.:Confessions of An Information Junkie:.

I actually have run out of stuff to read right now so I thought I'd spend sometime on this so as to englighten the rest of you 'unaware' b*tt holes... ;) ..
I came across this in a forum a couple of months back and well thought it could be used as a good basis to ease the transition to the "larger picture" I shall be shortly discussing.


The picture above features a very ugly model but some stunning sunglasses. So, what makes these sunglasses so special that they were "post-worthy"? Well its Oakley's new line of sunglasses which have an inbuilt MP3 player. Digital music eyewear???!!! Alright, so these sunglasses could serve as a good example for someone majoring in VLSI but is it necessary?? I guess its time for the millions of iPod owners(who own "conventional" sunglasses) to bow down their heads in shame. Seriously???? Is this the sign of things to come?.
It's undeniably a market where the power struggle has clearly tilted in favour of the consumer. This financial coup can lead to disastrous consequences. Alright so the Nokias and the Ericssons are conjuring up something new constantly in their laboratories. Now, does anyone of us ever stop and think how 'huge' the difference between a K500 and a K505 is??. Your loving trustworthy "brand" decides to fightback. Release a new product, hype it up and then produce a minimum of 10 models each having a slightly different variation from the other. These sunglasses are a testament to the indiscretion of the modern day consumer.
The most disgruntled sect of consumers are the tech-savvy ones. This can't be attributed to 'rapid' growth alone. Consumers are subjected to vehement and massive advertising campaigns. Slowly making us feel slightly obliged to buy the product. These sunglasses are a testament to the increasing indiscretion on the part of the consumer.
These issues would definitely have been addressed before and I'm no Amartya Sen who made some statements that is going to re-define the way the economy works. But I thought I should chip in my two cents.In my defense, firstly I would like to state that I am not some conservative hippy on some power trip who listens to Kurt Cobain's moans for morning "bhajans". My friends are going to verbally molest me if they stumble upon this post as they would find it very hard to believe that their materialistic friend really does give two sh**ts about the direction in which the global economy is heading. Well, I don't care if all the economies in the world entered recession but I do believe that the consumer should not be duped out of their hard earned money by misconstrued marketing campaigns.

"Confessions of an Information Junkie"... Why?

I have come to realise that many netizens see blogs as alternative journalism. Many can look at it this way, but blogs cannot always be legit. None the less, undeniably this will stay for quite some time to come. I really don't know what satisfaction people gain from going on ranting about thier personal lives and letting other people read their views on certain albums, movies, etc. This blog itself is just like the other million blogs that get a max of 1-3 page loads a day. But, we still keep writing. I feel that deep down inside of us, we all want to be heard. I know that's a very retarded comment to make but it seriously makes sense. Being a self proclaimed "Information Junkie", it's tough to contain your thoughts especially when not a single imbicile from your immediate environment refuses to listen to you. Anyways here are some more links regarding blogging and some more tips to help the noob blogger.

How To Write Killer Blogs And More Compelling Comments

Blogging... Blah, Blah, Blah

Russell Peters : Good Stand-Up Comedy

Another week and another downloading spree ends. I came across this interesting 45 mintue clip among one of the videos. It was this stand up comedian based in Canada of Indian origin whose name is Russell Peters. This guy's simply amazing. He rips apart at different communities with no shred of compassion. The guy's a hoot when he starts with his "motherland". Here's a link to the 45 minute clip I was talking about. Its nice to see there are some Indians who actually do have a decent sense of humour.


Russell Peters 45 minute clip

Oh yeah, I noticed that I mentioned the word "hippy" earlier in my post which lead me to do some research on hippy culture and here's a good link to explain what the hell these crazy people do and why they do it.

The Way Of The Hippy



State of Mind :Exhausted from the lack of sleep due to the enormously long process involved in moving all my music and music videos to my friend's laptop and then formatting and re-installing all essential software. I have to manage a 40 gb hard disk with a music playlist that consumes 16 GB alone.

Currently Downloading: 10th season episodes of The Simpsons
6th spisode of the first season Sex and The City.

Album Review : Jay-Z and Linkin Park - Collision Course



This album will go down in history as one of the biggest musical experiments.MTV deserves credit as they managed to get both of them together for a "Mash Up" concert, but decided to record an album before they actually went live. Both artists featured on the album need no introduction. Linkin Park shot to fame in December 2000 with the release of their debut LP "Hybrid Theory" which went on to win at the Grammies in 2001 and went platinum multiple number of times in the US alone. Linkin Park's music has a massive fan following among the East Asian kids.
A young Sean Carter took the reigns of the East coast rap scene with his solo debut album "Reasonable Doubt" which was released by Roc-A-Fella records. Apart from having a stunning girlfriend(Beyonce Knowles), this man can rap with such intensity and his versatile flow has been unmatched. Before he made it big, he used to lay down guest vocals on some of Notrious B.I.G's (R.I.P) songs.

Most of the production and mixing on the album was done by Mike Shinoda(emcee of Linkin Park). In terms of fresh vocals, the album has very few with Jay-Z just dropping 4-5 bars of new rap. Linkin Park are definitely not newcomers to the remixing genre. With their 2002 release "Reanimation" in which Mike Shinoda and Joe Hahn(the DJ) managed to gather some underground DJs to mix all of the songs from "Hybrid Theory" and also threw in a couple of new songs which were previously unreleased but had been available on the Internet as demo bootlegs. The album was criticized by many in the music industry as a blatant attempt by the band to keep their popularity rating high. "Reanimation", definitely was more of a Mike Shinoda side project.

The album has successfully blended two genres which lie on opposite ends of the same spectrum. I think most of the credit should go to Mike Shinoda The man is a genius and has successfully crafted a bunch of songs which sound very crisp. The only thing I feared was whether the album would be more of a 'clash' of two styles rather than a fusion. Jay-Z simply sounds astounding.

This blend of nu-metal and hardcore east coast rap might not find many takers. The current spate of the music industry leaves much to be desired. Nu-metal's fan base has been steadily decreasing with numerous bands appearing out of nowhere and they usually offer nothing new in terms of original music and most of their music is derived from hits spawned by nu-metal pioneers like KoRn, RATM and even Linkin Park. Nu-metal was put on the map with the release of KoRn's self titled album in 1994. Ever since, this genre had a fan base that never ceased to expand till now.

The hip-hop scene is really tragic. The production on most of the new hip hop albums are good but the lyrics featured on these songs leave much to be desired. Constant howls off "Biatches", "Booty", etc can be tolerated only upto a point. Hip-hop now enjoys a larger fan base due to emerging artists like 50 cent, and the Black Eyed Peas.

I really don't know if dishing out 500 bucks for this album is truly worth it or not, cause I managed to download it. But, I think the six studio songs and the DVD would make it your while. Pay no heed to the old school metal and hip-hop fans cause they always seem to be in retro mode. This sect of music fans generally downplay anything that is new and definitely this album would be put under the microscope and torn apart, bit by bit.

Okay, I am tired by the endless number of times that I have been questioned regarding the technology and the software behind ripping DVDs and their further compression to a format called DivX which is much lesser than the original size of the 4.7 GB DVD and still manages to maintain the exact same visual quality, but has to forego on sound by using MP3 compression. The codec DivX is some software which basically revolves around encoding and decoding video based around the MPEG-4 compression format. For more information on what DivX is and its birth. Check out the following link:-

What is DivX?
Divx-Digest Help Page

Now, everyone in my college seems to be astounded at the visual quality of video files encoded in DivX. The primary reason for all the limelight DivX is enjoying is the fact that a movie of say 2 hours length will give you the exact same visual quality as the original DVD it was ripped from. Now, to put all questions to rest once and for all so that all you dodos don't ever ask me again. This is how you go about ripping a DVD.

First, you have to copy the VOB files and the accompanying IFO files from the VIDEO_TS folder of your DVD. The VOB files are the main video files which are usually of 1.4 GB size and the IFO files much smaller in size contain information like the length of the movie and the breaks in the video for transition of chapters. Most DVDs come with massive protection nowadays, as the movie studios are losing out a lot on these fake DVDs manufactured in China or wherever they come from. But the good ol' programming community devised a software to break through most protections and came up with DVD Decrypter. DVD Decrypter is very simple to use and the movie will be copied to your hard disk within 15-30 minutes depending on the RAM and the processor speed of the machine.

After this is done, we have to now convert it to DivX. Now here's the difficult part. There are two programs that can accomplish this. There is GordianKnot and on the other hand there is Auto GordianKnot. Both programs are basically an integration of different components designed for different processes during the conversion process.
GordianKnot is for more experienced users who have a better idea of DVD terms like resolution and Aspect ratio. The values you enter and the choices you make will make a huge difference as to what your end result would be like.
For users who really do not want to go through the hassle of all that was mentioned above, there is Auto GordianKnot in the offering with a very simple interface. The conversion process can begin with three simple steps. First select the directory to where the DVD was ripped to on the hard disk. Choose the location and the filename for your final DivX file. Choose the size of the file(700 MB, 1400MB,... ). Add the job to the queue and start it. The whole process should take 4-6 hours again depending on whether you have a high end or low end machine. I suggest that you leave this part of the conversion process for whenever you sleep. High-end machine users can use their computer while the program is running in the background. Oh, I forgot one pre-requisite for Auto GordianKnot is that you need to have DVD Decrypter installed, as it only recognises the format in which it rips. All links for tutorials and program downloads will be given at the end of this article.

Okay then, so Peoplessss.... next time do not come and 'chaat' me asking me how DVDs are ripped and if I have the software and all that shit. I will always have the software but If you ever do need it, you have to come to my room and copy it to whatever medium you have.

Alright, now back to more 'pressing' matters. After my MSN messenger conversation with my Gulti friend in Dubai, I have decided to end the Babe of the Week post. He seemed to find it too gay or lame, I really don't quite remember. So thats it for that. I don't know, coming to think about it, it is a pain in the a$$ to put some picture up and then post something about the featured 'babe'... lol.
Check out Mental Equlibrium. There's a new post which clearly explains the split in Islam into two sects called the Sunis and the Shi'as.
At this moment, I truly am confused as to how to increase traffic to my blog. Its kinda getting pointless with me writing garbage and no one to comment on it. Some comments would be appreciated. My statcounter stats reveal that 80% of my visitors stay for 0 seconds. That's right ZERO. That really isn't very good.
Well habibis, I do not have anything more to write on. The links are for everything are given below so that you lazy f**ks don't need to go around molesting Google and in the process fry your brain looking for these programs. Links to tutorials are also listed.

DVD Decrypter Download

Gordian Knot Download (8.14 MB)

Auto Gordian Knot Download

AutoGK Conversion Guide

Gordian Knot Conversion Guide

Check this out. There is now a fully certified DivX player available for only $249. Here are some more articles on the DivX revolution and the future that lies for it. I recommend these articles to only those who are really bothered about DivX and can withstand 'techie' terms every 4 words.

DivX is ready for its sequel, is Hollywood?

DivX reloaded

And yeah, as most of you WOULDN't know there is always a major debate regarding which is actually the best media player out there. Sireesh, the Gulti friend I mentioned earlier told me about this player called VLC Media Player and he was telling me that it plays any file you throw at it. If a ZIP file contains a video, it will play. So everything he claimed was true. But the shocker was, it even played AVI files encoded in DivX without the DivX codec actually being installed on the system. How's that??.. Pretty darn good. But when it comes to music, I would still stick with Winamp. Nullsoft keeps releasing updates for the program and the DSP plugins availabe are amazing. But videos I suggest VLC.

VLC Media Player Download (for Windows users)

The best part about this is that now all those losers who use Linux finally have a player to play DivX files. I am not really enlightened about Codec support on Linux. But this is a hundred times better than that Kaffeine shit. But sadly VLC still doesn't have support for Real player files and Indeo Codecs. Bummer.

Oh yeah, all you men out there. Read the following article.

OUCH!!

Also came across this interesting post at another blog.

My 10 thoughts on successful blogging.

Okay, that's pretty much about it. A review on NIT Calicut's Ragam will be up soon. I had said that I would do one on Saarang and pretty much never got around doing it.

State Of Mind: Happy with the 130 k/s download speed I am getting after downloading five episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm consecutively. Also finally found a site featuring Jay Sean's album.

It's Valentine's Day...!! Yipeee... I was so excited that I thought I'd come and download Shark Tale at 3 am :-/ . Yeah its been pretty much this way ever since I can remember. No phone calls, no romantic dinner, Nada, Zilch, Zero.... No I am not going to greet all of you a happy Valentine's because it doesn't make any sense. You only greet your 'loved' one on Valentine's .. I don't think your classmates, hostel mates, etc need to be going around wishing you 'Happy Valentine's Day'. Day after tomorrow's paper will surely carry an article about how the Shiv Sena is doing its part in upholding the Indian 'culture' by trashing some Hallmark in Bombay.

Like I said in my earlier post, I've become a big big fan of Firefox. I just found out that you can alter the way Firefox loads web pages. I found this great way to improve your browsing speed using Firefox. The 'funda' is basically that it loads more than one page file at a time. Its the same concept that most Download managers use. Oh dial-up users wouldn't find this very helpful. Broadband users who really want their web pages to load fast, I really suggest you check the following link out.

Make Firefox Faster At Forever Geek

And all those people who still are using Internet Explorer, please heed my advice. Firefox is very customizable. If you do happen to download it, I suggest you first read this beginner's tutorial.

A Beginner's Guide To Firefox

I thought I'd post the lyrics of Corey Taylor's "Bother" so that whoever it is that happens to pass by this blog can check it out. Both, the Spiderman movie soundtracks have spawned amazing rock ballads. The first one being Chad Kroeger(of Nickelback) hooking up with Josey Scott(of Saliva) on "Hero".

Corey Taylor - "Bother" (From the Spiderman 2 soundtrack)

IWish I was too dead to cry
A self affliction face
Stones to throw at my creator
Masochist to which I cater

You don't need to bother
I don't need to be
I'll keep slipping farther
But once I hold on
I won't let go 'till it bleeds

Wish I was too dead to care
If indeed I cared at all
Never had a voice to protest
So you fed me shit to digest
I wish I had a reason
My thoughts are open season
For this I gave up trying
One good time deserves my dying

You don't need to bother
I don't need to be

I'll keep slipping farther
But once I hold on
I won't let go 'till it bleeds

Wish I'd died instead of lived
A zombie hides my face
Shelf forgotten with it's memories
Diaries left with cryptic entries

And you don't need to bother
I don't need to be
I'll keep slipping farther
But once I hold on
I won't let go 'till it bleeds

You don't need to bother
I don't need to be, yeah
I'll keep slipping farther
But once I hold on, once I hold on
I'll never live down my disease

Corey did this song with Stone Sour which is the band he formed prior to joining Slipknot. The band started playing in 1992 and retired in 1997. So, Corey and Slipknot guitarist Jim Root went picked up the broken pieces and Stone Sour returned with their first single "Get Inside" from their self titled debut LP. "Bother" happened to be the second single and found its way to the Spiderman soundtrack.

And yeah check out this interesting article on blogging at CNET news. Link provided below:

Google blogger has left the building

State Of Mind : Totally mindf**ed due to the lack of sleep.

I am sitting in the net lab now, pushing the little black buttons on the IBM keyboard under the rows of white tubelights which along with the 'exquisite' shade of green for the walls which really doesn't go a great way in improving this room;aesthetically atleast. Sitting and staring at the TFT screen, at this box where I am typing my post, the blinking cursor constantly shifting to the right as I relentlessly batter the keyboard, the steady increase in the download speed as I download the sixth episode of 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' for the day. 45 k/s ... ahh now 55k/s.... Going good .. going good ...

The macha dude next to me is as 'lost' as I am.I like that look though, the look on people's faces when they are completely 'immersed' in whatever activity they are engaged in while surfing the web. And now, I quite effortlessly manage to glance at his screen, and voila!!! What do we have here? ... Our man's interests do seem to be quite different though. Hold on a second...La Habibi, La La (that was meant to be arabic).... I now have Simran's navel staring back at me. Kollywood's leading ladies definitely is not my cup of tea. Oh great he's staring at Meena's behind now. This guy needs help.

Ahh.. Yes!! This deafening silence is broken. An over-enthusiastic North Indian brother is 'groovin' to the 'tunes' of A.R.Rahman's new composition Kisna. This guy's ear drums seem to be made of some super titanium alloy because I can hear him from up 2 rows ahead. The bloody song's blaring out through his cheap Chinese earphones with max treble. No!! No!! To compound matters further, he decides to hum along now. I think I'll turn back and give the 'disgruntled' look. Great, his eyes are closed and he's begun swaying!! So, I'm now back to typing this and reading CNNs extremely biased article on how North Korea basically wagged the middle finger at the United States by stating that they possess nuclear weapons. Mr. Bush's second term doesn't seem to be going off to a good start. I am now vehemently fighting against the inner urge building up inside me to start rattling on the f**k ups by the Bush administration but decided to channel these thoughts with a little fine tuning later for another post.

One dude's walking up and down the lab, desperately lookin for a comp. He's going up to the Kisna dude. He initiates banter by blaring out the words "Abhey..Kitna time lagega?". Mr. Enormous larynx seems to be enchanted with what's on Kisna Dude's screen. Oh great, Mr.Enormous larynx who really doesn't seem to give a sh*t about the people around him while he voices his opinion on how wonderful Preity Jjinta is looking in that wallpaper.

"Woh...Veer Zaara pikcher main ulti dikh raha hai baap!!” Resist, I say to myself! I start hitting the keyboard a little harder. Tyler Durden's words from Fight Club are echoing in my head right now "We are the all singing, all dancing crap of the world!!”

So I just finished reading all this crap I typed right now and I have no idea what this whole post is about but decided to title it 'Curb My Enthusiasm'. I just felt it was quite apt considering the fact I am sitting here after watching three episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm, back-to-back!!
I can assure you, this post was not written with the intent of enlightening all you dimwits who happen to be reading this. The term blog is derived from 'Web log'. So I just thought, what the hell.. this is my online 'journal' right? I can writer whatever I want in my space. This is MY domain!!

Whoever it is that has managed to read this far, I'll impart some wisdom to you now. First, go download Mozilla's Firefox!! If you didn't know what that is, its another free browser. Its more like an open source project and there are many plugins, themes, etc available for download.For more information on Firefox, click on the 'Get Firefox' button on the sidebar. The browser at first glance doesn't look shockingly different, but it definitely seems to be more stable.Only downside to using Firefox is that some time has to be invested in downloading all those essential plugins like Shockwave initially.

Oh yeah I just tried out the new search engine from Amazon, A9. They have something on why they're search engine's amazing and stuff. Well, I actually have no idea on how to compare search engines but I can confidently say that the results generated from the image search on A9 are pretty accurate and also their system manages to suppress the display of duplicate images. That's pretty good.

Sticking with the search engine topic, I did not know that Yahoo! and Google had a search engine for videos. That's right!! But I did find the Yahoo! video search to be better than Google. The search results generated by Google were pretty weird.

Yahoo! Video search
Google Video search

Totally in love with song by Corey Taylor titled "Bother". Its featured on the Spiderman 2 soundtrack. Corey Taylor is the lead singer of the mammoth 9 member nu-metal band Slipknot. The song's very different from the work he does with Slipknot. His voice is much more mellow and deeper. The success of this song I think led Slipknot to experiment a little with their sound on the 2004 hit album 'Vol 3: The Subliminal Verses'. The other song I am totally feeling right now is this Pakistani song "Bheegi Yaadein" by Atif Aslam. I have no idea what he's trying to say through the song but the music's pretty good. I have to thank my Dubai-based Gulti friend Sireesh(who btw will be going for that damn Sepultura concert) for sending the song over. Long live Gmail, for allowing a max size of 10 mb for attachments.

State Of Mind : Eager to go see some more episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Happy ,cause in the midst of all this , I am getting a constant 80k/s download speed.

Oh and there's this little wallpaper I made. It's still not done, but this is the basic idea.

Okay, its been quite some time since I've posted and I realised that the time for the Babe of the Week was around the corner. But I will save that for later. Just thought that I'd share some of the things in the last week which I found interesting.

• Here's a stunner. Electronics Arts is releasing a game titled The Godfather, which is a GTA styled action game which follows the same storyline as that of the movie. It looks like this game has been in production for sometime and it also looks like EA has preferred to remain hush over the project. I came to know about this pretty late, as usual. While checking out one of the rap forums I noticed this post about the new EA game. I read up further on the topic at Gamespot and was surprised to know that our bloody college net lab blocks IGN. Oh and I forgot, EA has roped in the services of Marlon Brando(R.I.P), James Caan and Robert Duvall to lend the voices to the very same characters they played in the '72 hit movie. A few pre-release screenshots are below:
  
  

  
  Read More : EA breaks Godfather's vow of silence

• The Iraqi people, for the first time took part in a democratic process by being able to cast their vote which will decide the type of government and also the winner will greatly influence the way in which the new constitution is going to be drafted. The election coverage by CNN and BBC was commendable and I was surprised to see that the casualties were few in comparison to earlier estimates. The Bush administration can heave a sigh of relief for being able to conduct elections in the war-torn country. There was this New York Times Post article which caught my eye and had me laughing.

January 30, 2005 --
BAGHDAD — The man replacing the mayor of Baghdad — who was assassinated for his pro-American loyalties — says he is not worried about his ties to Washington. In fact, he'd like to erect a monument to honor President Bush in the middle of the city.

"We will build a statue for Bush," said Ali Fadel, the former provincial council chairman. "He is the symbol of freedom." Fadel's predecessor, Ali al-Haidari, was gunned down Jan. 4 when militants opened fire on his armor-covered BMW as it traveled with a three-car convoy. Fadel said he received numerous threats on his life as the council chairman, and expects to get many more in his new post.

"My life is cheap," Fadel said. "Everything is cheap for my country." As Iraq prepared for a volatile election that is being watched across the world, Fadel heaped praise on the
United States.

Read More

The review of Saarang '05 Rock show will be up soon. Just been very lazy. And also Babe of the week will be posted later tomorrow.

State Of Mind: Happy to know that Narain Karthikeyan will be driving for team Jordan in the new F1 season. Karthikeyan will be the first Indian to represent his country in the prestigious league.Mesmerized by the song "The Outsider" by A Perfect Circle.