The Review That Has Been Accepted!

Yeayyy! I feel so ecstatic and joyful! My review has been accepted. Looks like it wasn't submitted at all, at the beginning...thanks to the crappy internet connection I am using at office. Here's a link:

http://www.gamefaqs.com/computer/doswin/review/R82419.html

If you care and have time, I hope you will read it...whoever you may be! I also achieved legend status in Gamefaqs, which is like a silly dream come true. I could've written these things in my other blog, but hey, this is nothing but personal blabbering. Guess what? Someone mailed me, commenting on a specific liner I have written here.

My life is changing every day. Sometimes I fail to plan, which means I plan to fail. lol...this line is revolving around my mind for quite some time. I heard this from General Alexander (no she is not a guy...she's a woman!) in Command and Conquer Generals: Zero Hour.

Today was a great day for BD cricket. Ashraful hit another century against India!

I wrote the above lines a long time ago! I guess I should post this here now, before it gets too backdated. A few days after this, BD won their 100th oneday against India.

The Review That Has Been Submitted!

Hmm....i just found out that the review I have submitted to gamefaqs got missing :
Now this is really strange. But I'm glad that I managed to submit it again (yeah I wrote it using MS Word). My first 4 reviews were written online, using the gamefaqs editor, which has no online spellchecker, and or text editing tools. I was planning to post the review here, but let's see whether it gets published or not. If it gets published, I will just put up a link here.

My boss came to office today, decorated by a luscious dressup! I wonder why.....anyways, I should be having better things to do.

I stopped writing my other blog, putting up an excuse that I don't have much time. But I have already started missing writing there....it was a different type of blogging. Oh well...all good things must end after some time.

Today is my day of relaxing away. I'm sure my recent activities have created some misconceptions, and some people will misjudge me for what I have done, and will do. But does it really matter? After all, it's not my personal life that will get affected. Hmm....can I say that strongly? I don't know...let's see what the future has in store for me.

My lunch was too heavy, and I had it a bit early today. It was beef khichuri, brought from home. Lol...this reminds me of my childhood diary, where most of my entries got flooded with the descriptions of what I ate that day.

Food, toys, games, arcades, chatting, browsing, forums....these things were always part of my life, and they still are. I still check out toys, whenever I go shopping :$

Damn....my whole life is getting disorganized. My PC has gone nuts, the home one! The monitor goes blank and the PC stops responding.

Damned life!

Lessons Learnt Today

1. No matter how friendly you try to behave, some people will always offload their anger and frustration over you.
2. There will always be successful people, who will brag a lot.
3. People who offload their frustration over you, might not necessarily be bad people, and you may not be able to hate them, which is an irony!

Thinking :

A New Week

Last Friday, I wrote a draft entry which I just erased and started writing again. Today is Sunday, the first day of the week. It is quite natural that an individual will feel demotivated to go to office, after the weekends. However, I had mixed emotions when I arrived at office today. My home net connection is giving me a lot of trouble, for the last one week or so. I haven't felt it's absence that much, as I have internet access from my workplace. Moreover, I got my new graphics card in order to hook myself up. But yesterday was different. I was at home, all day long, and after a point of time, I was really bored. I have a number of good games installed, but for some reason, I was not feeling like playing any of'em. I played Call of Duty, Medal of Honor Allied Assault, C&C Generals: Zero Hour, Fifa 2005, etc. I did enjoy playing those games, but I'd like to see more games. I am eagerly waiting for "LOTR: Battle for Middle Earth", which will be released tomorrow. This will be an RTS game, using the C&C Generals engine. From the reviews I have read, the game will be an RTS fan's heaven. Even if the campaign sux, hopefully I will be able to derive pleasure from the skirmish game. There is, infact an RTS game based on the LOTR trilogy; but that game is soooooo bad that I uninstalled it just after playing a skirmish game for 10-15 minutes. The graphics is ancient, and the gameplay is archaic. By the way, ancient and archaic are synonymous :p

Just came back from visiting www.wwe.com. WWE used to be one of my passions. I remember, when WWE was WWF, there was only one show per week. Nowadays we have Raw and Smackdown in Monday and Tuesday, and both shows have different rosters. But in WWF, Raw and Smacdown was actually the same show, with the same roster, and these shows were aired on alternate weeks. Every 4 weeks, there would be a PPV (Pay Per View) event, where all the titles were put on the line, through several gimmick matches. Anyways, I became a WWF fan just because of Undertaker. My IRC nickname, Dead_Man_Rollin is dedicated to the dead man himself. Back in the 90s, 3 of my cousins were really crazy about wrestling. They would not miss a single match. I liked watching wrestling, but I never regretted missing a show; nor did I check the TV schedule for WWF shows. But one day I saw undertaker single handedly demolishing a 3 man tag team. Both the partners of Taker were exhausted and beaten up mercilessly, Throughout the match, undertaker was standing silently. Atlast, when he was tagged in, he beat up all three guys, and pinned all of them using his signature pin (the darkness pin)--crossing two hands of the opponent on the lap and pressing his own hands on the opponent. After that, I became a taker fan, and started following WWF more enthusiastically.

My relationship with wrestling roots back even farther. My dad used to watch wrestling when Andre The Giant, Hulk Hogan, Jake The Snake Roberts, Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka, etc. individuals were at the peak of their careers. Now my dad denies that he used to enjoy wrestling, and was a fan, stating that "I didn't have anything else to do". This logic has some truth in it. This was the time when we lived in KSA. The male group of the small Bangali community of Dammam was pretty much hooked into wrestling. My dad claims that the group was responsible for making him watch the shows. Now in what context did this come up from? Well, when I first started seeing WWF regularly, my dad was indifferent.

Getting back to a previous link, when WWF was aired once a week, there would be a delayed transmission on Thursday. The show started at 8:30 PM, and went upto 9:30 PM. Ironically, at around 9 PM, a show called "Amanaat" was shown on Zee TV. Now my mom (later on, my dad, too) really liked this show, and there was no way for me to make her miss any episode. So what happened is, that I ended up missing the main event, and most interesting matches which would take place between that valuable 30 minute. And all this time, my dad would be absent from the scenario, because he stayed in his home office in the evenings. I used to listen to songs and study in the evenings. This wouldn't have happened if my dad stayed home in the evening. Looking back at those times, I now realize that I was quite afraid of my dad at that time. Maybe I'm still afraid of him, and maybe the level of fear has intensified, too. But why? Things changed a lot when my dad experienced his 2nd stroke. When was that? In 2002, as far as I remember. No, no..don't look at me like that! I had nothing to do with his stroke(s).

This Friday sucked badly...had to come to office twice, and though I enjoyed the pizza @ office (brought from Pizza Hut), it was actually detrimental for my health and obese body. The only good thing about the day was having a chat session with my abroad living chat friend T. It's been a while since I talked to her. Our friendship is funny and peculiar, and it's always fun talking to her. And whatta coincidence, she just logged in to msn. Later on, she called me in the evening and we talked for a while on random topics. And she got signed out just after 2 messages (one from me, and one from her).

Yesterday I received a phone call from Stormy bhai. He is in town now, and I am really looking forward to meeting him. He took a lot of phone numbers from me, and he sought an advice from me regarding the purchase of a mobile phone. In order to give him the best of judgment, I had to play a treachorous role and I suggested an Aktel connections :$

The fact is, our organization doesn't give the users a low cost solution towards TNT connectivity; not untill now. This is sad and unfortunate, but this is the reality.

After Ten Sports arrived, we got the opportunity of viewing WWE again. There was a year long interruption, as Star Sports decided to stop showing WWF. They started showing WCW instead, but it also stopped when WWF acquired the rights to WCW.

This time around, my dad stopped going downstairs, and he spent his evenings watching TV instead. So I had to fight for a piece of the whole TV watching Pie, where there were a number of strong competitors. Dad wants to watch sports (excluding WWE), mom and sis wants to watch hindi programs, etc.

I got 18 people online, in my MSN, but I don't seem to have anything to say to anyone. Isn't it weird? Not really.

Oh, one point to note. I don't really like people who have too many mood swings. To be more precise, even if I like someone, I don't like it when he or she has a lot of mood swings. An otherwise respectable/adorable person may turn ugly, when her or she has less control over his or her mood. And too much subtlety isn't good for anything.

So when I started watching WWE from 5:30 to 7:30 PM on Mondays and Tuesdays, I had to face a lot of problem. Moreover, the PPV events would go up to 8:30, which annoyed my other family members a lot. The automatic solution to this arrived, when I started going to HSBC for my internship. I'd arrive at around 6:30 due to immense traffic jam, and most of the time I was too tired and exhausted to gain the share of the pie. And not surprisingly, no one ever offered me a free show; that is, I would always have to ask for it. Okay, that's a lesson. No one will give you things unless you ask for them or gain them yourself.

Since I joined GP, things got even more difficult for me. Now I arrive at 8 PM....at times. Anyways to cut a long story short, I don't feel like watching WWE that much, nowadays. Once again, the point has been proven. Out of sight, out of mind.

But does this theory remains applicable, for people who never came within sight? Hehe....I won't elaborate. I don't wish to. Maybe some other time.

I miss AG a lot. I miss my AG, blog, too. It was quite different from the one I am writing here. Let's hope AG will be back again.

Signing off, till the next time.

Bye N Tc.

Looking Back: Part 2

I worked my ass off yesterday, and that's why I am workless today :-

I wonder why this place doesn't have smileys and or emoticons. Instead of writing "with happiness and a smile in my face, I say, today has been a great day", we can write:

Today has been a great day :-) :-D

I think smileys will become an integral part of our writing, in the near feature. Describing a simple emotion, like anger becomes a challenging task, when I am writing. But usage of a simple :@ can make things way easier.

Another year passes by, or to be more precise, will pass by after 29 days. This year, I was intensely involved with two online forums, www.amadergaan.com/forum and www.gamefaqs.com

I had about 6,500 plus posts in AG and I have 342 Karma in gamefaqs. Gamefaqs gives out 1 karma for each "active day". That is, if I publish at least one post in a given day, I will be awarded a karma point. As Karma points get accumulated, people get more privileges, like no posting restrictions, different staus, like "legend", "veteran", etc. The place is not that much interactive, but I love posting there, and I found a lot of cool links and information from there. I also wrote six reviews for gamefaqs, of which 1 got denied and 1 is still in pending status. My lates review is on Fifa 2005, and I am quite hopeful about it. I might as well submit this review for the "Review of The Month Contest".

I miss my writer days, and that's why I try to revive it every now and then by writing in forums. Look at my huge blog entries....I know nobody's reading, but yet I am writing volume just because I love writing.

The first guy who reviewed a writing of mine was really enthusiastic about my writing capabilities. Later on, he went as far as stating that I can become a writer like "Anisul Haque", and I can write goddo cartoons. That was an article written in Bangla.

Thanks Faheem bhai :-D

I will keep on writing!

Looking Back At Year 2004: Part 1

One of the good things about my job is that I get two holidays a week, Friday and Saturday. I don't really consider Friday as a holiday, because there are almost always some engagementin Fridays...either someone is getting married, or I need to meet some friends, or have to go to some family program, etc. Saturday is truly a holiday, when I have full freedom to sleep upto 12 PM, as well as to hang out with friends all day long. On Fridays, my dad stays at home, and he creates a fuss in order to wake me up before 9 AM. Every Friday morning begins with a quarrel. Whereas I see no point in rising early, every other member of the family considers it a honored duty to rise early! Strangely enough, in the rest 5 days of the week, I am the one who wakes up earliest, and I'm the one who leaves home long before my dad gets up from bed.

Are you an orkut user? I am one, and I am not very happy with the service quality. Google is a trusted brand name, and I expect better service from anything Google. Till now, I have used the google search engine, gmail service and orkut. I have been a long time google fan. Thanks to my ICT aware uncle, I got to know about google quite early. In those times, people would use yahoo, excite, altavista, lycos, etc. several search engines, and none of them were fast and accurate. Then came google, bringing a welcome change in our lives. It was a blessing for people like us, who were using slow dialup connections, back in year 2000. While yahoo search 2 minutes to display the results, google took only 15-20 seconds, and results were as accurate as any other search engine's.

But orkut is disappointing. It has some nice features, maybe too many of them, but the implementation is poor. One can create thousands of communities, using the same name. If we consider communities as Chat rooms/Message board, some critical options are missing. There's no way of adding moderators, and there's no way to edit posts--you can only delete them.

"Bad, bad server...no donut for you"

That's the message that is displayed, whenever orkut can't show something which you wanted to see. This is frustrating, and such occurences are more than regular. I used to hang out a lot in Amadergaan.com. But now that the site is not available, I think I will visit orkut more frequently. But I do hope AG gets back soon. Infact, I am playing a small part in a humble effort to bring back AG. Let's pray for the best for everyone concerned.

The last month of the year has started and it is making me a bit excited. Every year, I have some special things to look back at. Let's make a short list:

1998: Passed outta NDC and got admitted in IBA (almost at the end of the year)
1999: Got my PC and started chatting in Mirc
2000: My grandmother died
2001: Became Dead_Man_Rollin for the first time, I met an IRC pal in real life, got in to NSU
2002: Year of extreme ghura ghuri and addabaji, plus a lot of study
2003: Year of recovery--got my arse back in to studies. Scored a 3.75 and ended my uni life in Summer 2003. Did my internship from HSBC, applied for a job in GP, and got it.

November 6, 2003- now

My non-student life goes on. This year, I spent a lot of money in eating, treating and buying stuff. I haven't saved much. I upgraded my PC, with a lot of new gadgets.

I started my internship in HSBC in June 2003. Although most people managed to get internships as soon as they finished their courses, I relied on our career services department, and decided not to take any initiative on my own. That was a mistake, and I quickly discovered myself to be "one of the few guys and gals who haven't started thier internships yet". It was a very frustrating time, perhaps one of the worst times of my life. I was confused, my parents were angry and confused. I was always confident that my cgpa was adequate enough to earn me a respectable internship, but the job description I received from One Bank was really disappointing. I decided not to take up that job. I gave an interview in Scholastica Group, mainly a merchandising entity. They are the guys who hold the rights to importing Matell products, as well as Harry Potter books and a number of other expensive items. They operate the shop ETC., situated besides Pizza hut in gulshan. The place was good, I mean, the people looked smart and friendly, and the boss was quite impressive, inspite of being an Indian. The idea of having an Indian boss pissed me off, to a great extent. But I had to accept the reality. Indians are good, and they are better businessmen than most of us.

I had to sit for a number of tests. I was the first person to pursue the organization for an internship. They were treating me as a potential employee, which was nice. I had to give a typing speed test, an English grammar test, two interviews and one final interview! One woman took an interview, where she asked one question in English, and another in Bangla, and I had to switch between the two languages which was fun.

The distribution manager (the Indian guy) said "I will now have a meeting with my people. You can wait and watch it, and afterwards I'll interview you." The meeting was amusing, and funny. His speech was very close to being a pre-game pep-talk. We will have to sell this amount, if a person wants needles, we can import them too--the product is not important, the quantity is.

That's when I found out that these guys were trying to establish a supply chain for imported stationary items in different offices. They also talked about books, toys, etc. I really wanted to get in to Matell distribution. Hot Wheels is a name which always makes me emotional. I had many hot wheels cars in my childhood. I used to play a lot using those cars. I spent my childhood in an aloof manner. There wasn't too many boys of my age around, and I spent most of my time at home, playing with toys. Oh, I'm going off topic, I'll shed more light on this later on.

After the meeting, the Indian guy asked me whether I am ready to join here, or not. It was actually a job offer, whereby I'd spend 3 months here as an intern, and then get in full time. I just said I'll recheck with my faculty advisor and let ya know.

Surprisingly, the very next day I received a call from HSBC bank that I had been selected for internship there. I will have to sit for an interview, and if I like the job, I will be taken. Sigh....rest is history. A bitter history, to be more precise. I opted for HSBC and my 3 months stay in there was damn painful.

I'll write more later.

Coffee and Caffeine

For unknown reasons, I'm feeling cheerful and happy from the morning. It's a Wednesday, and still one more day left for the week to end. I received a bad news in the morning...my beloved site amadergaan.com has been shut down for indefinite period. Here's what I see:

the end

After serving about a million of visitors from all over the world for the last two and half years, we are forced to shut down (indefinitely) due to lack of finances. We were struggling to meet the server bills for quite some time and donations were few & far between. So we decided to close the server until we are able to find a permanent financial source and have a steady flow of donations to run the server. We don't see this as setback and we don't want all our visitors to think that this is the end of AG. We hope to return soon, sooner than anyone expects and your support would go a long way. If you have information/ideas about possible financial source(s), please do contact us. You can donate to AG via Paypal as well (use the link below). Donations would help us to restart the server and site soon. We would really appreciate your support.If you do not have a Paypal account and would still like to contribute contact us for more payment option.We will be back. Count On us.

I don't want to spend my blogging time talking on AG, and ruining the good mood I am in, so rather not talk about it.

I slept late yesterday (to be more precise, today). When the contact between my head and the pillow finally got established, it was 1:40 AM. The evening was different, to some extent. I came home at around 7:15 PM. Usually I take some snacks and sit in front of the PC and do the usual bit, i.e. listening to songs, playing games, browsing, posting in forums, blogging and chatting on msn. But yesterday I was so tired and exhausted, that I had my snacks and went to bed. I was listening to "Toss The Feathers" by Corrs, a wonderful instrumental. Then came my dad, and destroyed my mood by sitting in front of the PC. I was running Windows XP, and AutoCAD is installed in my other OS, Win ME. He restarted the PC and started working. This has been happening for quite some time...."The Battle for PC". My dad's weapon here being "I am working...you only play and spend useless time in internet". This is one argument which I cannot counter, cause it's true. But you know what? After spending 8-10 busy and dynamic hours at Office, listening to some good music, and all the other stuff I have mentioned earlier is probably the best thing I can do.

All this crap, coming from a 24 year old chap might sound pathetic. There are people, who always say that my parents don't want to acknowledge the fact that I have grown up. They still try to control the individual, who now has more than 1 years full time job experience in the toughest department of one of the toughest organizations of Bangladesh. He is responsible for approximately 1 million subscribers (me and Nafiz bhai runs the prepaid product development team, which is responsible for the 2 million plus prepaid subs of GP) and he is yet to fail an assignment.

Just came across a funny condom AD....it says:

"To all those who use our comeptitor's products: Happy Father's Day"

Kinda raw, yet funny.

Back to morning...it's only 9:30 AM, and the day has just began. Yeah, you can see that I don't have much to do this morning. The last 3 days were really hectic, and I had to accomplish some mammoth tasks. The problem with my boss is, she will expect the best output without giving adequate time. And sometimes, she'd ask for analyses, for which we need data. Without good data, how is it possible for us to provide concrete analytical findings?

Enough grudging about my job. I am not actially disappointed with my job. Something is better than nothing, and I get paid quite well. I entered this organization without any full time working experience. I did, however, have some part-time work experience. However, I never imagined that those experiences would help me in any way, when I applied here using their online job application system (www.bdjobs.com/gp). Strangely enough, I was asked many questions regarding my journalist(!) life during my interview. I had a lot of fun writing for Computer Times and Shaptahik 2000.

When I was a kid, I used to maintain a personal diary. But I quit writing when I found out that the I can't actually write the things that I wanted to write. As an example, one day I wanted to write about that flirting session me and my cousin had with the girl next house. Her's and our's home is divided by a wall, which belongs to them. Me and my cousin was playing badminton (as far as I remember), and she was watching us play. After so many years (that was in year 1990 O guess), I don't remember the whole incident, but we had some discussions, and we kind of become good friends. She'd always watch us play, and we'd occasionaly stop playing and chat with her. Times changed...she got restricted inside, we grew up, found the arcades and deserted the playgrounds....the cruelty of the world. She was always around, but I didn't have much conversations with her. My cousin was always interested in her, and he ended up getting her number and doing a lot more. I was quite surprised to discover her in NSU, again in year 2001. I talked to her after at least 7-8 years.

I got two bosses, and both are outta station today. My colleague tries to act bossy at times, cause he's the senior. But in paper, he has the same rank as mine. But I, too, like to make him feel special by always acting as the harmless junior. He is a hard working guy, and he gets less than he deserves, and vice versa. Didn't understand? Well he gets less money and more flak. The same goes for me as well....:s

I can keep on writing forever, but I don't wish to. I had 99 posts in my amadergaan blog (in almost 3 months) so you can see that I'm a talkative guy.

Let's finish this entry here. If I don't have much to do today, I might take up the keyboard again. In yesteryears, writers use to take up the pen...nowadays we take up the keyboard...lol...cool evolution, right?

Joe Satriani, Marty Friedman.....listening to'em right now.

bye n tc..