Benjys and FreeBSD

Missed almost three days … nothing much happened, though. Me and Sid went to the British Museum which turned out to be really boring. We decided to go to some other place, but Sid was tired, so we decided to go home. Then we decided to go to the Planetarium, then we decided to eat … started to look for a place called Benjy’s, couldn’t find it, instead managed to find a mosque to break our fasts. Then we did some grocery shopping from near the house, came home and I was really tired so I just went off to sleep.

The next day I decided to get a bit adventurous and install three operating systems on my PC: Windoze, Linux and FreeBSD! I ended up having to make a boot disk for linux since I couldn’t (yet) get the FreeBSD boot loader to ’see’ the linux partition. Anyways, I’ve been a FreeBSD convert for some time now. It’s much better than linux, I think.

Spent the last few hours trying to read my Distributed book .. the damn first chapter was too long! Then caught up on my emails.

Mocha and Pakoras

Yeah, today is the 23rd, and you may be wondering how I might have already lived through it! I haven’t since it’s 3:20 in the morning right now and these things I write about usually happen on the previous day.

I went to sleep yesterday after staying up all night around 10:00 in the morning. Sid was to go to his job at 12:30, so he got up and left. But he was back in about an hour or so, saying he was off for that day! So I slept until 3, and we then went out so that we could at least spend a little bit of time together roaming around London.

Bad decision. I forced him to go with me to see Euston central station, which is one of the cooler underground/British rail stations around here. Right next to that place is ‘Ambala’ which is one of the most finest Asian sweets shop I have ever seen. They have branches all over the UK, and their sweets are damn excellent! So we got Gajar ka halwa, ras malai, jalebis, pakoras and two samosas. We went back inside Euston station to eat. There are so many cafes and restaurants there, from croissant shops to Sbarro to Burger King. I took him to a place where they serve excellent Mocha (coffee with chocolate and cream). Great. Mocha with Pakoras. We are forever desis, I tell you! And we did this while sitting in the restaurant. By the way, I wanted a coke later on and we went into one of the many WHSmith outlets in the station to get one. They asked for almost ONE pound for coke!! I ran out!

Then we went to Foyles’ to get some computer books for uni. and I also bought the recently published ‘User Friendly’ comic book. It is mostly geek humour and not for people who don’t know much about computers. It has been going on daily on the internet for a long time, and was recently published due to popularity. You can go check out the daily comics on the Internet at this address. Sid is hooked. He’s been laughing all evening. I haven’t managed to read it yet!

I went back to sleep, woke up around 1:30 in the morning, right before Sid went to sleep. Anyway, enough rambling. I must get back to studying now. Tomorrow Sid is off from work so we may be able to go out to maybe one of the museums or the zoo or maybe Madame Tussauds … don’t know yet. I hope my camera still works!

Baked beans and Burgers

Well, nothing too exciting happened later on the 21st, I woke up around 16:00, just around the time that we are supposed to stop our fasting. Afterwards I took a bath and the landlord’s son came over later asking me for the rent. Told him to wait, since I’d have to go to the bank. Sid suddenly dropped in, and we both had to pay up. I wasn’t feeling very good that day for some reason. I just felt infinitely pissed at some(unknown)one for some unknown reason.

Oh yeah, I also went shopping that day, since we had absolutely nothing left in the house. All I could get was the basic burgers and fish fingers which we always seem to eat around here. There is usually no time, or we just don’t feel like cooking anything. Ate with Sid, hijacked a can of Harris’ (landlord’s son) baked beans, since we didn’t have tomato ketchup or mayonnaise or tomatoes to put on the burgers! Sid hates baked beans, but we’ve somehow gotten used to them now.

Sat up all night studying/on the internet.

First time at Foyles amid much indulgence

Well guys, looks like I finally decided to show up. It’s been a long time, and too many damned things have changed. So I’m just not going to go through everything here! As things come up, I’ll explain what needs explaining.

My christmas holidays started on Friday the 17th, and I’ve been lounging in my room since then, doing nothing but …. studying!! Actually, no … I went out for a while on Saturday, just to get something to eat. Sid was at his job, so I was home alone. Fun Fun.

I was supposed to go to college yesterday, to give a CD to a new friend I’ve made at college. Additionally, I was to go out with my Greek friend George, to look for books, and to just kill some time. I hadn’t been to ‘Foyle’s’ bookshop before, and I was amazed at how many good computer books they had. Of course that means that I’m going to be there again tomorrow, to waste some of my own money on books! I need two books anyway, for my Distributed Systems course.

After that, we found a great computer shop where they were selling used laptops dirt cheap. At the minimum, the prices were around 250 pounds, and some of the better ones were for around 600 pounds. I’m just itching for a laptop nowadays, after finding out that a lot of linux developers seem to have laptops.

Oh, I forgot to mention we went to Burger King in between! I ate a LOT, of course. I can’t stop myself at Burger King, especially after fasting all day. Then it was off to the Trocadero! That’s like, a huge six (or seven or eight) story arcade/cinema/bar/restaurant place. There are so many damn arcade games to play and they’re all really cool. Since the last time I was there they’ve added a race simulation, where you actually get to sit in a *real* sports car, and there’s a huge computer screen in front of you where you can see
the race. You need two people to sit in the car, actually, and I think you race against each other.

But George went for the F-14 simulator, the one which actually rotates all the way around, so you if you want to do a 360 degree loop, you’re gonna go with it! It looked really cool when he was playing, and of course, I chickened out. I went for my specialty instead … a big Airbus A320 simulator. This one had excellent graphics and was the first time I got to control something even remotely close to the real thing. I didn’t get a chance to land the thing, though. Next time I’ll go for the Star Wars games, which are cool as well.

OK, after that, I felt like having ice cream for some reason, and just out of luck we ran into Baskin Robbins on the way down from the escalator. I had no choice.

Then, George wanted to drink coffee, so we went to a cafe in Leceister Square. Leceister square’s cool, lots of cinemas, discos, restaurants, street acts, luna parks … basically you can run around naked here, and people probably won’t mind

After that, it was off to HMV, and then I had to leave for home. I bid farewell to George, since he was leaving the next day for Greece. Then I got on the Bakerloo line service, and came home.

Sid wasn’t home yet, and I was really tired, so basically I just slept until a few hours ago. It’s 7:00 in the morning now, and I’m going back to sleep. Later, then. Let’s see what happens today …