Nirenjan’s Space

Finally, I have my own domain…

I got this in my e-mail today. I found it so comic that spammers are trying all sorts of things to get your e-mail ID.

Dera Yooha! Memreb,

Tknah you

This was definitely spam, but I’m a little surprised that Yahoo! did not detect it.

That is the non-copyrighted, unofficial slogan (shamelessly copied by me!!!) of my class get-together, which was held today afternoon at the famous venue - Planet Yumm, Besant Nagar Beach. A total of 13 of us turned up at the venue one hour late, one who fabulously swished in a good two hours late coz she happened to fall asleep.

It was a good chance for all of us to get together after college, since most of us (not including myself) have become so busy with our respective jobs or studies, that we don’t even have time to log on to Yahoo! messenger and chat. Having planned to meet up at 3.30 pm IST, we followed it. Indian Standard Time => 1 hour late. So we met up at 4.30. Having burnt a hole in our pockets at the venue eating chat and ice-cream, and generally yakking for about an hour, we went walking on the beach, yakking some more. Finally broke up at around 6.30 and left for our places by the various transporation means available.

Hopefully, we’ll have another get-together sometime around Deepavali coz that’s when most of us have a good 4 days off and we can meet sometime during the weekend, hopefully.

I’ve finally finished backing up all the posts on this site to an MS Access database. I’ll use this database when I’ve finished with Blogger and want to use my own publishing system which I’m coding now.

I’ve installed Mozilla Firefox 1.0 PR. Pretty good browser, fast browsing, tabbed browsing, built in search toolbar, and probably most important - standards compliant. I’ve been recoding my new site to display the same in both IE6 and Firefox. Took me quite some time, but it was well worth the effort, given that more and more people are slowly throwing IE out of their systems and switching to Firefox.

I tried to backup my blog using an XML format and conveniently forgot the closing tag in the template. As a result, the xml wouldn’t display as it should have. To top it all off, I didn’t save my existing template properly. In the end, I managed to take the code from my existing post pages and put it into a fresh copy of the template. All is well, for now…

One of my SSN classmates has finally converted to blogging. Susmita Dutta has finally started blogging. You can read her blog here. And I thought I was the last of my breed :).

I’ve finally started reconsidering whether I should go in for a domain and a server of my own for my blog and the rest of my site. After quite a few weeks, I’ve finally made the decision to go ahead and get one. At less than a thousand rupees a year, it seems like a good deal. I’ll probably make the move sometime next month.

Until I make the move, I’ve put up a temporary site on Brinkster. Since I want some dynamism in my pages, I opted to go in for ASP, instead of plain old HTML. I’d like you, my regular readers, to drop in to my temporary site and tell me how the template looks.

He stood near the huge monument on the beach, awed by it’s sheer size. The monument was a fantastic piece of architecture, but neglect and nature had reduced it to a structure of rubble. The history of this monument was lost in the sands of time. The young archeologist vaguely remembered something his grandfather told him about the monument - it was built to commemorate the actions of a brave man, who drowned while trying to save another. That was one of the many stories told about this structure. He had heard many more, but which on was true? Neglected for years by the government, the monument had become a haunt for peddlers, drug pushers and all the bad eggs of society.

He wanted to find out what the real story was, but how with so many anti-social elements around? He had to find a time when there was nobody around. There was one such time. The high tide at noon. The area around was engulfed in the sea at high tide. The monument’s platform however, was sufficiently above the water, enough for him to view the plaque. He had a small boat with which he could reach the structure. He decided to plan his entire visit, for he did not think that he would get more than one chance.

Two weeks later, after procuring all the necessary equipment, he set out at a quarter to noon. The waves were just coming in then. He loaded the equipment onto his boat and pushed it into the water. It took him an hour to reach the monument. By the time he got his boat secured, it was almost 2 in the afternoon. The scorching sun bore down on his back, but he decided - It’s now or never. He bent down to view the plaque. Badly eroded by the salty spray and the sea winds over the years, the engraved text was barely visible. He took a few photographs of the plaque, thinking that he could develop them later and maybe process them to try and solve the enigma.

He proceeded back towards his boat to return to his lab, but to his shock, the lashings had broken. His boat was no longer there!!! He was marooned, but only till the tide receded. After that, he could simply walk back over the beach. He sat down, disappointed that he couldn’t get back home and try to solve the mystery. Then he thought, why not try to solve it here itself. He took out a magnifying glass and peered over the plaque. He managed to make out the words “drowned while trying to save a young girl” but both the name and the date were illegible. He finally gave up on trying to read the name and date and sat down to enjoy the breeze.

Suddenly, a huge wave washed over him. Thankfully, his camera was a waterproof model and so his photos were saved. But he was totally drenched. He thought, “Just my luck to get drenched! But the sun will dry me off.” He stood up to strech his stiff body, but he slipped on the wet surface and hit his head on the plaque. Just before he passed out, he made out the words “Karl Schmidt”.

He leaned back against the seat of the van, his arm resting on the door frame. He was tired and closed his eyes. Pretty soon, he was off into dreamland. Suddenly, the driver took a sharp turn to the right. His slothful body leaned against the door a bit too much and it swung open. His senses alerted, he was up in a flash, but half his body was already outside the van.

He had the presence of mind to grab the bars on the inside of the van to prevent falling out, but he still had to get back inside. Slowly and painfully, he managed to pull himself inside, but he still had to close the door. The handle was just out of his reach. The driver was still speeding, blissfully unmindful of the danger. He reached out, desperately, trying to reach the door handle. He caught the bars again, and heaved himself out slightly, so as to reach the handle. With one hand securely gripping the bar and the other just touching the door, he managed to pull the door shut and secure it.

With that completed, he leaned back and heaved a sigh of relief. Suddenly, applause broke out from the back. The rest of the occupants of the van, who were initially shocked, applauded the performance of the young stuntman. He simply laughed and shrugged it off. His only regret… no cameras caught his performance on film.

My mobile battery has the habit of kicking the bucket at the most odd times. I charge it and it will last for about 60 hours (including all the calls & SMSes I send & receive, not to mention the games).

On Monday morning, it appeared to have quite a bit of charge on it. It so happened that the battery went flat about 20 minutes before I reached office. Luckily I have an extra charger in my cubicle so I could charge it fully without any problems.

Now the battery has gone flat again, this time when I had just left my office. No calls possible for an hour (till I reach home). Now that I’m home, I can finally put the dumb thing on charge (and it will probably kick the bucket on Friday evening or Saturday morning).

After seeing Krib’s post on Blogstreet, I was a little surprised when I didn’t find my site in the Chennai listings and created a login for that purpose. I see that they have my website, but I’m not linked to it. So this post is solely for proving my ownership.

Update: I own this site!!!