Vacation Fever

Being severely affected by the vacation fever for the past few months, am slowly recovering to write this post. The attack was scheduled only for three weeks, but the symptoms existed for quite a long time before that.
Since the time I left my country, vacations play an important role in my life. It’s the big factor that keeps you going for the rest of the year. Below is the sequence of events involved in implementing a successful vacation.
1. Decide on the dates; let others at work know about it so that there are no clashes. This is normally done at the beginning of the year, when leave balances are credited.
2. Search for tickets; Login to all the websites and check out the different flights, routes and cost and book the tickets. Lesser the choice it’s easier. This step is time consuming with a huge number of airlines providing too many flights and routes; the cost varying based on the route and time. To worsen things here, all of a sudden you will find all flights are being filled like crazy in a day’s or may be even an hour’s time. Finally you land up booking the tickets based on availability. This step is normally done at least 2-3 months before.
3. Time to start shopping; Think of every person in the other part of the world and decide and shop the suitable things. Of course not to forget yourself, shop whatever you haven’t done for the past many days.
4. Inform your buddies about your trip; just thinking of a possibility of meeting up.
5. Time to think about official submission of the leave application; Now you may have to slog to avoid rejection of the application. Try to achieve near to impossible in the next one month if you got to get things right.
6. Roughly plan the trip; the visits, the movies to be watched, the malls to be visited, the pleasure trips to be arranged, the shopping to be done and what not. Everything is on the list and at this point of time it seems possible to do all this in the scheduled 3 weeks.
7. Now you are almost done with the near to impossible target, so submit the leave papers officially, praying for the right things to happen. Yes and finally it’s done.
8. Dust out your suitcases, empty the contents and dump them somewhere and start packing; Fear of excess baggage prevails until everything fits in and the baggage is weighed and checked.
Out of sheer excitement, it’s difficult to get a glimpse of sleep for at least a week before you travel. Then the big day comes, when you leave home with the luggage and your heart beats faster when you reach the airport. Flying seems to be really interesting.
Now landing at the destination, the first thought is about the return journey which will start from the same point. The time starts flying from this point and in no time you are back at the same place to board the flight for the return. This journey normally seems like a never ending one and sleeping during the entire flight becomes the only solution.
All is not over yet. Cleaning, unpacking, sharing experience and photographs continue for at least a week. Now Gear up, you got to get back to normalcy. And yes start planning for the next vacation.

The ‘Dave’ Days

I have never been crazy after video games or computer games during my entire life. Yes I love to play a few small games. PacMan has been my favorite for quite some time now. I have heard my bro talk about counter strike where they do heavy setup at home connecting n number of comps and laptops. I have the least idea what the game is all about, I can guess from the name though. Am sure that in no way can it be compared to the flash games I play.

The first time, I can recollect having played video games was when my uncle gifted us with a video game console with 2 joysticks. It was supposed to have 1000 games built in (I doubt it). The package used to lie in the shaft at home through out the year. We used to dust it out and connect it to the television set during our summer vacation. (Used to imagine ourselves as great techies at that time) There were a couple of games similar to PacMan and all kind of sports (football, tennis, racing, etc ...). Most of the games were shoot out games and there was one or two related to spellings.

Then came the computer days. We always had a computer at home, though unfortunately, we couldn’t use it that efficiently (for playing games). Initially we had a lower configuration comp (upgraded from MS-DOS) that wouldn’t survive if we loaded games on it. It was used to type out question papers rather (no better than a typewriter). Inspite of all these restrictions, we managed to play ‘Dave’, spending hours during the night. This game seemed to have impressed us so much that we normally ended up fighting for the comp often. Later we gave up the comp as my dad had arranged to get another one for his business use and the idea of having two comps at home was not that appealing. We were thrilled about the new comp as it was supposed to be of a great configuration. At the end, we felt that the old one was better, as we were not allowed to install/play games or any other software for personal use. We used to keep ourselves satisfied with Solitaire or Minesweeper (I like this one also) and the ‘Dave’ days died off slowly.

After my college days, I never had a comp at my place of stay and so no more games (apart from the ones I used to play on my mobile phone to kill time) until I got my laptop a few months back. Two days back, I was browsing through my bro’s comp and was amused to find the ‘Dave’ game (I wouldn’t have even remembered the name if I hadn’t found it there). Since then I have played that game more than a dozen times and have already copied it to my Laptop as well. Now nothing can stop me from loading it to my laptop. After all it’s mine.