Xoom.com

A few months back I was a worried man. Living in India, I had no other option of receiving money directly from Paypal to my bank account. Searching Google and a lot other forums finally led me to xoom.com. It's a really nice service ,which for a nominal fee, transfers money from paypal directly to the bank account. It also has got a good customer support as most of the times they are able to solve my queries.

10,000 B.C. Movie Review

Here's the first day first show review for the movie :

I probably saw the trailer for the movie in Dec'2007 and had my mind set on watching it first day first show since then. I imagined a movie based in 10,000 B.C. with lots of fights and high quality graphics . The movie that I saw today was disappointing-to say the least.It's not even within a 1000 km's of what I imagined.The director went through LOTR, The Matrix, 300, Apocalypto Now and several other movies and decided to make one single film out of it.

The story starts with a civilization living in some snowy mountains.Oh well, actually the story starts with a narrator's voice which is so gloomy and bad that you'd soon start to feel that this is not the movie you imagined. Ok, so back to the story. This civilization has a nanny , like the Oracle from Matrix movies, who can see the future . See sees four legged demons coming to destroy the village, and when they really come, I thought here we go with the excitement. I wondered if next we'd see some real demons or probably even the saber tooth tigers shown on the posters for the movie. The excitement was short lived as soon you get to know that the demons are nothing , but normal men on horses . For almost half the movie you don't know why did they attack the civilization and took about 15 of the helpless people, including the heroes love, as prisoners.The only thing worth seeing in this movie comes in this first half when the men chase several mammoths.But then , that's it.

The middle of the movie shows you the chase by the hero to get his love back. The punch line for the movie says " It takes a Hero to change the world ". God knows which world the hero was trying to save , as through out the movie the only thing the hero seemed interested in was getting back his love. The middle portion does give you an ostrich type bird attacking the hero's group scene and all, but the director fails to provide any excitement. The widely publicized scene of the Saber toothed tiger with the hero was a damp squib as they don't fight but make friends. Even the animation for the tiger was very unreal and coming from the people who made Independence Day, this was a huge letdown. Then come s the interval and one feels that probably the director has the best hidden for the end.

The end shows you a scene straight out of LOTR finale. Only that it was no where as magnificent as the original. We do get to hear the bad guy finally who's almost 8 feet's tall and one gets the feeling that the end can be an interesting one. What happens in the end is as mediocre as the entire film. The Hero picks up his spear and launches it at the big baddy, the spear goes through the bad guy's body and the bad guy's dead. No fight, no special effects, just dead. It was at this point that I wanted to scream and shout and say why did the director choose those magnificent scenes for the trailers, why did he not portray what the movie actually was . Probably like me, he too never understood what the movie was actually for!

While coming out of the theater, one of my friends said it'd be nice to see a scary movie type spoof of this movie, and I just wondered if this wasn't already a spoof movie on LOTR, Matrix, 300 and others. Better watch the trailers 20 times, you'd still feel happier!

GTA San Andreas!

I was waiting to play this game for so long and after a painfully long install,when I ran it on shitty Vista, I got a blank screen after the loading screen and in came the error "GTA_SA.exe has stopped working". It was so frustrating and I spent like two days finding a solution.
Well the solution is fairly easy though. When I installed GTA, it got installed in the third folder ...meaning folder inside a folder inside a folder and then inside the GTA folder. So solution is just to copy the actual game folder from that location to your windows drive/program files folder and it'll start working.

lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur

What made me search this phrase on net is a very small incident. A boy approached me for freelance designing and when i agreed he send me a sample template which had this line written all over text columns. I replied to him stating that although his design is pretty impressive, he has most certainly picked it from some website offering free templates because even the demo text is not in English, but some Russian or so language. Imagine my condition when I came to know the reality of his using this text :

Lorem ipsum is latin, slightly jumbled, the remnants of a passage from Cicero's _de Finibus_ 1.10.32, which begins 'Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit...' [There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain.]. [de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, written in 45 BC, is a treatise on the theory of ethics very popular in the Renaisance.]

This text has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since some printer in the 1500s took a galley of type and scambled it to make a type specimen book; it has survived not only four centuries of letter-by-letter resetting but even the leap into electronic typesetting, essentially unchanged except for an occational 'ing' or 'y' thrown in. It's ironic that when the then-understood Latin was scrambled, it became as incomprehensible as Greek; the phrase 'it's Greek to me' and 'greeking' have common semantic roots!"

Source :
http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/lorem_ipsum.html

NFS Pro Street Demo

Like millions others, I too am eagerly waiting for the release of NFS Prostreet. It's demo came a few days back and I downloaded it as fast as possible. However, must say that it's not that exciting as expected. The two demo mode races seem boring. Besides, the program is a resource guzzler. I have a fairly decent computer , with a CORE 2 DUO processor, 1 GB or RAM, 256 MB Nvidia GForce 7700 GS card , and still it hangs like hell on my comp. I choose the lowest details on the video setup option and it still hangs bad and the graphics look pathetic.

Will wait for the final version in the hope that it's much more suited to my comp specs.

New tank additions

20 th Oct'07 :


The nauvmi of dusherra festivals see me bringing a few more inhabitants to the tank. All earlier inhabitants are doing great apart from the unidentified anemone which died and had to be flushed away.

I got today a single Pakistan Butterfly Fish, the same unidentified anemone and also one cow fish.
I got the unidentified anemone again because think it got killed last time because of rough handling and so I wanted to try once more. This time I think it's doing great as it has been moving for the past 24 hrs and also accepting food (shrimps). I will however have to let go of the cow fish. although it's pretty attractive, info on the net says that it releases poison gas when stressed which has the potential to kill all the tank inhabitants. I can't risk that.

Got my Tank running!!!!

So in the early third week of my marine tank set-up, I have succumbed to pressure and got the fishes in. I started on the 12th Oct by bringing in a Star fish, a hermit Crab and an anemone (bad decision!!!) . On the second day, I went back to the shop and got myself 4 small clown fishes, another bigger anemone and one more coral which has fluffy feather like tentacles, i do not know it's name.

However, I feel the problem has just started . I see the water has become a little cloudy today and also, there is no movement in the fluffy anemone or whatever it is. Even it's colour has changed from green to brown and it has shrunk to almost half it's original size.Besides I can't figure out which side is it up and which side is down. Also how do I feed it ? My star fish always has one of its tentacles out of the water and I have no idea if it's a good thing or not?

16th Oct'07 :

My fears where correct .The unidentified bigger anemone/coral is now dead and promptly flushed .

sirreal63 replied as on Aquahobby.com forum:

Way too soon and poor choices for livestock. My suggestion would be to scoop us whatever is left of the anemone's and the starfish and take them back to the irresponsible place that sold them to you. Your tank is not ready for either of them.

Start with a couple small fish like clowns, they are hardier and will allow you to build up the biological filtration slowly. I would highly suggest a 30% water change and not put anything else in the tank for a week. Test the water parameters before you add anything. If your nitrates are not measurable and you still can measure ammonia or nitrites you are not ready to add fish. When you are ready to add fish...think small and only a few until the system catches up with the added bioload.

Be patient.