Badass!!! Going to Computex and guestblogging for tweaktown!!!

Yeah!!1 Believe that!!!

The going gets tough, the tough gets going..

Yeah.. but its good so far. I am sorta fumbling in the middle and I feel some part might affect Hardware BBQ, but I am taking this opportunity to become more organized.

Being involved and interacting with few company personnel and managers gave me a good idea for how certain things work. Few good men!! You will be surprised the amount of level-headed and neutral people who work in companies and are really someone who knows what they’re doing. They’re smart, they’re quick and they respect their competitors behind close door and don’t find an opportunity to diss their rival brands. Some people are really interested in collecting feedbacks and trying to improve the way things are.

Yeah, BBQ and cakes!! Random posting during the travels of the Corsair Press conference

“Oh yes, Hardware BBQ! Yeah, we subscribed to the RSS feeds“
“If its ranting, it has to be him!”
Sorcerer: “Mmm…cakes!!” Amey Dalvi: “The cake is a lie!”
((They did have cakes…and chicken!!!)
“Oh!! You’re the Sorcerer???”
“Hey man, you changed a lot since the last time we met”.
“This is Roshan Ashraf, he runs Hardware BBQ!”
“Hey who was that guy asking a lot of questions and not leaving Scott alone.”
“No worries man, we’re here to answer questions- that’s the point of this but you’ve asked many really good questions!”
“AAAaaaah!!! No wonder you know a lot of things happening around!”
“Yeah, you can shoot them in. I love reading emails!!”

Yeah, the conversation about me and few people (chip, tech2 and Techtree) who flew in on the same Mumbai-to-Delhi flight whereas the PC World came from Bangalore. The PC World dude said that “So since we’re in the online publishing as well, I guess we’re fighting for the same space”. I was like “Nah, that’s not how I see things. Besides BBQ is very new and I am the only one handling it for now”. They talked about traffic and about the colourful comments that are put on their site. Friggin’ trolls(?)

How was “The Cake” during 2010!!

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

OMG!!! Nvidia stole a cake from my blog and other short stories!!!

Nvidia PR is acting weird!! I was “promoting” those aunties and uncles, but they zoinked by imageshack image!!!!Paranoia, government conspiracy theories and public related work should be left by the experts and not me (well, atleast not PR)! Here’s why.

So I put this famous picture where the Nv dude is wearing an apron and a picture of a gtx480 being used as a grill with the “the way its mean’t to be fried grill”? Yeah, so I put that post to promote their graphic card-cum-grill. They removed it!! Why??? Because I “violated” them on my previous blog post. No seriously, LOOK!!

Isn’t that “supposed” to be a good thing? Its like you’re wearing those skanky pants and going to the office in the morning, you forgot to make a toast but you’re rig is running so you can just pop your bread there!!! You see the usefulness?

I always wanted a graphic card-cum-grill. I even made a jingle. So- seriously!!! I did make a jingle!! Its not yet done but here’s how the draft sounds!!

It grills!! It thrills-

Power consumption and heat dissipation gives you the chills!!

Your parents/wife/kids will throw you out after getting their hands on this month’s electricity bills!!!

I know that sucks- unless you have big bucks!!!

Now nvidia fanboys can get their chicken tikkas and tandooris to fry-

Because their system is going to be powered by GTX 465!!! Maybe have a add-on oven by using SLI!!!

*tantantantantantantantan….YAY!!!!!!TANTANTANTANTANTANTANTANTANTANTAN….yay!!!!*

I am still working on it though. I haven’t showed this to Nvidia PR yet, I just given an order for a giant “Phsyx” logo but the guys who was supposed to get that large neon signboard (with LED glitters that will blind anyone) went blind after testing that neon board!! Yeah, the neon sign doesn’t affect nvidia fanboys since they are already affected by it.

This is my finished product!!! Through to the eyes on the nvidia fanboys movies:
Episode 1:

Episode 2:

Episode 3:

So to those who think they can use me to promote their product/people, this is what happens you see. I might end up posting your sex tape on the internet. Seriously, ask Paris Hilton (Yes, a women is involved- AGAIN). I was supposed to send something else to her ex- and that video “slipped”. But look- I made her famous, but what do I get?  A big “YOU’RE FIRED YOU F*****G RETARD!!” letter and she ends up sharing the profits of those video sales (lol- who even bought them in the first place :-\  ).

But to those who think/will think that I promote stuff when advising on forums (YEAH, someone said that “indirectly” almost a year ago and even one time recently when I end up recommending corsair power supply) or to those who think I can become an excellent promoter/event manager/publicist, read up!!! This is what happen when I quit advising and start promoting, yeah?? YEAH!!!! You know what I am talking about!!!

Not-so-breaking news: Ati hired me so I might make a “through the eyes of the Ati fanboys” but too much pressure…Crosssssfire pooooowaaaah!!!!! FTW!!

Oh yeah, btw. Don’t use the word “skanky” unless you want to. It means “the act of looking cheap, dirty and nasty- slutty”. Yeah, my bad. Sorry.

Commander Shepard+ cake= win!111 (spoiler warning)

For those who love to taste wine as you drink, you are better off not reading anymore.

I played mass effect 2, l4d2 and bioshock 2 these past 2 lazy weeks- I started with mass effect 2 and then with bioshock 2, which I ditched in the middle just like bioshock 1. Bioshock is boring for me and playing mass effect 2 raised my expectations. Bioshock is a failed attempt of first person role playing action (yeah your actions sorta makes you choose a side but its crap). I ended up playing mass effect 2 using mass effect 1′s game save 3 times in a row and I never got bored of it. Its one of the few role playing games I enjoyed playing (and I couldn’t remember playing any role playing games before- maybe its diablo 2) and want to play more. Just how many games are there which makes you play over and over again?

In the mass effect universe, I had “exotic encounter” (pfft) with Ashley Williams and ditched Kaidan Alenko to die at the Saren’s base. Convinced Wrex to be alive (if you don’t Ashley shoots him in the back without asking you and I am sure wrex is an important character in ME3) I saved the citadel council. So if you are seeing a character leveling in such a manner then in pretty obvious that captain anderson will be recommended for the council.

End result? At the start of ME2, when Shepard was spaced all thanks to the collectors and their big ass ship. When he comes back alive and becomes Cerberus’ dog. First thing I did was get the scientist because nothing help more than upgrades, right? After rescuing archangel (Garrus) I went to the citadel. What do I find? The council left me for dead and acting all “high and mighty” and reinstating the spectre status. Also they dismissed the reaper connection and blamed on Geth because of  “lack of evidence” and concluded that even Geth could have met sovereign and manipulated Saren. Anderson backs you up but only when the council indirect accused you of treason by associating with cerberus. Ashley hates you, Tali is skeptical to join with you when finds about cerberus, jack freaks out about seeing a cerberus ship docked when he was trying to escape- the entire universe hates them.

But I managed to get an apology letter from Ashley later on . No I decided not to romance with any me2 characters. So I am guessing this is what pretty much will/should happen in ME3, assuming you have every me2 character’s loyalty and made sure everyone lives:

# Council will act like an ass and dismiss reaper’s story till they crap their pants when reapers invade.

# Ashley might become the captain/admiral of the alliance, so that settles army from human’s side to handle the reapers.

# Garrus might go back to the Turian army, convince his higher-ups to join the fight against the reapers.

# Tali (assuming she is not exiled/her father is not blamed for treason in ME2) might become an admiral, or else she will use her title as one of the saviours of the galaxy to convince the admiralty board to join Shepard’s war against the reapers.

# Wrex would finally merge the entire krogan clan and make a mighty army and maybe grunt as his general!

# Mordin might cure the genophage/ Thane’s sickness or round-up his sources in special task group.

# Legion will play an important role to convince the entire galaxy that the Geth are not the bad guys and the heretics are re-purposed. Clearing Geth’s name might make the people question council’s claims about citadel’s attack and weaken their control. Anderson might step in as the sole leader of citadel space.

# Jack would become the leader of the mercenary group, most likely batarians or maybe biotic based.

# Kahlee sanders (characters are there in 2 mass effect novels) might end up being the brains behind Shepard.

# Cerberus hunting down shepard, might use Zaeed against you.

# Samara might rally up the troops, whereas Liara might end up taking over Mordin’s job aboard the normandy.

# The rachni (assuming you let them live in ME1) will join you in Shepard’s war against the reapers, assuming you will help them earn the council’s respect.

# Thane is on the verge of dying. Might live if he’s cured or else his son might aid you.

# Miranda and Jacob will still be at your side, but most likely Miranda feeding intel to the illusive man. Jacob re-joins the alliance.

# The illusive man might try to gain prothean technology by trying to revive any prothean tech left in Illos, using the same lazarus experiment as he did on ME2.

Will I play bioshock 2, I am not too sure.

Mass effect 2: Star studded game with star studded perils, excitements, missions and voices!!

I loved mass effect 2.

No spoilers, no usual dialogues, Miranda..hmm…yeah (did I say no spoilers?), nothing to add anything what other people who have reviewed, played and enjoyed the game. There’s was one review from an Indian source (they are into “tech” magazines and brag as one of the highest selling blah-blah bullshit) which made some really lame err “reviews”.

Unfortunately, the cover system is still inconsistent and AI controlled party members continue to suck at finding cover.

Yo, doctor dumbass, you can direct your characters to take cover using “Q” and “E” and the characters do say (the matter’s the same) that they are taking cover. You use space bar to recall them to following you. They also take cover during gun fights on without positioning them (usually under heavy fire) and they not only do move over when you strafe towards them when they are taking cover, but they pick the second best spot for taking cover.It is better than l4d and l4d2′s friendly “artificial intelligence” (no they don’t have problems positioning themselves) where you have to lead them.

Just like the first game, Mass Effect 2 is not particularly impressive; however it’s not a bad game either

Yeah I am pretty sure crysis and GTA IV still gives you multiple orgasms.Word of advice, get you head out of the sewage.

I completed about five planetary exploration missions and none of those had anything to write home about.

Erm, haven’t you played any sort of role-playing games, AT ALL? Sucks to be you because if you did but haven’t figured out the genre or haven’t played this genre, because if you did, you wouldn’t even have said this.  By the way, you ain’t supposed to give spoilers on reviews. Writing game spoilers (or movie spoilers) is not equal to writing a game (or a movie) review, same goes for synopsis. Besides you’re reviewing a game, not the game engine. If you want to review game engines, make a separate article about it.

No offense, but they are so many beautiful writers out there that are calling them amateur is an insult to their gift, but sadly they don’t get paid much or don’t get any jobs at all. Rather, we see such samples here writing “reviews” for magazines and websites. Such people outta write scripts for porn movies. Porn movies have intense stories, ermm, it doesn’t matter? My point exactly.

So which magazine? Links? Oh it does NOT deserve the respect. Besides, the witty and the smart should be smart to know which magazine/site I am talking about.

There’s also few battlestar galatica stars who did lend their voice to their characters. I wish captain Bailey’s voice had the same depth like michael Hogan’s true voice (Exo of battlestar Galatica), sort of like a drunken old man thingy. I guess they did a “cleanup”. Truth  be told the only voice which was visible to me was Worf. When did a little bit of googling, I found out that mass effect 2′s voice cast is pretty star-studded (Yeah well “silver screen” stars, except The Matrix, as some people might call it, but IMHO most sci-fi is brilliant) when I searched it for youtube:

BTW, The illusive man’s voice is the best of all IMHO. But yeah Joker and Miranda’s voice for the character ain’t that far behind.

I have played mass effect 1 with a positive character and migrated the game-save to ms:2, it was worth it. So this is tempting me to play mass effect 2 using a negative role and make sure the council dies this time. Yeah I didn’t kill the council last time >_<”. But in any role, Wrex will still be around and maybe I will kill the rachni on this one. Most likely rachni will help (assuming the queen lived on ms:1 when you played) and aid Shepard in ms:3. Why I say so? the hint is in ms:2! In any case, Wrex doesn’t deserve to die in any scenario. One of the best and loved game characters. Sometimes, crazy is the only way to go!

Star trek fans know Lt. Commander Worf? He’s also gave is voice to the character called “Gatatog Uvenk” and its pretty obvious when you are hearing the character speak for the first time. But I happy to see wrek (hear his voice) but I also wished Wrex was also in “The A-team”. I guess the team from MS:1 and MS:2 might be together in MS:3. If so then in one of my game profiles, Kaiden and Miranda deserve a lot explanation from Shepard.
BTW, I played ms:2  using the onboard graphics so its pretty decent (well for an onboard yeah). So people who would try to scare you to upgrade to a better graphic card (just like those samples who told others to upgrade specifically to play crysis, nicknamed, the bottleneck busters!!!) just to play the game decently,  don’t be disappointed (unless you’re one of those paranoid people who want the “MAXXED OUT” in every way, still I guess 4850 and 4870 is enough). Read the game’s minimum specs and see if you’re cool with it.

The meet with “The Doctor”

We met medpal

Indeed we did!!!

I, aces170, viralbug, bikenstein and nukeu666 went for a dinner at 5 spice, Saki Naka. Yeah!! Dinner @ Andheri east! I reached over there via Bus in an hour’s time, although I chose to walk from Marol Naka since there was a lot of traffic over there and its a lot faster to reach when you walk. Horrible, horrible traffic.

We had a pretty good time but we wanted to have the infamous “mission impossible”. Its like- the biggest dessert they have!Only what they had was “Death by a chocolate” which I and viralbug along with bikey and the doc ..

…but aces had a cake! YES!! We had a cake. More specifically, it was Aces170 who had the cake

Although it looks as if aces has the doubts about the cake >_>. It’s a strawberry cheesecake. So I guess it doesn’t count!

Speaking of cheesecakes, I like cheesecakes, but not mom. Mom thinks that it takes more like whipped cream and a jam on top :-\. But then again, many bakeries do that and make it obvious. I am pretty sure a day will come when I would see a place who serves strawberry cheesecakes- like this!!!!

Now this cheesecake doesn’t look like jam over whipped cream, nor it looks as if someone taken a making mould, filled it with whipped cream and threw in the strawberries. I mean, how on earth will you earth the  strawberries which are not chopped and the cake at the same time >_>”. This one has a crust with the part which looks like a cheesecake and strawberries!!!!

This cake, dude, is unfortunately a lie as its taken from google

What would be the reaction? Well probably..

…pretty much the same reaction as viralbug’s expression, especially after knowing that there is no “Mission impossible” left.

The Anand Shimpi meet!!

BIKeINSTEIN written about a pretty good stuff about the Anand Shimpi meet which happened in Mumbai pretty recently over here.  Although he could have enabled spell check AND CHECK MY NICKNAME’S DAMNED SPELLING! Just so that people would know, TE members weren’t the only lot who came here, there were few people who did come to meet Anand who weren’t in any forums/much into forums! I, Harshal, Bikey and Kunal (Harshal’s friend) travelled together.

For those who are in technical forums or read technical reviews don’t know who Anand Shimpi, I am sure you guys will now when I say that he is the one who started anandtech.com!

So, far as what I could recall from the meet, we came inside inside the Ramada Powai. There were 2 people, Anand Shimpi (obviously) and some guy who was mimicking an American accent, so I (and I think Harshal and maybe bikey did but I am not too sure) assumed maybe he was Anand, later turned out he wasn’t.

Why fake an American accent? Dunno and don’t care. Just so that the readers will know, never fake one’s accent. You’re simply mimicking the same accent of a person who is speaking with the same accent for almost his entire life. Many people (I am sure Indians do when foreigners mimick our accent) might take it lightly and tell to themselves “Ignore the fool! Concentrate on the cake!” or even take this very offensively and even as a personal insult. As long as what you say is clear, accent is irrelevant.

So the crowd started to grow:

Oh yeah, there’s one thing great about the forum meets, they do seem to piss off the restaurant/hotel staff, atleast as far as TE’s meet is concerned. We later moved to the poolside where we had a chance to meet Anand’s parents. The pool looked pretty much most of the pool in a 5 star restaurant would have, except later we turned out to be dinner for the mosquitoes.

The people from TE who did come for the meet was Rohan, Sumeet, Aditya, Ananth, avijit, Igo, Amey who came all the way from Pune, thexfactor and gaganjain. I am pretty sure I asked zoombas from Chip forums, but he had some other plans.Before I say what did we talk about, let me make you read the entire story and squeal at the same time by saying that OCZ sent some stuff with Anand as a giveway, 2 of them of which was 60GB and 40GB ocz SSD drives. If you are lurking around the tech forums and are in Mumbai or somewhere near, YOU FAIL!!!!11 Its pretty tempting to see this happening here since giveaway (even rams, let alone SSDs and what not!)

As bikey said, Some key topics discussed were-
* How he began, way before AnandTech happened
* The story behind AnandTech
* The guiding principles of AnandTech and how it is different from the many others, a lot of whom are no more now.
* The “business” of running Tech sites and how it can be a disservice to the tech community.
* Some of the key people behind AnandTech and their contribution
* The joy of keeping AnandTech running truthfully inspite of various pressures/challenges and some related incidents.
* AnandTech’s commitment to uplholding reader’s interests and continuing to fight for the same.
* Responsibility of hardware manufacturers towards users to providing quality products, irrespective of the segment they belong to.
* lack of innovation in the industry today- a frightful reality and why it is necessary to keep innovating, for the sake of innovation
* Motherboards and manufacturers- the past, the present and our expectations.
* Larrabee- the good, the bad and what next.
* Consoles(gaming) in general- PS3, Xbox360, the success of wii, cell chips, …
* Proposal of a common spec platform for gaming for greater good, making single manufacturer consoles obsolete
* x86, the past, present and future
* AMD- hits and misses and where to now
* AMD Bulldozer
* Intel, Lynnfield, Nehalem
* Power saving in new gen harware like Nehalem
* Apple, macbooks and related
* OCZ, past and now and memory businesses in general
* the power of a present day GPU and the stark reality of how underutilised it is or how untapped the available potential is.
* Nvidia, ATI- products, SLi/CF,, driver development the future
* Intel Atom- how it happened, why is it so and what next
* smartphones, the technology behind them and how unsmart they and we are.

What did he miss? We talked about msi big bang that was showcased in msi’s recent overclocking tournament and that he is a star trek fan, which probably would make James Kirk happy! I know it made me happy . Then again, majority of the people are fans of star trek, and plan to make most of it as reality.

So, what was the giveaway?

The other guests i mentioned of earlier in the teaser- courtesy OCZ Technology and AnandTech.com -
A 60GB OCZ SSD, 30GB OCZ SSD, 4GB OCZ Reaper HPC DDR2 kit2 sets of OCZ Platinum DDR3 kits2 sets of 2GB OCZ microSD cards, 4 AnandTech original edition tees!!
and 3 “Team ocz” overclocker tees! Oh yeah there were lot of anandtech pens- red and mintgreen. Red was in lesser quantity, probably because for the time being ati is bashing nvidia!

So who were the lucky dogs? Igo got the 60GB SSD whereas a non-te member got a 40GB version. The reaction? Well what would one expect?

Igo with all smiles and reminds me of the joker whereas Harshal is keeping an eye on the 40GB (i think).

Don’t know his name, but he was so suprised, it distracted him from holding the drivefor the pic. Yes! You got zhe precious!!

Bikey seem to have a firm hold of Anand’s arm! But out of the lot, Bikey was the most enthusiastic about this meet!!! Dear lord I hate my pics >_<”

Harshal got zhe micro SD cards, although he did wish he would have won one of the SSDs.

And me? Well I got zhe tees

Good….GOD!!!! Will my pics EVER LOOK GOOD >_<”

A good meet. Something that should have not missed!!!

So coolpcguy and Zoombas, no cake for you!!!