my life.....a soap opera

well its official. my life is a soap. the one with weird camera angles in split seconds, to emphasize the plot. i am not sure if i am to be proud of it.

every other moment when you feel that yes, life can't screw you anymore, up comes a whopper that knocks your pants off! and with the shocking twists in the plot in the soap, so seems to be my life ( yea so what if i am dramatizing a bit, i did say it is a soap! bunch a puritans).

so it all started when i was talking to my folks and my mother usually shows restrain on one particular topic whilst talking with me. she asked me about the job scene and i said its pretty lame and dont expect to look up before the start of the new quarter. as i completed that sentence, my mom uttered that she had shown my birth chart to some astrologers and they assured her that i would be hearing some good news regarding my career in the week of dec 8 - 15 2008 (irrespective of the economy). i ridiculed it but at the back of my mind, i thought if it was already written that, something sort of a fatalist line of thinking. i dismissed the idea because i knew i had no offers on hand and the one i was working with didnt seem too bright. it was on my mind nevertheless (monologue / thinking out loud here).

that said, the next morning, i hear from my manager about a possible extension. gleefully i call my mom to relate the news only to hear, i told you so ( soap intro song here) . fast forward a week later, i get the information that i wouldnt be able to get the extension because i graduated and the position only was for someone who didnt graduate ( weird camera angle and music here).

when i first heard about the extension, i went to the extent of questioning the veracity of free will or non determinism but seems like there seems to be a hint of it around.

i guess i will have to wait and see how the story unfolds for like the soap opera, you never know what turns up next.

.... and then it happened

it was a thursday evening like no other. as the christmas break was coming closer, my roommates and i were deliberating over the details of a roadtrip to new york from la. and we had a good reason to be excited about it. it was daring and adventuresome. whilst making our way towards the gym for the daily routine ( we were still deliberating then), a glance on the person walking past us reminded me of someone i knew.

a tad unsure, but later pacing towards her, i called her name out. she stopped her walk, stood there for a split second and turned around. still a couple of feet from her, i waved at her. it was not a full wave. i stopped short half way through. and then it happened. my heart beats went from a steady beat to a panic attack. i said to myself," calm down now, she is not going to bite you". as i assured myself, i covered the ground and was in a conversation distance to her.

and so there i was, with tousled hair, shorts and a windcheater. a scene right out of a teen flick: a pavement, grass on one side, an underdog, and the chick of the flick. we conversed and conversed a little more. the steady beating of the heart resumed and i asked her if i could interest her in a cup of coffee. a few pleasantries later, we bid each good bye and parted ways.


until next time,

cheers,
kyos

snooping

over a couple of months something struck me.

it is common knowledge that the google search results were populated based on some ranking alogirthm. hence i wondered if it is possible to poison those results such that your websites get populated first. obviously if you had some relavent content, over a period of time it will be somewhere in the top list. but i didnt have any relavent content interesting to the masses out there. (Note: BTW i am not doing something new, look up search engine poisoning, only that i didnt refer to any of the material online to do what i did).

then i reasoned, what would be the most popular search queries in google? the first thing that struck me was movies. mp3s, clips. basically any media that can be mooched for free (bunch of deadbeats!). and i did know that sites such as rapidshare , megaupload etc hosted such media. if one is adequately familiar with the naming conventions of movies, they usually are titled with divx, xvid, rmvb etc.

so here is what i did: i created a post with the following text:

rapidshare
megaupload

rmvb
divx
xvid
700mbs

thats about it. and i published it. and viola! within about a week or less i began receiving hits from people who were searching these terms. in good amounts as well! and more the number of hits, the Page Ranking algorithm gets duped. even the above text will cause numerous hits.

now if i were a virii author ( I AM NOT, SO GET OF MY BACK!), just hypothetically, that would mean that with some amount of social engineering, i could have links to text in the post pointing to some viruses and the rest of the story is all too familiar these days.

well thats about from me,

cheers,



p.s.: this was done purely with the motive of research and with no other intentions!