Rohit Nair’s Blog

It’s been more than eight month since I posted something here. Eight bloody months. This in spite of several jobless periods in those eight months including one week of doing absolutely nothing at home in Ernakulam. Clearly, blogging is not my cup of tea. Or maybe it’s just twitter getting all those lines popping up in my head. Add to that my extreme laziness and this state of the blog is quite expected. Well, i’ve decided not to be too fancy or creative and at least post things that come easily to me, namely reviews and football. I had started putting my restaurant reviews on Burrp! (one great site) as i’m pretty sure they would get more readers there than on my blog I might duplicate some of it, but I guess having some updates here is better than having none at all. Also hoping to come up with a post for Real Madrid’s almost unreal transfer season. The Galacticos are back baby!

PS: I contribute on Burrp! with the username “rohitnair“

What a week it’s been, probably one of my best after coming to Bangalore. To summarize the events,

sprint deadlines, work late, legacy systems, ecstasy(cafe), addiction(cafe),  barton fink(movie), meetings, curse IE, bamboo shoots(restaurant), bowling @ amoeba, meet family, home food, football, dostana(movie), taken(movie), skandagiri, night trek, get drenched in rain.

I doubt if I’ll be able to move a muscle tomorrow. Time for some much needed rest.

Now that I have a domain name of my own, thought I’ll move my blog to it and use good ol’ simple wordpress to maintain it. Setting it up took mere minutes and thanks to ljarchive, I could export all my livejournal posts in a jiffy. Also, trying out a plugin that will apparently cross post to livejournal.

It’s been a long time since i posted here, and a longer time since i posted a restaurant review. I’ve been caught up with work lately, and hence the lack of time. I have been to quite a few restaurants in the past few weeks though and i thought I’ll just summarize my views here. Ratings in brackets next to the restaurant name

Giancarlo’s Place (3.5/5)
Went here with my team as it’s just across our office. The place looks very upscale and has nice ambience. As for the food, it was good at best.The garlic bread they served us was not too good, the crust was just too hard. I had lasagna for my main course and it was decent and very filling. The selection of desserts is quite limited and falls well short compared to the choice at Sunny’s next door. Service was ordinary, and i remember we had to wait at least 15 minutes for the bill.

Toscanos (4/5)
One of the new joints that have opened up in the UB City food court. They bread they serve at the start is awesome. Our starter(smoked salmon) was quite disappointing, the portion especially small. The main course(i had some Toscano’s special chicken) though was heavenly. Didn’t have the appetite that day to try out their desserts but i’ve heard they are pretty good as well. The food is served aesthetically and you might find it hard to dig your fork in!

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Now that I’ve entered Mac Land, I thought i’d list out my top apps that I use almost regularly. All freeware of course.

1. Quicksilver : Trust Quicksilver to be the first app to be listed on ANY such list. It just is the most useful and amazing app on a Mac. Basically a keyboard app launcher, its has a lot more features that can be customized using some of the many plugins that are available for it.
2. Adium : Adium is the most popular multi protocol chat client on Macs. It supports AIM, Jabber, Yahoo, MSN (in case somebody still uses it) and everything else that you can think of. You can also set the current track playing on iTunes as your status message.
3. iTerm : The terminal on OS X Tiger is pretty basic. Therefore iTerm is not an option, its a must! It has support for tabbed terminals and everything else that you would be familiar with on a normal Linux terminal. If you are a vi/vim user there is this issue of the arrow keys not working for navigation. You could always go back to the original HJKL navigation keys but if not, this is what i did to fix it.
4. VirtueDesktops : Virtual desktops is another feature Tiger does not natively support. Worry not as VirtueDesktops fits the bill perfectly, with Compiz/Beryl like desktop transitions as well.
5. Growl : Growl is a system notifier, and it’s highly customizable. You can set which apps should notify you and when they should do so.
6. SizzlingKeys : This gives you the power to control iTunes without leaving your current app. Plus it notifies and gives details when a new track starts. (Keyboard shortcuts to control iTunes can be set using the iTunes plugin in Quicksilver as well, just make sure you don’t enable both together, especially with the same shortcuts! )
7. Azureus : This not an obvious choice, but in the end i use Azureus because its highly customizable thanks to plugins. SpeedScheduler is one cool plugin with which you can schedule your downloads without staying awake waiting for those unlimited download time slots(BSNL broadband users will love this) It is resource heavy and has a lot of useless and unnecessary stuff in it though.

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I’m talking about the much awaited release of GTA IV of course.The game is finally out and the critics are already raving about it. Just to give you an idea,check out the ratings given by some of the mainstream game reviewers
- IGN : 10/10 overall plus 10/10 in each of the categories,the first time they’ve given a perfect score since ’99!
- Gamespot.com : 10/10, first game since 2001 to get that rating
- Official Xbox 360 Magazine : 10/10
- Official PS3 Magazine : 10/10
- Xbox World 360 – 98%,their highest rating for a game yet
The list goes on and on,and obviously the hype surrounding the game was worth it. This is what NY times had to say about the game “violent, intelligent, profane, endearing, obnoxious, sly, richly textured and thoroughly compelling work of cultural satire disguised as fun”. I think that just sums up the GTA series as a whole,and GTA IV seems to have touched perfection. I just CANNOT wait to get my hands on it. Sadly, there is no PC version and there may never be one(i even found an online petition asking them to launch it soon,lol). The only way I could play it would be on the PS3 in office! Need to convince the necessary people to get a copy somehow!!

Edit : My wish has come true! Thanks a ton to Ankit for getting it from US. PS3, a huge Plasma TV with HDMI cable and GTA IV, what more could you ask for!

Finally got a laptop for work, and man,the wait was surely worth it! A MacBook Pro! With a 2.4 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2 GB ram, a 256 MB Nvidia 8600 card, 200 GB hard disk, DVD Writer and so on, the MBP is a beast of a laptop, easily one of the fastest ones around.
Sadly, IT supports only Tiger and thus there’s no multi-touch support, no Spaces, no Boot Camp (Come on!I need Windows to play games and exploit that Nvidia card! Plus to run that useless but indispensable app called Internet Explorer) It’s a bit weird to have just one mouse button but hopefully will get used to that. And although OS X is based on Unix, certain updates do require system restarts.

Every single South Park episode right from the first to the latest can be viewed on their official site for free! Yes, you read that right. This news was like a godsend on a slow Tuesday morning.So what are you waiting for? Here’s the link, go check it out yourself!

http://in.news.yahoo.com/indiaabroad/20080324/r_t_ians_hl/thl-falling-asleep-on-the-job-can-improv-b9640bb.html

Now that’s what I call useful research. And i wouldn’t mind following the findings to a tee.

Well,that happened to be our team name for yesterdays KQA quizzes. Best part is that we didn’t qualify for the quiz for unseeded teams while we qualified quite comfortably for the open quiz(with all the seeded teams participating) Credit to Pravin and Thomas Jacob, they were on a roll for the prelims.And it was awesome to see QED,WALTO and Metaquizziks fighting it out. Some great questions and some stunning answers.