Alright....... finally one of the longest days of my life is about to come to an end!! I've been moved to this new shift in the office starting 4:30 to 13:30. Its 12:10 as I type this and I feel that I've been sitting here since Hum Aapke Hai Kaun hit the theaters....I don't know how the world outside would have transformed, it would be like Tom Hanks in Cast Away returning from an isolated island to the civilized world after years.Now this is a UK call center I work for, so the timings in terms of London are 11 pm to 8 am.So, there are no calls since all sane people in London are asleep and those unlucky people who are not would be working in an unfortunate shift like I am.Most of the Internet websites are blocked here, so the only productive thing I did today at work was to figure out a way to crack the security wall and access the websites and hence the Blog post!Well, since its noon now and people who are from the world of "Normal Timings" have started to come to work, I can hear human sounds again. Its feels good knowing that ever since I logged in the language hasn't changed much and its disappointing to realize that girls still believe in the fashion of covering themselves with fabric.
Someday my friend...... Someday!!!
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Monday, December 21, 2009
Enlightened!!
I don't why but seems to me that maturity is one of the the most immature topics to talk about, I mean only a guy with the least amount of maturity will have issues with it and keep posting blogs on it. So as per my track record, it seems that I am not a mature person. But the thing that amazes me is that how people have different concepts of what being a matured person is. Now, as per me a matured person is any person who does his work well, and when I say work I just don't mean the office work, even the work at home. Now it does not matter what his/her attitude it towards the work as long as the work is done well and done on time its cool. But, one of the people I know Mr. S is not of the same opinion as per him, maturity lies in the way a person behaves in front of people, so if he goes around cracking jokes and behaving casually he is not matured. You know what the funny part is until now I thought what Mr. S said did not make sense but as I type it, it shines up on me that he was right... now who would take me seriously if I did not act serious... ohh... I feel enlightened Thus the conclusion being that its not only enough that you be serious at work, you also need to portray it to others that you are serious towards your work and if you can just manage to do the latter without doing the formal, then you're the man!!!
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Never End
Is anyone tired of Portal-inspired games about some faceless dude stuck in a sterile laboratory environment full of death traps yet? I know I'm not! Here's another one, comin' atcha! Never End is the ungainly title of this new platform/puzzler from Chinese developer Zlong Games. It may remind you of the Shift series in some not-so-subtle ways, but this game earns its keep with some great atmospheric touches and clever level design.
You control a smoothly animated silhouette of a man who is trapped in the middle of a giant maze full of spikes and shifting blocks. Move left and right with the [arrow keys], and jump with [up]. Now, you wouldn't be a very good lab rat if you didn't have some kind of experimental physics-warping super-power, would you? In this case, it's the ability to alter gravity by rotating the entire room 90 degrees at a time. Do this with the [Z] and [X] keys (sorry QWERTZ users, Asia is unsympathetic to your plight). Your penultimate goal is to find a way to one of the four exits on the outskirts of the overhead map. Your ultimate goal, if you want to wring maximum value from the game, is to escape through all four of those exits in turn, locate all the hidden clues, and uncover the greater secret behind the mysterious structure that confines you.
Most of the puzzles revolve (ha!) around the rotation technique. You'll nearly always be sharing a room with at least one heavy, oddly-shaped block, which must be manipulated using your gravity-altering powers to clear a path for you. Thus, Never End plays much like one of those abstract block-shifting puzzles, except here the blocks can smoosh you flat if you're not paying attention. It's like a big, complicated, deadly game of Tetris.
In a welcome twist (ha ha!) for an online puzzle game (although Shift 3 dabbled with this idea as well), all the rooms are physically connected. A map in the upper right side of your screen keeps track of which areas you've visited, and whenever you exit a room, you'll get a glimpse of the over-arching blueprint of the maze. Many puzzles have multiple exits, some of which can be impossible to reach unless you enter the room from the correct direction. This kind of multi-layered puzzle design makes Never End feel like a complete, intentional experience, rather than a mere list of puzzles that just stops when the designers run out of ideas.
Analysis: First, let's talk about the controls. They're not great. The jumping scheme follows in the footsteps of classic puzzle-heavy platform games like Prince of Persia and Flashback, where every jump had to be tackled in a specific way; but the main character's movement here is too fiddly to be comfortable. In the beginning I spent a lot of time conking my head on the bottom of blocks, when I meant to be pulling myself up onto them. The key is to start a few steps away and run into every jump, even when common sense would tell you to simply stand under the ledge and jump straight up. The standing jump is almost useless in this game. You generally need some momentum.
You control a smoothly animated silhouette of a man who is trapped in the middle of a giant maze full of spikes and shifting blocks. Move left and right with the [arrow keys], and jump with [up]. Now, you wouldn't be a very good lab rat if you didn't have some kind of experimental physics-warping super-power, would you? In this case, it's the ability to alter gravity by rotating the entire room 90 degrees at a time. Do this with the [Z] and [X] keys (sorry QWERTZ users, Asia is unsympathetic to your plight). Your penultimate goal is to find a way to one of the four exits on the outskirts of the overhead map. Your ultimate goal, if you want to wring maximum value from the game, is to escape through all four of those exits in turn, locate all the hidden clues, and uncover the greater secret behind the mysterious structure that confines you.
Most of the puzzles revolve (ha!) around the rotation technique. You'll nearly always be sharing a room with at least one heavy, oddly-shaped block, which must be manipulated using your gravity-altering powers to clear a path for you. Thus, Never End plays much like one of those abstract block-shifting puzzles, except here the blocks can smoosh you flat if you're not paying attention. It's like a big, complicated, deadly game of Tetris.
In a welcome twist (ha ha!) for an online puzzle game (although Shift 3 dabbled with this idea as well), all the rooms are physically connected. A map in the upper right side of your screen keeps track of which areas you've visited, and whenever you exit a room, you'll get a glimpse of the over-arching blueprint of the maze. Many puzzles have multiple exits, some of which can be impossible to reach unless you enter the room from the correct direction. This kind of multi-layered puzzle design makes Never End feel like a complete, intentional experience, rather than a mere list of puzzles that just stops when the designers run out of ideas.
Analysis: First, let's talk about the controls. They're not great. The jumping scheme follows in the footsteps of classic puzzle-heavy platform games like Prince of Persia and Flashback, where every jump had to be tackled in a specific way; but the main character's movement here is too fiddly to be comfortable. In the beginning I spent a lot of time conking my head on the bottom of blocks, when I meant to be pulling myself up onto them. The key is to start a few steps away and run into every jump, even when common sense would tell you to simply stand under the ledge and jump straight up. The standing jump is almost useless in this game. You generally need some momentum.
Once you learn how to physically get around, though, this game really becomes rewarding. The puzzles require a lot of careful thought and creativity to solve, even though there is usually just one solution. You don't really have a lot of room to experiment, since rotating the room all willy-nilly will usually get you squashed or dump you onto a bed of spikes, so you have to consider each move before you make it.
The flip (oh ho ho!) side of the deliberate puzzle design is the slow pacing. It would be nice just to rip through a room like Usain Bolt* once in a while, but unless you've basically memorized all the necessary moves, you just can't. That, plus the occasional backtracking, plus the gawky controls, means your gratification may be somewhat delayed. It's like when your blind date shows up wearing braces, but then turns out to be a trained masseuse. Which totally happened to me the other day. Back in 'Nam, don'cha know.
Anyhoooooo, what really sold me on Never End, and transitioned me through that awkward phase of the relationship, was the sound design. Half the time, it's nothing but windy groaning noises and mechanical creaks, as though you're stuck inside a vast metal structure of some kind. Which, in case you haven't been paying attention, you are. The sounds do more to describe your environment than the spartan, monochromatic graphics do. When the music finally cuts in, it plays more to your total isolation than to any sort of comfort, and it doesn't stay long before the mournful howling floods back in. There does seem to be a little hiccup where the sound clip repeats, but it doesn't hurt the overall effect too much. I also want to acknowledge the nice, solid whump the giant blocks make when they fall, accompanied by plumes of rising dust. Those suckers look heavy.
It's probably best to ignore the zany cartoons that open and close the adventure. They seem to have been crafted by a different, more light-hearted creative team. They looked at this lonely, nihilistic game and said "This is too much of a downer. We're hitting the main guy with a truck, and then he falls down a manhole. We're basing the sound effects on Looney Tunes. Deal with it."
Before we wrap this up, indulge me a moment. I suppose it's inevitable, when a game is as widely played and loved as Portal, that nothing bearing the slightest resemblance to it can exist without conjuring up references to Valve's little meisterwerk. Nowadays, it seems like you can't make a game featuring talking computers, laboratories, death traps, anonymous protagonists, physics, or humor without some totally cutting-edge wag letting us know that "the cake is a lie" as fast as his pudgy fingers can type it. That's fine, but let's just briefly remember that Valve didn't actually invent any of that stuff. Homicidal computers go back at least to HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey; death traps to James Bond movies and countless comic book super-villains; anonymous heroes to the beginning of time; physics to Sir Isaac Newton; and humor to the day I finally worked up the courage to ask my best friend to the junior prom and she said "No." Oh how we laughed. Moreover, I think it's safe to say that Portal would not exist if not for the gloriously geeky 1997 math/horror film Cube, which really set the standard for this sort of thing. In fact, Never End bears more than a passing resemblance to Cube, what with the giant shifting geometric underground building and all, so from now on, let's keep the Portal comparisons to a minimum.
Oh wait. Turns out there's a big fat obvious Portal reference in it after all. Sigh, never mind. Play Never End.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
The Boss Swap
"I hate my boss" it’s like a universal fact isn’t it.
It's like someone saying that the earth is round or the sun rises from the east.
I know nobody who likes his boss; why go far I don’t think even my boss likes his boss.
Although, my hatred for my boss took a dramatic change this Thursday.
Now I have 2 close friends in my office, one of them is in my department, I secretly call him "2X" because of the speed of his speech, now since 2X is in my department he is under the same boss as I am and the other friend, "The Robot" that guy feels nothing, no hunger, no cold, no heat.
"Robot" is in another department under another boss.
Now, this Thursday Me, 2X and Robot had got the tickets for the movie "Chandni Chowk to China" which was supposed to start at 6 in the evening, a comfortable time for all 3 of us since the office gets over by 4.
Everything on that day was just like any other day,
- My Boss was disappointed at me.
- I cared a damn.
- And 2X was at his maximum speed about everything.
Now my boss had left early from the office that day, so at 3:30 M5 came into my office.
(M5 is Robot’s boss, name explained later)
Now M5 comes and asks me to prepare and exhaustive report about the company sales over the past 6 months.
“There goes my movie” I thought to myself.
I asked Robot and 2X to proceed, hoping that I would be done by 6 and would meet them directly at the theatre.
But M5 had different plans, he made me sit till 7:30 in the office, making me change the excel file again and again.
And finally at 7:30 he released me saying
“Rehne do, mai khud hi karlunga”
He must have really done something very good in his previous life, or else I would have had a Gun in my hand.
And that how I decided to name him M5
“Made Me Miss My Movie”.
Anyways, Robot and 2X saw the movie and gave the review that that it was totally crap
“Totally Crap??? Try M5, you’ll know what’s totally crap” I thought.
So ever since Thursday I have this new found respect for my boss and I thanked God that M5 wasn’t my boss, I feel sorry for Robot though.
So, the whole experience wasn’t bad at all, it made me realize that you boss may not be good but he is not the worst, so be thankful and I didn’t have to watch CC2C.
Life is not bad and I hope Robot gets a new boss.
It's like someone saying that the earth is round or the sun rises from the east.
I know nobody who likes his boss; why go far I don’t think even my boss likes his boss.
Although, my hatred for my boss took a dramatic change this Thursday.
Now I have 2 close friends in my office, one of them is in my department, I secretly call him "2X" because of the speed of his speech, now since 2X is in my department he is under the same boss as I am and the other friend, "The Robot" that guy feels nothing, no hunger, no cold, no heat.
"Robot" is in another department under another boss.
Now, this Thursday Me, 2X and Robot had got the tickets for the movie "Chandni Chowk to China" which was supposed to start at 6 in the evening, a comfortable time for all 3 of us since the office gets over by 4.
Everything on that day was just like any other day,
- My Boss was disappointed at me.
- I cared a damn.
- And 2X was at his maximum speed about everything.
Now my boss had left early from the office that day, so at 3:30 M5 came into my office.
(M5 is Robot’s boss, name explained later)
Now M5 comes and asks me to prepare and exhaustive report about the company sales over the past 6 months.
“There goes my movie” I thought to myself.
I asked Robot and 2X to proceed, hoping that I would be done by 6 and would meet them directly at the theatre.
But M5 had different plans, he made me sit till 7:30 in the office, making me change the excel file again and again.
And finally at 7:30 he released me saying
“Rehne do, mai khud hi karlunga”
He must have really done something very good in his previous life, or else I would have had a Gun in my hand.
And that how I decided to name him M5
“Made Me Miss My Movie”.
Anyways, Robot and 2X saw the movie and gave the review that that it was totally crap
“Totally Crap??? Try M5, you’ll know what’s totally crap” I thought.
So ever since Thursday I have this new found respect for my boss and I thanked God that M5 wasn’t my boss, I feel sorry for Robot though.
So, the whole experience wasn’t bad at all, it made me realize that you boss may not be good but he is not the worst, so be thankful and I didn’t have to watch CC2C.
Life is not bad and I hope Robot gets a new boss.
Monday, January 5, 2009
Reponsibility...
Responsibility... I don't know if I understand the term completely or not, I mean I think I am responsible but then most of the people don't. (Although this is not the only topic where others differ from me). For me, responsibility is more of a term which calls for itself, as in I am sure if the need arises, I'll priortize what to be done, how it's to be done and shall act accordingly but then if there is no need for it, why do it??
Alright, let's take a situation now. I am an extremely forgetful person, forgetful to the extent that I have a note on my cupboard reminding me to drink water, clean my room etc. let's assume there is another guy called 'Pillow' (it's right in front of me, which is why) so now Mr. Pillow remembers everything and does everything on time. So would you call Mr. Pillow responsible and me non-responsible. I wouldn't, not because pillows aren't alive but because I know I forget which is why I put a note as a reminder, now isn't that responsible.
Second issue, I purchase what I like without considering if it's worth it. Most people, sorry all the people also categorize this as being irreponsible, and since everybody's opinion is the same I assume they are right, but my question is if I work and earn enough money to do all my duties (pay my bills, send money home etc) and I still have money to spare, why can't I buy something that'll make me happy, why should I settle for less when I can afford the better one if not the best!!!Nopes, everyone wants me to save waiting for a situation to come to use that money!! What if that situation never comes, what if I can arrange money at that time if I don't have it.
You know, I know exactly what my problem is, it is that I don't see a problem in the way I interpret things. God help me, I don't think anyone else can.
Alright, let's take a situation now. I am an extremely forgetful person, forgetful to the extent that I have a note on my cupboard reminding me to drink water, clean my room etc. let's assume there is another guy called 'Pillow' (it's right in front of me, which is why) so now Mr. Pillow remembers everything and does everything on time. So would you call Mr. Pillow responsible and me non-responsible. I wouldn't, not because pillows aren't alive but because I know I forget which is why I put a note as a reminder, now isn't that responsible.
Second issue, I purchase what I like without considering if it's worth it. Most people, sorry all the people also categorize this as being irreponsible, and since everybody's opinion is the same I assume they are right, but my question is if I work and earn enough money to do all my duties (pay my bills, send money home etc) and I still have money to spare, why can't I buy something that'll make me happy, why should I settle for less when I can afford the better one if not the best!!!Nopes, everyone wants me to save waiting for a situation to come to use that money!! What if that situation never comes, what if I can arrange money at that time if I don't have it.
You know, I know exactly what my problem is, it is that I don't see a problem in the way I interpret things. God help me, I don't think anyone else can.
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