The Drunk Santa Blog

Date: 29^th June, 2008.

Things don’t really seem as they are, people are like things, they aren’t really what you think they are. I’ve learnt that the hard way. I have trusted, believed and got my back stabbed. Today, was the day I came into this world, forty years of torture and pain.

I remember this extract which my dad used to tell me when I was sixteen or so ‘One guy sitting in a bar said that life is hard, another guy sitting besides him said that it was never meant to be easy.’ When he told me that the first time, we had an argument on how life should be made easy. We ended up not talking for ten days. During those ten days, it felt so important of having this, this ego, and now it all seems petty.

Things which were so important to me, now seem to be of no value. They say that this happens when one is in love. I for one don’t believe in love. I remember telling my ex that, before I told her I loved her that is. It seems funny and maybe lame now, but I can’t really help it, sure I know that I am heartless git who doesn’t care about anyone else except myself. But that’s how the world works today. People leave their parents, I just left a girl.  I guess, I’m probably saying that to make myself feel good, but as they say in those Orbit White commercials ‘It’s working.’

Speaking of commercials I was watching the 1984 commercial that day, and you know what, I still think it’s one of the best I have ever seen. I remember working hard on that, we actually worked hard more on the commercial then on the computer. Yeah, well that’s what people say. People actually say a lot of things, specially thanks to the Internet and these Web 2.0 mashups, rumors travel at the speed of light. I’ve been hooked with girls and guys, and even Michael Jackson. But what hurts is when the people who used to like you, now hate you or well make other people hate you. As they say ‘It’s strange how people react to stuff, it’s also strange when people don’t.’

Things are what people ‘love’. A girl who used to hate you a day ago, won’t love you today unless you have money. Money is power, it can make people lick your feet and also various other parts of your body. My dad always said that only money minded people think like that, but every person is indirectly money minded. I am not ashamed to admit it, but people are. If I was taking up a job, I would take up a job in the company which would pay me the most, even if I a day ago hated that company. I just have a questionable nature, I guess.

I don’t cut a cake with my family and friends on my birthday, I don’t get gifts from the people I invite to my party. Heck, I don’t even have a party, since I was a child, I was told not to waste money and spend it wisely, I remember cutting a slice of bread, because my dad well, didn’t get me a cake. I mean you know somewhere deep inside you always know that one day you will have to leave the small town to be something, It was the same for me, I just didn’t belong, I was an outcast in my own eyes, it felt pretty bad.

My dad, who had actually adopted me, gave me a hundred dollars when I left home at the age of seventeen. A hundred dollars, was like a huge thing back then, I remember going around and telling my friends about it. People said that I should face the world and be with the guy who had adopted me, I didn’t have a problem with that, I just didn’t want people judging me, about everything. In the big city, I knew that wouldn’t be a problem. I knew I could be anyone I wanted, I knew I could do whatever I wanted, without having to answer anyone. I kinda missed the normal teenage things which most people wish they missed. People say that I was the lucky one who got away, but getting away wasn’t as easy as it sounds. People say they miss the good old days, I say I don’t really miss the hardships and the bread with onions and ketchup part.

Sometimes when you have a family, you hate them, and when you don’t you miss them, It’s strange how life is. Some people get what others want but not what they don’t want, like me, I always wanted a family, I always wanted to get rid of the home-sickness feeling I always had bottled up inside me, but I didn’t. ‘Maybe that’s all that family really is, a group of people who all miss the same imaginary place.’

People say I am not original as I quote other people a lot. It’s actually that sometimes quotes can make it easy for people to express themselves, I am not expressive, I am mostly expressionless too. So, quotations really help people like me, but well people are always right, I really wish sometimes that I could think like them.

Some think they understand me, others say I need to get myself checked. But whenever I go on the stage and take out a new device from my Levi’s people applaud and scream, the board of directors actually had asked me to retire and rest with my near and dear ones for the rest of my life. I obviously refused that offer. That stage was and remains to be everything for me. It’s where I have expressions, it’s where I am like ‘the rest of them.’

Note : This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. My inspiration is the life of Steve and Jobs, my own life and the people around me. Oh and I’m still open to suggestions for the name of this character.

Yet another unscripted podcast. We cover the inflation, Mozilla Firefox 3 - Download Day, Hybrid cars, Shiv ki Sena, Sikhs being sick and loads of other things. Another record breaking length for the poopcast at around ten minutes thirty seconds, listen to it. I’m joined by the editor of The Drunk Santa, Palak, who happens to be a guy. Yes, I’m serious.

This also happens to be the first ever EXPLICT poopcast, in the history of poopcastism.

Stream it HERE | Download/Stream it HERE

Date : June 9th 2008

I stood there, waving, wondering and smiling, after each sentence I spoke, they clapped, they could clap forever, I guess, I was God for them. They looked at me with those curious eyes hoping that I would point my finger at them and call them on stage with me, sadly I didn’t like people, not a particular person but just people in general, but these guys could kill themselves for me if I asked them to.

And no, I wasn’t a rockstar nor was I in some kind of heavy metal band, I was just a spokesperson for a startup company with my friend, which turned into a multi-million dollar corporation. I wasn’t really happy that day, my girlfriend had my child, and it was all over the news, she had asked for money and I didn’t give her any, maybe I was wrong, but I am not ever gonna admit that I was, out loud. I was thinking of a name for her kid when this girl screamed from the audience. She had a shrilly voice, I shook my head and looked around, and there she was, wearing a black overall and a nice black cap to go with it, she smiled, at that moment, I thought I was in love. The keyword being here being: thought.

I met her quite a number of times at some coffee shops, her name was Lilly and she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my life, yeah well that’s what I told her, she wasn’t in any way what I liked about a lady, yet it seemed that I came more close to her as the days went by. After a long year I decided that she wasn’t the one and even if she was, I didn’t want to be with the one, at this moment of the my life, not because I couldn’t handle a relationship but because of something which I’ve yet to figure out, maybe it’ll be like one of those mysteries which a man will never be able to figure out.

I started hating everything about her, the love had disappeared and it was time to accept the fact, for me, I told her everything, and she came up with a question which really made me furious rather than sad, she asked me if I was in love with someone else/dating another woman.

This all happened when I was ‘fired’ from my own startup, at that point of the time, everything around me was crashing but I still don’t think I took the wrong choice when I told her it was over. While she went around bad mouthing me, I was more busy with other things, I built up another company, and it failed, the disappointment of of that and my poor health made me take a trip to the hospital. The doctor said I won’t live a happy life. I looked at him and told him that I was happy, I lied.

I got back to what I was after a few years, and it’s been a great journey since then, my company has never seen so much success, and I have never seen so much of innovation going on, one thing I don’t see is why I am still not happy, maybe because my goals are way outta my reach, maybe my nature of wanting more just doesn’t let me acquire anything, and just maybe I had everything I ever wanted in front of me, but I never realized that it was that I desired.

Note from the author : This story if a work of fiction, however the characters described in the post do bear some similarities, to real life people who exist in the world. This story has been completed in just two days, and it’s basically a mashup, i.e - It’s a story of two different individuals [I guess you can figure out who I'm talking about here. Hint : Steve Jobs, CEO/Spokesperson of Apple and Jayesh Bhagchandani Owner of TDS.] But the two individuals have been molded into one unique character. If this post is liked by people, then I might actually post ‘The Confessions of a Spokesperson’ regularly. Btw I am working on a name for this character, so suggestions are welcome.

As Jayesh said in his last post, we are going to appeal to more people and more genres. So here it is, “The Santa Geekshop”

So you got a fresh new laptop. Spent some 60K to make it into a monster of a machine. All the Core 2 goodness coupled with multi gigs of ram and what not.

Enter Windows Vista.

Wow.

The “Aero” and (dog) “flips” amaze for the first few runs but then a question pops to mind. Why is my sweet sweet machine running as if I am running a Pentium 2 machine with 64 MBs of RAM? You suddenly realize that you may have bought a bust machine and break into a sweat. Then you decide to call up your friendly neighborhood geek and he promptly informs you “Windows = Sh*t” and “Vista = Sh*t Unleashed, get Linux/Mac”.

But we, here at The Drunk Santa, are here to inform you otherwise. Vista still blows, but you still have XP SP2. It is possibly one of the best Operating Systems ever made and we insist you buy an original copy as soon as you can. Because the Microsoft Genuine Advantage is just so very orgasmic. And because we fear karma. Maybe the roadside CD-wallah at VT/Lamington will help you in this regard. But be sure to check if its original or not. That is what counts.

Note: Beyond this point, this post will deal with how to install Windows XP on a Dell 1530 since that is what I have. Things may work with other Dell/Non Dell models. You can try if you are a bit adventurous. Links to the XP drivers have also been included.

Step 1: Backup all data in a drive other than the C: drive on your computer. Or preferably in an external drive.

Step 2: Restart. Press F2 to get into the BIOS. Follow these steps, or else the XP CD will refuse to detect your Hard Disk. (The arrow keys the tab key and the enter key are what you need to work with the BIOS. Pressing Enter on any section’s name with a “+” next to its name expands it. You will need to expand the 2nd section to get to the options mentioned below.)

2.1: Go to the section called SATA Operation and select the ATA option in place of AHCI.

2.2: Go to the Flash Cache Module section and select OFF in place of Enabled.

There are other ways around this but, well, they are more complex and I don’t really like typing all that much. You won’t really notice any difference in terms of performance, security, stability and all other such buzzwords.

Step 3: Save and Exit. Your laptop will restart now.

Step 4: Press any key when it tells you to. (You need to have the original XP disk in your drive before this.)

Step 5: Press “Enter” and keep on accepting all the nonsense.

Step 6: On the partition screen read the instructions and delete the C: drive. ONLY DELETE THE C: DRIVE IN CASE YOU HAVE BACKED UP YOUR DATA IN OTHER PARTITIONS.

Step 7: Create a new partition from the empty space created on deleting the C: drive. Its simple, you just have to read the instructions on that screen keep pressing the required keys.

Step 8: Select the freshly created C: and press Enter. Select Quick format from the list of options that appear.

Step 9: Keep pressing next, next and more nexts. When your laptop restarts, don’t “press any key” when it asks you to.

Step 10: You will get your copy of XP installed in around 30-45 minutes. ( It is pretty straightforward and umpteen guides exist for installing XP on the computer. Just google it. :) )

Step 11: Ahh. All is well but you don’t have any sound. And no Ethernet. And nothing else for that matter. Officially Dell has no XP drivers for this machine. But it does have drivers for other machines with the same parts in them. So after some research, I’ve come up with the XP drivers for XPS. 1330 users will need a different driver for their Ethernet. All the other drivers should work though.

Bluetooth Drivers
Fingerprint Drivers
Ethernet Drivers
Touchpad Drivers
Graphics (Nvidia) Drivers
Dell Quickset
Remote Control Drivers
Sound Drivers
Sys Utilities Drivers
Webcam Drivers
WiFi Drivers

Update:

Here are the chipset drivers (Will solve the “no drivers found for base system device” problem)

Chipset Drivers

These drivers are the same as those that ship in the drivers DVD. They work fine with XP too.

And so here you are! All the windows goodness with no almost no Blue Screen of Death and blazing performance. Have Fun!

Disclaimer: The author(s) do not accept any responsibility for anything that may go wrong while you try this out. Although, I have tried and tested this technique umpteen times on my own machine, there can never be any guarantees. I suggest you read the guide carefully and follow the steps exactly. Best take a printout and keep it with you if you are doing this for the first time.

It’s been a month on this domain, and we are still in business, not like real business (thanks to our readers who are lazy to click ad’s)

Anyhoo, I’d like to share our statistics and other plans.

Statistics/general Information:

• 1,071+ hits in the past one month
• Busiest day : 20th May (The day when the Skywalk post had been posted, it got 91 views!)
• We have posted 20+ posts in total so far.
• We got 244 hits in the first week, 240 in the second, 252 in the third and 222 in the fourth.
• We have a Beta versions of Podcasts out.
• We have over 7 authors.
• According to Google Analytics people spend around seven minutes reading our blog.

Future Plans:

• We plan to get Google ad-sense on our blog.
• Also, we plan to post after every 2 days no matter what, and for that we need authors.
• We plan to change the theme of the blog, soon.
• We plan to get our podcast listed in iTunes.
• We plan to appeal to more people
• We also plan to test our skills by writing stuff in different genres.
• I plan to get a custom teeshirt made.

Please note : If you want to be a part of the blog and if you can post regularly (atleast once a week) you can visit the ‘Contribute’ page or the ‘About’ page to contact us.

I am joined by Palak Parekh yet again, in the longest poopcast yet. The quality has been improved and the content well, not so much. Another random blah-blahing recorded file where we talk about stuff like the druggie cricketer, WWDC, Hillary’s campaign to be vice-president and also some weird news coming from the ‘health’ stuff, and lastly scanners which have can scan through clothes. Funsies! Oh and also ‘behind the p00p : Poopcast in the making 0.003′

Stream it from Wordpress : The Drunk Santa Poopcast #0.003 (128 bit kpbs- Wordpress)

Stream it from Archive.org in a number of formats/Download: The Drunk Santa Poopcast #0.003 (Archive.org)