Amusing

My Internet connection was down for most of the week. The Tata Indicom guys got it working again today morning (finally!), but just as I opened up Gmail and Yahoo! to check my mails there was a power cut. It was time for lunch anyway so I shut down the computer and went to the dining room to eat. I start to eat and the power comes back! Lazy to go back to the computer, I switch on the TV. I randomly surf channels for a while till suddenly the transmission goes! How frustrating the day has been so far! I won't bore you with more of that though, since that's not what I wanted to talk about in this post.

[Note: The stuff below was written a few days ago. I dated back the post to make things easier to understand.]

I was glancing through the Deccan Chronicle (yes, the paper with less news, more gossip) yesterday and I came across some amusing bits of news -

My School is Haunted

Yeah! The St. Patrick's lane is apparently one of the city's spooky sites haunted with ghosts. Here's an excerpt -

"On full moon nights we can hear owls hooting and dogs howling. When I take my dog out for a walk on such nights, his hair stands on end and he starts howling, which is very unusual. In fact, many friends have seen women in white hanging from trees when they drive from there at nights."

Whoever wrote that must be imagining things. I studied there for 12 years and have passed by that lane at night a number of times. I can tell you there are no ghosts there.

Kerala Police Crack the Code

At the end of the email threat to kill the PM, there was this so-called cryptic inscription -

F/26/04JUL1980/UnM/BTECH/TMEC/ENGG/21.129.98.160/IP/686609

You probably figured out what most of it means by now, but the Kerala police "could not make head or tail of the inscription. [snip] Sleuths of the special team led by DIG Padmakumar racked their brains to decode each letter. The cyber forensic squad and experts from Microsoft gave them tips."

So finally after all the effort which "would have got a congratulatory nod from Dan Brown", this is what they got -

F: Female
26: Age
04JUL1980: Date of birth
UnM: Unmarried
BTECH and ENGG: Engineering
TMEC: Trikkakkara Model Engg. College
21.129.98.160/IP: Relate to Wipro and Info Park in Kochi
686609: Pincode of Mevaloor in Kottayamz

They manged to track down the woman, who promptly told the cops about the email threats from her former lover, Akbar Raj. He was picked up in a couple of hours. If he wanted to get caught, he could have simplified things and just given his own details, no?

I probably won't post for a while (ok, like as if I've been posting regularly all this time) because semester exams are coming up soon. You might see an occasional post if I'm terribly bored though.

Oh and Karthik, you might want to have a look at this. So much for preservation, eh?