Random lyfe update

Hmm, my University exams are finally upon me, and I've had absolutely no choice other than to study. Y'see, I'm going to have to, if I want to maintain at least an 80% average. Currently I am on 80.12%, and that is as borderline as anybody can get. Although I *do* have the 8th sem to look forward to, where I think I can put together a decent showing in the project thingy, it'd still be nice to do well this semester. As a result, for a change, I'd have done well in an odd semester. Curiously, for the last 3 years, I've topped the 80 mark only in even semesters, and fortunately for me, it's been a decent topping (~82+), which has served to offset the previous semester's poor performance. So I can still claim to have 80% every academic year...

Many a time, people have wondered why I place so much value in exam results, after basically mucking around all semester. Well - now you'll know. I like giving exams. No, really. Time for a disclaimer here - specifically, I only like giving the exam, not the preparation that has to go into it. If you have any issues with this, kindly take it up over e-mail ;)

Lots of people have been posting political stuff on their blogs - the most prominent being George W. Bush's getting re-elected, and more recently, the Shankaracharya getting arrested. At the time of those particular bits of news breaking, I thought I'd definitely do a long-ish piece on either, but everytime I got close to a comp, I could actually feel the lethargy sneaking around in the my bones, so yeah. But here are my two paise anyways:

• Dubya - Calamitous. Suckiest news I'd heard all month


• Shankaracharya - Let the law deal with it.

The latter event had multiple members of my family in a regular to-do. By 'my family', I mean all people related to me. My immediate family's too cool ;)

Anyways, today blew. Went to college and turned out, I'm supposed to come tomorrow. So go back. Sheesh. Hmm, change of topic necessary....

I've finally gotten around to liberating my list of links from the LHS table to the RHS table, below the Google AdSense [click on them!] iframe. Now - I think - they look so much better, free of the table border constraints. If any of you think some link should be there, tell me, and I'll add it! And preferably, get me the URLs of the images of the buttons too ;)

Currently, my comp's running only Windows XP Professional Edition. And this flies in the face of all of my friends' advice to use Win98 for my Internet purposes. But I've installed a firewall thingy [after having to chuck ZoneAlarm for Sygate], so I'd suppose things are fine 'cause I keep blocking the strange shit that WinXP chooses to do, like broadcast to some weird-ass address for 'Simple Service Discovery'. But the amount of spyware inherent in Windows XP is simply staggering. I mean, hello! I really don't like my comp sending/receiving any type of data without my knowledge. And when I'm online through an archaic 56k dialup connection [that isn't really 56k, and never averages above 36-40k, but that's another story for another time], I want to save as much bandwidth as possible for *my* work alone. I don't want my important packets to have to jostle for space with some inexplicable data transfers.

And Google's finally let me down. The Google Desktop Search Tool tries to connect to the Google website, even when I chose for it not to do such stuff during the install procedure. Talking about Google letting down people, I would like to think Orkut is not that bad because of Google. Orkut's so buggy in spite of Google. And that's only because it runs on ASP.NET. I've also noticed stability issues with dotNETJunkies, and a couple of other similarly-enabled sites. So yeah, compared to Google, Microsoft still sux.

Sometime, I'll do a properly full technical post. But until then, I'll just keep updating about each exam!

Nth update: Abilon rocks as a feed reader, but is sadly deficient went it comes to blogging :(