I have been in India for about a week now.  I just had a very rough night.  I was out with a friend and I was feeling tired and wanted to head back home.  My friend flagged an "Auto" for me, a yellow three-wheeled scooter with a bench to sit, and top.  He negotiated the price down to 130 rupees, and I headed off from his area in Guampali to Kondapur where I am staying. 

Ok, so I should have known, we should have known, but I took the cab anyway.  Even as the cab arrived I had an ominous feeling.  It was painted in some kind of festive/pagan looking figures and had tinted windows.  The Auto looked rougher than most I'd taken the time to examine.  130 ruppees seemed like a pretty good deal to get from one side of town to the other for an American anyway.

The driver had a passenger, they seemed like good friends with each other.  They laughed and giggled like school kids.  They were kids.  My driver was a child.  A crazy rebellious child.  U American? the friend says.  Yes.

It started out driving on the wrong side of the road, they sped down the wrong side of the road, moved into the right lane.   This kid was fast.  I started by compaining, you guys are driving crazy, I giggle.  Then the driver's friend says giggle, Yes, he is very fast!  giggle.  Fast!  Pats  his friend on the back.  His name is dolagara.  What's your name?  Steven  What's your name?  Rolda.  What's your name? Ralph!, I say realizing he made up the names.   I am joking he giggles.   The engine stops, they start it back up.

Ok, they continue, the kid shuts off his engine while riding down the road, effectively reducing his breaking power.  The car slides down the hill, he continues to slide.  I'm like, no break?  A chorus of giggles.  U American?  5 buck!  giggle. 5 buck!!  I say, You guys are full of shit.  Pull over I say.  They ignore me, and continue the descent.

They continue the rampage, now the driver swerve's toward people and swerve's away, several times this happens.  These children are taunting death.   Now I begin to really complain, what is wrong with you, you are driving crazy!  giggle giggle.   

They start and stop the engine several times, there car sometimes goes excessively slow and other times very fast downhill in neutral with the engine off.  I begin to wonder if we are running out of gas.

The death cruise sweeps down the hill further, at this point I am losing my shit.  I say pull over, pull over, over here, left, left, over here, pull over, pull over,  Pull over now!  Fucking pull over.  What the fuck is wrong with you!!! You cannot drive like this!  Pull the fuck over!!!! FUCKING PULL OVER!! AARGGH!!! PULL OVER!!  They turn around look scared, and finally pull over.  My screaming freaked them out.  These are little kids after all.  Reality hits them, this is fucking scary what the hell did they think they were trying to do.

Ok, they finally pull over.  I get out.   They look perplexed.  I walk away.  They follow in the cab.  Sir let's go, get back in the Auto.  FUCK YOU!  Do you understand? FUCK YOU!   STOP FUCKING FOLLOWING ME.  I walk against traffic.  They follow me against traffic.  The friend gets out of the car, and tries to grab me and put me in the car.  I call my friend, immediately start telling him the number of the cab.  I hang up accidentally, I call back, and explain what's happening.  He's worried for me.  I'm not exactly sure where I am I tell him, now he's really worried.  The kids keep following me backwards forwards.  Now they start saying SORRY SORRY SORRY WE ARE SORRY.. SORRY SORRY SORRY.   Please get in.  Yes, I understand you are just kids, you are young and crazy you want to go crazy and drive crazy that's up to you, but me, I'm not interested in being part of that.  So you go do that on your own.  They continue to follow, now I keep repeating their cab # on the phone, and the friend realizes it, and covers up the cab # with his hand.  But I already have it memorized.  I would be amused if I wasn't so upset.  Then I say, I am going to report you, and walk away.  They do not follow me.  Maybe they had problems starting their car.  I'm trying to get my bearings and walk down the street to find a place I can tell my friend I'm at.  Finally I get to Barista, a coffee shop, and walk inside, ask them where I am, and tell my friend.  He's on his way.  I order a Chai Masala and Chocolate cake, and go to sit down and wait for it (they heat up cake in India so it will take a while), and who's there entering the store.  Those damn kids!  They convince the gaurd to let them pass, and make their case to the people at the shop.  Now I have to defend my case.  Back and forth we go.  I then report them to the staff.  Then one of the Barrista employees mediates.  Whole thing repeats, I try not to curse or get upset.  Be cool, the Barrista employee says.  They want me to pay the 130 rupees.  I refuse.  Back and forth we go.  The kids go around the shop, people feel bad for them, I mean after all they are just children.  One of them says this, they have no future, they are just kids.  Now it dawns on me, I am so stupid, I should have known not to let a child drive me to my place.  What was I thinking?  I still refuse, these kids are fucking stupid, they need a lesson.  The mediator says pls obey them.  I say no way!  Be cool he says.  The kids ask to talk to my friend, they say, they know he is coming, so when he comes we'll talk to him.  They claim that they don't know any English, and that was the cause for confusion.  Now at this I have a laugh.  I say, how did the kids know my friend was coming, if they don't understand any English.  The mediator asks them this, and they stumble.   I say if the kids want their money they should call the police.  They do know English, at least they know it well enough to know when someone asks them to slow down.  Most Auto drivers know it well enough for that.  The mediator asks that I pay them 30 to 50 ruppees and they will go away.  I say no, but I'm getting worried, theses kids are not going away, and I am afraid that when my friend comes the whole scene will repeat.  I agree to pay them 30 and extend the money, they say no 50!, I pull away, and then they accept.  Good for them.  Then they apologize in Hindi, they had said SORRY so many times.  I am not interested, but am pressured into accepting their apology, so I shake the driver's hand.  Then the friend shakes my hand and tries to do a secret handshake.  What a crazy kid!  I laugh.  These kids are something else.



















  Hyderabad, specifically. 

You are purple. What a romantic person you are.
You're sentimental and forward-looking (those
are opposites.). You're a sophisticated and
refined--with a refind taste for chocolates and
wine (yum...). Tempermental and moody, you let
people know when you're angry. But other
times, you just sit and sulk. Alone. When
around people, you're a generous person, with
insatiable needs. You're a starving artist,
basically. You're enjoy getting into debates
over politics and religion with people of the
same intelligence of you. But you know they
can never convince you otherwise, you stubborn
person, you. As a unique person you are (not
to mention just a tad bit eccentric...), you're
well-liked by either a few people, or too many
people...


What color are you? (Amazingly detailed & accurate--with pics!)
brought to you by Quizilla

The top 5 things I want are:

1. BMW M4
2. Tempurpedic King Size Bed
3. Asus Laptop
4. Aeron Chair + Scientist's Desk
5. a full T3 line for 3 years

what is the cost of all this? i dunno but i think it's under $200k.

i was setting up an e-gold (http://www.e-gold.com) account today, and remembered sealand for some reason.

looks like havenco (http://www.havenco.com) called it quits last year.

I always thought sealand was a real island, but it is actually a tower that is built upon a purposefully sunken ship by the english.

it is the size of a basketball court and it is ugly as fuck.

i guess anyone who can build a tower in the sea in international waters, can have their own country.

here are some pictures...

http://kim.nyclondon.com/sealand.html

havenco was actually located in one of the pillars.

here's the guy who founded sealand and left: http://www.venona.com/rdl/

just got back from the baking co.

after spending time incubating and developing the order management system for toydalwave.

J came by with a check today; good thing too, The rent is due. J has gone to Cali to pick up a new car.

saw J4 again, he's really into free software!

later on saw a group of "cool boys." these boys were pretty hot shit. it looked like an http://www.urbn.com catalog. this made me sad and self-hating.

realized i could embed the cms into the cms for multi-table edits by making the cms class (which generally exists for each table) detect whether it is being commanded and also for it to detect whether it should call _super_main( ) or _embed_main( ) from main( ).

i suppose i will be implementing this tonight; some friday night? eh?

attractive women with drugs are welcome to swing by tonight

about:config

you can mess with all your prefs here.

ain't it grand?

i've been playing with nglayout.initialpaint.. to solve a problem with my cms

sometimes with the cms when you update the page it look as if only part of the page was reloaded; the part that changed. this works better on fast connections... and it has to do with nglayout.initialpaint's value which is 250ms as i recall.

well if the page downloads before nglayout.initialpaint then it will repaint the page completely in one step; but if it takes longer than the page will be downloaded incrementally. if you google for nglayout.initialpaint you will find tons of freaks who suggest setting this value to 0, making your browser always do an incremental update (which makes the browser seem faster; but can many times be slower).. anyway, i want to set nglayout to a high value; since the complete at once repainting is what gives my cms the effect of doing a differential update. i guess when the complete, atomic repaint is done the the graphics system takes mozilla's rendering and just blits the changed parts. i initially thought mozilla was taking a diff with the dom tree and calculating the update, but according to someone in #mozillazine that's bogus.

anyway about:config does have useful features for increasing speed such as the pipelining feature for downloading more at once.

i met a really cool kid today; another J over at pyramid.

funny how you meet someone. i was just walking out to our outdoor table with my falafel and he was standing out leaning against a pillar; for seemingly no reason (probably to say bye to Z). anyway, he is a big fan of pyramid too.

it started off slow.. oh do you want wireless here? um, yea; do you work hjere? no, but i setup the wireless at the baking co. oh, are you- yeah, i set it up and i could probably get him to put it here; though there's not as much room. so you built computers in bread boxes? yeah, it just kind of happened; it's funny; we started a linux users group (do you know what gnu/lin- yea!) at the baking co. and they were so nice to us, we decided to give them wireless. somehow we progressed to speaking about RMS and how they invited stallman to their LUG but how they pretended they were a GLUG to get him to come, but how after he came the LUG members felt like they should be a real GLUG. so, now they run a real glug. so i guess the thursday glug has finally caught up with me and i will be attending next thursday. J is implementing cool security shit; i like J. but he likes debian; which makes me sad. i asked him if the gentoo founder attends or if he knows him; no on both counts. we must find the gentoo creator and bring him to our Glug! though; i'm guessing he lives in ALBQ.

this was kind of funny. somehow, meeting him didn't feel like deja vu. too often when i meet people it feels like that, and it scares me.

i found a very intesting blog last night while in a daze... http://www.egobsd.org. this chick is pretty cool. i think i will regularly read her blog. it's a blog about a sys admin. somehow i feel like reading her blog and meeting J were related.

J1 and J4 exchanged business cards. so hopefully J4 will bring us work.

all this geeking has made me want to rebrand our co (currently http://www.mayam.org).

here are some designs.. http://ossix.net/page.html and http://ossix.net/page2.html.

page2 is better.

here was an inspiration: http://www.segpub.com.au

so today, i checked out the new $5 Fallafel Buffet at Pyramid Cafe. Egyptian food rules!

Then I headed to Las Vegas (, New Mexico) with H and we found a town that was made out of brick during the Great Mercantile Age. Though somewhat deterioriated, the town has kept a certain splendor by maintaining the structures of old (such as the old soda fountain place or movie theatre).

Still Las Vegas is mostly a boring town, and we didn't stay there long. ALthough we did run into a C|H|A-user who apparently thought I looked (almnost typed loved here..) like Salveter the loony toon character.

Anyway, after that we returned to Santa Fe, and further appreciated the facist pueblo-ness of the town.

I am now working on the toy site content management system. It's coming along pretty smooth. J wants to use JS with XML-RPC for future programming, but I'm a little hesitant. I just created enuf inertia to start writing in PHP and not in language X; it's going to take some convincing to sway somewhere else since I already have a codebase that I don't want to port; especially not in JS (that woudl be difficult)! Though the JS core is a better lang than PHP core. In fact its a lot like python's core. But there are no libraries for JS. So it would be necessary to use a second language as well for certain operations.

But I do see the advantage, JS/XML-RPC could be (or at least feel) much more responsive.

i jsut received a check from a client. they paid me $200 more than they had to.

i'm just giving them a credit for future work.

it's funny to because on their invoice i gave them a dicount, so really they paid $250 more than they had to.

yay. i may be able to pay my huge credit card bill and my rent.

though i may not even have to pay my rent since i was out of gas (stove,shower,heat) for 3 weeks.

shit it's almost skiing time in santa fe and taos.. give it a month or two...

i hope i have the money to buy a season pass and a set of skis or maybe a snowboard and oh yea health insurance

anyway, i encourage everyone to donate to my cause.

my paypal id is ossix@ossix.net!

go crazy! the kill steve donation project is underway.

i promise to take pictures of me skiiing and post them on the this site; and maybe provide audio too.

hell maybe even video if yur lucky! video crash ski cam possibly..