KQA's 25th

The KQA's 25th Anniversary is being celebrated with a two day quiz festival starting tomorrow, the 28th of June. and I are setting the Entertainment Quiz, scheduled for 3pm tomorrow at the St Joseph's Boys High School, Bangalore.

FYI & A, as they say around here.

Going Legit

Like the Corleone family, I'm going legit. I've stopped my visits to National Market, avoided visiting torrent sites and have turned over a new byte.

Honest. All my recent movie acquisitions have been from stores. Spent money on the Final Cut edition of Blade Runner. Bought the 12 disc special edition of Lord of the Rings. Bought a bunch of games like Sid Meier's Railroads!, Shogun, F.E.A.R, Age of Mythology, etc. Downloaded a valid version of World of Warcraft and after some epic quests, managed to get a paid account that works from India*.

Why, you may ask. Because I can. So there.

* Thanks, and

Celebrity blogs

Ram Gopal Varma seems to be the latest to hop on the blog bandwagon. Though I didn't particularly care for his blog, I found some of his responses to comments quite amusing. This, for instance:

Comment: Please make commercially successful films.

Ans: Thanks for the advice. It didn’t occur to me.

And:

Comment: A study on you would be incomplete without AAG.

Ans: Ahhhhh! You are telling me! The greatest education I have ever had in my life with regards to cinema, my life and my self is due to AAG and its aftermath. I must have had one million twenty seven lakh thirty thousand and twenty three advises, and criticisms not including the ones I deduced myself. Now you can see how much more richer I am. Want any charity?

I think they are human too, these actors and directors.

Tech Notes

So there I was, trying to use the World of Warcraft downloader and it telling me some of my ports were blocked. It apparently needs a set of ports to be open and enabled. I googled and found that I need to setup port forwarding for faster downloads. But that assumes a static IP for my computer. My setup is something like this:

Airtel --> Huawei modem with DHCP enabled --> Netgear router with DHCP, which doles out IP addresses to my VOIP adapter, my laptop, my desktop and any rogue machines in the wireless vicinity that are aware of my SSID.

Fixing a static IP for my desktop was the first step. I could set it up in my Negear router itself, by assigning a fixed ip to the MAC id of the desktop. Then I moved on to the Huawei modem and went into the Virtual Servers section. Added the ports needed by the WoW downloader. Restarted the modem. Moved to the router and went to the Port Forwarding section, ditto. The final part was configuring my Comodo firewall to allow TCP-in on those ports. Everything worked like a charm and I felt so proud of myself.

Until I found the Vundo trojan happily resting in my machine. Sigh.

I just can't wait...

From left to right: Silhouette, Mothman, Dollar Bill, Nite Owl, Captain Metropolis, The Comedian (kneeling), Silk Spectre, and Hooded Justice.

March 6, 2009. I just can't wait.

Image from Ain't It Cool News.

W

Good Josh!



This is from Oliver Stone's upcoming biopic, W. Should be interesting.

Convergence

It's all coming together. The three great obsessions of Indians - cricket, politics and films. Add a dash of eye-candy and music, and you have the perfect masala mix that can keep a nation enthralled for a month and more.

We have Shah Rukh Khan, that matchless actor. We have Vijay, the younger chieftain. We have Preity Zinta and Akshay Kumar. There's Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi, Prime Ministers in waiting, along with current and past Chief Ministers. We have businessmen. Beer and cheerleaders. Not to mention the scandals and the spice. Inconsequential cricket matches get higher TRP ratings than saas-bahu serials? Of course. You have slap-happy characters on the cricket field too. You have tears. You have what it takes to keep everyone's eyes glued to the telly. Ads galore, buy more, spend more.

Everything is condensed into a tiny capsule, fit for mass consumption. The Times of India-fication of our nation is now complete.