Sunday, January 13, 2008

Dodecahedral calendar

Made my own dodecahedron calendar today. See this link for more info (via lifehacker).

Came out better than I expected it would, given my ineptitude at cutting and sticking. When I cut something in a straight line, it comes out looking like a cartoonist's representation of a thunderbolt and I am as adept with a glue stick as is nerd hitting on a hot blonde - it leads to quite a sticky situation, but the whole thing just comes unstuck.

Useful addition to the table and completely worth the effort :-)

new Keyboard

Got myself a new keyboard yesterday. The move was motivated by the deviant behaviour of a couple of key keys in my old keyboard.

The enter key:Once it was hit, with one's finger, it would as its name suggest enter into the space available so that it could make contact with the necessary bits of the keyboard, to allow the computer to recognise that the enter key had been pressed. Then quite unlike its alias, it would decide not to return from that position, thus giving giving me more "enters" than I had asked for.

The 'right' shift key: Quite the wrong behaviour, from this one. Once it was pressed and shifted out of its position of rest, it simply refused to come back, thus giving me lowercase with CAPS LOCK on, inverting cases and never once making a case for itself for good behaviour and bringing upon the keyboard capital punishment.

Things back to normal now!

Tuesday, January 01, 2008

It was five past midnight

Last night, which was the last night of last year, I, like many other people was celebrating the onset of the new year, occupied in the most natural of all nocturnal human activities - sleeping. I had gone to bed just a little after midnight, thus ushering in the new year in semi wakefulness. At around five past midnight, when I had reached sheep number 7, the calm of the night was broken by the call of Bell's invention. After time had decided to bring in the new year, the phone decided it was time to ring, in the new year.

A call on the land line is quite a rare occurrence given the many cell phones at home, and a call after midnight an even rarer one. I let the ringing continue hoping that ignoring it would make it stop and having a hunch that in all likelihood, the call wasn't meant for anyone at home. As I reached sheep 15 the ringing stopped and I was beginning to drift off.

Just when I had bid good bye to the sheep, the phone rang again. I thought that whoever it was must be quite desperate to get whoever he/she was trying to reach given the time of the night and thus decided to do something about the phone. I got my behind off the bed and picked up the phone and said "Hello".

The voice that greeted me from the other end was sort of high pitched, the type that one does not associate with grown up men. My brain dumbed down with the onset of sleep, for a moment thought it was a woman. At that thought synapses fired, the neural net was suddenly abuzz with activity sending signals to the rest of me to become alert, and suddenly the journey from the bed to the phone seemed worth it. That burst of alertness provoked more thinking and this is the unfortunate bit, the rational me realized in a despair inducing burst of logical deduction that if the voice was indeed that of a young woman, then the call was certainly not meant for me.

After reaching this conclusion the brain decided to begin the shutdown sequence again. At that time, the voice at the other end asked for "Arumugam Sir" and the tiny number of awake grey cells in my head, realized that it was boy and after realizing that, the gray cells went to sleep. I said "wrong number" and hung up, dragged my body to bed and dozed off.

Yawn!
PS: Happy new year!!!