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This week’s theme is “texture”. I really don’t know what to shoot for it, so I’m just going to go with stuff I find that has texture of any kind.

These are two footie balls. I picked the smaller one up at the MCG where I watched a game of footie. I remember wearing an Essendon shirt and supporting them. I forget who they were playing though.

After watching the game I was totally blown away by it. It is by far one of the most fun sports I’ve watched. So I went to a sports store and picked up a full size ball. Unfortunately, I’ve never really had a chance to play it myself properly. I found these lying in the basement a few weeks ago. Sadly, I don’t have a pump to fill em up (I’m working on acquiring one).

I’ve owned a rugby ball and several American footballs, but what’s different about a footie ball is that the surface is really smooth. Not as smooth as a soccer ball, but definitely nowhere near as grippy as an american football.

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This is a collection of prehistoric, ancient, and old media that are in my room.

The records belong to my grandfather. He had many more, but these are the only ones that seem to have survived. They’re mostly old Hindi movie soundtracks, but there also a few English albums. I am told (I don’t really remember it myself) that they used to play these for me when I was a kid and that I would dance around the living room listening to the songs on these records. I must have been pretty terrible even back then. My favorites (and I do remember these) are Baby Elephant Walk and Que Sera Sera.

The floppies came a while later. In 7th grade I bought a bunch of floppies so I could get my own copy of QBasic from the computer lab. I later used them to bring home a copy of Turbo C++. This way I could spend all my lab time playing Unreal Tournament and Counter Strike. I’d do all the assignments at home, and take them back to the lab for submission on these floppies.

After that, came the CDs. I was overjoyed when I got my own CD burner. Pretty quickly, I earned the reputation of being the guy who could provide certain “items of interest” to the other kids at school. I still have most of the stuff I burned back then lying around. It’s pretty amusing to flip through the discs and read the labels.

Unfortunately Rosco is sick again. He threw up earlier this morning and as a result had to be taken to the vet. 3 injections went in, and I have to give him a tonic, an antacid and some other tablet for the next few days. Sadly, this is not an uncommon occurrence. He seems to fall sick every so often. Reminds me of when we got him as a pup. He was so weak and frail. I had to feed him milk through a baby bottle, and he was always really picky with food. He seemed to prefer chewing on my fingers and toes. Fortunately, he bounces back from this sorta thing in a couple of days.

Since that was sad, here’s a puppy photo to make you happy:

I hastily took this on my iPhone when I was on the way back from the gym today (this was probably a bad idea in Bangalore traffic). This is the front gate of what used to be the best high school in the country when I was in it. I am a proud Cottonian, and this defines me in so many ways. Not a lot of people can say that they went to a high school that’s been around for over a hundred and forty years.

I have far too many memories of this place to write about here. It’s safe to say that I had a blast here. It’s also amazing that I’m still so close to this place. I have a feeling I won’t be going too far away for too long even in the future.

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This is a late 2007 Macbook Pro. More importantly, it’s my first Mac. I think it’s safe to say that this magical machine changed my computing life in a huge way. It wasn’t my first Apple product – I had “taken over” an iPod classic that I convinved my mother to buy “for my father to listen to music on when traveling”.

I’m not really a sentimental person. I’ve never felt all that attached to anything. This is one of the very few things I own that I’m really hesitating to put down. It’s definitely too old to be useful as my primary machine. However, it had been performing alright as a file server. Unfortunately, the power brick is busted (it actually started smoking – gave me a bit of a scare) so it can’t stay on (the battery has a life of around 2 minutes). I’ve just let it lie on my spare desk for the past few weeks (hence the ridiculous amount of dust). I have grand plans to build out a proper server somewhere in the house, but I still think I’m going to go buy a power brick and try to keep this guy running for a little longer.

Here’s my computing life story – feel free to skip this, it’s long and boring. My first computer was a Compaq PC running Windows 3.1. My father had bought one for himself so that he could access his email from home. I pretty much only ever used it to scribble in mspaint. This was then upgraded to another Compaq PC that ran Windows 95. This was when I discovered Road Rash. After that I “built” my first PC. By that I mean I hired a local computer store guy to go buy the parts for me and assemble it in front of me. This ran Windows 98 for a while. By the time Windows XP came out, I was old enough to build a computer on my own. I told my father I wanted to build a new PC. Of course, I wanted to build an outrageous gaming monster and said “I need it for school projects”. My father (he’s always been smarter than me) asked me to convince him. I made a powerpoint presentation with the details of exactly what I wanted to build, and why I needed it. Of course, it was a load of bullshit. Sadly, he saw through it and we settled on some more reasonable hardware. I built it, and it ran great for several years. What I loved about this one was that I was able to convince my father to let me get a huge (for the time) 17 inch CRT. When it had run its course, I built two more similar PCs. This was when we moved to our new house in Ulsoor which meant that I finally got a DSL connection. I ran through my alloted download limit of 500MB in around a day. This was also around the time that I started to play around with Linux.

It became time for me to leave home for college. I bought a Dell Inspiron from the University online store (the coolest thing about it was that it came with a decal for the back that was covered with Michigan Ms.). It lasted me a little over a year. When I came back to Ann Arbor in September, the iPhone 3G had just come out. I really wanted one. I convinced my parents to let me buy one, and they okayed it. I went to the Apple Store and saw the Mac. I just couldn’t not get it. I went back, told my parents that I would continue to use my dumb phone, and that I would instead buy a Mac (which meant I got a free iPod Touch). They okayed that so I went and bought this awesome guy. It took me a few days to get used to it (at this point I was a Linux convert), but I’ve never looked back since. This was probably the best decision I’ve made in my life.