Wallet

“Of all the things that I’ve lost, I miss my wallet the most” – Pradeep

Well, technically I did not lose it, I just forgot it at home. The bottom-line being that I was left without any cash. So I had to borrow money for breakfast ( Rs.17) , then again for lunch (Rs.100, of which I ate for Rs.60. And , yes, our caterer rips us off !! ).

All this is fine, except for the fact that I had a call till late that night (My theory is that the later the hour of the call, lower the likelihood of something useful happening !!) , which left me very hungry .

Now normally this is not a problem as I can stop by at any of the restaurants nearby and hog. Unfortunately, just as I was about to pull into a restaurant , I was reminded of the bare-bones financial situation sans the wallet. 40 Rs would not even buy me a glass of lime-soda there :-(

Sadly the master chef reversed out of the parking and headed home hungrily, the MasterCard ad inspired verses, swirled in his head

“One liter of juice - 85 Rs
One tandoori chicken – 150Rs
Meal for one at Chilli and Pepper – 600Rs
Carrying your wallet when you are hungry – Priceless”

On stories and names

Inspired by the fake IPL blogger, let me also come out with names of characters that may appear in my blog in the near future.

Disclaimer : Any resemblance to any one living or dead is purely co-incidental. These are purely fictitious characters

Disaster, Daya, Lion, Senior, Windy, HBP(High Blood Pressure) , Senior, No-logic, Cucumber, Fat-drip and Chatter-box

Let us say No-Logic, Cucumber and Chatter box are of the fairer sex and Fat-drip is in the U.S :-).

So last weekend, Disaster, Daya, Lion and myself decided to have a bachelor cookout.

Bachelor ???, you might ask 

Well Daya and myself are not exactly bachelors, but for all practical purposes we can be assumed to be that for the next couple of weeks. Chatter-box was invited, but was busy with something or the other and No-Logic went on the usual weekend escapade to home. Windy was not yet a bachelor and so was not invited.

Intense discussions on menu followed for several days. Finally clear demarcation of roles and responsibilities was done. I would make Appam and Chicken Tikka, Daya would make fish fry, Lion would make egg curry and Disaster would make Dal. Saturday evening would be the time, and venue would be my house.

Saturday started off for me with purchase of chicken ( bone-less of course, bones are for dogs !! ) and appam mix. Kept the chicken marinated in a mix of lemon juice, curd and various top secret masalas for close to 6-7 hours :). Daya & disaster arrived with marinated fish and Lion too made his presence felt soon there after.

We were all set to start. The evening started with a magnificient display of chicken tikka by yours truly ( Hey, my blog, I will write whatever I want) .

Lion started with Egg curry and immediately started demanding ingredients which I did not have. Fresh green chillies, tomatoes etc .. A deep dive into fridge revealed some mildly rotten tomatoes and wilted green chillies. Lion was shaking his head as if he were the main chef of The Taj. After some severe sledging, he proceeded to reluctantly use the available ingredients and start cooking. Intense pressure was heaped up on him , with sarcastic comments flying thick and fast. Showing true Lion like qualities, he delivered under pressure with a very nice egg curry.

Daya proceeded to fry the fish in Goan style, and ended up eating half of the first fish to make sure the frying and masalas were in order ;). He also tried to use some un-named powder in my kitchen thinking it was rice powder, luckily we caught him in nick of time. BTW,  I still don’t know what that white powder is ……….

Disaster meanwhile just wanted to boil dal with salt ( and sugar !!! ) and add nothing else. After some not-so-gentle coaxing, he came around to making a version of dal that us normal human beings could consume. I must add here that Disaster has zero threshold for spices, show him a green chilly and he will start sweating like a pig !

There was nothing to say about the appam, except that the master chef’s stamp of class was clear in the soft fluffy creations ;)

Overall cookout v1 was declared as a grand success by all parties involved. Cookout v2 was also planned tentatively for the next Saturday, details of that to follow soon !!

Power woes

2-1-2-1-2-1-2-1 …..

No, this is not a new mathematical series that I invented, nor is this my bank account number

2 hours of power –1 hour of no power. The timings so precise, that you can almost set your clock based on it. The electricity company is again trying to push people to insanity.

This pattern continues on into the night also. 2 am in the night I wake up with mosquitoes almost airlifting me off the bed !! Tried Odomos repellant cream, it was simply not rated for this many mosquitoes . Finally I had to burn a mosquito coil just to get some shut-eye.

Of course the fumes from my coil triggered my asthma now :(, but still after a while I was able to fall asleep. Have slept less than 4-5 hours per day for the past several days due to this power situation and other things.

On a side note, there is quite a bit of talk in the US now about Smart Grids and Demand Response programs. Folks, learn about these from KPTCL, who surely have one the best load shedding programs in the world !!

There is no way you will end up complaining about your electricity bill, because the power is almost never there when you need it :-) And due to the scant availability of power, you are pushed to use it smartly ;).

KPCTL should be a pioneer in Smart Grids !!

Sport as mood elevator

Nothing lifts your mood like when one of your favorite teams pulls of an amazing victory.

I was watching Manchester United Vs Aston Villa on ESPN . For the most part of 80 mins, it looked like ManU will slip to their 3rd consecutive defeat.

They were trailing 2-1, their makeshift defensive line getting torn up time and again by a pacy and crafty Villa forward line, injuries and suspensions had caused at least 5 first team players to miss out. With Liverpool going above them in the table yesterday, the ManU title challenge seemed to be headed towards disaster.

That is till two pieces of brilliance turns the match on their head. Cristiano Ronaldo had been a passenger for most of the match after his early strike. He latches onto the ball outside the penalty area and lashes in a low drive to the corner of the net. 2-2

Then in injury time, 17 year old Federico Macheda makes a stunning turn and curls in an unstoppable short. GOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL and 3-2

This is surely how Premierships are won.

Liverpool is playing some stunning football, sets up a fascinating final few matches. This season has been one of the best that I have watched

Will to survive

Have you ever felt like losing your will to survive ? [ Now don’t panic, this is not about losing will to live. That one is a different kettle of fish altogether, I have no time for that nonsense !!]

Was reading Paulo Coelho’s Manual of the Warrior of light again, when some lines jumped out at me. These are verses picked out at random from different chapters.

When the warrior of light watches a sunset and feels no joy, then something is wrong …… A warrior of light makes use of solitude , but is not used by it

The warrior of light does not always have faith. There are moments when he believes in absolutely nothing. And he asks his heart ‘Is all this effort really worth it?’ But his heart remains silent . And the warrior has to decide for himself.

The warrior of light has learned that God uses solitude to teach us how to live with other people.

W32 Vitro Virus strikes

Don’t know how this virus got in.

I use Avast Antivirus Free edition and Zone Alarm Firewall.

Avast caught this virus, but was unable to clean it, only option is to delete the file. The pain was that the virus infects windows system files, so if you try to delete the files, you end up with an un-usable OS pretty soon.

Ended up re-formatting the hard disk and re-installing windows !! Pretty bad, I need to be more careful in future.

Some of the things you could try include

• Re-building the windows installation as described here. Please read the discussion at the link carefully, may not work for you depending on the installation CD you have !! Also there are folks complaining that this did not really solve the problem. Worth a shot if you catch the virus really early, I guess
• Trying to download and install some other anti-virus. I tried this and the moment I tried to launch the installer, the virus corrupted it :(
• Sophos anti-virus seems to indicate they can clean this virus, I am not sure how true this is
• Copy your personal data ( don’t copy any exes !!) to an external USB hard disk ( quite cheap these days) , reformat and re-install windows. As mentioned above, this was the only thing that worked for me
• If you are not in a tearing hurry, you could try waiting for a couple of weeks before someone comes up with a fix for this. Unlikely you can wait that long though :)
  

Read more at the following links

http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=42709.0

http://www.tech-linkblog.com/2009/02/polymorphic-win32vitro-most-virulnt-virus.html/

http://dcs-tech-corner.blogspot.com/2009/02/new-virus-warning-w32vitro.html