The Arsenal Obsession #COYG

Despite being raised in India, there has pretty much been only one sport which always appealed to me. It's football (ugh, soccer). And ever since I was a kid (before moving to the states), I have been a fan of one team and one team only. Whenever i describe myself (even on online forums like Twitter Bio, etc.), I always take pride in being an Arsenal fan.

So much so that it's part of our living room!

Life on the Pacific Coast

I moved to the states about two and half years ago and the Arsenal fan in me had a very interesting situation ahead. European football games typically happen on weekend and kick-off is usually somewhere between Noon and 5PM local time. For Arsenal, local time happens to be London time, which is 8 hours ahead my local time, thereby making the US west coast to be the worst possible region to live in for a European football fan. For a game starting at noon in London, i have to be up by 4AM. That's right, 4AM!

Because of this, my typical weekend looks like this:

Say the game is on Sunday at 1PM London Time.

• I'm usually out on Saturday nights pretty late (either a movie or something else).
• Back home around midnight.
• Spend some time playing games or watching something on TV.
• It's around 2PM or so at this point and dilemma ensues. Do i stay awake for 3 more hours and watch the game, or should i get some sleep (and risk missing the game by oversleeping)?
• More than often, i end up staying awake the whole night.
• Watch the game.
• Sudden existential crisis for the rest of Sunday. What now?

Twitter Effect

When i was in school, we watched games as a group. Always as a group. When i moved to the states, I have been meaning to go to a sports bar and enjoy the game with a supporters group. But i have not managed to do so even once (usually because of the ungodly hours).

Twitter came to the rescue. I usually tweet a lot during the game (and annoy the crap out of my non-football friends) and i have made a lot of new friends (living on various parts of the world) because of that. I now really feel that watching the game with Twitter feed open is as good as watching it with friends. And there's always casualties (TV Remote being the worst victim).

Live

I'm slowly getting towards a point where i might be able to afford to fly to London once or twice during a season. I am really looking forward to making it a habit of attending one or two games every season in person.

And by the way, for the uninitiated, #COYG = Come On You Gunners.

Happy February Everyone!

-Vignesh

Our Story!

Circa May 2005 - The Characters

Boy - A 10th standard student in Coimbatore, who moves to Madurai for higher secondary schooling.

Girl - A 10th standard student in Chennai. No prizes for guessing where she moves for her higher secondary schooling!

May 2005 to June 2007 - The Beginning

As many would anticipate, they both ended up being classmates in their new school. Despite that, sadly, nothing interesting happened in this period of time (we know, they were such idiots back then!). They just looked at each other on random days and barely spoke.

June 2007 - The Actual Beginning

The girl moved back to Chennai and the boy moved back to Coimbatore for college. As with most couples of this generation, they started conversing with each other in the form on SMS'es and phone calls. Few days after that, they felt they were really close to each other. Few months after that, they realized they can't live without each other.

Few Months (or years) Later

The boy was on a late night train journey and as it was always, they were talking over phone (despite the annoying train noise). He felt something spontaneously and popped the question. It took a while for him to get an answer, but it was an answer that he rejoices till today!

P.S. The time frame of the above paragraph is omitted intentionally. ;-)

September 2011 - LGTM

The girl told about her life choice to her parents and the boy did the same to his parents. Both of them were genuinely happy instantaneously. No hesitation, No fuss, Pure happiness. It was then they realized how gifted they were to have such wonderful parents!

September 2012 - Its Official

The boy and the girl got engaged on September 2nd, 2012. It was a small but wonderful ceremony with family and friends.

December 2012 to March 2013 - The Present

We are writing this draft over a video chat (damn you geography!). We are really excited about the brand new phase of our lives that we are about to step on to. So please mark your calendars and try to be there on our special day, as your wishes would mean a whole world to us!

By the way, the girl's name is Gayathri and the boy's name is Vignesh! :-)

March 2013 and Beyond

We are undergoing our "Happily ever after" phase. :-)

P.S.: I didn't write this now. I am just copying this from my wedding website. Since that domain expired, I wanted this to live somewhere on the internet.

-Vignesh

The Last One by Myself!

Before you start reading, I really would like to warn you: Stop, Do not read. What follows is utter crap.

It has been almost 5 years now since i fell in love with this amazing girl. It’s almost time now. I am literally counting the last few days of my bachelor life. The 7 and odd years that i have known her has just swung by very fast. It just seems like yesterday that I was a small school kid. I honestly can’t remember how college life went on so fast. Here I am now, sitting in a totally different part of the world, still unable to believe that I am actually here.

When I look back at the past 7 and odd years, there are various wonderful moments which I would say have made my life what it is now. Not to brag, but not many people in life get almost everything they want, especially at such an early point in life. I am indeed one of the lucky ones. I am surprised at so many things that I do these days. It just seems like yesterday (literally like yesterday) that i went around nagging people for career advice. Yet here I am today, talking to many of my friends about building their career, etc. I really am surprised at the way I have turned out.

I am in this state where i ponder upon looking for words to express how my life has turned around to what it is now. There has been unexpected twists and surprises, expected happiness and so many other feelings which words cannot describe.

If I sit back for a moment and think about why I am writing this post, I honestly have no clue. I just felt like I should write something that will forever remain as the last post I ever wrote as a bachelor. Not that it is a big feat or anything, but blogging was something which, despite many resolutions and swearings, i could not keep up with. So, not to feel bad about myself that I hardly write anything these days, I started out writing this particularly pointless post.

I am flying out to India tomorrow. It’s gonna be the most #epic trip of my life. Loads of things to look forward to. Girl of my dreams, getting together with her. Life is fun. Hopefully I write something meaningful sometime soon (of course after I am back from the India trip).

-Vignesh

Festival of lights is here !! :-)

Hey folks,

The festival of lights is here. We are all gearing up to celebrate the death of narahasuran in a high fashioned manner after these many decades. I just want to take this time off and wish you all a very happy deepavali.



Here is a small one for all the rajinikanth dudes!



இனிய தீபாவளி நல்வாழ்த்துக்கள். இந்த தீபாவளி தினத்தை உங்கள் சுற்றார் மற்றும் உறவினர்களோடு கொண்டாடி மகிழுங்கள்.

-Vignesh

Video games from our childhood - From 16GB to 16 KB :-)

Note: Throughout this article, "we" means my generation of people (i.e.) people who are almost close to my age.

Everyone knows the phrase, "Thank you mario, But our princess is in another castle". This article focusses mainly on that phrase and its whereabouts.

There must have been a period of time in every kid's life where he/she used to play video games. Though many cool portable gadgets have come these days for this generation children, Though many cool games with 3d/4d capabilities have come these days, nothing can match the joy of playing good old nintendo video games which we had when we were kids.



We had only two categories of video games when we were kids. One was called Hand Video Game which used to work on two pen torch batteries (which our parents use to hide during exams). It had simple but wonderful games like the car race (similar to crazy taxi in facebook) and the brick game (similar to modern day tetris) which we would play for hours together trying to set high score after high score. Another category was (this was supposed to be a costlier category when we were kids) TV Video Game (this was the nintendo video games i was talking about). Those days, we would pay hundreds of rupees to buy a video game casette. And there were casettes that had many games in one (i still remember when i was astonished once by seeing a 73 in 1 casette).

To name few of my very favourite games (most of them were all time top favourite for almost everyone who played it).

• Super Mario - IMO, there is no better game than this till date (simple, yet very addictive)


• Contra - Mostly considered as a boy's game :-)


• Duck Hunt - Great one during the days we used to play with the gun and feel as if we were policemen shooting the duck


• Baseball - We hardly knew the rules, but we still played it because we did not get cricket casette for cheap rates


• Adventure Island


• Paper Boy


• Pacman - Now google has taken it to the next level ;-)


• Bomberman


• Galaxy


• And much more..

Though not as professional gamers, we do play a lot of games in computers (some famous ones include need for speed, fifa, cricket, counter strike, age of empires, etc.), nothing can give us the joy that those games gave us when we were kids. Recently after seeing a tweet from my friend gkns, i was very desperate about playing these games in my computer. Intuitively, my mind said there would definitely be emulators that can emulate video games in our computer.

Before talking about how, there is one small point to note. Earlier i used the term casette, now being in the computer era, i am rephrasing it as ROM (Read Only Memory) disk. Many of us would have opened the plastic casette and found a chip with a black circle spot in it. That chip is nothing but the ROM disk that contains the game (just like the CD/DVD's in which we buy games today). Those disks were capable of storing data in no more than kilobytes (reasonable because those days floppies of size 1.44MB were predominant and the chip was like one fourth of the size of a floppy).

And now, being in this computer era, simulating the entire video game device becomes very simple. We need two components. One is obviously, we need the game data from the ROM disk and another one is a software that can process the data and do the job that the video game device does but using the computer's wide available resources. The emulation software is available for both windows and linux.

Windows Emulators: Nestopia (1.13 MB), FCEUX (900KB)

Linux Emulators: xnes and kemu (Just search for "nes emulator" in your package manager and install it)

ROM Disks: You can download ROM Disks of my favourite games here. You can also download disks from various freely (and most likely illegaly) from http://www.coolrom.com.

All you have to do is, download the emulator and the ROM Disk and then use the emulator to open the ROM Disk. So, why download games of size 16 GB when we can enjoy even more at just 16 KB :-) Download now and have fun. Dedicated to all who played video games as a kid :-)

P.S.: I seriously expect a lot of comments for this one :-D

-Vignesh