some people are just fishing for trouble...

why would you ask a question like this unless you’re just asking for trouble?

blizzard's WoW armory

blizzard put up the armory for WoW character stats - i like this a lot better than allakhazam because now i don’t manually have to run a tool to update my character stats - plus the interface is much nicer :) so i updated the links on the side…

that having been said, i haven’t had much of a chance to play in the past month or so… my main is still only 60 :p

oh, and i just added a gaming category to the site too for all these WoW posts :)

popping a subset of gmail messages...

so i usually always pop my gmail mail, especially after i heard the paranoia about how google was closing accounts at random and people were losing insane amounts of email. but recently, i suffered a hard drive reformat (courtesy of windows, which attempted to format my entire hard drive rather than a partition because my hard drive was over 160 gb and win2k can’t read more than that, so it named the drive corrupt), i only had email up through the 4th of january popped from my gmail account.

however, i couldn’t find an easy way to pop the email that i had lost between january 4th to today. i tried many things - i tried resetting the pop option to allow downloading of already downloaded mail in the settings, and this worked for some subset of messages and eventually ceased to work (i got ~1100 messages the first time, ~400 the second time, then ~200, and so on, but eventually it stopped getting new ones).

finally, i found a solution - first, delete anything in your deleted folder. then, select all the messages you already have (for me, anything older than 1/4/2007) by doing a search for “before: 2007/1/4” (not sure if this only works for inbox and sent or whether it also searches the archived mail, but you can just use “show search options” and search for messages that way too just to be sure). take these messages and delete them. then goto settings, and under forwarding & pop, set gmail to download messages that have already been downloaded. now goto your email client, hit download, and you should get just the subset of messages that you didn’t trash.

you can then goto the trash can, select all conversations and move them to inbox (be careful, don’t accidentally empty the trash!) now this will cause a problem - you’ll find your chats and your sent mail that has no replies to it also in your inbox (which frustrated me). the solution? goto the inbox, do a search for label:chat - select all the messages and hit archive. then go back to the inbox, do a search for messages from: me, and mark all those as archived. then go back to the inbox one more time, do a search across all mail (including archived mail) for messages to: me, and hit “move to inbox.”

and that should do it!

ahmad tea

my own tea company? nah, that’s just my distant cousin, ahmad with an a… he makes good tea though ;)

hills of san francisco

so countless times have i heard people talking about how san francisco is so hilly… when people would ask me, i’d say, “sure, its hilly” - but seriously, how was i to know? the only two places in san francisco i had visited were the airport several times and pier 39 once…

but things finally changed… this week, i made a trip into downtown san francisco. and man, when people say its hilly, its really, really hilly! while driving up and down the roads, i couldn’t help but remember roller coasters… the hills up were crazy steep, and when you got to the top, you had to keep driving a bit in order to actually see in front of you.

the other really nice thing was that every once in a while, you’d get a nice view of the bay. i think i should take my camera and take some pictures there some day, and see the golden gate bridge while i am at it.

scorpion on a plane?

this is insane - they won’t let me take my cologne on a plane because its not in a ziplock bag, but scorpions are okay?

burning crusade midnight signings

blizzard people are signing copies of burning crusade ~5 miles from my house… so very much tempted to go, but i can’t imagine waiting a day in line to get one of 4500 copies… and besides, if it takes lines from 6 am to get one of 4500 copies, it’ll be so crowded that i can’t imagine it being worth going… then again, it could be nicely ebayable… shrugs

my bigger debate is, “to buy it, or not to buy it…”

google reader shared items

i’ve gotten used to using google reader for my rss feed reading. one of the nice features is the ability to share interesting items. i decided that i might as well start using this. here is my shared items page, and here is the atom feed. i’ve also added a link to the side of the page.

64 bits!

after much trouble to get things to install, my home machine is now up and running with gentoo 64!

qatar...

yes, yes, i said a continent per day… but alas, i got busy and there is only so much time and so many continents… (i am not really visiting all the continents, i’d just like to think so :)) i am currently writing this from qatar. i was in uae earlier (both in sharjah (al-shariqa) and dubai). sharjah reminds me of egypt a lot except for the number of desis and the traffic laws/driving patterns. dubai on the other hand could very well be a city in the us. the cost of living there seems to be very expensive - the price that you pay in the us is the price you pay in dubai, despite the fact that 1 dollar is ~3.6 dirhams. some places are even more expensive - a cup of coffee at starbucks, for example, was 12 dirhams, or roughly $3.33.

qatar is similar to dubai - there’s a lot of building and construction happening there. the building architecture in both qatar and dubai is quite amazing actually. some amazing looking buildings! anyway, so yeah, qatar is pretty cool too… very much like dubai (like a city in the us as well). cost of living is roughly the same as that in dubai, as a matter of fact, most places take the dubai dirhams as well as the qatar riyals. the exchange rate is almost 1:1, maybe one being 0.98 or 0.99 to the other.

one last interesting fact - getting into dubai, with a us passport, cost me nothing. getting into qatar, on the other hand, cost me around $27 for the visa.