deferred live

9830503234 :: Ari – Richard Wright is no more !!! He died on 15th sept after a short struggle with cancer… he was 65

9831190761 :: Ki bolchis?! You sure?

“In the welter of arguments about who or what was Pink Floyd, Rick’s enormous input was frequently forgotten.” I see him staring at me from the wall.^{from my wall}

9830503234 :: without richard there wouldnt hv bn any pf. I feel broken inside. And in the remaining yrs the others will pass by.. its only a lifetime.

9831190761 :: Let’s turn on the Echoes.

9830503234 :: W.H. Auden porechis.. “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,..” toke pathalam

9831190761 :: “Thank you for your music”. Not “Can i have your autograph?”

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Exception To The Rule was published partly on September 19, 2008 in timesonline.co.uk

Those were the days of miracle and wonder. The days of simple worries and harmless lies. The days of bliss, though not of the ignorant kind. Maybe not bliss, because didn’t even know that emotion then. And was so good for me and I am sure so good for all the other kids in class IV at Don Bosco Park Circus school.

Goddamn, well I declare have you seen the like?
Their walls are built of cannonballs,
Their motto is don’t tread on me ^{Uncle John’s Band}

I am sure I have. Plenty of them. Once the ISC was over, first in bits and then in torrents. And now I see them every where, the omnipresent vermin, and I pine for a piper.

Think this through with me,
let me know your mind,
Oh, what I want to know,
is are you kind?

I really don’t know. And I really do not like the cynic me. I try. I read. I stay awake late into night.

The existence of these pages are just for the self’s roll-back eventuality. One day when I will not be able to remember the fairy tale, I will come back to these lines. And I will sleep to the tune of my piper, who died young.

I live in a silver mine and I call it Beggar’s Tomb;
I got me a violin and I beg you call the tune,
Anybody’s choice, I can hear your voice.
Whoa-oh, what I want to know,
how does the song go?

I heard a phone call me from Paris. And it was my own piper, on my 36th birth day. Will it ever turn out to be the call to follow her? Probably not.

Come hear Uncle John’s Band by the riverside,
Got some things to talk about here beside the rising tide.
Come hear Uncle John’s Band playing to the tide.
Come on along or go alone
He’s come to take his children home.

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The Pied Piper of Hamelin

Is when the recipe is a sure shot headway to truth and uncomfortable numb. I am talking about Chrome Dreams, and the Chrome browser, and the irrelevant connections between these and Beat movement and the formation of a new DIN.

---

---

Now for some clarification for self posterity.

Chrome is the beta released by Google.
Chrome Dreams II is the album by Neil Young.
Beat is what was lived by Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, Ken Kesey, and their ilk.
DIN is what is shown as the mouse over.

So did India ever had a Beat movement going? Are you kidding me? One Ms Protima Bedi burning her bra and some retarded JNU ‘unthink tank’ do not make a Beat. I should be ashamed even to broach this up and explain to all and sundry. Ok, so that out of the way, time to try to recollect the chrome dreams.

To me it is the best possible kind of dream. A dream which is not obscenely camouflaged with the unreality of things, and a dream that is more close to the nightmares of real life than real life itself. Ok, maybe this is one contorted definition, but hey. This is my muse! :-)

I slept (sleep) some extreme sleeps, now and then. The intent remains not to wake, but since not-to-wake requires extreme courage and conviction, every time it gives in to awakenings. The chrome dreams are dreamt in those periods of trying not-to-wake and the catching on desperately to slumber. Slumber as in ethereal sleep. Beautiful, pure sleep. The thoughts that pass along the mind and the heart at those moments are what make up the chrome dreams.

So much for definitions. Now for the obscure correlation. I was Delhi for the DIN , I was having the Beat talk in Delhi, I had multiple chrome dreams after I came back, I got to know about Google’s new browser after I came out of my dreams.

And is it surprising that the browser is called Chrome? Blows my mind :-) and makes me stay awake another night so to prepare me for another bout of chromes. Woooohaaaaa!

Is when you refused to get uninstalled. I am talking about Windows Media Player 11.0

I had to uninstall five … seven … eleven … 13 (not reiterating my favourite primes) times, to get good riddance.

1) Windows Media Player 11
2) Windows Media Format Runtime 11
3) Hotfix for Windows Media Format 11 SDK (KB 929399)
4) Software update for Windows Media Player 11 (KB 936782)
5) Software update for Windows Media Player 11 (KB 911564)
6) Software update for Windows Media Player 10 (KB 936782)
7) Software update for Windows Media Player 10 (KB 917734)
8) Software update for Windows Media Player 6.4 (KB 925398)

And then each time, with every uninstall, I was threatened. Firefox, VLC, Media Coder, et all may not work after this uninstall. VLC? Media Coder? All awesome open source applications who are light years away from any dependencies on a Microsoft .dll. And Firefox? It will not work if it does not find Media Player! Wow.

Ok, so it was not thirteen times. It was eight. But sure felt like a bad infinity.

[Edit:: 9th November 2008, 20:44]
I was not playing the Shine On You Crazy Diamond when I was writing this. Only later it dawned on me the lines, “Well you wore out your welcome with random precision, rode on the steel breeze.” Two completely different interpretations of wearing out the welcome. One the banal of the worst kind, the other sublime and surreal of the saddest order.

I got rid of Outlook at office, and was able to insert the tao in the Thunderbird signature. I wanted the same at my home laptop too. When I opened ari-signature.html in wordpad {yes, the OS is still Windows :( }, I somehow did not like the look of the font face tag. So I went checking.

I found font face was all right, but then saw the possibility of @font-face. As told by this website:

A potentially useful feature of CSS3 is the @font-face rule, which allows the developer to specify a font for the page that may not already be on the client’s system. Until now, most web sites have been developed with a small list of ‘web safe’ fonts – tahoma, verdana, etc, which are native to most operating systems.

@font-face will allow the browser to download a font for rendering the page; a link is given to either a remote site or a folder on the local site which the browser will access, download, install and render, so the site can be viewed in the way the designer desired.

For example:
@font-face { font-family: 'The New Font'; src: url('http://www.example.net/newfont/'); }
Will access an external site to download the required font.

Wow! So it means that our (Ani and I) nightmare with Hindi fonts could have been done without? Hmmmm. So I had to read more. But then, as almost always, I digressed. But as almost always, the digression was worth it. I came across another great article in a list apart. And it lead me to Prince.

Prince.

And there I found another reason to trash Microsoft . On 11th April 2008, or there about, I was fumbling with my justifications for Firefox. I don’t need to mumble now. IE does not pass the acid2 test. And it fails by a nautical mile. I am talking about IE version 6.0.2900.2180.xpsp_sp2_rtm.040803-2158 (just to be technical, and not taking chances).

While at Prince I came to know about SIL. It was earlier known as Summer Institute of Linguistics. And the fact that they produce beautiful fonts like Gentium, a typeface for the nations. I also managed to browse through the SVG flags at Commons, and all this time being mesmerized by Prince.

Well I don’t really recall how I went tap tap tapping, it must have been some reference for the site’s usage of @font-face. Won’t be tapping soon, unless I get the iPhone.

An awesome pdf generator, funda about @font-face, the possibility of fontier-less web, another reason to trash Microsoft , and the knowledge about another great NGO. That’s what I get for digressing. I will take it.