You have got to be freaking kidding me…
A retired veteran and candidate for Oklahoma State School Superintendent says he wants to make schools safer by creating bulletproof textbooks.
Bill Crozier says the books could give students and teachers a fighting chance if there’s a shooting at their school.
Thanks to Schneier on Security for the link.
Original Article: WBIR.COM – Candidate says bulletproof books could save lives in school shootings
– Suramya
The event manager in Windows XP allows you to find out when a system was rebooted or shut down. To run the Event Viewer follow these steps:
1. Click on Start -> Control Panel
2. Double click on the Administrative Tools
3. Click on System in the left pane. Resize the window so you can see the Event column in the right-hand pane.
Once you have the window open look for an entry of 6009 in the Event column. This shows when the PC was shut down or restarted. A start-up will be logged by a number of events, mostly with the code 7035, 7036 and 26, corresponding to various services and checks.
Source: Check a computer’s event history
– Suramya
Just when I thought that it couldn’t get any worse… I found this:
This is a pure rip off of the famous Thriller video by Michael Jackson in some south Indian movie. Thankfully the music sounds different but the dance looks the same, and it has the same ugly red jacket.
I don’t mind when some one copies a little bit of a song, or creates a parody of something, but this is just plain ridicules. A couple of years ago it wasn’t so evident when Hindi movies copied something from an english movie, but now with the increasing globalization its increasingly easier for people to identify what movie a particular concept was stolen from…
The sad part is that its not just Indian movie makers who do this, they are just the most ballant in creating the ripoffs and its not like we have a shortage of filmmakers with original idea’s in India, its just that some people find it easier to copy than to create original ideas…
– Suramya
Yesterday (1st Nov) was Anu’s birthday so Anu, Amit, Myself, Vinit, Sandeep, Vivek and Pranav celebrated it with a quite dinner at Olive Garden. The food was as usual pretty good but the service was really slow. It took them over 40 mins after we placed the order to get the food. Thankfully they brought the appetizers a lot sooner so we didn’t starve.
Here’s a photo I took of the birthday girl during the dinner (Took it using my camera phone so its not the best quality…).
And no I wasn’t brave enough to ask her how old she was… All in all it was a good fun night. A big contrast from yesterday but still fun.
– Suramya
Oct 31 was Halloween (Also known as Samahain) and it was also Vivek’s birthday. So we (About 14 of us) decided to get together to celebrate both. We all got together at our place and took the Path train to New York to watch the annual New York Halloween parade. It was a lot of fun, everyone was dressed up in a costume and looked cool: Vinit was a Mafia boss, Reema was a cat, Aarti dressed up as the Pink Panther, Jyoti was dressed as the Devil and it was fun. Some of the costumes we saw were pretty amazing, people had spent a lot of time, energy and money on them and it showed. The best part was that everyone was having a good time.
After watching the parade for about 1 1/2 hours we decided to get something to eat as we all were starving and needed food. So we called and made a reservation at Uno Chicago Grill. We were about 2 blocks from the place so we were walking to it when we found out that the streets had been closed off for the parade and we had to walk all the way over to 11th street (from 4th street, to get to 6th street) and then walk back. Vivek managed to sneak across the barrier and waited for us to get there which took a while as we were busy admiring the costumes we could see.
The food was good but the company was better and we spent a lot of time just talking and enjoying the food. Yes I took a lot of photos and will post them soon.
Now its time for me to catch some sleep. Will post more later.
Update (3rd Nov 2006): Uploaded the Halloween photos to the Photo gallery.
– Suramya
The internet connection at our place had been down since Saturday morning. So I called up Comcast and made a complaint on Sat, they said that they would have someone come over on Tuesday to check the connection as everything seemed ok on their end and the problem was on my side. So I was like fine, I guess I can survive without the net for a couple of days.
Today the guy was supposed to come between 3 and 6 but I came home I noticed that the cable modem was still blinking and it didn’t look like anyone had come (We had told the super of the building to let the repair guy in) so I called up comcast to find out what happened. The lady I spoke to told me that the repair person had called it a night and since he had been running late he didn’t come to our place… How stupid is that? If I had stayed home from work by taking time off I would have wasted half of my day. The least they could have done was call me so I wouldn’t waste time waiting for him…
NEways, then she goes on to tell me that they can only have someone come over on Thursday. Thats when I blew my top and told her that it was their fault that the guy didn’t show up and I wanted someone here tomorrow to fix my connection. She said that she didn’t have the authority to change the schedule but that she would put in a request for me and I should call them up again tomorrow and talk to dispatch and have them send some one over. She was pretty nice and was feeling pretty sorry about this, so I was like fine… I will talk to them tomorrow.
While I was talking to her I was also playing around with the modem, I had remembered that the modem had a status page that I could get at so I starting looking at the values and it looked like we weren’t getting any signal from the comcast server. While playing with the status page, for some reason I had this feeling that someone might have disconnected our cable in the basement or something, because the net connection was working fine on Sat morning and it stopped working in the afternoon with no changes made.
So I went down to the basement and checked out the cable connections. I saw a couple of wires were disconnected but only one didn’t have any label on it (The others had apartment numbers on them) and I didn’t see a cable with our apartment number on it. I could see an open socket where I could plug the cable in, so just as a test I plugged it in and came back up and rebooted the modem, sure enough when it came back up I had connectivity. 🙂
If I find out who the idiot is that unplugged us, I would have a nice long chat with him/her…
Thankfully I was able to get connectivity back but it still doesn’t excuse Comcast’s handling of the situation. If I hadn’t figured it out myself I would have had to spend another 2 days without net access, which sucked. Now I have to call them and tell them that the issue is fixed. Don’t think I will tell them how I fixed it…
Well this is all for now. Will post more later.
– Suramya
Updated the About Me section so now it shows photos of most of the friends I have listed there. I didn’t have photos of some of the people over there 🙁 but will add them as when when I find them. Also updated the part telling what they are doing right now.
Next on the to do list, is to update the actual About Me section and update some of the tutorials.
– Suramya
This is just a rant on how the war on Terror is affecting our regular lives.
Those of you who know me know that I love taking photos. I used to take photographs at the drop of a hat of anything and everything I found interesting. But now I am scared to do so. You never know when some idiot is going to decide that you are a terrorist because you are dark skinned male in his 20’s and doing something thats too complicated for his/her tiny brain to comprehend…
A couple of days ago I was driving back to New Jersey from New York via one of the tunnels and I saw the machine they use to clean the tunnel walls and I wanted to take a picture of it as its something unique and interesting. Surabhi and Vinit both told me not to because photography is prohibited in the tunnel and that it might get me in trouble so I didn’t take the photo, but I wanted to… and will always regret that I couldn’t. Whats there in the tunnel that I would capture with my camera phone that I couldn’t find on the internet? There are photos available online of the entire system and its not like the stupid thing changes every year…
When I took a photograph of an interesting advertisement I saw on the subway station a few days ago I actually stopped and thought about whether it was safe to take a photo of a stupid poster without getting in trouble. How bad is that? A couple of years ago I wouldn’t have even thought about it and would have clicked multiple pics from different angles. Now I had to look around make sure no one was paying attention and then take the picture. Basically I had to hide what I was doing… which I shouldn’t have to, I wasn’t doing anything wrong.
Then on my way back I was reading the PATH Rules and regulations (What can I say… I was bored) and they have some serious restrictions on taking photos in the Path station also. According to the rules I can’t take a photo in the path train without being accompanied by a PATH employee and after having filled out a bunch of paperwork. How sad is that? I agree with the fact that they won’t let you take pics of the emergency gear and the control systems but whats wrong with me taking a photo of me and my friends sitting in the PATH on my way to having a good time in the city? Though to be honest I haven’t been stopped by anyone yet.
Whats especially annoying is that we are missing out on so much… If this goes on and more and more photographers stop taking photos then the future generations won’t be able to look at how the local subway/shop looked a generation ago. They won’t have any pictures/references of the daily life of everyday people all they will have for reference are the glam shots and the posed pictures which are approved. This would suck…
The spontaneous photographers give you an unrehearsed snapshot of a particular moment. I hate taking posed pictures as I rarely like the way they come out. The best pictures I have taken are the spur of the moment random shot of something that looks interesting, of someone doing something silly or just a person going on with their life naturally. It gives you an deep insight into human nature. Think about it, if a person knows that they are about to be photographed they will act differently no matter how hard they try to be casual and act normal. It shows in the picture. A spontaneous photograph is a photo of a person/object that is taken when the subject is going on with its daily life. Its natural and it shows. Its an art form and unfortunately its dying.
The worst part is that I am staying in New York and the photo opportunities over here are endless and I can’t take it… 🙁 Well its the same thing in any major city but… you know what I mean. New York is unique. Though Delhi also has some amazing photo opportunities and the next time I am there I will have my new camera so will photograph everything. Just wait and see…
– Suramya
Found this amusing: Sorry Blockbuster, But I love P2P
– Suramya
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