Friday, October 21, 2005

Browser Mania!

What's it with me and Web-Bowsers?

The more i acquire them the more i am dissatisfied with them, yet i keep on downloading new web browsers and trying them out, but now i think i need to stop doing that.

Why?

To get some work done, alright!

Half of the time i am trying out new softwares, the major chunk of which are new browsers or their updates. The other half i spend surfing the internet. And then i wonder, "Why no work is done!" or "Time sure flies!"

Got to get some work done, sometimes atleast. Well this week proved to be just that, I was working on a crystal report for 3 days, and when it was done, I didnt believe that i hadn't done much on the internet or tried new applications for 3 days.

So that day i scheduled a download for the developers version of Microsoft Sharepoint 2003 and started installing it the next day on a windows 2003 sever.

As i was doing that i got a mail from the Flock crew, that their new browser was up for developer preview and i should check it out. Damn well i did check it out, right away.

"Why?", Beats me! I currently have a host of browsers including the closed beta of Microsoft IE 7. No i am not a beta tester for Microsoft, "How did i get it ?", well things do get in your way, when u spend half the day surfing the internet.

Browsers i have tried, include Firefox, Opera, Avant and even Aol Explorer which is based on IE browser engine.

Every browser i have used till date has its set of issues which motivates me to keep on searching for an alternative. Even Firefox is not up to the standards which i forsee a web browser should have. But now that i have tried so many i still dont know which one to use, i hate tabbed browsing, as i am accoustomed to using different windows for different pages, so the first thing i do for each new browser is to disable tabbed browsing. Exporting the bookmarks comes next on the list of customizing the browsers, then comes adding all the plugins and extensions and the newsfeeds which i use eveyday. Whooa! that is a lot of work, now i know where my time flies.

By reflex my mouse pointer clicks on the Internet Explorer icon, and i end up using internet explorer most of the time.

Firefox asks too much from a user, download this and that, close the browser and start it again, tweak it here and there, come to think of it it is not a browser a lay-man will be able to use it to its full potential. A web browser should have a very small learning curve, so that the user can get down to work right away, well in my case, get down to wasting my time asap.

Well, i have lost the point why i am writing this post, well i am using the inbuilt blog editor in
Flock , ya but that is also possible through other browsers if u have a blogger extension installed. So what is the point i am trying to make, well it is that, surfing the Internet should be a fun experience and so we should have that fun through different interfaces, which are web browsers, so we should use different browsers so as to have the best of all the worlds, well not always.

Internet Explorer 7 beta suck big time, "What's the problem?" Well, when u click on a hyperlink, it should open the respective link at one go, well IE 7 beta does not get half of my clicks and many a times i have to see if my click really did ring a bell with the damn browser. I like its inbuilt rss reader though, but it still fails to do what is the basics of a web browser, that is to open a link when clicked upon, i haven't tried to resolve the issue, well i don't seem to have the time to do so, wonder where all my time goes........

Tuesday, October 04, 2005

The haunting continues . . . . . . .


Well, I could go on and on, on how much my friends help me forget my old crushes by keeping me updated with news about them, but there are more things which make me think about all those girls I used to like once upon a time, or I still like them, don’t know really!

Dreams, dreams allow a person to experience things one wants or wishes to happen to happen to him, or more likely will never happen or are impossible(that word must be in everyone’s dictionary, for the sake of the much needed positive pessimism in everyone’s life).

Yeah those same dreams which manage to scare the hell out of you some times, and so are called bad dreams, but I still don’t know why they are called “nightmares”. I have never had mares or for that matter horses in my night dreams or even my day dreams (yeah I have lots of them too)!

It really dawns on you that you are a loser, when you have a dream or dreams(in my case) where the girl, whom you once wished to be with, a long time ago, appears or keeps on reappearing.

Now this would have been a very blissful scenario had it been that the girl was on talking terms with you or was seen by you every day. You could have gone up to that girl and narrate her your dream, and get her all thinking, is he a weirdo (most of the time!) or, does he really like me? (Chances are good if the girl is a hopeless romantic) In that case you might be getting somewhere, or might even succeed in get her interested in you, or even succeed in wooing her completely(again, in the case of a hopeless romantic).

But the scenario is different, when a considerable amount of time has passed since you failed to woo her (in my case all my fault!), and you are still a loser when it comes to girls, with whom you had a good chance, it’s the worst thing that can happen to you!

Now you can’t blame your friends for reminding you of that girl, because it’s your own delusional brain, which is still high on love dope, which is causing you the entire trauma.

You think, what in the name of Don Juan (de Marco, the guy who got all the chicks he ever wanted!) is happening with me!

Am I so lovesick, that due to the lack of a proper or even an improper (would be fine in my case, anything goes...) love life, has caused my brain to have such wonderful mirages, which remind me of my bad luck, of all the fun I could I have had with that girl, of all the love which would have been due to me, of all the things which would have transformed me from an atheist to an ardent follower of all religions (is that possible? yeah more than my getting the love of my dreams!).

In those dreams (I think this is totally in my case!), I see that girl, alone with me, totally smitten to me, doing all those things …and we are having a rocking time. Got the picture?
Start of my pain!

Being woken up by somebody from one of those dreams, is like God (you wish his presence, but know he’s not there, anyone who gives anyone a reality check) showing me how he has not gifted me with any love life!
Reality bites? Certainly does, and bites real hard…..

You wake with a start,(That is if you remember the dream at all when you wake up, which will probably be because the dream might not have been a morning dream, that is might have come in the middle of your sleeping hours, so the memory of it, is not immediate when you wake up. The memory of the dream may return to you sometime afterwards in the day, or may fail to do so completely.) Thinking, aha, what was that, wow, and then it dawns, hey, what the fuck? What the heaven was that? Damnit, I am such a loser. The girl whom you tried to forget, and it took months of self realization, the girl whose face, you thought was erased from your memory, just reappears out of the sick brain and here I am thinking about her in the morning,

And this is so going to carry on for the rest of the day, you wish, for days, probably.

And does the pain return, you bet it does, without a return ticket! The problem is that you start thinking about her and all those stupid things; you did when you were in lala-land, when you were high on love dope. You think about things like, does she remember me? (Duh huh!), does she still like me? (You wish), does she have dreams about me? (Even LSD will fail to excite a person to think like this…), do I still have a chance…

No, no chance at all……….now you are gone for good, gone from the fields of sanity to the dungeons of preposterous ideas, O yes, I have lost it, totally. If wishes were cupids, losers would find all the love, definitely.

You wake up, from sleep, the dope’s still on, try to think sanely, fail to do so, and keep on trying… Well it has to wear out sooner or later when you remember the definition of a dream, how it is at the disposal of the mind to hallucinate oneself, to have some consolation when you sleep, to give you some fun, to cheer you up, to help you picture things you might fail to do in your entire life, to simulate the impossible, yes that’s what dreams are meant to be. They act as a placebo to the people who are mad about things they can’t acquire, or experience.

They are for the good of all the losers. It’s like virtual reality, only this one’s free, but will be seen only by the select few, the lucky lot, the lucky lot of the unlucky ones.

I haven’t heard a person of dreaming of things he already has or a person dreaming of things he has done a dozen times already.

It’s like the poor man’s liquor, gives you’re the high (you may go too high), but also gives you the worst hangovers. And dreams involving lost love or in my case love never found have the worst hangovers, heaven when asleep and hell when awake.

After some time you get used to these kinds of dreams, if you are lucky or unlucky enough to have them in the first place!

Sometimes, you even look forward to meeting that girl again, like on a virtual date, you wish! The moment you start wishing for a particular dream, thud, your mind drops the idea all of a sudden and all the dreams you are get, are the routine ones, the ones in which you get killed in the battlefield, get chased by a ghost and stuff like that(all of these are in my case.)

It’s like your brains your own enemy, and in a way it helps you to move on and not get carried away by intangible thoughts, to more practical things, like ‘life’s a bitch’ and ‘shit happens’, like all the normal people.

Dreams which feature your “love lost” are in some ways essential, as in they help you in getting some of the things done, which otherwise you could not have ever experienced, because dreams are as good as real life, the only difference is that there is no record of the things which happened in your dreams anywhere, other than your brain, which also forgets it after some hours, and that there are no repercussions of your behavior in your dreams.

This way dreams are better than real life, but the only thing is that they are experienced or viewed by a select audience and this audience may have dreams through out their life. Obviously you have to wait for a good dream to come, and have to sit through all those bad dreams. Hey come now, you can’t complain, after all how much more can a loser ask for!


P.S: The night after I wrote this chapter, I had a dream (Some coincidence!) in which I was playing a game of cricket with Aishwarya Rai. In the dream we did not speak to each other, and from where I was fielding, she looked quiet bossy, I think she was the captain of the team in which I was playing and that’s all I can remember about that weird dream.




Old Crushes keep haunting . . . . . . .

There are times in everyone’s life when you like someone very much, but you just can’t hit it off the way you wanted, after you’ve met her for the first time.

It’s like you have introduced yourself to her once,
But just can't get through the initial fear of talking freely with her, when you meet her again for the second time or in my case the third and the fourth. And from then onwards it’s just the smile and the “Hi”. That's the best you can do.

Then you feel this person is unlike the ordinary girls you meet up with, whom you talk to very freely and hit it off well. You feel this person is special, or even more, like in my case you feel you are in love with her and so you have a hard time talking freely with that person.

It’s like when she is around you heart misses a beat and you glance at her and when she glances back at you, all you manage is a sheepish smile and pretend to look away (in my case at my watch). At least that's what's has happened with me a lot of times.

It’s very frustrating because you want to talk to her and get to know the person well, but you get the creeps the minute you see her. Again it’s in my case at least.

And because u don't talk to her or fail to do so, you keep thinking about her and that's what drives you crazy and the enigma of the person increases.

It’s like what’s with me and this girl. Why can’t I talk to her? Does she like me or not? Well that question probably never gets answered.

After some time, after you are too chicken to talk to her, after “I am going to talk to her this time” promises to yourself, the “HI’s” you used to get from her, dry up and the smiles are the next casualty.

As time passes, when you pass her it’s like you are back to square one and it seems that we don't even know each other. End of story.... probably.

And if this entire episode has been witnessed by your friends, then.... start of a new story.

You are a dead man, might not be, but you certainly are a loser. Your friends are convinced that she and you are made for each other and the word spreads. And every time she approaches, there are whispers, or even shouts (in my case) “there comes your girl “. And now you ought to know by now that this girl has been tagged.

“Tagging” is the act of linking a person with another, even if the boy has talked with the girl once or twice,
And that's it. The girl’s name will be linked with you every time any of you friend sees her, even if she’s married, and has two kids. She is still going to be your girl. And you can’t do a damn about it.

Its been months since you have blown away your chances with this girl and a many more, with whom you once dreamed of being with, but ever time she passes, some one or the other is gonna pass a comment or call your name loudly to get the girl's attention towards you, or worst (my case), call the girl's name with you name. It’s like a song they make up about you and her, yeah those bastards; who are your friends. And then you think that you are better off with your foes.

The girl by the time must have made a strange image of you in her mind, chicken, asshole, sissy etc.
She must be thinking, what went wrong? He was supposed to be a nice guy and now he doesn't even talk to me and his friends are playing cupid!

All you are left with is the sweet memories of her and
Ofcourse, your friends. You are at a stage where you are trying to forget this girl and get on with your life but every time she’s approaching, you get reports like, “she's coming”,” she was looking at you” , ”  did you see her smile  “, yes indeed she was smiling, no, laughing at me and my stupid friends. “Well thanks guys!” you say, when she starts to avoid even passing next to you or your stupid posse. But friends will still refer to her as “your girl” and will never let you forget her completely.

Even when you have graduated or years have passed, news about her trickles down to you, “She topped her class” , “ She’s going abroad” ,”She’s got a car “, “ She’s earning loads of money” thanks guys ,for your loyalty and your Intel . It’s like 3 years and they still manage to get some news about her to me. Great guys! Who’s your source, definitely not the CIA, after 9/11!

After all that time I was trying to forget her and so many girls after her, I still manage to know how she’s faring.
That gets me thinking about her and I start digging in, to get more info, and just to act casual,  say things like “ good for her” trying not to attract suspicion, that I do miss her.

Guys, will you give me a break from your reporting, not just about her but about all the girls who I am trying to forget.

Thanks guys! What did u say?  She’s coming back, When?