Additional blogs I post on

I also post on a few other blogs. Here they are:

1. XENDX: xendx was a blog Marc and I started that was intended to post about bloopers in print and stuff like that. We haven't posted there in a while.
2. Loquor: The latest one I'm posting on, this is just an amalgamation of the good old days when we were back in school and stuff was stuff.
3. Mindfault: Marc's first blog. This is where it all began. This is where he started his plan for World Domination.
4. George Files: Did I make a typo in choosing the subdomain for this blog? No I didn't. There's a story behind it, but never mind. I changed the name for the new blog. This is where I post most often.

That's all. It was good to be back. For a couple of seconds. Then I started yearning for Wordpress again.

New blog

Yeah, I've finally changed to my own host and now use Wordpress. You can find my new page at:
Roshan George and the blog at George Files

The $39 experiment

A very interesting idea, I didn't think it'd work, but it did. So this guy uses $39 worth of stamps to mail different companies to ask them for freebies and he gets them. Well, go here to see it in all it's glory.

Calvin and Hobbes

Definitely one of the finer cartoons ever drawn, in my opinion. One of my favourite strips ever. So anyway, here's a link which tells you exactly why Calvin and Hobbes is so freaking awesome.
And here's my favourite Calvin and Hobbes:
Here

Rain and Garbage!

Frankly, I have nothing against some cloud cover. In fact I absolutely love it. It's the constant rain I can't stand, that and the garbage floating in the streets now. No, it's not a pretty sight. A month ago, I could overhear conversations in the trains about Mumbai being flooded and how that could never happen here. Heh, look who's quiet now!

The way the Municipal Corporation handles the whole thing is quite systematic (should we be grateful?):
1. Remove muck from stormwater drain and place on road.
2. Let rain water spread muck evenly over road.
3. Wait for summertime.
4. Spend crores of money on scraping muck off road and piling it on the pavement.
5. Wait one month for it to rain in Mumbai.
6. Push muck back in drain.

It's brilliant. Even I admit it, it is a perfect loop. There is absolutely no flaw, no danger of running out of muck because they can always create the muck if they don't have any left after it dries on the road. The only real problem is when the road is the muck. Well, I thought it was a real problem, until I saw how the Corporation handled it. They just pushed the whole road (actually, what was left of it after the Telecom and Water departments got it) into the drain. Sheer Genius! (Yes, that is a capital 'G'.)

By now, I am tempted to capitalise the 'M' in muck and I probably shall if I refer to it any later than here. Then it would be Muck, like Godzilla see, and that's a good analogy because both are Terrors of Crowded Cities.
In any case, the kind of people I hate most are those who take all their garbage and dump it on the pavement. And then to make it worse, they'll try dumping it all in one spot, presumably to attempt to create some garbage sculpture of Mt. Everest (to scale), and this leads to half of the garbage flowing out on the streets. This ,naturally, is very convenient for pedestrians, who enjoy trying to dodge human faeces, dog faeces, cow faeces, and the lower slopes of the garbage mountains. In fact, these obstacles make very sombre-looking people act very lively, which is never uninteresting.

And then of course, there's the mandatory girls-without-umbrellas incident, which must have happened to a helluva lot of people; that is, if you believe the Life Insurance ads on TV. Sometimes I laugh myself senseless at the stupidity of it all. I think I'll go do that now.

College Culturals & Job

In 2 days, our college cultural event for the year starts (each department, and each sub-organisation inside MCC has a separate one too). 3 days it be. Frankly, it's the first college-held culturals I've gone for this year, having missed everything else due to one reason or the other so I am really looking forward to enjoying this one to make up for all the missed chances.

Anyway, I'm still half-heartedly looking for a job because I could use an alternative source of income, my allowance barely covering all my expenses.
One easy way of making money seems to be to do what Tech Support staff generally do.
Format a drive and then charge Rs. 200 for that. Easily done. Now, anyone need their computer fixed?

qRO having trouble.

I've been playing Ragnarok Online for the past one year and a few months and most of that on the private server qRO (short for Quality/Quebec Ragnarok Online). It all started with some changes to the server, followed by char db corruption, followed by a DDoS attack, followed by some more corruption, followed by even more char db corruption, and then came the big hit, one of the best admins was fired for "trying to take over the server. "

I'd like to see the server live and pass through this phase easy but... it seems unlikely and in any case, I lost most of my items in a bit of corruption or loss of security my id.

What this means to me is that I now have a free 3-4 hours a day to do stuff which I used to spend on RO. I am still working on map development for RO, and some mods. I'd like to see which server would like this and go to one which has an atmosphere which is conducive to development.

What is really sad is to see the big change in the people who play this server over the months. People who seemed to be nice and friendly in the beginning seem almost removed from the community and many of them have actually exacerbated this problem.
Even if qRO recovers it would seem that the heart has been torn out of it, with some of the nicest members of the community leaving (for other servers, or just leaving the game itself).

Protect? LIES!!! [SafeDisc and all such]

It all started way back in 1985 with Macrovision's video cassette protection which did not interfere with the picture itself but which confused the recording machine so that VCR-to-VCR copies were not possible.

Then when computers came out software developers started devising ways to protect their software from being copied. That didn't work too well, with various cracker groups destroying copy-protection on the software. But, still, there were those who would buy and install original software, and most companies could still make a lot of money.

However, just a couple of years ago, the developers of copy-protect software hit upon a brilliant idea,

" Why not make the software block CD access of CD-Burners? " [SafeDisc reportedly does this. The software protected by SD won't install while Nero or other burning tools are present on the system]

From there it was a small step to,

" Why not install device drivers on the customer's computer to ensure they can't do anything very well as long as this software is installed? In fact, let's make it so that we don't even tell them about it."

Say hello to Starforce, the next generation in I-will-screw-your-computer utilities.
Not only will it install itself without informing you (either in the EULA or separately) but it won't uninstall either. Games "infected" by this also have their demos "infected".

Significantly, no-cd cracks for the games using StarForce are all over the Internet and Starforce seems to have achieved little piracy-wise. The people who are really being punished are those who buy the game. Interestingly, after being e-mailed about this, Starforce replied with a removal-tool.

That tool is mirrored here .

To get a list of games infected by Starforce goto:
http://www.glop.org/starforce/

Scanning through Gameburnworld's pages too yields a couple of programs that could be used to disinfect your system.

NOTE: These tools may not be able to undo any damage already done.

Sadly, it seems that this copy-protection seems to be interfering with some people's ability to play the game that had the protection. Some of these people have returned the game, others have reformatted (thereby removing burning software, etc... that SF or whatever doesn't like) and many many more have simply opted for a warez version that doesn't do this. How paradoxical, the protection causes a spread of warez versions!