The good:
FINALLY got my new hard-disk working.  Which doesn’t sound very difficult (come to think of it, I didn’t think of it as anything difficult) until I actually TRIED to install the damn thing.  The process took a long LONG time, partially because of the power outages, partially because of the aged hardware (the mother-board & CPU are almost 4 years old), and partially because I had to manually check each and every single hardware component.

Once the PC started running, and the HDs started detecting, I moved onto a phase I like to call the Jumper-Cable-Waltz.  To make a long story short, it involves reconfiguring jumpers, cables, and preying to Bob that the thing works.  A lot.  At one point,  I nearly suffered a stroke when my 200Gb disk showed up as 32Gb.  As luck would have it, I needed to remove the jumper…

Needless to say, by the end of the night, I had managed to install my new HD and get it running.  Which means, for the time being, most of my time at home will be spent editing home videos.  (Lou, stop thinking dirty things.)

The bad:
Many many moons ago, I started working on a pair of projects.  A comic and an animation.  Many many moons from now, I’ll STILL be working on the comic and the animation because, the jokes and/or gags have stopped being funny…  I can understand other people finding them funny… but imagine if you will, being exposed to a set of jokes and/or gags over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

I thought so too.

The ugly:
Edited home videos of yours truly.  (Lou, stop thinking dirty things.)

…GOODNIGHT EVERYBODY…

Salutations.

If you’re a frequent visitor to YouTube, and you’d like to download the
videos you’ve see (or find an easier way to download the videos you
seen) you might wanna try the following sites.

http://video.qooqle.jp/dl/ only works with YouTube. You paste the URL into the box and the page automatically generates a direct link to the video file.

http://keepvid.com/ Is a little fancier in that it works with sites other than YouTube.

You can use a download managers like GetRight to download the files at your own leisure, rename the extention to “.flv” and watch them with an FLV PLayer…

That’s all. XD

For no specific reason what-so-ever…

If memory serves, it happened during the summer of 89.  One fine afternoon, my father had seen an article in the local paper which had, apparently, drawn his attention to a great extent. 

The article talked about how, a rather large chunk of ice suddenly fell out of the sky, right in the middle of a middle-of-no-where-type village.  It landed in the muddy grounds next to a pond where the local Muslim population was washing up before their timely prayers.  By chance, or luck, no one was hurt by the falling ice.

The local elderly wise men declared the ice to be of divine origin.  Aside from the strong, yet pleasant smell, the ice was blue in color; which could only have meant that it came from the heavens above.  And who else but God could and/or would wield the power to will a piece of heaven to come loose and rain down upon his humble yet faithful servants as a sign of divine blessing.  Could there be any other explanation?  After all who else but the all mighty could cause the aforementioned Ice to fall from the sky on a bright cloud-less day, into the middle of a village located somewhere in the tropics?

It was thus declared that the divine ice was a blessing from god, and would have miraculous effects on the faithful, e.g. cure ailments, and the like.

The faithful “used” the divine ice any which way they thought it would work.  Some drank it as a miracle potion, others used it as a miracle lotion, others still, may have done things with it that I prefer not to think about.  Unfortunately, the faithful did not have proper refrigeration technology, so the divine ice could not be preserved.  Every last drop/piece was thus “used” by the local populace, until only the memory remained.

Fast forward a day or two it took for the story to reach the newspapers.  The article had gathered my mother’s attention due to it’s sheer absurdity.  She thought it was fake.  My father, who worked for the Bangladeshi Airline at the time, had a different theory all together…

He thought it was caused by a leaky fuselage, combined with some good and/or bad luck.  Airplanes, generally travel at high altitudes.  Aside from their take-offs and landings, they’re usually flying really, really high.  The temperature is so cold those altitudes that liquids have a tendency of freezing.  Fairly quickly.

According to my father’s theory, a plane returning from the Kolkata-Dhaka trip basically sprung a leak, somewhere near the wing.  The good thing was that the leak was not deadly, i.e. somewhere on the fuel tank.  The bad thing was, the plane was leaking toilet fluids.  A combination of bodily wastes and used toilet water treated with chemical cleaning agents & deodorants, and Blue Dye.  The leak would have been practically invisible to the naked eye, which was why no one detected it during the standard pre-flight check ups, and in a twist fate which made it impossible for any …er… large and solid “components”, to slip through the hole.

Drop by drop the unintentionally filtered fluids leaked out of the tank, and made their way on to the wing of the plane until they froze solid.  Over time, the frozen liquid grew in size yet it stayed firmly attached to the plane, until the plane passed the Bangladeshi border, and reduced altitude in order to approach Dhaka Airport.  The temperature got warmer, and the ice had “grown” bigger.  So under it’s own weight, and an ever decreasing “grip” on the wing, the frozen chunk of blue toiled-fluid broke loose.

My father had approached his boss about his findings.  Unfortunately, as his boss pointed it out to him, it would be their own necks on the line for not detecting and/or fixing the leak in the first place.

Thus, was born the legend of the Divine Ice…

AKA two projects that I can’t seem to finish.  One involves drawing, something I should be good at; and the other is an animated short.

Project 1 was almost done. Almost.  Until I had one of those eccentric artistic epiphanies.  It wasn’t what I wanted.   I mean it WAS what I had set out to do, but it just wasn’t what I should’ve set out to do in the first place.  So out went the 8 semi-static panels with a “copy-paste” look, I dusted off a couple of my old comics, and started doing face & figure studies.  Like I stated in my last post, it’s not a good feeling to suddenly realize I’m no longer adequate at something I was good at.  And If I should try and re-develop my skills, I shouldn’t aim for “adequate”.  It became longer process, but hopefully the results show off the extra effort put into it.

Project 2, while “simpler” in terms of graphics requires me to record my voice.  A seemingly simple task, which has a seemingly simple obstacle.  Bad wiring.  Most homes here lack earthing, i.e. a way of allowing excess electric charge to be dispersed into the Earth.  Needless to say, when hooked a mic up to my PC, and picked it up, I got a nasty jolt.  Attempt two involved getting jolted at a friend’s house.  Attempt 3 saw me getting shocked back in my own room, again.  Ironic, considering increase in the frequency of blackouts.  Attempt 4 involves convincing my cousin to lend me his handicam, recording video footage of me talking, and transferring it to my PC via USB.  (It also involves getting shocked, but to a lesser extent…)

Almost comically, one of proud Bangladeshi tradition is that of blackouts.  Dhaka is spiraling into a burst of development which far exceeds it’s capacity to develop.  More and more people are converging into a place which had insufficient resources to begin with.  One of the side effects of this was the ever increasing frequency of Blackouts.

Case in point, a new shopping mall opened in the neighborhood.  A new shopping mall with floors & floors of stores, each with lighting by the buttloads.  However, the power plant responsible for supplying the neighborhood with electricity remained the same old power plant.  The result, more Blackout.

Odd as it sounds, I’d come home to a candle lit dinner for most of the past month…  Until we got one of those emergency lights.

Ever realize that you can no longer do something as well as you used to.  Something IMPORTANT, that you can no longer do as well as you used to? (Lou, I know you’re reading this, get your mind out of the gutter…)  It started roughly a month ago, with the approach of a friend’s birthday.  Being the genius that I am, I figured it’d be nice to send something unique, as opposed to a plain old e-card.

Up and until two years ago, my job involved drawing storyboards.  Panel after panel of whatever the script required.  In my …erm… “prime” I’d manage to finish an 8-Panel storyboard in a day. That was two years ago.  Then, my responsibilities shifted from drawing to animation.  Needless to say, my skills didn’t just get rusty.  They crumbled.  So here I am, roughly a month late on something important that should’ve been delivered on time.  It took me two weeks to get the artwork done for one card. ONE CARD.

Inevitably, life, it seems, doesn’t do things on a small scale.  Atleast for me.  So…

The number of Cards increased from one to three.  It’s been a month, I’ve finished drawing of them.  So why haven’t they been sent??

Because Windows 98 crashed.  Windows 98, the operating system I use twice a year now-a-days, crashed and I had to re-install Windows 98.  Why do I use Windows 98?  Because my scanner works with Windows 98 and Windows 98 ONLY.  So I HAVE to keep a partition on my hard disk with the aforementioned Windows 98.  Except, I don’t have drivers, for Windows 98, for my relatively new video card, so I can’t run Photoshop, in Windows 98, which uses the TWAIN drivers to scan images from my scanner.  Funny thing is, the rest of the work will be done in Windows XP, which is still running just fine.

I’ve got artwork sitting at home because I can’t scan it, while I’m sitting at the office with nothing to do.

So I’m downloading the drivers for my video card, for Windows 98, so that I can run photoshop, scan the cards, edit/color them and finally, FINALLY send them off to their recipients.

Unless, the political situation here becomes even more unstable,and I’m stuck within the confines of my office for the next few days.

As the ancient Romans would’ve said: “Tam exanimis quam tunica nehru fio.”

Is there anything as deceptively dangerous as the
comfortable and familiar daily routine?? 
It has all the charm & bliss of being wrapped in a warm blanket on a
cold winter morning, except the morning never expires.  And there in lies the problem.

Comfortable and familiar daily routines can make time fly,
seemingly speeding up days to run their course over a smaller duration of time;
transporting an individual from a desired point in time, such as a weekend, to
the next desired point in time, such as another weekend.

The problem is, while a weekend may consist of two days (or
for unlucky folks like me, one day) four of them come at the cost of roughly
one non-refundable month.  A month that
may have been spent more productively, had the person not tried living from
weekend to weekend.

Inevitably, it’s an odd and unpleasant experience to pull
oneself out of a warm bed on a cold winter morning, especially if the only
thing to look forward to, for the rest of the day, is to getting back into the
warm bed; but chores and responsibilities, especially if they’re part of a long
term plan, have a tendency of being extremely sensitive to time.

As a teacher of mine pointed out through a practical exercise:
the more time you have to do something, the less likely you are to do it on
time because it’s natural for most people to think “I still got time”
and procrastinate.  I was one of those
people thinking “I still got time”. 
And then suddenly it hits; TIME’S UP.

It’s not a pleasant feeling to suddenly realize that I STILL
haven’t made much progress on those personal projects I was supposed to have
finished.  Hell, some of them should’ve
been finished 10 years ago.  Hence…
THIS.  My little attempt at getting back
into the habit of writing.  A daily blog
entry (with the exception of Fridays), consisting of roughly 200 words, on
whatever happens to be on my mind.

…er… and that’s the way it is. XD

Er… that’s about it actually.  I’m planning/hoping/preying that I can
eventually work this into a roughly 5 minute short.  But given the
render time (NINE HOURS to
render five seconds of footage with two models) it won’t be finished
for a long time.  Even if the project is completed, it’ll take a couple
of months to render…

That’s all. XD

…and back, and shoulders… AY!!  Not exactly the best way to start off a post,
but over the past two weeks or so, this pain has become a major part of my
life.  Luckily, the pain was never
excruciating, but MAN is it irritating.  Anyways,
things have gotten better over time.

In an unrelated topic, I need to put more effort into
my guitar practice.  Due to work, and the
aforementioned pain, I’ve managed to actually reverse whatever progress I had
made.  I keep making an ass of my self in
front of my instructor.

…UCK!!

Brazil lost the World Cup Quarter-finals.  They lost to France, 0-1.  Inevitably, as a fan of Brazil, I’m upset.

Having said that, the French national team played a
superb game.  They dominated the field,
kept Brazil on the defense, and during the *rare* few instances where a
Brazilian player managed to get the ball into the enemy territory, overwhelmed
their opponent.  Brazil, until the last
ten minutes of the match, did not play the game they should not have been
playing.

France played a good game and won.  Brazil didn’t.  Oh well… Here’s looking at 2010. =^^=

As you may or may not have expected, this post follows yet another World Cup game, played by the Brazilian national team.  As you also may or may not have expected, Brazil won.  This time, their victory was against Ghana.

Ronaldo Luís Nazário de Lima officially became the highest World Cup Goal Scorer with his first goal of the match, five minutes into the game.  Ghana, try as they might, got a couple of opportunities to even the score, but unfortunately for them, they kept missing.  The closest Ghana would come to scoring a goal was header by Ghana’s John Mensah, from a Corner Kick.  Unluckily for the Africans, it bounced off of an unsuspecting Dida’s knee.  A few inches to the side, and the ball would have slipped through, between the goal-keeper’s legs.

Sometime near the end of the first half, Adriano scored a goal that should not have been accepted, since he was offside, twice.

And then suddenly… the power went out.

When the electricity came back an hour later, the game was over.  As expected, Brazil won the game.  It sounds selfish, but a part of me was glad that nothing exceptional happened during the last 40 or so minutes of the match.  Ricardino scored yet another goal for Brazil; which would have been memorable for any other team, but for the defending champions, its just another brick in the wall.  (For a lack of better terms.)

Still, the Brazilians’ game is improving, and they’ve made some progress from the team that barely scored against Croatia.  Hopefully, we’ll find out just how much they manage to improve on July 9th… =^^=

…and hopefully, the power won’t go out…

…

…otherwise there will be rioting on the streets…