kerneljack's diary

I went to different hardware sites today and read and read and read a lot about the processors that are currently available on the market in order to decide on an upgrade path for my friend Siddiqi. Currently we are considering either the K6-III 400 or PII-400. The PIII is simply too expensive, and the excellent K7 is not out yet. The K6 has slow FPU performance, but it’s integer performance is superior or matching the PIII, especially after overclocking. For those of you who would like to know more, read the reviews at Ace’s Hardware. It’s a good thing I went through all this. I’ve been reading for two days straight, and I still am not through it all. The CPU competition is tough nowadays.

I received some emails yesterday from my friends Darryl and Sid but nothing yet from anyone else. I was so busy reading those CPU specs that I still haven’t emailed some of my friends. And I had a really hard time last night getting connected. For some reason I just couldn’t connect. I emailed a complaint to the ISP.

Went to the video store yesterday (finally!) and got four movies: Mercury Rising, X-Files (The End), Kiss The Girls, and, of course, Sgt. Bilko. Also ended up eating at Pizza Hut. I’m never going to lose weight this way! By the way, the small pizzas we ordered were REALLY small and the salad was crap compared to the salads at Pizza Inn.

Watched Mercury Rising, didn’t like it so much.

So I went to the ISP (Internet Service Provider) yesterday and within two hours I had a working connection to the Internet. Great, except for that stupid 15 minute limit. Everytime I log on to the Internet, I feel like I am running a race, you know … I must get as much information as I can in 15 minutes because I may not be able to connect again. My dad keeps talking about getting a dish or something using which we can bypass the phone system in our building. For the unknowledgable amongst you, I am talking about a satellite dish, not cutlery, thank you.

I wonder if any of you are wondering about what site I chose to go to after I connected for the first time? It’s a linux site, of course, and happens to be my favorite site: it’s slashdot which is a site for linux/unix and other nerdy/technical/scientific/antiwindoze information.

Then I went to hotmail.com, of course, the site whose expertise is “giving you access to your email anywhere in the world whenever it feels like it and doing it really slowly too (it’s owned by Mickeysoft, remember?)”. Anyway, I had received emails from two people! Cool! One was Darryl, a very BIG (no pun intended, Puffy!) friend of mine. The other one I couldn’t figure out. It was a very evil and devilish email from someone who wanted to drive me crazy and to do amazing things. I know only one such person on this earth who would want to do such a thing: my dear friend Evangelia. A maniac, a (b)/(w)itch (take your pick) an appreciator of good music, good friends, and crazy people. I’m sure she misses me as much as I miss her. I hope she has managed to find something interesting to do for the summer (tell me about it yaar!).

Some Hyderabadi friends came over later to congratulate me on my graduation. Their kids played Quake2 on my PC and loved the game. I couldn’t give them the CD, though since I had copied it to my Linux partition from the CD and I left the CD somewhere. Movie freaks they were, though and they kept on insisting that I connect to the Internet and show them some kind of secret chat session like in the movies ‘The Saint’ and ‘Assasins’/'Specialist’. I told them to stop bothering me and made them watch ‘Woody Woodpecker’.

I am really running out of music to listen to since my CDs are not back yet. I hope I get them soon, pleeeaaaasssseee!

Later on, I watched ‘Die Hard 2′ for maybe the 15th time. My mom always manages to get riveted to such movies for some reason. She watched the whole thing again and cursed Bruce Willis for jumping around so much.

I still haven’t gotten an Internet connection so that I can put this page on the web. The companies I asked only give three month subscriptions, and I finally found one that gives one month subscriptions but I have to be there in person. Hopefully I’ll go tomorrow. And I’m supposed to go with my Dad to get the CDs in a couple of hours. Keep fingers crossed, yes?? Yoda-fever.

Afterwards …

No dice. It’s now almost 4:30 p.m. and I’m supposed to be going with my dad in half an hour or so for the Internet subscription. And I MIGHT get the CDs tomorrow

Today I spent the time trying to revise some older stuff that I had learned before. I managed to revise some stuff about the ‘awk’ programming language and also some DNS basics. Later on I watched ‘Star Trek: First Contact’ again, and also a bit of ‘Lethal Weapon 2′. I also finally sat down and wrote one of my first letters in over one month. Thank God I got it finished. Now I have to write three more! Whew.

My mom woke me up at 10:00 am and asked me to get dressed immediately since we had to go to the customs office to get my CDs. Anyway, to make a long story short, we went and we came back empty handed. They told me to come again in two days.

The reheated Biryani from yesterday tasted much better today at lunch time. From my experience, I know that reheated Biryani sometimes tends to taste better than the first time you eat it. I tried to read some more of Operating Systems and took an afternoon nap.

I applied for the Internet too, through Faisal, who is a friend of mine. He told me he’ll arrange it for me. The only problem is that we don’t have a separate line for the phone in our house so we have to share it with the others. This is ridiculous. I can only use our phone for fifteen minutes before it disconnects to give others a chance. I’m going to kill the landlord. He better get us a line soon.

In the evening we went out to get a telephone extension and some other electrical cords for my room, and we ended up standing at a Broasted Chicken outlet. My dad looked inside, I looked inside, my mom looked inside, and then we were inside. Watched ‘The Saint’ (for the tenth time, probably) while eating. Watched some TV, read Operating Systems and slept again at 3:00 am

Today I was still stuck up in the Bahrain Hilton but I was in a hurry. Why? That’s because I was supposed to wake up at 7:00 a.m.(hah!) to have my FREE breakfast at the restaurant. Of course, I missed it. I woke up at 11:58 am and I had to rush to re-pack some stuff (especially the gifts from Christiana and Christiana (hehe) and Evangelia). When I headed down, the transport was already waiting for me and so I missed lunch too!! Damn. Maybe next time. Anyway, me and some other Brits used the lunch coupons to get free coffee and drinks. Anybody want a free breakfast coupon for the Hilton? I still have it. I also have the magnetic key card for the door to my room. I’m thinking I can reprogram it to open any door in any Hilton in the world!

Then off to the airport we went! Bahrain is a very nice looking place, lots of sea everywhere you go and lots of bridges to make sure you notice. Anyway, I’ll skip the parts where I went through immigration and stuff and head straight into the Boeing 767. I always wanted to fly in this plane, since I have flown it many times in computer simulations and really liked it.

The guy sitting next to me suddenly startled me in midflight (I was listening to some music on the radio) by asking me: “What the hell is that outside?” I was about to freak out when I looked out and saw nothing but clouds. No fire from the engines, thank you. So, like, dude, what the hell are you talking about, I asked him. He kept pointing at the clouds and asking the same question. So I said: “Oh! Clouds!! Yes, they’re nice, aren’t they?” He finally shat up! Dumb guy, really. And when we finally reached Jeddah, he asked me to fill out his immigration card for him since he didn’t know any English. Well, somehow I didn’t get the chance to do that.

After immigration, all the baggage went by and mine didn’t arrive. Oh oh. So I went and complained to someone and it seems that my baggage had already arrived and they kept it separately. Many thanks to my yaar Siddiqi for saving me there. And at the customs they kept all my CDs (42, in all) and told me to call the next day.

Finally, I got out, hugged my mom and dad and went home. The new house is really nice, very spacious and lots of everything. I really love it. As usual, the first thing I did was set up my computer immediately and I found that the
floppy drive was completely destroyed! Everything else was okay, luckily, and I don’t really need the floppy anyway. Booted into linux and everything was okay … hooray!!! I spent the rest of the time eating dinner with my parents and talking with my mom. I didn’t sleep early, as usual and spent the time reading my ‘Operating Systems Book’ and watching a little TV. Slept at around 3:00 am..