Busy Day

I know I should've posted yesterday, according to the new alternate-day routine that has replaced my everyday routine. But it was such a busy day that I didn't have time to come to my PC for the whole morning and afternoon. In the morning, after waking up a little late (give me a break, it's still Sunday!) I readied myself and went to the Bidhan Chandra Institution to answer the National-level Science Talent Search Examination organised by the Unified Council, Hyderabad. Hope I make the achievers' list this year too.
The test ended at 12 noon, and we left the building five minutes later; it took me another five to get home. Then after bathing, lunch, and reading the newspaper, I went to the Mangolik hotel where the Durgapur classes of Shrutinandan, my singing school, are held. Class was from 2:30 pm to four, after which I came back home, freshened up, and then sat at my PC.
It doesn't take me very long to check my Gmail, Blogger updates and in-game messages on Travians. Once I was done with that, I began prep-working on my school project, which is tomorrow (1st Feb). We are supposed to make a nature magazine, and it's taking extra work because the the teacher isn't allowing us to bring the pages printed and assemble them. We can take print-outs, but we must cut them out and assemble them there. What a waste of time!
Given all the above, I hope I can be forgiven my delay in posting, especially because I am going to post two consecutive days to make up. Cheers!

Wallpaper long due

I made this along with the last one I posted, but I had a lot of other things to post in the meantime. Anyway, at last here's the 23rd wallpaper, made in Photoshop. I did some crazying around with different colours and brush shapes for this one.

24 and 25 are ready too. Once I have posted all 25, I'll begin working on a separate page on my blog with thumbnails and links of all the wallpapers.

Ring ring... why DO you give me a call?

Bollywood ringtones and callertunes. Celebrity gossip. Lotteries. Sports updates. Telemarketing. What haven't they got? And at what price? Well, I just have to drop everything I'm doing and answer phone calls full of recorded whining and keep pressing numbers as per their (recorded) instructions. First it started with text messages. I always deleted them. Now, they've moved on to persistent calling. I was never a huge receiver of calls, but nowadays I find it difficult to pick out the important calls to answer, so huge is the number of useless calls. Half the times when I'm expecting an important call, I answer my cell only to find that it's one of those familiar metallic voices that are edited to give the impression of a miniskirt-clad office girl with painted nails and loads of make-up or of a handsome-but-dumb guy in a formal shirt, tie and suit pants, expecting to ensure the attention of cellphone owners of either sex. And most of the other half of times, I'm engaged in cursing at the recorded voice expecting that the person operating the recordings will hear me and switch it off (it happened once), and it leaves my phone engaged and the important caller never finds me.
I have no idea what sort of people form their target customer group. Must be semi-literate green grocers, domestic helps and fishmongers who can't download cheaper or free stuff from the internet and are not aware of the futility of the quizzes and lotteries they offer. Even the text messages are so stupid that I wonder if they really take us for imbeciles. A text on my Mom's cell guaranteed prizes for answering if milk was white or black. Such texts are a regular feature, sometimes naming a famous sportsman asking if he is a sportsman or an actor, sometimes offering festival specials or religious advice, or astrology or 'love percentages'. Sometimes for a few bits of currency, sometimes even for free.
My cellphone provider rubs salt into the wound and sends a searing pain up through my nerves, shooting right into, and wrecking, the intellectual, emotional, creative, and sanity-maintenance areas of my brain. How? Well, my darling Reliance keeps handing me out its own bounty of telemarketing by text and calls. They try their best to convince me to switch to one of their more bloodsucking schemes with more advanced money-laundering methods. Which is why, when in some rare occasions a real person (real miniskirt / real formal shirt) calls, you cannot blame me for not being as gracious with them as is appropriate. And you surely cannot deny me a pat on the back for still being gracious most of the times and not asking to speak to their boss.
And then there are those you-won-more-money-than-there-actually-exists-in-the-world-just-count-the-zeroes things that sometimes come by e-mail too. Unfortunately cellphone spam filters are not that advanced yet, so we are bombarded with messages from phishing scammers that are cheeky enough to make you wish to entangle the perpetrators of this torture in fishing nets and throw them into a fishpond full of piranha fish. Nowadays, realising the fragility of texting, they too have learnt to call, with their hoard of lotteries, inheritances and African estates with dead owners. Why don't they create an account with the money and send me the number? Saves me trouble, y'know.

The Winter Dusk Blue

My semi-transparent blog background (thanks, Blogger!) allows me to change the feel and mood of my blog while maintaining my favourite falling leaves. Till date I had only tried the lightest default shades of the main template colours. Now I have decided to venture into darker shades, and experiment with the effect they have on the presentation of my blog.

As winter begins to show the tell-tale signs of goodbye, I sometimes feel like hanging on; not to the toasty sunshine, for it will be the last thing to go as spring bridges the leap to summer, but to the cold evenings after the early sunsets, when a dark, uniform blue stares back at me when I stare up into the cloudless sky. Imposing yet soothing, I forget that it is the fore-bearer of the dark when it inspires me into the thoughtful, poetic mood that I enjoy being in.

Isn't it nice?

This face of the sky won't be seen for many more days; as the weather grows warmer, the monsoon winds will once again turn onshore and the evenings won't have any more cloudless skies. Paying tribute to that silky, comforting, blue that makes my winter day as the light rapidly fades, my blog's background this time is a two shades darker version of the default blue. And of course, shaken by the wind that blows from the riverine plains out to the sea, the last few leaves fall, marking the onset of the tropical winter's homeward journey and announcing that spring has already set foot in this direction.

Terrible, terrible mistake

Like the few past years, this year too I answered the Olympiads conducted by the Science Olympiad Foundation. They designate a common roll number for all of their Olympiads for a particular student. When I answered the National Cyber Olympiad, I came to know that my individual roll number was 020, and placing it accordingly after the school and class codes had also worked when I checked the NCO results from their website. I also answered the National Science Olympiad organized by them, and the results were due today.

Why me, guys?

Due to an overloaded server, I had to wait for long before I got access. And the wait ended in a dreadful shock; the name, information, and result of another classmate of mine was displayed under my roll number. I rechecked the NCO results; there was no error on my part. Thanks to their overloaded servers, the tedious task of trying out all (about 001-070) serial numbers of my school and class has become a near impossible task -- half the times the servers can't be reached. And because of the overload, they have taken down the rest of the site temporarily, cutting me off from their contact details. Now I can only wait and hope that I do get my result. A fair result? I don't know if that's too much to ask for, given the terrible mistake they have made. And if the present condition of their website is any indication, I am not the only sufferer.

*follow-up: Today (23rd) the overload is gone, and I tried every serial number in my category till I found mine at 029. My All India Rank is 110, School Rank is 1, and I am selected for the second round. However, I cannot breathe easy, because this mistake may cause me further problems, and also because of the mistake I cannot be absolutely sure that these results are mine, even though I've been ranked this high (and better) before.

Sleep drifting deep, deep drifting sleep. . .

Yesterday evening as I studied History in the bedroom, I nodded off. I hadn't slept well for some days, so Mom didn't wake me up. She covered me with a blanket, with all my clothes on. She shut down my computer and did every pre-bed ritual (placing of covers and putting away stuff, etc.) for me. Then she tried shoving dinner into my mouth, but didn't get more than a slurred question about my computer. As soon as she assured me that she had turned it off, I turned myself off too. Today morning I woke up, sweating under the extra layers of my non-night clothes. It was such a frantic morning. I always pack my bag carefully the previous night, but I had to do it in half the time in the morning. And I still left my crotchet needle back as I grabbed the staple and the wool to take to the stupid mandatory S.U.P.W.(craft) class. S.U.P.W. is supposed to stand for Socially Useful Productive Work, but as some wise person once said, it indeed is Some Useful Period to Waste. Plus I only realised it once I returned home. I genuinely thought I'd lost it, back in school. Oh, though I feel sleepy, and History's so boring, please don't let me do that again, Ma. I can't stop it myself so...

The title which seems rather appropriate, is not so if you take the parent context into consideration; the lines are from Wilfrid W. Gibson's 'The Ice-Cart', a poem in my English course-book this year; it's the last poem on this page, if you're interested. Image courtesy Google Images, as is usual on the LoudSpeaker.

Farewell; plus Studying for exams

Farewell!

Today the students of class 9 bid farewell to the outgoing class 10 students. The outgoing batch came dressed up, mostly in saris and they all looked good. We heard the 9th and 10th students enjoying in the hall. We 8th graders were supposed to take care of the school while things went on there. This time's farewell got us thinking. Next year our turn to plan a farewell for our seniors. And next to next year our turn to leave school. As much as I hate this school...
Anyway, the final exams are near. Good thing we have a whole 100-mark paper instead of it being broken into two unit tests of 20-80 or 10-90. Anyway the chapters are repeated, so why not do it all at once? The only non-100 papers are where we have projects/practical work. Most probably we'll have a 10 or 20-mark practical in Biology; and 20-mark projects in EE and Computer. The Computer Project is done, EE to go. Speaking of Environmental Education (yes, that's what it is), we are so lucky. The stupid idea of including EE in the Board syllabus has been abandoned in the revised syllabus, which begins with our batch! No EE from next year. No EE! In addition to no GK, no EE! I'm rejoicing. We all are. Poor seniors. On the downside, starting three years before us, the Shakespeare play in English was changed from Julius Caesar to As You Like It. Crap.
Back to this year, I've started studying (oh, hell) and have hardly made any progress. In Chemistry, I'm done with Metals, Electrolysis; and Hydrocarbons is quite easy and will be done soon. I'm worried more about the chapters being repeated from first term. In History, I've finished Birth And Advent Of Islam, started with the Renaissance. Have 5 more chapters in History (worried about) and 2 in Civics (not worried about). Our teachers have been darlings enough not to repeat old chapters in History. Physics has a whole load of repetition and I haven't made any headway. Biology... don't wanna talk about it. More than knowing stuff, the 'way of writing' and stupid formats matter more in it. Maths is ok, no rote-learning there, same with English Language. English Literature, do later. EE and GK, manage somehow. Bengali Lit., memorizing poems only headway. Lang., same (some poems we need to know for summarization exercises and stuff). Gotta go study history. 
Oh, hell, just let me go to class 9, please!!!


Image Courtesy: Google Images

A waaallpaper!

Heh. As if it's something new. A black-and-white mess made in Photoshop. Don't ask me how it happened. I don't remember.

KFC in Durgapur

It opened nearing the end of 2010, as a part of the still unopened Durgapur Junction mall at the heart of the bustling City Centre, the most modernized part of the city. It's only yesterday that I found time to visit it. Of course I had been yearning for a visit : a world-famous name had arrived at a stone's throw from my home. I looked around, and I whatever I saw was nothing special for an international brand in a shopping mall. Witty slogans, an LCD screen running ads, snazzy menu displays and employee tees, and a grinning photo under 'Chef of the Day'.
But once I tasted the food, I realized well enough why KFC was the fast food religion of many people. It even managed to convert as staunch a fast food sceptic as my mother. We tasted the new Popcorn Chicken and also some crispy Chicken; we opted for a takeaway and didn't eat until we got home, or else I'd have ordered more. For the next visit I'm planning to buy the juicy traditional recipe and a burger or two. And maybe a few of their desserts. I have no words in praise of KFC's food except:

Wallpaper 21

A wallpaper made in Photoshop by using a combination of three special-effect brushes and several brush modes and colours.