I love snow; actually not.

East coast is acting weird these days. When I gone to bed yesterday night, it was fairly clear all around outside. And today morning, when I woke up at 6 it was almost a whitewash outside. I immediately picked up the phone and call my office. Hurray!! we will be open from 11am. Sweet. Bitter thing is, it will not be easy to get to office at 11 either since it is still snowing with a mix of rain. Now that is the worst thing since the rain will freeze up at night and make out live horrible tomorrow morning. Anyway, its time for me to read the news and sip in my glass of coffee.

How do you get scammed by A/V retailer?

The answer is easy, ask them a dumb question, that you need a coaxial cable? Circuitcity guy will be happy enough to throw you a $20 cable for your digical adventure. Basically a coaxial output contains RAW audio data from a source an dthat has to be decoded via DA decoder to get audible sound. Now what I found, is plain and simple, any RCA cable will just do fine as a coaxial cable, period. Shame on me, I did not know that before and spend $$ to buy a so called digital co-axial cable.

deleted the jocker's pic.

Party time.

Changing face of party. Lighting by 420ex in slave mode and LED flashlight.

Sony is feeling the heat amid winter chill

It's been a while that Sony BMG was busted for their sniffing technology impregneted in some of the best selling music CDs. It was first made to the public almost a month ago and since then the company was slammed over and over again by privacy consious user groups. The evil program, called rootkit is well known for its evasive behaviour. There is not many means to detect it from windows environment other than a few programs like chkrootkit. More on rootkit can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rootkit . As part of my Dell laptop, rootkit came preinstalled in my PC as a security feature an dthankfully enough it was documented in the manual.
Even more funnier fact is Sony's use of Open Source technology to implement DRM. Researchers found at least 5 functionalities in Sony's rootkit technology, already a part of LAME, an OpenSource product (ref:- http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-5960222.html). It will be interesting to see how Sony is going to defend the rising lawsuits in several different states in future. At the same time, it will be a good lesson for music industry who are typically getting an upperhand in tracking down and closing P2P softwares like Napstar and Kazaa.

Healthy Weight:- here is the standard.

How much do you think reasonable? Check out the title link. Sad or funny? Stupidity? or negligence? Whatever.

Toilet

I was at Chicago last October to meet my lincolnian friends. Went to Devon as it is a must do for Indians visiting the windy city. Unfortunately, I had to go to restroom and I found something quite amazing. "lota" in US! Look at the right bottom part of the photo, next to poo station. Not to mention it was quite filthy, probably my second worst toilet experience here, just next to a rural gas station in Nebraska.

Things moving so slow today

Yaw! today is the first day after marathon vacation of last week. So far, th eday is quite slow. Quite a few folks at work still at vacation. Jeff is not around. Superwomen Marianna is there, but she is kinda quite today. It's a good day for me though. Got some 2gm of a target compound, which was actually teh result of 2 weeks effort. Gee! orgchem sux at times.

Rupa at work 

Rup Ki Rani 

So here is she!

Ehhe! cute huh!

Physics Dept, RKMV. The dept looks the same.

sarswati Puja, RKMV 

Arnab and Munnabhai 

Proud dad of Veronica and Somak.

Birth of Veronica Celebration party 

Thanksgiving 2005

Like last few years I have did it again, oops! The blackfriday sale is probably teh bigegst impulsive shopper's frenzy in the world. Kudos to dedicated buyers who camp outside bestbuy and circuitcity under below freezing temperature. I was almost dead two years in front of Bestbuy, waiting patiently for two hours in bitter cold for a graphics card. Finally I got on but I made a promise to myself:- never again in line on BF. I think online shopping is much pleasing. Get a glass of hot coffiee, relax and buy exactly what you need. So here is what I got this year. A 200Gb hdd, an 80Gb hdd, 60 blank dvd and some other itsy bitsy. Now time is up for rebate hassels. I know Norton is gonna give me some real hard time. So is Hitachi. Too bad that I don't get them during the holiday but there will be truckload of stuff for me on Tuesday. The UPS driver will be crazy!
Anyway, it's time for me to learn some lessons on RAID5 setup, that's what I am going to do with my 3x200 GB hdd.

Amazing Ad of Honda Accord

My friend just send me a link for new Hionda Accord ad. Definetely the new Accord looks very very sexy and am thinking of getting one. Anyway, the main point of the post is the ad itself. Looks like it is real. According to the link, it took 3 month to create and $6 million to finish up the project. Here is more detailed report from Telegraph.

So I meet the right person

So I meet this nice little girl somehow. Man! am I lucky? Oh yeah. Updates coming soon.

Scifinder 2004 under Linux

It was actually bugging feature of Scifinder that Linux/Unix is not supported till date when IBM is actively pushing its market in Linux. Anyway, I was unable to use Scifinder in my Linux box for while untill I made a fresh try tonight.
With the help of wine, I installed Scifinder and copied the site.prf file (necessary for browsing and independent for each subscriber, I mean univ). After that I put a symbolic link under wine in the emulated C:\Programe Files\Internet Explorer towards my original browser, Firefox. Now everything runs smooth as melted butter.

What's up with Neo4 platinum: second story

Geez! what a mobo! that's my final impression after playing with this board and my 3000+ Venice for last couple of months. In one word, the board is amazing, but on a side note, good for bravehearts. If someone do not want to do any OC'ing, this board may be a good one but why someone want to spend hundred bux for that matter?
One thing I really hate about MSI bios by the fact that they are pretty much stubborn if you mess up something. That means, the board will not post if it does not like your settings. On a retrospect, Asus board are quite an wonder to work with. Most of the time serious errors in BIOS can be reversed without opening the case.
Anyway, I am pretty happy with Neo4 Plat now, except for the jet engine like northbridge fan. I hav eno clue why they put such a horrible fan in the first place. Shams shame! As of now, my venice is flying at 2.39GHz, Corsair VS1GB kit is going strong at 217MHz. BTW, memtest can produce a horribly wrong sense of RAM quality if you run it with my setup. I use to encounter a gazillion number of errors in test 5 and upwords.

Trying to test

Just trying to test if things are going okay or not. Having some problem for a while with updates. Don't know what is actually going on.

What's up with Neo4 platinum

Okay, so my ol ASUS A8V deluxe was sent for better treatment by someone in Canada, I am in a position to play with a brand new MSI K8N Neo4 platinum MOBO. With my 3000+ AMD venice cheap this board screams. What I mean is 269FSB!! that translates 2.4GHz of RAW power from a CPU meant to be 1.8GHz. And cooleste thing is the CPU temp....it's still at 39 degree C. Amazing, huh!
By the way, I have not talked about the royal pain I am feeling out of the PCI-E graphics card though. Comp is booting up like a rotton car starting up in canadian cold. I hit the power button, the BIOS posts with full fire, and windows is just about to start..but there is BUUMMM!! and there is a nice blue screen of death!! I am yet to figure out about the problem. Anyway, here is a very informative thread I found at MSI support forum .