This is a small tutorial which I wrote by putting together some tips from Mozilla’s knowledge base. It takes only a couple of minutes and saves a lot of your valuable time.
Suppose you have 5-6 or more websites that you visit when you fire up your browser. What you’d normally do is that you would open a new tab manually for each site, then type in the address/select from your bookmarks. Pretty tedious, eh? In this tutorial, we’ll see how we can get Firefox to do the boring stuff for you. All you need to do is tweak a few settings, after which you can open tabs for all your must-visit-daily websites with ONE click. Sounds good? Let’s get our hands dirty, then.
http://www.gmail.com|http://www.chelseafc.com|http://www.abhi247.com
After finally getting myself a good Internet connection, the last thing I wanted was that thing dying on me. That, dear reader, is the reason for my absence from this place for the whole week. I just got the damn thing working today and now I no longer feel like I’m missing a limb. 
Okay, so here’s a brief recap of all the things that happened and didn’t happen during the past couple of weeks. First off, I got myself a new cellphone – the Nokia N79 that I’d been dreaming about ever since I read its review on GXSaurav’s blog. It’s a sleek petrol black model and I am in complete awe of its beauty, intelligence and all the things that a pretty girl should have. Okay, so that was a little weird, but what else did you expect from a techie? 
My New Phone
Then we had a freshers party on the very same day for the latest bunch of recruits. That went well, even yours truly managing to jive a bit. Sunday was nothing special, what with all of us catching up on the several hours of sleep lost during the week. Then came Monday, and I agree with Garfield. It’s the worst day of the week. I just about managed to scrape through it, half-awake. On Tuesday, my Internet connection started acting up and wouldn’t let me log in. The same had occurred with a couple of friends who had bought theirs from that retailer. The next day I went to the retailer and told him about the problem. He asked me to fill up another CAF form and assured that the connection would be re-activated soon. But as expected, his assurance turned out to be holow. 3 days passed by without any action being taken. I’d made up my mind to get this thing sorted out myself, since complaining to the customer care didn’t help matters either.
My Internetz
On Thursday, I got a minor shock. I was out having a cup of tea during lunchtime when a friend called me up to tell me that the speaker from our classroom was missing and the IT guy was calling the Class Rep, which happens to be me. I frantically rushed back since the stupid thing costs Rs.6500, which would have to be borne by the scapegoat. Err, I mean the Class Rep. Thankfully, someone had casually picked up the speaker and kept it in the conference hall. My wallet could breathe easy once more and we enjoyed ‘Chak De India’ after a few initial hiccups.
My Class (With Lights On)
Then came Friday. Usually the Class Rep gets bullied around by the faculty, has to be responsible for every mistake that the class makes and has to do all sorts of stupid things. But call it my luck, that I’d not been subjected to any of that. That was until Friday. It was lunchtime and I had dozed off in the class, as had most of the others. The next lecture was free since the faculty was busy in a workshop. The lights were off, a few cellphones were playing music and the ambience was highly conducive to sound sleep. Then all of a sudden I heard a call to hide the cellphone and the moment I opened my eyes, there was the director standing at the door, turning on the lights. Needless to say, his first question was – “Who is the CR?”. That was the call for me to get ready for a kicking. But thankfully, I just got to hear a few choice words and nothing much happened. My attempts to save my skin and my class, did earn me a few comments of “Well tried!” from my mates, though.
These don't NEED a caption!!
Oh look! It’s Saturday already! Today I was on my own. That was because I’d been watching a movie late into the night and woke up at 11:39 AM, when the rest of my mates had already gone to the academy to play cricket. “No problem, I’ll just get the Internet connection sorted out today”, I thought. So after a quick bath, I caught a bus to the nearest Reliance Web World. The customer service rep over there was a pretty helpful chap named Santosh. It took 2-3 hours, but he managed to get my connection up and running. I was delighted! After that I just needed to get myself a blanket and a new pair of shoes. Did that, and hopped on the bus back to base. On the way I met a few of my mates returning after the match(es). They had won 1 and lost the other. No need to worry, though. Those were just practice matches. The real thing starts next weekend. My class (F) has been drawn in the group containing sections J and H. I’ll keep y’all updated on the results. 
And I hope this time we fare better in football. Last time around, we cruised to the championship in cricket and even beat the other 2 trimesters. But in football, we were knocked out in the first round. We had put out a make-shift team and I had an absolute shocker that day. 
And to make things better, Chelsea have just beaten Wolves 4-0 with a depleted squad. We’re now 8 points clear of Arsenal who got turned over by Sunderland. ManU are playing against Everton as I write this. Let’s hope they lose as well. 
Joe and Flo Celebrate!
Oh well, I guess that’s about it. If I had to rate it, I’d give this week an 8 on 10. Bring on next week, I say! But first, cheers to Sunday!!!
What happens when an Internet forum member accidentally mis-spells Quake Wars and fails to correct it before others notice?
This happens. Yours truly was quick to use his image-editing tools, not wanting an excellent opportunity to pass him by!
It’s been close to 18 hours since that wretched penalty shootout. If you’d been paying attention like you should have been, then you’ll recall the bit about the streaming TV link I was talking about. So for all those who do remember, here’s my first-hand experience of the whole Internet TV situation.
It’s been around long enough, but I got a taste of it only a couple of days ago. Internet TV actually lets you watch television on your computer using the Internet, for free or for a small fee. In my case it was free, as in free beer. Now you’d think why would someone want to watch TV through the Internet when you can just watch it on the… err.. TV!
According to me, this kind of service is pretty nifty if you don’t get a particular channel in your country, such as in India we don’t receive Sky, Fox etc. Being a football lover, the off-season brings a lot of boredom with it. The only notable sports channels that broadcast the beautiful game in these parts are ESPN & Star Sports but even they don’t show any pre-season friendly matches. As things stood, I was getting bored to death waiting for the new season to start, until I stumbled upon my saviour – www.justin.tv. The site is one of several Internet TV sites on the web, offering a collection of channels catering to different tastes like sports, news, technology and a lot more. Eureka!!!
It took me just a couple of minutes to find a channel that was broadcasting the match I was looking for, so that was pretty easy. But alas, in my excitement I’d all but forgotten about my pathetic excuse of a broadband connection. It offers me a blazing speed of 256 Kbps which, sadly, didn’t seem enough to sustain a constant video stream. The streaming would be interrupted after every few minutes while the data was being buffered, with a message ‘Not Broadcasting’ written across the top of the screen. Beggars can’t be choosers though, and I had to settle with whatever was on offer.
Twiddling my thumbs while the buffer refills...
But then again, in this age of HD video output, the quality of this broadcast was downright pathetic. I tried other channels to check if it was a problem with this particular channel, but there wasn’t too much of a difference. Instead, I started getting more slowdowns due to the better quality. Switched back to the old channel. To give you an example of what it was like, at times I couldn’t make out where the ball was. The players looked like sprites made up using an 8-bit palette, in full-screen mode.
Reminds me of my 8-bit gaming console of yesteryears...
Inspite of all this, it was quite fun actually. Sometimes it’s refreshing to rewind back to the days before HD, 1080p and what-not. Getting to see a channel that will probably never get aired in India, and that too for free, is quite fulfilling in itself. Overall, I got what I wanted and I was more than satisfied.
Maybe someday I’ll be streaming a live broadcast in full HD on my 100 Mbps Internet connection… I can dream, can’t I?