Without the Wired World

It has been one of the difficult and most boring times of my life. I was isolated and totally cut off from the Internet for four whole days. Yes, you got that right, for me the geek, this was TOUGH! No Email, No instant messaging and No Web.

The reason: our ISP, Sri Lanka Telecom (SLT) has got some of their under-sea cables crashed.

SLT's statement said “the SEA ME WE III cable has been damaged about 10km away from its cable landing station at Mt Lavania. It is suspected that the damaged was caused by a ship anchoring in an anchor prohibited area. SLT has dealt with the SMW III consortium to rectify the fault as early as possible".

It was disappointing to switch on the PC, to see MSN Messenger giving up with a red crossed icon and silently going onto the system tray and ICQ also giving up after trying for about 2 whole minutes. Launching Outlook didn't get any further either; I was stuck with emails which I have already read four days back.

Now, this surprised me, I suddenly realized that I have nothing much to do with my office computer. :-( Well finally did some mailbox cleaning up, a Scandisk and a hardisk Defrag!

My usual morning experience would be:

• Switch on the PC
  
• Log on to the Network
  
• Then MSN Messenger and ICQ would go online
  
• Launch Outlook
  
• Open IE, browse to GMail
  
• Open IE window 2, goto msdn.microsoft.com
  
• Open IE Window 3, goto slashdot.org
  

Usually it takes about two hours in the morning to finish this daily "warm-up" routine and get on to doing some useful office work.

But when the 'Net is down, you have nothing much to do but sit down and wonder what to do next... offline. And suddenly Solitaire and Minesweeper makes a lot of sense.

It's a frightening experience.

Windows XP SP2 Released

Finally!

After so much "Coming Soon" messages, it's finally out. But if you plan to just update a single computer, you'd still have to wait: it's still "coming soon". The network install of SP2 is available. However this is more than 270 MB in size and it took me more than 1:40 hours to download it.

I've been running the SP2 Technical Preview for almost two months now (see my earlier blog post) and I have been really impressed and have had no issues whatsoever. I just love it when MS gives us a major OS update with a facelift.

Here are some of the Security Related icons you will see after updating to SP2. (see tooltips)

       

Great job Microsoft, I'm awaiting for Longhorn!

Game: Prince Of Persia - The Sands of Time

These days, my late nights are spent fighting my way through the evils of The Sands of Time.

The name of the game: Prince of Persia



This is the latest version of the famous "Prince" game I've used to spend a lot of time playing back in the 'ol skool DOS days. Then came the Prince of Persia 2, gave a whole new meaning to the gaming in those old days with excellent graphics and SoundBlaster sounds and music. I remember getting so much addicted to this adventure game series and playing it several times over and over again.

Back in the early 90's of the Prince 1 game, I remember it came on a 5 1/4 floppy disk and ran amazingly well on a i286 machine with 640 KB memory and a CGA 16 color graphics card with No hard disk and No mouse! The sounds were played on the internal PC speaker. (Yikes!)

Now in 2004, the all new 3D version of Prince of Persia -The Sands of Time, comes in 2 CD's and demands 1.5 GB hard disk space, 256 MB memory and a nVidea GeForce3 graphics card! Things have surely changed a lot.

I had to throw away my old GeForce2 graphics card and buy a new GeForce4 card just to play the game.

It's too hard to give up, the game is very addictive, thrilling and adventurous as always. As with the earlier games, the Prince has to survive the booby-traps and the bad-evil guys. The controls and the movements are a bit tricky and confusing due to the 3D nature of the game, but nevertheless, it's a good game. The Sands of Time has already wasted a lot of my time!