Ghorepani Hiking Day 1: First Times

14th October 2007, Sunday

We were all set for the hiking and so were to meet at buspark at 6:30. But being a Nepali it's obviously against our morals to be on time :). I reached at 7. Rajiv and Rajendra followed. Babins and Jiwan were already there. Had some arguments on whether to take a bus or micro. Finally took a bus at around 7:30.

Few minutes on the road and we got stuck again at Kalanki aka Kalanki ko jam. Some yawnings, roaming around and cursing government for not broadening the road, we finally hit the highway at 11.

Bored at Kalanki ko Jam. From Ghorepani Hiking

The other guys – Prajwal, Narendra, Mahesh and Umang were on bike. Their plan was to go to Manakamana first, reach Pokhara in the evening and meet us. Our plan was to go the Pokhara directly first, have some sight seeings and meet the biker guys later in the evening.

But unfortunately due to delay at Kalanki we reached Pokhara later. The biker guys were already at Sanish's place. We finally met at Prithivi chowk.

Most of the guys were for the first time in Pokhara so we went directly towards lakeside and Phewa tal. It wasn't my first visit to Pokhara (infact i was in Pokhara for a week few months ago) so wasn't interested at all. But other guys were really enjoying the place. We stayed in a hotel at Lakeside. It was Prajwal's friend's.

In the evening, again went for some walk. Our plan was to get dinner and go to a disco. But the club we went only had a concert. There was a snooker table too, so some guys went to play. Rest of us stayed outside.

We roamed around but it only got boring and boring. I was sleepy of day long bus ride. Finally we found a club. We all decided to go there, have some beer, jump around and go back to hotel room.

But WTF, it was a dance club. I mean only a real gal dancing at the front. Not kinda disco as we all had imagined before entering. It was the first time most of us had ever gone to a dance club. And it was embarrassing. At least i was.

Things got lil okay later on. Some guys even went to the front seat and some started talkin with the dancers. But nothing 'special' happened. I came to know later on that some cops had also arrived at the bar but obviously nothing wrong with that. I had few glasses of beer. Bar closed at 11.

From Ghorepani Hiking

Free Burma

Use GNU Octave instead of MATLAB

Especially engineering and technical people out there, you might have used MATLAB. How did you get it?? Bought it?? Commercial version costs $1900. Even the student version costs $99. Or got it pirated? Well it's not good either..

Here's the alternative: GNU Octave. It's more than just alternative. Good thing is that it is fully MATLAB compatible, that means every code written for MATLAB also runs in Octave.

GNU Octave

The most important of all is that GNU Octave is Free and Open Source Software. It also runs on Linux so everybody who wanna move to Linux but holding back due to MATLAB, well, we've a catch here..

GNU Octave's web address: http://www.octave.org/

Watching Youtube (and other online videos) full screen

The best OS to have in your computer is Linux. In Linux, one of the best software to install is CompizFuzion (previosuly, Beryl). Well, I normally don't like to have flashy graphics as it gets boring and counter-productive with time, but the screen zoom feature always rocks!

Zooming screen?? Where could this be useful?? This feature is targeted for people with poor vision so that they can magnify part of screen. I do have good vision (after wearing glasses though) but this feature comes handy when watching videos from sites like Youtube.

Online video sites like Youtube and Google Videos have small sized videos. Now if you have CompizFusion, just press Win Key and rotate the scroll wheel and zoom it to full screen..

Normal Screen


Zoomed a bit


Zoom More..


Full Screen

Firefox font fix

My last post on decreasing dpi got my Firefox fonts so damn small. Tried a lot of ways to fix it, even changed /chrome/userContent.css and userChrome.css but nothing worked.

I later installed a plugin named NoSquint which permanently changes the zoom level for individual or all sites. While this worked fine for me, i was lookin for a permanent solution.

Finally i found out that firefox tries to sync it's dpi with system's dpi, which i've already set low. Now the fix for that is as follows.

• Go to address bar and type about:config
• change the layout.css.dpi value from -1 (or whatever) to 0 (zero)

My Firefox now shows normal fonts.