Opinion
How to add a blog roll
<h2 class="sidebar-title">The Royal Blog Roll</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.site1.com/">Link 1</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.site2.com/">Link 2</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.site3.com/">Link 3</a></li>
</ul>
<br />
The key lies in mimicing the existing Blogger code to your own needs. Although I do think that Blogger should have its own little Settings pane for a Blog Roll as it is an integral part of almost every blog, just like Comments. This code above is taken directly from the template of this blog. It's the whole sidebar code, and is denoted by a nice and friendly
<!-- Begin #sidebar --> in the template. There's similar code in each blog.
Bad Taste
Karan blogged about the hilarity of NCERT, but this just leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth...
First post :-)
Exun Fares us Well
So long, and thanks for all the mozzarella.....
We shall misses it.
The White Tree Uncloaked
We think Sir will like it.
The White Tree Cloaked
Guess what it is! It's a sneak preview. I hope some certain other seven people won't mind.
Floppy Castle!
Explanation Unnecessary.
Need for Speed: Underground
Need for Speed is just one of those games - pure entertainment and nothing else. There's no mucking about with story lines or anything - just plain, simple and
smooth racing. It's based on the movie 2 Fast 2 Furious. Go watch it for some low-brain-activity entertainment.
The best thing in this game is the sound. Firstly, there're these awesome, simply fabulous tracks from all kinds of artists like Fuel, etc. which I don't listen to normally, but in the game they're just perfect. They're just the perfect tracks to be playing in the background. Then there're the actual sounds which are also awesome - the cars swooshing past, the streetlights whishing by, and the sounds of the engine and the gears, all with Doppler effects and everything. It makes for an awesome experience.
The graphics are also amazing, though, on my machine - an Intel Pentium M 1.4GHz (768MB RAM, 32MB ATI Radeon Mobility graphics) IBM laptop - they aren't exactly eye-popping, but they are way better than anything I've seen before in racing games.
The gameplay is simple with no bullshitting. Arrow keys are all you need unless you use Manual transmission. I use manual because I've seen it gets that little bit of extra performance out of the car with auto just can't. There are five modes of play in the game - Sprint, Circuit, Knockout, Drag and Drift. The first three are regular lap runs, while the last two were new to me. Drag, which is featured in the movie 2F2F, involves driving down a straight section of road in the minimum amount of time, and beating your opponents to the finish line, but it's a unique experience because it mainly depends on three things - your gear shifting ability, your ability to avoid hitting any other car (except the opponents' cars, which you
can hit) and other stuff that comes in your way and your ability to use Nitrous Oxide at the right moments. If you hit anything you lose the race. Actually it's officially called being "Totalled". You also lose the race if you don't change the gear in time and get a "Blown Engine". Now, Nitrous Oxide is this very entertaining part of the game. It's basically an overburner or afterburner kind of thing of which you have limited supply, and which give you an immediate extra boost in speed. Immensely useful in outrunning your opponents. I won't explain Drift in detail - it's got a lot to do with how well you can make your car skid.
The problem with NFS5, I found, was that it was extremely hard to control the cars. This is not there in NFSUG. The cars are extremely easy to control. Also, all the upgrade options for the car, which used to be a mystery to me in older versions of NFS, have now been simplified. The good thing is that most of them are locked in the beginning and get unlocked slowly as you progress and so, it's not very daunting on people like me who know nothing about Drivetrain or E.C.E. and Fuel Systems, etc. But for those who do know, it offers a wide variety.
Graphics -
9/10
Sound -
10/10
Gameplay -
10/10
Overall - Find the average.
Brilliant Game! Go get it.
Airport Express
So what's the deal? I'm not going to discuss its worth for money here because I'm not interested in that. What I would like to detail upon is my experience in setting it up and getting my network, tunes and printer on the air.
I obviously did not mean to get those hovering but to get them streamed and linked wirelessly.Here goes. I plugged in the USB port of my printer to the airport express and connected it to the power supply. The indicator on it glowed green for a second or two and then went yellow and started blinking, which, according to the Setup Guide provided meant 'AirPort Express may be out of range, or there may be a problem with your Internet service provider.' I turned to my PC running Windows XP Professional with a 802.11g compatible PCI Wi-Fi card plugged in. It haden't found the new access point yet so I refreshed the list of available wirless networks and a new network titled "Airport Extpress Base Station" followed by some code showed up. I clicked connect and it did. The software CD was in and the Airport Express Assistant had opened up which notified me so:
must not forget to mention that irritating "error" notification sound
Nevertheless, I went on with the assistant, chose to setup a new wireless network but after it said that it had identified an Apple Airport Express Base Station, it did something funny, asked me for the password. It wasn't enter 'a' password, it was enter 'the' password and I obviously didn't know what to enter as nowhere had Apple mentioned that such a thing would happen. Not knowing the exact reason of this problem I decided to restart my PC, as with Windows, it works a lot of times. After restarting, I logged on as a different user and openend the Airport Express Assistant, which notified me once again, but this time I was given the option of setting up a new base station or modifying the settings of existing base stations instead of network options like before. I chose to setup a new base station and then to create a new network. It asked me to set a password for the base station and other network options which I configured and finally got my wireless network ready.
The Airport Admin Utility had even mopre options to tweak your network and Airport Express Base station and one checkbox for printer access.
That is what I moved on to next, setting up my printer to print directly from the Airport Express Base Station. The Setup Guide clearly gave the steps needed to be followed to get the printer firing pages, which involve the creation of new TCP/IP port and setting up the printer on that port. That done, the test page printed perfectly and so did the other pages I deployed for, duh, printing.
But the easiest of them all was streaming music. I just opened iTunes and it had a nice little dropdown next to the three buttons on the bottom right of the window.
When will windows have such lovely applications (besides iTunes and Picasa2) which just get the job done.
I chose to stream the music and itunes instantly told me that no speakers were attached to the device, so I plugged in my headphones and started listening to music. Very simple.
That was Airport Express, although it does have lots of other features like extending the range of your already existing wirless network, keeping upto 5 different profiles etc. but these were the basic ones.
-Rungta
The Royal Blog Roll
I already love this blog - simple and white, and very nicely weird. Now I announce the second idiosyncrasy that we will give it - The Royal Blog Roll.
On this website's blog roll shall be only those well-chosen websites which pass the vote of each member. Any member can veto the decision (until our membership becomes too large, the constitution is changed and authority of veto is restricted to some original n members).
And the third...First Act of the Impulsive Highlighters' Constitution
- A change or addition in constitution shall require the consent of each reigning member.
- The Royal Blog Roll be established to contain blogs and websites of exceedingly high honour.
- An addition, deletion or modification of the Royal Blog Roll require the consent of each reigning member.
To pass this Act, each member must consent, which is kind-of recursive, but what the heck!
Hungry Kya?
I suppose you wanted to have another pizza tonight Karan.
Delhi, like other 'big' cities is full of pizza outlets, without which life would have been very dissapointing, for me atleast. Getting a pizza delivered to your doorstep and biting into it is heavenly, as most would agree. But a lot depends on the brand.
The 'heavenly' can very much become 'helly' (if such a word exists, which I'm quite sure doesn't) if the pizza turns out to be bad.Pizza Hut tops the list for most, and it does make great pizzas, although it hasn't got a big menu and it is the most expensive one I suppose. Don't think anything more needs to be told. Stores can be located on their
website, which does have a pretty good
locator, although it isn't update regularly for it doesn't feature the Pizza Hut on Janpath, the venue for this year's Exun Farewell.
Darn, I had hoped that it would give me the location. Now I'll have to go hunting all over Janpath.Next up is the Hunger Helpline 1600-111-123, yes I'm talking about Domino's . I particularly used to dislike this brand until Souvik Dada convinced me to give it one more try (as I had eaten their pizza's earlier) when we were in Chennai and my views changed. The pizza was delicious, and as soon as I was back in Delhi, I ordered for Domino's. This does mean that its good, but also shows that a lot depends on the Pizza you choose from their menu, as my tastebuds hadn't undergone some huge change from the last time I had Domino's to the time I was in Chennai. They do not have a dedicated Indian website although outlets can be
located from their
international website. I have to mention their speed of delivery, as when I was in Goa two years back, we ordered pizzas to be delivered home (my friend's place in Goa) and went there ourselves with a 5 minute stop outside the restaurant and to our surprise, the Pizza was there before us.
Raffaele's Slice of Italy, the latest I've had pizza from, is pretty good. It has a huge menu, cheap prices and the best part is it tastes good, although the cheese which I had asked for wasn't very good so better check that before you order one from here. I'm a vegetarian so obviously had a veg pizza but my non-vegetarian friends seemed to just love it, the Chicken Heavyweight in particular, and they claim it to be better than Pizza Hut. There are two outlets that I know of, one in ShahPur Jat (26497970/51750626), and another in Vasant Vihar.
Nirula's - chalta hai, not bad. Can be located
here.
Smokin Joe's, now renamed, was the worst I've ever had. I don't have any contact details about them either as I didn't care to keep them with me any more.
On a scale of 5, based purely on taste, there following are my ratings (I'm a vegetarian):
- Pizza Hut
- Domino's
- Raffaele's Slice of Italy
- Nirula's
- Smokin Joe's
The following are the ratings of two of my non-vegetarian friends, whom I stay with:
- Raffaele's Slice of Italy
- Pizza Hut
- Domino's
- Nirula's
- Smokin Joe's
So, where are you calling up the next time?-Rungta
Impulsive Highlighters
Welcome normal people...
and of course my dearest impulsive highlighters!Impulsive Highlighting is an art but it requires very little training - you either have it or you don't. However contrary to popular opinion (actually I'm fibbing because there
is no 'popular' opinion regarding impulsive highlighters or highlighting) ImHi can be useful apart from being fun, and the fun thing is that ImHighers know its uses yet they probably haven't even told themselves about it, in words.
Apart from discovering hidden messages camouflaged as the background colour (note:- this is the real meaning of reading between the lines), highlighting can also be used as a convenient and quick way of bookmarking the place where you stopped reading, so that you can go to the kitchen, pick up that packet of Kurkure and continue reading from precisely the point where you left off.
I have also discovered using very complex mathematics involving mathematical induction and deduction that all great people who have used computers were impulsive highlighters. As I said, the mathematics behind it is very complex, but rest assured that you're blogging on the shoulders of giants (which, sometimes, is literally true).
Now I come to the tricky part. What really is the purpose of this blog? Well, when I clicked the "Create My Blog" button, there was none. But while having a bath a little while ago I thought about it. I think we ought to post reviews - of all sorts of things. This should range from books to computer games to movies to Pizza places to All India tests and everything in between. Now, the foremost important thing to do is for someone on this blog (excluding me) to compile a list of Pizza places in Delhi with their phone numbers (and a list of locations of their branches as well).
Get on the job Rungta!We could also talk about stuff in general of course, and I don't mind people talking about Linux or anything. I am not a tech prude.
This is hoping that Rungta will post with some regularity.
Rishabh Kaul,
at
4:09 pm, March 03, 2005
