New Year 2009!

Wishing all my readers and blogger friends a very happy new year! Let all your wishes come true and may you achieve your goals for 2009.
And oh yeah.. Any new year resolutions new or carried over for 2009?

Mamma…

“I love you dear“
“I love you too Mom…“
And then they embraced together and cried. That was the end of the film.

Amrita was crying in her seat. I blinked my eyes to ward off the tears. People had started to move out of the theater. It was our usual habit for the rush to calm down first and then to move out. The background song of the film was still playing somewhere in the corners.

The ending words of the film were still ringing in my ears. When had I said the same to my Mom? But how to say? I am not a child or boy anymore. I am a grown up man now. I have a wife now. We have been married for around 5 years now. It was her plan to watch the film in theater. Among the Indian audiences. After all, we had been living abroad for 3 years now. And maybe living again when she is well enough. Mom. no, Mamma. That’s how I call her. Her operation was held just one month ago. And my vacation which I beautifully clubbed with the fine excuse, is about to finish. This weekend we will be flying again, if tickets are obtained. The same old job, the same old routine, the same old woodhouse in US, where only me and Amrita lived, the same old house where I will miss having Mamma’s food.

Unloading GRUB without bootdisks

They say “An idle mind is a devil’s workshop“. I guess I became a devil on last thursday. Everything was fine till two weeks before. The Red Hat Linux and Windows 2000 existed co-cooperatively on a single hard disk! But then, some days before, I was unable to boot into Linux. The GRUB loader was not responsive to the keyboard commands. And that was it. I lost the patience. I installed Partition Magic 8, deleted the Linux partitions, one by one, and then re-formatted the whole unallocated space to FAT32. I was happy at my “kartoot” and kept on browsing. Shortly after power went off and I had to restart in the night, during my free time. There it was, the black screen with GRUB Hash command mode edition (or something similar), mocking at me, asking me, “don’t you dare play with me!”

There was no floppy boot diskette. Even if it was there it was of no use, as the floppy disk was not working. I didn’t had a bootable installation cd of any Windows. Recently I had taken the essential software kind of DVD from home, which also contained Win XP SP2 installer image. But there was no CD/DVD writer in the pc. I had just a backup laptop for surfing the net. Now what to do?

The Morning Craze!

It have been creeping inside me for a long while. Taking my attention away. Making me not able to concentrate anywhere else. It provoked me. I tried to avoid the tingling sensation it gave me every few minutes. I couldn’t ignore it. The pain was deepening. The morning was busy and hectic as usual. But it demanded me to sit down and take rest. I couldn’t. I started worrying whether my hubby would start asking what’s the problem is. How will I say to him? I am sure. He won’t understand it.

How To Fight Blogger’s Block

The blogger’s block is a common ailment which affects bloggers knowingly or unknowingly. It is also known as writer’s block, but that covers a vast scope, as all bloggers need not be writers. But for me, when you write a blog post, you are a writer. There are several reasons for the writer’s block. The few ones I can think of now are:

• Running out of Ideas
• Having too many ideas clogging the flow
• Having no time
• Feeling low or in a state unable to think
• Physical inability like illness or broken finger!

There maybe other reasons too, but need not count to writer’s block, but the end result is the same – no new posts on your blog. Of course I have excluded the “inaccessibility to the net”, which comes under publishing, because then, you do have new posts and maybe you are writing!

Now, let’s move onto the solutions.

Being a silent spectator

The women harassment had been talked of long before too. But when people started writing about them personally, I felt happy within inside. Not because I like them being harassed, but because I came to know that it happens to them too and that I am not the only one. I feel then, the strength inside me being woken up and to follow their ways and to raise protesting arms.

Long before, there was this BlankNoise project which talked of eve-teasing. This had sent flashes to my mind about my own experience. But then, I was reluctant about myself or as to what happened towards me. But now, as Chandni in her posts clears it out, I feel, every woman has been through one of such experience.

ArchanaOnline.com – Yes. Its here!!

Yes. Finally I did it. I own the site www.archanaonline.com now. I own a domain. This fulfills the dream I had from long ago. From 2005. It was when I started blogging.

I have written about the journey of this blog which provides an insight for the first time visitor.I remember the time, I played with HTML, Microsoft FrontPage etc to create a first HTML page. I checked on creating phpBB, Invision Boards forums too, I checked out options like blogger, webhosts, CMS software like Drupal and Mambo so that I could make a brand on my own. People were busy posting tech posts and galloping forward and I was too shy. Maybe, in those times, I have been so old fashioned that I was reluctant to plunge into the internet world, by investing money to buy hosting or domain and all or to market myself. And now, it took me almost 3 years to step forward.

List of 20 Hindi movies I loved watching.

Following the path of Ashwin, I thought I could easily make a “Top 100 Hindi movies to watch before you die”. But then I realized there are many pending movies like Taare Zameen Par or rather my recommended wish list of Hindi Movies, which I haven’t watched yet. So I am now listing only the selected movies that I have watched and loved watching it.

There are some famous films which have not made to this list like Rang De Basanti, or Lagaan or Hum Tum etc. They are kinda good movies, but to be true at heart, I won’t mind giving them a pass, if not for the hype it created. There are some movies which can be good entertainers and huge hits in Bollywood, but the scripts or themes of such were not like extra-ordinary. So I haven’t included them also.

The list is NOT in any rank basis or in any particular order. So here it is.

Mélange – Random Tidbits – IV

Another potpourri is overflowing from my mind today. Its been a long break. I had been to Colombo, Pattaya and Thailand.

I had promised the readers this and that, but I am late now. I thought of publishing the thoughts whenever it surmounted, but twitter came to the rescue. Is it a rescue? I do wonder. Rather it absorbed most of my ideas by pulling in tweets from me, whenever I wanted to post. And that too from the time of Olympics.