Swatantra Jeevan

Robin n Looza has always been one of my favourite Nepali bands. Despite some of their lyrics not making any sense like their song Nepal, which is somewhat hazy especially in the chorus where they go like ‘Nepal, Nepal – mero gulaf ko kada’. Maybe it has a deeper side i need to look into. Besides ‘Jawaf’, i really like their song ‘Swatantra Jeevan’ which means ‘Free (as in Freedom) Life’. Robin n Looza has always had somewhat mildly revolutionary attitude on their relevant songs. This one’s one of them which empathizes the public sentiments churned in the political turmoil and false hopes. The song’s pretty straightforward,

Swatantra Jeevan

Robin n’ Looza

hawa ko saas ma mero mann dubiranchha
thachha malai timro dukha
risau bhane mero mann dukhna thalchha
hirkam bhane ma hari janchhu

neta bhanera timile daura suruwal launchhau
ke dekhchhau timro aaina ma
kath ma dhunga le mero sharir bhanchna sakchha
tara mardaina yo jeevan, yo swatantra jeevan

timro bata ma kei lina mandina
samasya chhaina mero jindagi ma
chodinchhu timilai ma mero aakash ko tara
mero mann ko maya

timilai maile ke bhanna sakdina
thaha chha aafno bani byahura
ekchin ko lagi timile sochyau bhane
dekhla mero jeevan, yo swatantra jeevan

hawa ko saas ma mero mann dulna thalchha
thachha malai timro dukha
risau bhane mero mann dukhna thalchha
hirkam bhane ma hari janchhu

neta bhanera timile daura suruwal launchhau
ke dekhchhau timro aaina ma
kath ma dhunga le mero sharir bhanchna sakchha
tara mardaina yo jeevan, yo swatantra jeevan

The translation goes like this:

My breath is sinking with the wind,
I can feel your pain,
It hurts if i get angry,
I’ll lose if i fight

You wear a ‘daura suruwal’ as a leader
What do you see in your mirror
My body shall survive on woods n rocks
But my life will nor perish, this free life

I dont want anything from you
I dont have any problems in my life
I shall leave my stars from the skies to you
the love of my life

I cannot call blame you either
For I know my habits quite well
If you think for a while
You might see my life, my free life

This song is pretty well suited to the Nepal right now because exposed to the false hopes time and again by the political leaders, people have lost faith in the government and the positive changes. Moreover, the habits and the mentality of the general public have also unfortunately tuned to survive with the country. Hence there in the song, he goes like “I cannot blame you either, For i know my habits quite well”. Its sad sitting here thousands of miles away from home commenting as an observer. But its even pitiful to see those who try and get pulverized.

Losing weight

All through high school, i weighed 78kgs. Being six feet tall, and weighing as much made me looked somewhat like a malnourished ostrich. Losing weight was never a thought that struck me then, even in my wildest dreams. After my undergrad, my weight rose upto 82. But it was still okay by my standards. I looked pretty lean. As for everyone of my age then, i used to go to the gym to build some muscles, do some workouts and try and remain fit. I used to walk a lot everyday which tuned my weight in balance. The horror struck when i joined the software company. It was a small company, about eighty of us worked in a large hall; project manager sitting inside his glass cubicle from where he could ‘keep an eye’ on everyone. It was a sendentary job programming modules and writing codes. The only time when you could leave your chair was for the coffee and smoke breaks. Those too came with implicit timers and every second extra owed you more work on the desk. I commuted to work on public transport, and to make it simpler, the bus stop was just five minute walk from where i lived. Till then, for me dieting was something that only lame people especially of feminine gender did to make themselves look extra special and have a topic to talk amongst their peers. A year and a half passed. I put on five more kgs, which wasn’t that bad either. Then i came to the states.

It was a different experience for me here at the states. Every fast food you ordered came with either chicken or cheese and in most cases – both. The first year was really enjoyable. The fat-rich savory food pleased to my palates till the last bite as i munched on from pizzas to burgers to subs and whole range of intercontinental dishes. It’d been a year for my flatmate when we (me and my girlfriend) arrived here, so he was a bit calorie conscious but never a spoil sport. Though he had gained some weight, he never said no to a beer. The merry-making for a year, caused me to gain some ‘muffin-tops’ and a slight pot belly; in his case he acquired an acquired an outright huge belly – maybe i could put it as a cauldron belly? Then came sunny.

Sunny was our another flatmate; male by gender. His name’s a little misleading here in the states, i’ve seen that look in many girls at many different places and comments like “Sunny? Your name is Sunny?” “Awesome”. Well anyway, he’s got a barbaric look and a matching body. He doesn’t have much height but he does have a broad build. For half a semester, we were rejoicing as in the past but at one point of time, everybody realized their sluggishness and started working out. We started by doing beach body exercises from DVD’s. It really did cost a lot of determination and perseverance. Two things which i have in a limited amount, but we did try our best. Since i was teaching this semester and the workload started growing heavy on me, i decided to take a break. My girlfriend too, tried to concentrate on her work. Sunny on the other hand had comparatively a lesser workload so he continued on the mission of losing weight.

He was a real brute. He consumed 1200 calories and burnt 800 calories. I don’t know how he survived it but he lost about 20 lbs. He was like an inspiration to all three of us. So we started dieting too. Consuming less carbs and working out more. I lost about 3 lbs. It was nice to see all that but in the meantime, somewhere it felt that i was getting weak. I thought i was imagining things. So one day i burned about 500 lbs on the treadmill, came home had a light snack and went to bed. Then came pain.

Next morning, i was feeling weak. My thyroid hurt everytime i swallowed anything  at all and i was having a mild headache. So much for trying to lose weight, i cursed within but that wasn’t alleviating my pain. I suffered the whole day. Being sick is the worst thing that could happen here at the states since there’s no one to look after you. Luckily since i was a weekend, my girlfriend was there to boil some hot water, make some tea and cook some food. I feasted without hesitation that day. I didn’t care about calories or my weight. I just ate. Next day, it felt that some of my strength had returned. I wasn’t feeling all that good but it didn’t feel bad either. Then onwards, i decided to go slow. Losing weight is really painful especially if you try to do it overnight, but if feel if you target it over a large span of time – i think i should be fun.

Installing Snort on Centos made simple

If you’re using Centos 5 and you need to install Snort on it, and if you’re not a Centos user like me (I like Ubuntu better) then chances are you might come across these really annoying instances – at times so furstrating that you’d want to smash the box on the wall. Here’s how to keep it simple.

Before installing Snort, make sure you have all the right “tools”. If you’re unsure of what you need, visit Snort.org and check out the requirements. Few other things besides the ones mentioned there that you will be needing is flex and bison. (which is the newer version of lex/yacc). Thats the easier part, here comes the annoyances:

Annoyance 1:
While installing the daq for snort, it might say that libpap is not found as shown below.

checking for pcap_lib_version… checking for pcap_lib_version in -lpcap… yes
checking for libpcap version >= “1.0.0″… no

To overcome this, go to tcpdump.org and download libpcap version 1.0.0, not the latest one i.e, 1.1.1. Now if you have already installed 1.1.1, get to the directory and do a make uninstall. untar the 1.0.0 file and do the usual thing, i.e.

./configure
make
make install

trying doing a configure for daq once more, this should do the trick.

Annoyance 2
ldaq-static not found… but we just installed daq right? what went wrong? the reason for this message is that the path has not yet been added to the linker. To over come this, do a

gedit /etc/ld.so.conf.d/daq.conf

inside the gedit, type out the path where the daq was installed to, it will be something like

/usr/local/lib/daq

Close the file and then do a ldconfig -v | grep daq

you should see some output with daq

Now get back to your snort folder and proceed with the installation. It should work out without any more hassles.

Installing Dell 1710n driver in Linux

This tutorial is for Ubuntu (and I’m using WindowsXP to obtain the ppd file), but i’m sure it’ll work on other distributions as well. There aren’t many Dell printer drivers in Ubuntu by default so you’ll need a ppd file to do that. You can create the ppd file all by yourself with the instructions below (since i could not upload it here).
Steps to create the ppd file (In Windows)

• You can download the driver here
• It will most probably be an exe file so either you can extract (though its and exe file, its just a self extracting file) it using wine or by logging into windows machine
• Next, goto the location where you installed the file it will most probably be C:\dell\printer\Drivers\Print\Win_2KXP\ENGLISH\ and find the file DKAAY1P2.PP_
• Open a command window, navigate to that directory and then do expand DKAAY1P2.PP_ dkaay1p2.ppd

Steps to install the ppd file in Ubuntu

• Boot into Linux and navigate to System >> Administration >> Printing
• Click on Add, and when a window pops up, click on Network Printer
• Hopefully your printer is in the list (else check the networking, or if its a http printer then provide URI)
• Select the printer and click Forward
• It will search for new drivers (it may take some time)
• Click on provide PPD file and navigate to where you have the ppd file stored
• Your printer is now installed, you can test by printing a test page

This tutorial does not cover the driver installation of Xerox workstations or other such office-based printers. Nevertheless, this generic approach could be applied to other printer drivers as well.

New York trip

Last friday i flew to New York. I’d heard stories about the place – mostly amazing. The view of the cit y from the small double glazed window of the Boeing 737 was awesome. The empire state building stood proudly there with all the other tall skyscrapers. My plane landed at eight in the evening. Even though the temperature had soared above eighty five degrees, it seemed a lot more pleasant as compared to atlanta. After such a long time i was pleased to see Sandesh (Than-than) at the airport. We took a bus and then a metro and walked a few blocks to reach his apartment. I wasn’t surprised with the bus, which resembled MARTA which exited from the airport station. The number of people reminded me of Atlanta but the diverse race of people in the bus was something to see. The metro station wasn’t in such a ‘clean’ state and the metro made a lot of noise when it travelled. I enjoyed the walking the most since the area had a warm appeal. His apartment was in Ashtoria, Queens. The houses were small in height built next to each other and the whole community had a greek themed architecture. In short, it looked amazing. People stitting on the stairs outside their homes, talking to neighbors, teens skateboarding, if you’ve seen the movie New York waiting, its exactly what it looked like. You could feel it. That night we went to Jackson Heights for the dinner in a Nepali restaurant called Himalayan Yak. Friday night, mongoloid facecuts, nepali music in the air really reminded me of Thamel. The nostalgia was overwhelming, postitively. The food was good, khukuri rum tasted like home and the guy playing the guitar happped to be my senior in the vollege. We shot some pics, recorded some vids and we were off.

Day I was the most interesting of all. The sun brightly shone up in the sky as if to greet us, no clouds. We rode metro to Central park, which was, as well like in the movie. Lots of people doing lots of things. Good number of girls getting tanned in the sun. People playing football, freezbies, guitars and more. Then walking on, we reached Time Square. Time square was something else. Lots of people and billboards, billboards and more billboards. Colorful, and vibrant. To top the fun, there were a lot of fairs taking place in the city. I didn’t find anything interesting though but it was fun to stroll around the city. Tiring as well. The daylife was great. Lots of things to see and lots of places to relax from the hustle. After returning to the apartment we rested for a while and then we head for the party a friend of than than was throwing. It was in a bar, too crowded, and not much room to chill. After meeing a few of his co-workers there and being introduced as a tourist from atlanta, we got out of that place and then head to another bar. It wasnt a bar actually, somewhere between a club and a bar where you could drink n dance – plus no cover charge. The place was filled with hot girls with short skirts – mostly white. After grooving for a while, we came out of Fat Baby that was the name of the place. We were planning to return home and then, on the way we met than than’s former roommate. He invited us to the bar in inside a hotel. The bar, on the seventh floor, had somewhat a decent crowd and a nice balcony from where you could see new york from a higher altitude. It was amazing.

Day II: Watching the world cup match between italy and new zealand all morning, i booked a ticket to new haven and then thats it.

There’s something special about the place, New York that makes you want to come back there. I dont know if its the daily rush or the homes or anything but there’s something about the city. Atlanta’s a great place to live, but new york is something else.