Halo 3

The Halo 3 game commercials are the best game commercials I have seen till date.

President of India

Looks like the would be President of India, could at least do one thing others Presidents couldn’t – Talking to ghosts.

In a truly cosmic conundrum, on the day her name was announced as UPA’s presidential candidate she was at Mount Abu, at an ashram when she was still governor of Rajasthan. She said she communicated with the spirit of the godman of the ashram, who died 38 years ago.

Another controversial statement was made by her a couple of weeks ago in a function.

We had the concept of ‘purdah’ to protect women from Mughal invaders. So, they stayed indoors and were veiled.

Other controversies around her include

• Accused of shielding her brother in a murder case
• She is the chief of a sugar factory which had defaulted a loan if 17.5 crores
• License of a cooperative bank setup by her was revoked by RBI because of financial irregularities.

My first week at nvidia

My first week at Nvidia turned out to be much better than I had expected. Especially after watching Maq people slogging for almost 12 hrs a day. Nvidia’s new campus is located at nanakramguda. Its quite far away from where I live, almost 16 kms. One biggest piece of advice i had heard from almost all of the Nvidians is to use the transport facility provided by the company. But, I still prefer to go by my bike.

The first day was full of various kinds of orientation. All of the last week was spent studying some docs and finding out how things are done at nvidia.Best things about nvidia are the free food and flexible work timings.

ps1: Gamers of ug2k3 (part IV) is long overdue.

ps2: thinking of buying WoW next month.

ps3: Does anyone know if moto rokr E6 is good. what about nokia n76?

ps4:  I never thought that my post could create a such a big discussion.

ps5: last.fm is a nice site. should thank iv for that

Gamers of UG2K3 (part III)

By the start of 2005, there were more than 100 people who played cz in IIIT. Majjj(captain of CSI) had taken the initiative to conduct the first cs tournament in iiit. Almost 10-15 teams had registered. The teams were from ug2k3, ug2k2, ug2k1 and some teams from MSIT and MTech. The four strongest teams from ug2k3 were

CeG                    Titans             VDCS             Slayers

Obelix                  wtf                    Austin           lol

Butcher               Osiris               Str3@k         haha

Trueshot             Sirius               peesu           1 fked Bitch

Matrix                 Frag                mouli            cool

Jim morisson      rock                 Dragon         Player

There were some other teams like the destroyers (spawn, t3, F@n etc.), one clan made up of (sid, fauji, gunjan etc.). ug2k1 had 2 teams, CSI and Smoking guns. ug2k2 had 2 more teams.

This was the best tourney ever. It even had a webpage(made by majjj) which had scores of all the matches and the demos. HLTV was setup for every match. Most of the matches had atleast 10 viewers (which doesn’t consider the number of people on one comp). The tourney started some time in February just before Felicity. Double Elimination method was followed. Some of the close matches were

• CSI Vs CeG
• CSI Vs DTA
• Tits Vs Rao’s clan (It was a draw in the first map)

Sadly, the final wasn’t played. Though CeG still maintain that they had won the Tourney, technically they haven’t. The other team in the finals was Titans. Some of the highlights of the tourney were

• The most watched match in the tournament was between CSI and Titans. It had almost 50 viewers on hltv. Unfortunately, the match was one-sided. The Titans were extremely lucky in this match. I still remember Anand’s head-shot to saki across the Aztec bridge . Mahesh also had some “good” shots.
• Rao’s god-like sniping in the match against Titans
• CS videos were also made while the tournament was going on. The first one was from smoking guns (not sure, but it was a ug2k1 clan). Then shiben had made another video. This was followed by the dta video made by me . All the videos were awesome.
• CSI’s win against CeG in dust2.
• DTA vs Slayers match (the best in my opinion ). This was the match for which we had made a lot of strategies, saw a lot of demos, changed the strats a lot and we even discussed strats through email. The final draft of the strategy was made by yar who sent a very very very long email to all of us.
• Spawn and co. were always discussing about strats during the lecturs
• This was when CeG’s hiding room was founded.

During the summer of 2005 there was another tourney with 4 teams. they were

DTA             Mamus             SWF             Assasins

Austin           Majjj                   Sirius            Tiger (ravi – msit)

Peesu            Slipstream         Spawn           Donkey (anil)

str3@k         WTF                    t3                     Aragorn

zaknaf3!n     Osiris                   F@n               @chillies

Player           Rock                     Frag

DTA had won the summer tourney by defeating Mamus 16-14 in de_cbble. That was one of the best matches I have seen in IIIT.

In one of the most shocking news in the history of cs at IIIT, SWF had defeated DTA in the league stage of the tourney. It was like bangladesh defeating Australia . Soon after the tourney SWF was dissolved.

PS: A preview of SWF – The movie was released in june 2005. But the could never make it to the big screen.

PS1: Some of the best players from outside IIIT at felicity ’05 were Ass buster, Insane, Flying Donki, Fatality and Itallion Stallion.

PS2: The next part will be on BF2 and age-reloaded.

Gamers of UG2K3 (part II)

Soon as the second year started, we got WLAN. WLAN in those days was nothing like what it is today. It had good download speeds and people could easily play warcraft and counter-strike at the same time. People started playing CS 1.5 on wlan. The pioneers who started counter-strike were

Obelix (IV)

Butcher (tipo)

Trueshot (sham)

Matrix (Manish)

Jim Morrison (Trappy)

Wooster (Arun)

???         (srikanth)

Desiarmy (Atwal)

???         (Gunjan)

???        (Gautam Singh)

???        (sid)

Osiris    (Ujwal)

Armmor (sriram)

Legend (vishnu)

??? (sagar)

rock (anand)

This soon spread to the lab and there were 15-20 people more playing cs. The labs used to be full of people playing cs. Labs Rock. The people who played cs in labs were

katti ramdas (t3)

Dragon (vp)

goldberg (me)

Str3@k (manto)

Austin (yar)

lol (sairaj)

zaknaf3!n (chandramouli)

1 fked Bitch (amar)

cool (pavan)

Spawn (vasan)

Sirius (deepak)

player (yp)

haha (komar)

wtf (mahesh)

weapon (ramji)

saki (saki)

??? (nani)

I thinkhave covered most of the names

ps1 : next post will be on felicity 05, the cs tourney and the summer cs tourney.

ps2: please someone help me fill in the names that i have forgotten.

ps3: First day at Nvidia. It was good.

Gamers of UG2K3 (part I)

Four years ago, when I got admission into IIIT-Hyderabad my first impression was that students here would me studying for at least  16 hours a day.  After a few days of joining the institute, I once stepped into the then ug3 lab (venki’s batch). I was surprised to find about 10 people playing quake (though i didn’t know that it was quake back then) and a few more were playing AOC.  Soon we got  our own labs which had  IBM  PCs with 64MB RAM (some of them had 32MB RAM)  running  Windows  2000.

The First multiplayer game played in the labs was Fifa ( i think it was 2k1) by Arora, IV, yar, trappy and few more people. After a few days people started playing age. Most of the matches were played in a single map (Arena – the one with walls). The people who played age were

Ramanujamux (tipo)

<arbit word>Hippo (IV)

Screaming Eagle (Sham)

Matrix (manish)

Konqueror (me)

LEO (komar)

Dragon (VP)

???? (trappy)

???? (Monga)

( please point out the missing names in the comments)

We had a lot of fun playing age. Tipo shouting out for help even before the match had started and Prof Govindarajulu calling us parasites of the society.

The best age players of our batch had learnt the game in the second semester.  Almost all the players who played age in the first semester stopped playing age soon after the sem.

Some other games played in first year were Road Rash and NFS 2.

PS: Will try to finish off part 2 and part 3 soon.

Shootout at Lokhandwala

Most of the movies i have been watching in the last few months have been very crappy. yesterday we went to shootout at lokhandwala (though i wanted to goto spiderman 3). we were lky to get the A row at the multiplex, especially because we had gone to the theater 10 minutes before the start of the show.

This was a good movie. Though, I expected a little more. The movie is about a team of policemen who taken on the bhais of the underworld. The movie ends with an encounter between 6 gangsters and hundreds of police which last for about six hours. Acting was decent. The background score was awesome. The third song in the movie, aya ganapat, was good.

 

ps1: i am finally done vacating my room at IIIT.

ps2: next post: Gamers of ug2k3 (chronological order).

ps3: The Silver Thief. Interesting story about a thief who steals silver. read it only if u have a loooot of time.

ps4: checkout the screen shots of windows Longhorn reloaded

India Today college rankings

India Today’s Best colleges surveys is out. IIIT-H has got 16th rank in ratings. I wonder what GAG has got to say about these rankings. IIIT-Allahabad is at 8.

firefox tip: Keyboard shortcut for undo close tab is ctrl+shift+t.

A car powered by compressed air by Tata Motors. Details here.

Hyderabad Traffic Police

Ever since I got my new bike, I hated the helmet rule. I stopped using the helmet more than a month ago. As usual I was on my way to college and the police were waiting for me just around the corner at Cafe Latte. I was stopped checked for my ID and then was let off with a fine of Rs.50. Luckily I got the a receipt for the fine i had paid there. Then again while I was returning back i was stopped again at the Madhapur police station for not wearing helmet. I was let off after I showed them receipt of the fine I had paid earlier.

W e decided to goto Imax to get tickets for Cheeni Kum. Unfortunately I had done the big mistake of parking the bike near the “no parking” board along with 20 to 30 other cars and bikes. While we were returning back, there was this police constable who just pulled out the fuel plug. After some bargaining we were let off with a fine of 100 (i didn’t have a 50 rupee note with me). And btw we didn’t watch the movie, which sucks even more as we had to pay lot of money for nothing.

In other news, hunting for a house in Hyderabad sucks. Just when you find the right house, there is a jackass neighbor, who does not even live in the same building, who has a problem with Bachelors living next to his house and complains to the “colony association”. Serioulsy, what’s so bad about allowing Bachelors to live in a colony, that too in an independent house.

ps1: Almost everyone on iiit blogroll use PSs.

ps2: this is my first post on this blog

ps3: Always get the receipt for the fine for not wearing helmet. you wont need the helmet for the rest of the day.

ps4: Overall the day sucked so bad that i wanted to blog about it.