Total Black Out!

I'm experiencing what could be best described as 'Every Geek's Worst Nightmare', namely, his Computer Being Stuck by Lightning!

My laptop powerbrick had been having some trouble and I was unable to charge my laptop. Now that my desktop and BSNL Wi-Fi modem being fried by the stupid lightning — I'm experiencing a Total Black Out!

I'm sorry to all those folks to whom I cannot mail, scrap in Orkut, talk in IRC, or any other net nonsense that I used to engage upon (I'm composing this on a borrowed laptop; thanks Remya).  I must have probably angered some Gods, who might have gotten displeased that I was giving my attention elsewhere.

Here's my sad episode...

Last Saturday, I was sitting in my bedroom, reading PBM notes (ok, don't believe it, if you don't want to), when I heard a distant roar of thunder.  I looked outside and saw darkened sky and lightning streaks glowing outside.  Usually, in a similar situation, we used to plug off our telephone.  I rushed downstairs, to plug off the phone, lest it be fried by lightning or something.  Mission accomplished, I proceeded to the refridgerator (I should mention that I was alone in my house, the 'other' members were out on some errands).  Suddenly, I heard a crack of thunder, a streak of white lightning, a *buzz-clank*, and the circuit-breaker switched itself off! 

I checked the TV, which was not connected, then I remembered that my desktop's UPS was plugged in.  Not powered on, but plugged in, along with the Wi-Fi modem.  I rushed back to my room, and yanked the plugs off.

It was during evening that the power came, and I went downstairs to switch on the circuit-breaker.  Sometimes afterwards, I came upstairs and switched on the desktop.  Nothing!  I weeped!  Then I tried the modem; blink-blink.  I weeped harder!

Now I have nothing left to read except for my exam notes. Maybe the Gods want it that way.  I hate deities that get irritated in short notice and wenge their anger on us poor humans. Back to exams and revisions... maybe I'll sell of my desktop or laptop or both. :(

But I feel like quoting Morpheus, "Fate, as it seems, is not without a sense of irony!"

Valentine's Day: In love with Xfce

My laptop power brick got burned out day before yesterday. Since then, I've been unable to perform anything even trivial with my ~50mins battery backup. I've been thinking about replacing the battery too, but since the warranty got expired I think I might have to shell out cash from my pocket. Now that I've switched my attention to my half-abandoned desktop, I've been in search of some GUI-thingy that is simultaneously sleek and performance wise top-notch. I've been using E16 for sometime, both for lack of availability of E17 in Debian Etch and to be "unconventional" not going in the paths of KDE or GNOME. What is most expected out of a GUI (I'm refraining from using the term Desktop environment) is a decent file manager. Sure, I can be satisfied with dired in GNU Emacs, but that's not what you want when you want to copy a ~400MiB video to your friend's thumb drive. The keyword here is "immediate". My desktop is a Celeron 634Mhz box with 128M ram. By most of the so-called "modern" standards this is clearly outdated. I don't know whether it's Binny or Sameer bhai (both of LUG-Cochin) that told me about Xfce. I had dismissed that thinking Enlightenment is all the way to go. But Enlightenment does not have a "decent" file manager. I thought, "What the hell, anyway I'm sitting here unpurposefully, why don't I try out yet-another-desktop-environment?". What striked first about Xfce was its sleek and polished look -- quite like GNOME. And what's more: it uses GTk2 (think Pango and it's advantages here).  These are the visible virtues of Xfce (originally XForms Common Environment):

• Lightweight (Literally!  Uses 60M of my 128M ram, and 30M of my 252M swap in extreme conditions)
• Nice and gooey desktop apps -- I'm head over heals for Thunar.
• Sleek and smooth and 'sexy'.  All thanks to GTk2.
• Have all the D-Bus, HAL and blah-blah functionallity.
• Fast.  Yes, for all my needs.

I think I'll stick with Xfce for my future desktop compting needs.   Gosh! Why didn't I think of this before? "Time," as Morpheus suggests, "is always against us."