I was sitting in office and getting bored (ya office, done with college. Woking now). Not that i didn't have any work to do, I was just a little too busy thinking about the coming weekend. I was web hoping and I came across this blog (btw, should check it out. pretty cool..) and it reminded me of my own. So I decided to pay a visit my blog sweet blog. i realized it has been almost 10 months since i posted. gosh, 10 months. Now that's some number huh. It felt shitty for some reason. i mean, when i used to post something and i received comments about that, it made me feel happy. Now it has been quite a while since i had that feeling. And then i thought, damn i'm gonna post. right here right now. Its friday afternoon and tomorrow is Ganash Chaturti. about half the employees in the office have taken leave. It wouldn't really hurt if one more employee skips a day's work to make a blog post.
Just about a week ago I was thinking about this blog and how i'd probably never post again. But here I'am, writing a blog post in Xcode 3.2, in-between bunches of C and C++ code, just in case my boss pops up behind me :P :P :P. Feels like i'm giving birth to a new blog :P. As I type this, my conscience is telling me that i'm supposed to be working on a game for iphone…but to hell with my conscience. I'm pretty bugged right now to deal with that my conscience.

So wassup with my life?? lot of random shit happened. stuffs i can't even remember right now. but some of the most significant ones, 1.getting kicked out of EA mobiles in the 1st round of interview.(they probably thought i was too awesome for them) 2. a trip to bangalore ended even before it started (whole different story. got into the train and had to get down before it even left chennai central.) 3. me and Ryan made a 3rd person game called fart-o-boy. (you can check out the developers' blog here). now we are onto the good stuff. 4. did a 3 months internship in company in Goa. Yes, GOA. 5. successfully graduated from college. congrats to me, I'm a professional game programmer now :P ( i'll never get tired of bragging about this ) 6.my laptop when for an all expenses paid trip to singapore, thanks the to assholes in sony service center who decided sending the laptop to singapore would be cheaper than importing the parts to India. 7. I was offered to work in the same company, and i said sure. it was Goa, so why not. best place to dispose off all the post college excitement.
So now you know three things. one,why i was bugged. Two,why this post was typed out in a native programming environment and most important, three, that I'll never stop posting in this blog.

I have like tons of photos and videos and stories from my days of internship here in Goa. I hope i don't have to wait another 10 months to put those up. God it feels so great to finally post after such a long time. If ur reading this, I'm expecting some comments here guys. And yes, more stories coming soon from the land of green grass and pretty girls. Till then,

amor y paz….

Surveys..bad!!!

When ur having a good time, u never know how time passes. And rightly said. It just seems like yesterday when my college life started and 2 years have gone so fast. I can’t even imagine there’s just 1yr left. God, I ‘m gonna miss my game lab (the place where we sit and game all the time). Just the other day, I was sitting and wondering why haven’t I posted anything about my college life in my blog. Its supposed to be hyper fun. Just like the days in BV hostel. So I planned to post couple of posts about the stuff that happens here at ICAT. So here it goes. The first of it.

I’m right now in 5^th sem. How the hell did I reach 3^rd year? I swear I have no fockin clue. N I bet, nobody else does. I’v been bunkin classes more than I’v been attending. I’v never know the timetable (I’m not sure if there even was any..), I’v never kept up with the assignments and so on and so on.. I assume my marks comes from the ‘final-submission’ shit that happens at the end of each sem. Who cares. End of the day, I’v managed to drag my lazy arse into the final year. And that’s to it.

This sem, I decided to put the past behind and start working on the projects in a more dedicated manner. Cos this is the stuff that’s gonna get me a good job. ( u need to be in a good job to get married u c..i’m not a despo, as u might think otherwise..but still..). During the 1st weed we weren’t doing anything. Just gaming all day, without even know what we had to do this sem. One fine morning, Jai sir and Pradeepa Ma’am entered the room (we miss you pradeepa ma’am………no u jerk, she’s not dead.. she left the collg..) and gave us briefing about what we were supposed to do this sem. Long story short, Form teams of 2, find out what people like to play, and make games according to their preference.

Now, to find out what people love to play, we needed to go out to the public and take survey. As in, make them fill up survey forms. This was to be done by Ryan (my teammate/designer). I needed to go to hardware shops and find out the best selling PC configs. As soon as out profs told us abt the survey part, we knew this was going to be one big pain in the ass.

So we got down to business. We set up an online survey. We got some responses. But the real thing was yet to be done. A couple of days later, you cud find everyone in my dept with a stack of survey form and asking people to fill it up. With some considerable amount of forms filled up, it was my turn for the hardware survey.

With big hopes of getting loads of survey form filled up, I headed out to Richie street. Ryan and Ishan were with me. I think it was around 6 or 7 in the evening when we left college. Yes, I remember that day. Just when we were about to leave, Jai sir came into the lab to play cod and told us that pradeepa ma’am was quitting. I remember saying “oh..so sad” with a big grin on my face. So, as I was saying, it was around 6 or 7 when we left college and took a bus to Richie street.

After getting there, I had to take Xerox of my survey forms. It took us half an hour to find a Xerox shop where the Xerox machine was working. With everything ready, we were up for battle. Quite some time has passed and I don’t exactly remember the order in which things played out, but this is pretty much what happened. In Every shop we would start of like “ hello sir, we are game design students from ICAT doing a survey…..bla bla bla..”

Shop1: we tried to find out which console was being sold the most. The guy in the shop gave us lot of details. He was actually pretty good. But we needed to take a video interview, which he did not agree for. Said he needed his owner’s permission.

Shop2: ( and shop 3 and 4): owner not available/ no, we are not interested.. (slap on the face.. fataakkkk..)

From here onwards, our into started something like, “hello sir, can I Talk to the owner or the manager of the shop..”

Shop 5: This guy had pan in his mouth when we entered. (the green leaf thingy .... not the cooking pan..) When I asked for the owner, he nodded his head. I told him abt the survey and gave him the form. He filled it up quietly and handed it back to me. This was the only form that I was able to get filled all day.

Shop 6: two fat motherfuckers were sitting in there watching TV. I asked them and they said “we are veryyyyy busy.. try the next shop”…I was so fockin pissed, if I had a grenade launcher, I swear I would have fucking blown there motherfuckin faces off….

At this point I totally gave up the survey thing. I was ready to lose marks but no more insults.. But ryan and Ishan wanted to try couple of more shops for interviews. Among us, I was the only one who could speak tamil. So I had to do the talking for them. We reached another shop. Ishan said that this was the shop our college bought Wii from. So I expected ppl there to be a little ICAT friendly. But what the fuck.

We entered and gave our into dialogue. There was a guy who looked more like a politician. In a harsh manner he asked us for what purpose. We gave him a little more details. In the end even he declined.

This was the last shop that we entered I think.. ( actually secondlast..).. it was a CD shop. 2 young guys were there.. we asked them if they could give an interview in front of the camera, they said we had to ask their owner. They directed us to another shop on the floor right above.. We went there looking for this guy and that son of a bitch started arguing with us. He started saying some random shit about people taking vids like this and putting it up on TV. I tried to explain that moron that we were college students doing this for our project, but won’t just accept. I had to work real hard not to bite my teeth and to keep the smile on my face. But in the end I just turned and walked out.

This is kind of an ‘end-of-the-day” video.

.

The only good thing was we had a nice dinner together in a hotel near by and went home. And just yesterday I realized that I lost even the one form that I collected.

Well, this is just the tip of the ice burg. I bet there’s more big ass trouble coming this sem. I’ll keep u ppl posted of everything.. till then, Take care and remember SURVEYS…BAAAAAD!!!!

And here’s a bonus videos. This was in marina beach the next day I guess. Ryan and Ishan.

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