It’s been a while since I jotted down anything here… 68 days, in fact, and while that’s not a record, it is quite substantial. And my last post didn’t actually have anything to do with me (ahem.) So that brings the time differential to… a very excellent sounding 123 days since my last post with any real content (which might be a record… Hmm)! Let’s see… what has happened in all that time?

Long while ago

I had another motorcycle accident! Eeeentiiirely my fault this time around. Well, almost entirely my fault (is that correct?). You see, I was going through this nice round-about at Poojappura Jn. when the bike toppled over. Just ‘la ‘dat. Sure, I might have been going just a little too fast, and I might have been juuust a little too aggressive with the cornering angle, but in my defence, I’ve taken that corner at much scarier speeds and angles before – n’ more than a few times at that. Guess I stretched my luck a little too thin this time around – and of course, there’s the reason for the almost in the entirely – my bike ain’t what it used to be, it’s been in quite a lot of crashes and they’ve taken a toll on its handling.

There was another guy with me this time – first for an ‘accident’. Nothing happened to him, except for a tiny scratch on the palm. I, on the other hand, got my knee torn – which consequently had to be stitched up. I was stuck at home with a near useless leg for almost 2 weeks, during which period, the thought “have-to-go-to-the-bathroom” was exceedingly mortifying. As an aftermath, I’ve partially lost sensation on the skin around my knee, and the nerve endings seem to have been juggled around by the incompetent (?) doctor who closed the thing up. If I touch the part where the skin got torn, I get a not-so-nice tingling sensation in my numb areas. Intriguing and slightly disturbing at the same time…

Right after my leg healed (somewhat), Dishaa happened.

Let’s put it this way: I wasn’t looking forward to it. Having had an insider’s view of how things were coming along, I didn’t have much hope. I wasn’t in charge of anything, having had my fill of… umm… being in charge of things in the last iteration of the same. However, being the geek that I am, I helped out the guys with the gaming event.  After a very shaky start, it actually went pretty well. I didn’t see any of the other off-stage events, partly, because I was stuck guarding my computer at the gaming location, but mainly, because I couldn’t give less of a damn. <shrug> I was, however, there for the Cultural ‘Nite. I wanted to see (and scorn) the performance of some northie practically unheard-of guy (and his band) for whom the organizing committee had dedicated around one n’ a half lakh rupees. To my utter surprise, it turned out that the guy was actually really good! I video-d the whole thing, and its up at my YouTube page! Here’s a link to a playlist!

Sometime in-between

Holi happened. At college. Video evidence to the carnage that occurred can been viewed, once again, at my YouTube page. Here’s a convenient playlist for the lazy people.

Recently

I’ve discovered that gaming online is actually possible these days – and I don’t mean simple not-so-delay-dependant ones, I mean the real hardcore stuff! I’ve been playing Left 4 Dead and Counter-Strike: Source regularly for the past month – the latter almost exclusively for the past 2 weeks, mainly because L4D has started becoming stale. L4D is a ton of fun, possibly the best online co-operative game ever created, but with only four (official) maps, you get tired of running through the same places over and over again (even with the AI Director, which mixes things up for a different experience each time). When everybodys’ networks are fine, lag is almost non-existent. ^_^

There was another get-together at school. Was kinda fun. Pics up at my picasaweb. Header image is a shot of the Indoor Stadium that is fiiinally finished (or so it seems).

Oh, and College Days are over. My S8 university exams begin in 3 days, and as usual, I’m not looking forward to it. Wish me luck.

It’s 4.50 AM right now. I think I’ll head to bed. Yes. I’ll do that.

Girl: (smiles)

Guy: You know that I don’t have a crush on you.

Girl: Of course.

Guy: Good. Well… you were right… I like them both. One, I’d rather have never discovered. The other – well, you know how that is – it’s awful pretending not to be interested.

Girl: Then why pretend?

Guy: Just afraid, I guess.

Girl: And you call me naive?!

Guy: It’s not the same thing!

Girl: (smiles)

This is for all the geeks n’ techies out there, who might find it useful as a reference. Here’s the link to the detailed results (oc-ers only).

I played around with my 2-year old C2D E6300 two months ago and managed 3.15Ghz with some voltage increase. The board I’m using is the Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3, which encountered some trouble going past the 400FSB mark, but a +0.1V increase to the board fixed that. The OC is 24-hour prime stable and 7-hour OCCT stable. Here are the basic stats:

E6300: 450 x 7 = 3.15 Ghz (69% increase from the stock 1.86Ghz)

VCore: 1.3875V

G.Skill 2×2GB DDR2: 450 x 2 = 900 Mhz at 5-7-7-19 (automatically clocked down by the board from 5-5-5-15)

Memory Voltage: +0.1V

Now I’ll come to the more interesting bit. I acquired a PNY GTX 260 (192 SP) 2 months ago, which was the reason I went to the trouble of overclocking the CPU in the first place – since the CPU bottlenecking was so evident in 3DMark 06.

When I switched from my old 7900GS to the GTX 260, the 3DM’06 score went from 4430 to 8437 (1.9x), which I thought was extremely low for a GPU that was two generations ahead. So, after overclocking the CPU, I checked again to find a new score of 12396, at which point I noted that returns were becoming very small, and hence stopped pushing.

However, what’s even more interesting is how the new 3DMark Vantage behaves at the two CPU speeds. While this isn’t mentioned in the detailed results, the Vantage score went up only about 200 points, telling me that it didn’t care one way or another how much faster my CPU was, simply because it was that taxing on the GPU. This sort of explains why NVIDIA recommends (at least) an E6300 to go with the GTX 260; they expect newer games to be far more taxing on the GPU than the CPU and now, with PhysX ported to the graphics card, that makes more sense than ever.

On top of all that I’m getting a brand new BenQ E2200HD tomorrow, so yesterday night, I decided to push the GPU for that extra muscle it’ll need to get settings up at full HD. Here are the basic stats:

Core: 710 Mhz (19% increase from 576 Mhz)

Shader: 1420 Mhz (14% increase from 1242 Mhz)

Memory: 1225 x 2 = 2450 Mhz (23% increase from 1998 Mhz)

These values, I believe, are slightly higher than what most others have achieved with the 260! Yippee!! Memory was stable at 1250Mhz, but pushing past that to 1280Mhz caused a BSOD in the middle of my Vantage Test (2-minute run of Calico to test stability), so I backed down two steps to its current point. Same with the Shader, which caused artifacting at 1500 Mhz. The Core seems stable at 710, but I haven’t bothered pushing that since I’m not comfortable with a higher Shader.

This time, GPU scores in Vantage went up from 8828 to 10026, which I believe brings it in level with the Core 216 flavour. In any case, a 1.2k increase sounds really good to me!

While googling for some reference results to know what I could expect, I wasn’t able to find any overclocking test for the PNY GTX 260, so I hope this helps someone.

Life has not been ideal this past month.

• People have been confusing me more than usual, and as a result, I’ve reason to believe that I’ve been more than a bit-of-an-ass about more than a few things with more than a few people.
• I’d had this vision in my head of Dishaa ‘09 shaping out like one of those domino-stacks that fall out perfectly. Unfortunately, the reality is that people are flawed (including me) and nothing turns out perfectly. I just hope it won’t end up too far off the intended mark.
• And the Exams are here. Again. Sigh.

So many things to do and no(t enough) will to do it.

And on top of all that, I feel dead (Tired – but in a different way) all the time!

Hmm… come to think of it, that’s not too bad. Hmm…

Or so it was called, since it was supposed to be the last trip that s7 ppl’d be going for….

As far as I was concerned, the start was boring. I have not been blessed with an ability to dance, and in light of that knowledge, I find it extremely embarassing when situations arise where one is expected to participate. Thankfully, no one bothered me much and I was able to while away the time in music land… while all around me, the world went mad with guys and girls jumping around to the beat as best they could.

It wasn’t a pretty sight.

I woke up while we were still on the way up to Wayanad. Some of the sights were truly breathtaking – light filtering through the clouds, expansive vista-s… sights, the sort of which you only see in Discovery Channel or the National Geographic.

After refreshments, we headed straight to Edakkal caves, which turned out to be an unexpectedly strenuous trek / climb / clamber / death-defying-feat-of-utter-stupidity. I backed out at about the middle of the climb right when the rains started. Visit Krish’s picasaweb album for views from the top and a bunch of photos of the people who actually did it.

Those who survived (not everyone did. Nimmi busted her head. ) headed on to Ooty. I spent four hours listening to music, sitting at the front of the bus, at the end of which an exasperated Rakhi waved me over to sit with her wondering (correctly) why I’d bother with the awful front seat when I could sit comfily next to her.  We reached Ooty late at night with the effects of the trek plainly visible, and after a spot of partying, everyone was dead asleep.

The morning was beautiful, to say the least – just the right temperature and the light was brilliant. I took a whole bunch of photos that I’m quite proud of!

We then headed to Lake Ooty, where, with the little time we had, we went boating! I’ve been to Ooty two or three times, and have been to this same place every time, but for whatever reason, I’d never gone out onto the lake. It was fun! I’d also gotten myself a cowboy hat - something I’ve always wanted to buy, and the inevitable photo session ensued.

After a quick stop-over at a tea factory, which I skipped because it was raining, we were on our way back to Trivandrum.

All things considered… an average trip… nothing particularly exciting or memorable, and nothing to complain about…

How forgettable is that.

All the pics can be found over at my picasaweb album. Clicky!

We went to veega land during the onam holidays. Me, Sabir, and Petti, that is. At veega land, we jumped around like idiots in the wave pool for hours on end, and Sabir almost sicked up after being spun around for too long in a blender-like apparatus. The same one left me feeling very sleepy for some reason.

Oh, and they have a NEW roller-coaster over there! Looks quite tame and you don’t hear anyone scream while they’re on it, but when you get on, you realize that that’s because they’re too busy hanging on for dear life… well, girls anyway. Guys also have to make sure that some rather fragile components don’t get damaged in transit… to speak in geek-lingo. The ride is fun though.

We also walked around the Marine Drive (Bay Pride Mall, Pentamenaka, etc.) for a bit, before getting on the train back to TVM, and most of the photos I’ve put up at my picasaweb gallery are taken there. I bought the little one a rather cute arm-band thingy that read (appropriately) “the little one”. A little too many letters to fit her wrist properly, but as Sabir pointed out almost immediately, it should fit some other body parts quite well.

She won’t like that. <wicked grin>

I’m leaving for my class trip (Wayanad – 2-day) tomorrow noon / evening. So I’d thought I’d update this place before I left! See ya!

Update:

5 minutes after posting this, I get a call from Unni saying that the trip’s been cancelled. Apparantly, some girls are concerned that their parents won’t let them come when they see that the total number of girls is low. We only had about 25 people coming anyway, and the budget was tight as it was.

Useless bunch of (spineless) gits. And it’s not just those girls, it’s for all those who backed out after commiting to the trip.

Sigh.

Listening to music on earphones when there’s people all around is an odd experience. You can see everyone talking, their lips moving to silent words, and I’m outside it all. It’s like hiding in plain sight, when everything you can see makes no difference one way or another. See, anyway. The phone ringing, someone trying to speak to me, or even just someone throwing stones at me – that’s about all it takes to break the moment.

Read this:

“ALL THE REPRESENTATIVES WHO ARE NOT APPEARING FOR RECRUITMENT PROCESS SHOULD COME ASSIST THE CGPU ON 26TH AND 27TH. IF THE STUDENTS SELECTED TO INFOSYS ARE NOT APPEARING FOR THE RECRUITMENT PROCESS,THEIR OFFER LETTERS WILL NOT BE ISSUED. ALL ARE HEREBY INFORMED TO TAKE THIS WARNING SERIOUSLY. AND ATTEND

TOMMORROW. ATTENDANCE OF REPS WILL BE TAKEN SEPERATELY.”

Rude people anger me; especially when their rudeness is uncalled for. The fellow with the threatening tone (and seemingly, a fetish for capitals) above didn’t bother asking nicely first before going out all gung-ho about it.

The Onam Celebration thingy was fun! Our atthappookkalam was the usual clubbing of designs picked up from here and there (this time Jaimy came up with ‘em all) and even though I didn’t stick around till the end, I’m pretty sure we didn’t win anything. I took a whole bunch of photos, and have put up the best at my picasaweb account.

My beloved JBL has said bye-bye… for the time being anyway. Some kinda loose connection inside the sub means it just makes odd buzzing noises most of the time. I tried opening it up and peering at the innumerable PCB-s with their forests of capacitors, but couldn’t find anything obviously out of place. So much for my being able to repair anything and everything. Therefore I’m in the market for a discrete powered subwoofer! If any of my innumerable (ahem) readers can point out someplace to shop for them, or have advice pertaining to the same, please contact me!

I went to New Theatre to see Mummy 3: The curse of the… blah blah yesterday. That’s totally unimportant because the movie was that bad. The interesting thing is that I went with two girls (no guys. wha?!), and I had a chance to observe them, after the movie – over lunch, hopefully without them becoming any the wiser.

What I (so keenly) observed is this:

They’re a loving, affectionate bunch.

Not that two girls constitute a large enough sample for me to generalize something like that, but I suppose, since the above statement is a compliment, it won’t hurt to let it stand.

I also keenly noted that, unlike guys, they were almost impossible to read. While this might be attributed to my loser-ness w.r.t. girls, and the consequent inexperience, it’s almost fun to be with people who you can’t… predict (but that’s not the right word)! Unpredictableness is exciting!

On a completely different note, I finally got myself a proper sound card and a pair of entry-level audiophile class headphones. The headphones were initially a bit of a disappoinment, but I’ve grown to like the sound that it makes. There’s absolutely no resonance to the bass (and that aint always good), but mid-s, high-s, they’re all there. A case of quality over quantity, I suppose. I have to say one thing though; I can’t imagine headphones getting any more comfortable than these. It really is easy to forget that you’re wearing these gigantic things on your head. And the sound card – that’s just plain awesome; there’s no reason to get anything else, really.

And on a very sad note, my 8 month old WD 500gb HDD has passed away. Cause of death is the dreaded click of death. Probable cause for that is because I’ve been keeping it ouside the case, on top of a pile of books, while being crushed by two other hard-disks. However, I would like to state, in my defence, that its S.M.A.R.T. parameters, even on its death-day indicated a 100% perfectly operational disk.

That’s enough news for now. Been a long hiatus eh? ^_^ Ciao!

Edit: Updated Duttan’s blog link, and changed header image.

I have an idea. Why not change the header image every post?

You’ll be pleased to hear that I finally made my first true Windows application today. Albeit, one that did nothing whatsoever other than exist, and then, exit. But at least it did those things properly. Oh, but it also turned out that it works only on my system.

Damn.

I also managed to finish Okami (Oh-kami) about a week ago, at the end of (a stunning game) which, it gleefully reported that I’d spent 56 hours at the controller, over a period of 95 days. That’s an average of a little over half hour a day. See! There’s proof that my mum’s allegations of “Oh, he’s always playing games” are totally, irrefutably baseless.

I’m also contemplating investing in a spanking new X-Fi XtremeGamer (yuk! that sounds so cheezy) sound card, to replace both my worthless onboard sound, and the 500 rupee(s) stand-in Yamaha… something… that I’d hoped would be better (it wasn’t). This particular X-Fi is the cheapest hardware accelerated X-Fi card available on the market, and at over Rs. 6000 online, it is still over 2000 bucks dearer than in the states. Ah well, that’s the price you pay for living in India. At least this way, I’ll have some justification for the 1.5k I dropped on the Zalmans… well, MM-Gear, really.

So that’s it for tonight. 3:23 seems like a nice time to sink into the pillow. See ya tomorrow for lunch.

girL: So you’re saying that they can do whatever they want?!

guY: No… you’re thinking about it the wrong way. You don’t define boundaries for others! Boundaries exist only for you.

L: I don’t understand.

Y: What I’d like to do is to sit next to you and snuggle up, because you look cuddly and I’m cold!

L: What?! Heck! No!

Y: Exactly! I’ve set a boundary for myself that I can’t do that. I’m not setting a boundary or a rule for you, but only for me.

L: … That still doesn’t make any sense.

Y: Yeah, that usually happens. Just give it some time.