Archive | June, 2008

The Quarter life crisis

There comes a point in everyone’s life when he/she is faced with a multitude of daunting, unsurmountable issues that could very much change his/her way of life. This usually happens somewhere around one’s mid-age and pop-writers flippantly call this ‘The mid-life crisis’. Carefully considering the going-ons in my life hitherto and after hours of introspection, I realized that I am being plagued by a rather devious variant of this ‘mid-life crisis’. But I still have a healthy 30 more years to kill to pass my prime, so it’s not exactly mid-life. It’s the Quarter life crisis!

C’mon, I’m no philosopher to coin high-brow terms; I just ripped it off from ace-blogger Jiby chettan (who actually used to be my senior at school). ;-) His ‘Quarter life crisis’ set in when he was 25. It’s an existentialist angst about living the American dream. Jiby also echoes an identity crisis and speaks poignantly about hours of soul-searching, trying desperately to find the answer to the question of life. Despite well-paying jobs, he couldn’t find his real ‘calling’. But in the end, it was all for good, he muses. To quote Jiby:

“The crisis was good for me – it has given me dreams, it has given me a reason to work hard, it has made me strong. I don’t know about success, but I will survive. I will be happy.”

In a nutshell, Jiby didn’t actually find his solution, but he learnt to live with his crisis beaming all through. Which is precisely what I feel incapable of. Messed up academics, daily fights with parents, break ups, losing all my best friends to trivial matters; even a minor (<-understatement) tiff with the law… At times, I feel like pulling out every single strand of my already-thinning hair with all the stress! Possible solutions to problems end up worsening others. Probably, I’m not taking the right decisions and end up falling deeper into the pit with every step I take; I can’t possibly know. But I do know that each of these problems have a worst-case-scenario which could potentially rip my life into shreds.

Enough rants! As I’d mentioned in my earlier posts, blogging is my way to kill stress. I’m already feeling better and I think I should get back to studies. If rumours have their way, my Fourth Semester exams will commence on the Fifteenth of July, which itself is two months late! Even with my unquenching interest in my subject, Information Technology, I actually don’t know enough crap to fill the answer papers… Paradox, eh? Well, paradoxes are way of life for this quarter-life-crisis patient!

Dunno if I’ll be able to blog in July, but I’ll sure try. Keep visiting…

And do pray for me! I seriously need a LOT of divine intervention! :-)

Posted in LifeComments (12)

Break free!

Ever since I started computing at around the age of 11-12, I’ve been using MS Windows. At that time, the computer topped a pre-teen’s wish list. I reigned over the PC, triggering missile launches, racing obnoxiously-fast cars, maneuvering fighter planes; even plundering aliens. I felt like Neo himself with my own cyber identity; logging in and out of the Internet ‘Matrix‘, rescuing the world from satanic villains… I didn’t realize I was inexorably and inseparably being trapped into Microsoft’s own matrix! I would snub out the slightest talk about alternative O/Ses. Mac was too hi-fi for me, GNU/Linux was too anti-user and was no match to Windows even with all Stallman‘s “free-world” philosophy backing it. Perhaps the fact that Mr William H Gates III shares my birthday added brownie points to my perception about Windows!

Only if I could realize how DUMB I was then!

They say, age moulds a man’s brain progressively. And yes, I learned it the hard way, after losing Gigabytes of music, photos and personal documents to a vicious virus attack in mid-2006. Thankfully, I had backed up most of the data, but fate it is, I lost a lion’s share of my documents! Ever since, I’ve been skeptical about Windows. Later that year, I got my first taste of Linux when I joined GEC Barton Hill, which loquaciously promoted Open Source. The shift to RedHat Entreprise Linux, though bumpy proved fine. I was amazed by the sheer scalablity of the O/S: it ran perfectly even on drastically-outphased PII systems! The user interface wasn’t as bad as hear-say. Gradually, I grew more used to GNU/Linux and started contemplating being an active Linux user.

Well-researched articles by the celebrity-blogger pR@tz acted as the final catalyst. After some research on my own, duly assisted (indirectly) by subz3ro I chose Ubuntu and ordered the 8.04 Hardy Hernon disc in late April. The CD arrived by mid-May, and in no time; I became the 473947th GNU/Linux user in the cyberspace! Installation was a breeze and it took me hardly fifteen minutes, even with my run-of-the-mill P4 system with a measly 512 Megabytes of differentially-speeded RAM.


My Ubuntu GNOME Desktop

No, I’m don’t intend to diss Windows with this post… Windows still owns more than 90% of the Desktop User’s market with its repertoire of memory-hogging but user friendly O/Ses thanks to aggressive marketing and the first-comer advantage. But I must admit that hardly a week after Ubuntu, I feel extremely elated at the computing experience. Though I had initial hiccups including non-availablity of codecs and Internet connectivity issues, I managed to tide over them with the help of Linux geeks. The feel of the O/S is simply mind-blowing. Gnome almost matches Windows with its user friendly features. And yeah, there was a whole lot of bundled applications; from a bundle of cheeky games to a full-fledged torrent manager! The image editor Gimp actually renders effects that are at par with Photoshop. Of course, there was the latest edition of OpenOffice which has all the flexblity and features of MS Office, minus its memory-hogging ones.

All in all, I actually feel reluctant to use the scroll keys of my keyboard to select Windows in the O/S choice menu while booting my system these days! Ubuntu scores way better in answering my day to day needs like music, movies, internet, and coding. The sluggish drawl of the ever-damned Windows applications was a far by-gone thing. Besides, the ever-essential “anti virus” is now redundant! To top it all, there’s the Free Software Philosophy which reaffirms that I’m not violating any copyright when I download free software from the internet.

So here are five reasons why I think you should embrace GNU/Linux (if you aren’t a Linux buff already) :-)

1) Linux is fast.
2) It’s reliable and safe, so say good bye to viruses!
3) Distros like Debian are utmost scalable (which means they’ll work even on low-end systems)
4) If you’re a coder, you can tweak Linux to your liking.
5) You’ll end up having more fun than the average Windows user! Of course, you’ll miss those mad-graphics games, and a plethora of apps. But life sans viruses, worms and spyware has its merits, no? :-)

[This blog post was conceived in a system that uses Ubuntu. Join the Ubuntu community at http://www.ubuntu.com/]

Posted in Computers, Linux, TechnologyComments (23)

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