In Bombay !!

Finally in Bombay - sorry for not informing most people on my exact departure day .... even I did not when I would be leaving for sure.
Guru , the bastard , 'cos of whom I had to extend by one more week ! His tongue is BLACK BLACK BLACK !!! :) (for 'Kari naaku' in mallu)

Reached here yesterday morning - and day before was hell in office and I dont mean 'cos of work (maybe would blog about it later).
Bottomline is that , if I need to continue to do interesting work , I 'might' need to part ways with Sun .... might be a sad day indeed if I ever make that decision , esp since I am in an incredible team doing some kick-ass work working under a brilliant tech-lead :(

For the time being , continuing to drift along with my life .... mom's food rocks :D I already feel better ;)
Settling in here at parents place - the net conn has , unfortunately , not yet arrived - will get it tommorrow , so until then it will be this 112kbps dialup from Tata ... so no IMs until my conn is up and running !

Bought Half Life 2 a couple of weeks back , and could try it only today (had shipped my stuff 3 weeks earlier itself while I continued at friends place in blr).
The game sports a (new ?) online auth , update , etc module by Steam.
THIS IS A MAJOR PAIN IN THE REAR and I seriously hope that they will get rid of this brain-dead idea.
Swapping CDs has been a pain until now for most games , with all that "copy-protection" which means that legitimate users are in trouble if they want to backup their game cds.

In case the developers did not know - CDs get damaged , scratched , and has a pretty poor life IF you use it regularly ! (Like most good games)

Now , with HL2 inconveniencing the user has been taken to a next level !
God knows who designed the brain dead system of mandatory online registeration and updates for HL2 - the bloody thing does not allow you to play it unless you go through hoops to get it activated.
Then it starts downloading monster files - *sheesh* , the designers would have assumed that everyone has 1+ MBps connection , a**holes.
AND the worst part is , they dont have the decency to mention "Mandatory high speed net connection required" or something similar in the box - so you have already shelled out 1.5k before you realise that you are in deep shit !

If I knew about this stipulation , I would have not bought it as a matter of principle - I buy games like crazy and know about the piracy problem that the industry is plagued with : but this is an insane way to try to protect a game !
The bottomline for any protection system is - should be tough for breaking the game for a cracker/pirate , but if the "protection" is by inconvinencing a valid user (and to a great degree in HL2 !) - then it would be better to go for some other method.

No one will play it , other than the dumbos like me who bought it without doing adequate research on it :(
Just because we play brain first person shooters , the designers/developers should not consider all of us (players I mean) as brain-dead and stupid.
I am going to stay away from all these type of games ... you can keep it to yourself, morons !
I would suggest the guys at HL2 to get better servers and firewalls to protect their code and not stupid ideas like this this for protecting the binary X-(

Ok , ok , maybe I am pissed right now for having spent 5+ hours coaxing my slow conn (of the disconencts - so painful) to get the bloody game updated and running.
To be fair , the one thing I liked about this system was that - I dont need to juggle the 5 CDs the game comes in (they should release a dvd ver in India !!!).
AND If you work on a backbone , then your game and system would be always up-to-date without any user intervention (similar to the Java Webstart idea actually) and you wont notice the 3+ hours of retries that I had to put in today :)

From what I played of it till now , the game looks impressive as of now - not really in DOOM3 league , but still damn good (maybe I have not reached so far enough to notice the better details).
One thing that is damn good is the physics and yes - the modelling : bloody realistic modelling !
If you thought Final Fantasy (the movie I mean) was good - then this one blows it away with the realistic faces , lights ... man makes me want to finish the GL book I am reading faster so that I can churn out a game like this ;)
Will blog more on the games 'finer' points later on.


Lastly:
IN2CABLE (the cable internet company) sucks - they are plain robbers : there is no other way to put it.
Swindling people is one thing , but these dudes - atleast their marketting and techsupport in Bangalore , take it to the next level !
I am pretty much disgusted with their behaviour , and I will keep away , from now on , from anything to do with IN2CABLE or Hinduja Brothers (who own the company - and so in my eyes morally responsible for the company).
I will put up the details later , but the gist of it is that they ripped me off Rs. 15K + and then they gave me some bullshit corporate policy and lack of reimbursement support , etc , etc - load of crap I say.
They dont even have the courtesy of replying to emails or answering phone calls *sheesh*