Friday, December 29, 2006

Q3 Nostalgia

I recently found my Quake III installation CD ROM while cleaning up and organizing the huge pile of CD ROMs in my room! Suddenly I was hit by a nostalgic feeling of missing all the fun me and my friends used to have in college lab while playing Death matches and CTF(Capture the flag) missions in Quake III when we were in our final semester of Engineering!




The game play used to go on for hours! We used to take small 5 second breaks by either by pressing Alt+Tab or by turning off the monitors when the lab managers/instructors or even our lecturers came around!

Best of such situations, One fine day, we were playing Quake in the laboratory in the last row of computers, me along with 3 of my friends 2 per team. The whole lab was vacant. We were half way through the game and suddenly the Head of our Department showed up in the laboratory and headed towards us! All of us managed to somehow switch off the monitors before he came to the last row! He had a doubtful expression like what we did in the last row when the whole lab was vacant! For our lucky fortune, each of us had a pile of documents related to the projects we were doing and we reasoned out that we were sitting together and discussing about the implementation of the project since the lab was vacant ;)

Then came along like bullets, a series of questions related to the project! All my friends looked at me with a scared expression on their faces and they all relaxed and smiled when I answered those questions at the same pace not giving him a moment to doubt, for we still had quake running on the systems with only monitors turned off! Finally, he probably felt our reasons and my answers were reasonable, he wished us all the best in achieving the goal we set for ourselves on the project and left the place.

We were very fortunate not to have speakers on any of the systems in the lab, else we would have been probably thrown out of lab and the lab manager would have checked upon us every time we were in the lab!

Everything rolled over my thoughts in a moment! College days were the last when i played Quake death matches and Need For Speed races! We even used to have contests in the college fest for these games!




The last contest in which I played, we had Quake with the Afterwards 2 mod. Afterwards mod is the best Quake mod I have played till date! We generally used to play for a limit of 100 frags with over 12 people running around the Arena! We had sometimes even played for 200 frags!

Quake has been the most addictive gave I have played ever! I was fully into gaming till i was in college and have played all sorts of computer games, the very first game I was hooked onto was Wolfenstein 3D which is probably the great grandfather of Quake, and one of the best FPS games of its time! I was so addicted to the game that at a point of time, I had around 80 mods of Wolfenstein! Some other games which were of my interest are Roadrash, Need For Speed and the whole of the Age of Empires series!




Now I wonder if I will ever play Quake 3 death matches with my same gang of friends over a network! I guess dream is finally turning into reality as one of my friends is setting up a computer training center and I have suggested him a Quake death match challenge between us friends for the inauguration ceremony of the center! ;)

Frag 'em!

Monday, December 18, 2006

A bit relieved from work...

Finally i feel i am a bit relieved from work! With a release scheduled around the corner in a couple of weeks, development has been brought to still and bug fixing happens only for very very severe bugs!

All these days, my whole work schedule was upset! Used to get in and out of office at timings which seemed very odd when compared with my regular work schedule...

Unfortunately once i even ran out of fuel in a place where there was no petrol available anywhere around 5km radius, and to make things worse and make me feel even bad, it was on a Friday night at 12:35 PM (I know all of you out there who are Software Engineers would definitely understand why i felt bad about this). I will write about this incident in another post since it is a separate story by itself and can span pages!

I am very happy that finally i am getting some time to sleep in the normal sleep hours!

Now i am trying hard to get back to my regular work schedule which should be easy since still we are in a bit of what i call relaxed mode of software development.

Remembered a quote from one of my friend's email signature... it brought a smile on my face now :)

Work Like a dog, Exercise like a demon, Party like a rock star!

Saturday, December 16, 2006

A Phenomenon called YAARI

Social Networking Rocks!

Here's an excerpt from a comment i left on the blog of a social networking site called Yaari

Social networks will become an inseparable part of people who are hooked onto internet, as of now, the net is drawing more and more people towards it… People will definitely get in once they start recognizing the awesome power and usefulness of social networks (for example, i started orkutting more after i got in touch with school friends with whom i had lost contact for past 8 years)…

Yaari is a new entrant in the whole plethora of social networking sites out there! None of these sites were interesting to me after i came across ORKUT! But Yaari is a different story! I am hooked to Yaari since the time i joined, It has cool fresh look and feel with vibrant colors and guess what, The interface is done in AJAX! Rearranging page elements is as easy as it can get!

Will write more on Yaari sometime later... try it hands on!

So long gone...

Damn! it has been 2 months since i forgot i had a blog! All off a sudden today i remembered that i had a blog and i have not posted on it for the past 2 months...

Work's been keeping me away from all other stuff from past 2 months... Hope i will have time to breathe and write blogs sometime soon!