Category: Stuff that doesn’t fit

Stuff that doesn’t fit in any category, or leftover posts from the big category revolution of 2009.

Poha [en]

Poha is the delicious breakfast Nisha made for me this morning. I’m going to write down all her recipes… As you have understood, I’m safe and sound in Pune, after a totally uneventful journey (take away the rickshawallah on departure who tried to get an extra 10Rs off me, and the same on arrival).

Even if the circumstances seem to make it a worthwhile cause, please do not initiate or propagate email petitions. And while we’re at it, snopes has collected for you a whole page of rumors following the terrorist attack.

Read, get informed, and be wiser, good people!

Monkeys [en]

Yesterday, I was watching monkeys running about in one of the hotel buildings, when I heard a nasty yowl and saw a commotion. One of the monkeys had caught the cat I had spotted roaming around the area earlier – and the cat wasn’t happy about it. It escaped. The monkeys went after it a little, and gave up.

Yesterday too, Anne-Marie was nipped and scratched on the arm by a monkey on Ram Jhoola. Superficial bleeding – but still. The day before that, a monkey had been trying to open her door (it had got in before and ate some bananas).

A few days back, a monkey on Laxman Jhoola caught Archana’s dupatta and playfully pulled on it when it realized she was afraid.

A day after our arrival in the hotel, a monkey came running in the corridor of our building. Florence set off to take a picture, and as she was approaching the animal, aiming with her camera, it bared its teeth and made a fierce jump at her. She retreated into the room pretty quickly.

I don’t remember the monkeys being so aggressive two years ago. Are they suffering from overpopulation?

Internet Cafés [en]

IUCAA, 15 August 01

Before going shopping today (a torture for a shopaholic like me who has a credit card but enough saris and indian stuff to last her a long time), I went down to FC Road to find an Internet Café where I could type down these notes in peace and communicate with the rest of the world.

Cyberia, the Internet Café in which I spent a great many hours during the initial phase of my first stay here, is no more. I recall that they were about to move when I left town. After a lot of hunting around, I tracked down the present office. The closed door which greeted me gave no indication that an Internet Café was still part of their business plan (if anything was left of it at all).

Having tested two Internet Cafés during the afternoon, I daresay that Cyberia is no small loss to me. The people were friendly, technically competent, and above all, each computer booth came with plenty of keyboard and elbow room. All the places I saw this afternoon – and I saw many which I did not enter – seem to have adopted the cramped-cubicle-with-keyboard-in-drawer system. For somebody like me who enjoys resting elbows on table for a comfortable typing position, it is a complete disaster. Add to that my persistent tendinitis, which pokes a sore head out whenever I am sloppy in handling the mouse or attacking the keyboard, and you’ll get an idea how uncomfortable I was.

Keyboard Stories [en]

To make things worse (as it always happens in this country…) they all seem to have standardized on a 101 key keyboard. Sounds like a lot of keys to hit, doesn’t it? Actually, it is short of one to keep me happy, especially when I mark up as I type. But now, before I let you know which is this magic missing key, I have to provide you with a little digression.

If you don’t know how to touchtype (or perform anything near it) and have never marked up HTML by hand, you might not understand all of what is coming. Don’t worry – it’s pretty futile stuff, though it might hopefully be funny for those who have shared similar experiences.

Have any of you touchtypers out there ever experienced the joy of finding yourself in a country which uses a keyboard layout different from yours? It’s absolutely maddening. It is back to square one, or worse. You just can’t type. Chances are that you will quickly figure out how to install your native keyboard – that is, providing you didn’t already know how to do it.

With a year spent in India, regular trips to the UK, and enough excursions into “raw DOS” (understand: with the factory default keyboard settings) on broken or misbehaving computers, I have gained a fair knowledge of the English (US and British) keyboard. The mapping isn’t that different from the French (swiss) one (which is, while I’m at it, radically different from the standard French AZERTY keyboard, which requires a “shift” key to access the numerals), although most of the punctuation keys are scattered about in wierd places.

The main problem with these English keyboards is that they don’t give access to all the pretty accented characters one uses in French. And having to type ´ and à all the time simply makes me want to scream (especially on a keyboard where I fumble a bit when it comes to “non-letters”). All this to say that if I need to type in French (other than chat and email, which can survive without the accents), the first thing I do when I sit at my “workplace” is install my beloved French (swiss) keyboard.

And now, as you have had the patience to follow me through this geek-talk, I will tell you which key disappears in the void when you install a 102 key French (swiss) keyboard on a machine which depends on 101 little plastic caps for your input. I warn you, however, that non-geeks may not fully appreciate the revelation. So be it.

The missing key is the one which enables to type “<” and “>”. (Note for non-geeks: these two characters are indispensable for writing any HTML tag – locate the “view source” command in your browser to see it with your own eyes.)

With this information in hand, you can imagine how much I miss my Cyberia, and how much I hope that I will find an adequate workplace in Rishikesh. All the more as my typing has trouble keeping up with my writing, which in turn has trouble keeping up with my life and thoughts. None of which really matters as my site is still unavailable.

Arrival [en]

IUCAA, 14 August 01

The journey to Pune was rather uneventful – which is good. Bombay, seen by night from the rainy sky, consists of patches of blurred flickering orange lights. Landing there has something to do with entering the uncharted territories: all the rules our world goes by are abandoned behind in the plane, and one is left alone to face India.

Nevertheless, I was very satisfied to find myself immediately at home. No stress, no worries (even when we had to change busses because there were only four people travelling to Pune). It was as if I had never left the country.

Going through the arrival section of Bombay International Airport for the second time in my life, I was capable of understanding how this place had managed to paralyze me two years ago. Not only is it very Indian – it is actually “nasty Indian”. Not pretty for the least, unfinished, frightening. As if they had done it on purpose to scare the poor first-time foreigners out of their wits.

It was nice arriving in IUCAA and seeing Nisha and Shinde. I had a nap in my comfortable (by indian standards, of course, but I can appreciate that) hostel room, and was woken up by a shrieking telephone at the very worst moment possible of my sleep.

You know – that moment where sleep is deep, in which some loud persistent sound rips unconsciousness open and sees you stagger across the room to the source of the disturbance, completely disoriented, not knowing where you are and what language you are supposed to be speaking. Then follows the half-awake nausea which grumbles deep inside: “This is too hard, I was better in the land of dreams, let me escape reality for just a little longer…”

IUCAA without most of the people I know is starting to hit me. I keep expecting to bump into all these people who used to live here 18 months ago. No Aleika, no Taramai, no Bagha, no Suketu… It-s a bit spooky, and I’m not sure I like it.

Monsoon never makes things any better either – it’s simply dreary.

Worm-virus: Sircam [en]

Sircam is rated high-risk right now. It will spread by email using addresses from Windows’ address books, attaching a random file from the “My Documents” folder. Yes, I’m sure you all want your private files circulating around the Internet! It also does more nasty stuff, and I adamantly suggest that you read some first-hand information to protect yourself (and your friends).

[link from Zeldman]

Moved [en]

Every now and again, I bump into something on the web that moves me.

Noah Grey: Circumstances [link: staticred]

A couple of months back, there was Lance Arthur’s very last life serial.

Today is the Gay Pride in Sion. You make the links.

Net-awareness [en]

Do you know that at this very moment, hackers could be using your computer to launch an attack upon a server? Well, before reading this very interesting article (thanks for the link, Ben), I didn’t. And I can promise you that upon reading it, I ran a few simple checks which luckily (*phew!*) were negative.

I heartily recommend that you spend the time necessary to read the article – and if you’re lost in the technicalities, go straight down to the bottom to find out how to check that your windoze machine isn’t carrying a zombie…

Kaycee [en]

Pour ceux d’entre vous qui s’y intéressent, un article en français tout à  fait correct est sorti il y a quelques temps. Soyez sûrs de lire mes commentaires dans la partie “discussion”!