Random Musings #13

Bite my shiny metal ass! — Bender, Futurama

Random Musings #12

Damn, people are cruel. All everyone wants is for someone to listen to their [sordid] affairs without having to listen to what he has to share. It is true what they say, “The opposite of speaking is not listening: it is waiting.” Sheesh!

Eid

A bit belated, but whoever is reading, I wish you a meaty Eid mubarak.

Eid this time round has been relatively enjoyable. From early morning till way late in the afternoon on the first day, I was dirt busy. There were only two butchers hired to perform the sacrifice and subsequently properly chop the meat, so I had to help them at various points in different ways during the sacrifice of the goat. In the interim of all that, I got blood splattered all over my jeans, and shreds of meat and, especially, fat stuck onto my t-shirt. As soon as the butchers had finished their job of chopping the meat into appropriately small pieces and had left, I quietly cleaned and washed the entire porch floor with water and a cleaning viper. I had to open clear the drain just outside our house, which had been clogged with a mix of water, blood clots, pieces of fat, and general garbage. Mom did lend a helping hand, but I took care of most things myself. A major part of chopped meat had got goat’s hairs stuck all over, so I helped mom wash up all the meat. It was a yucky afair, with melted fat accumulating all over my hands and some part of the forearm. And I was already too dirty. No sooner than I was done with everything, I took a hot water bath. It was only after the bath that I felt relieved. Heh.

Rest half of the day until late evening was spent online working with a colleague on a network programming puzzle. Somewhere around late afternoon, a friend asked if I would be able to drop by his house. I was excited, and negotiated a time in the late evening for meeting. At quarter to eight, with dad’s consent, I jumped into my car and drove to the friend’s house, where we both talked and talked and had a great one and a half hour together. I was home by half past nine. I stayed up till an hour after midnight, and then dropped dead on my bed.

Next morning, on second day, I woke to the usual sounds of mom and dad leaving for work. In the afternoon, a friend dropped by to pick up some notes. We both talked for a while, until I had to politely ask him to leave as mom and dad, which arrived an hour earlier, were waiting to leave with me to a relative’s house very far away. Again, I was the driver, and I drove some 45+ kilometres to get to the place. And, then, I did another 45+ kilometres on the way back. Pain clasped my back, hips, legs and arms as, having parked the car outside home, I stepped foot outside. Late in the night, two cousins, who have been married to each other for some time now, showed up. I kept awake till an hour and a half past midnight, and, then, eventually, dosed off.

The third day is still progressing as I write this. I have to study for my MPI exam scheduled on Monday, 16 January. I don’t expect we will go anywhere today, or anyone will visit us, but who knows.

CyberHiSpeed: What a cock-up!

Cyber.Net’s monthly unlimited dial-up package, CyberHiSpeed, is cocking-up of late. It takes more than two to three failed dial-in attempts to successfully get through. It is interesting to note that the failure to dail-in is not attributed to unavailability of ports at the ISP’s end, although seldom it is, but to the peculiar ways in which the server to which connections are dailed-in responds to login credentials and other strings sent by the calling device. Half of the time the server blatantly fails to respond. The rest of the time the server spits back strings which cause the connecting device to get into a hung-up state. Having a server either not respond to login information well after a preliminary connection has been established by way of a phone call or hook-up the modem by sending undesired strings is an order of magnitutde more annoying than simply getting a BUSY dail tone back. I have no doubts the PSTN adds the appropriate amount for a connected call in such situations to the end-user’s telephone bill.

This is neither the place nor have I the time to provide detailed evidence of such behaviour. I do, however, plan on writing a descriptory rant in time to come. It need be noted that almost everyone who I have been in touch with who use CyberHiSpeed package have been facing similar problems and, likewise, shared the same sentiments.

I felt a strong sense of deja vu writing this. Oh, well!