Pulsar 220 after 4000 K.M.

 

Now that one and a half years have passed since I posted my first impressions about the Pulsar 220 its time to post my impressions about how this bike holds up after 4000 K.M. in 18 months. As you can gather the bike hasn't been used a lot (what can I do, my office is close to my house) but the amount of problems seems to be disproportionately high.

I've been changing the engine oil at almost every service and all the services till now have been completed according to schedule. I've made a couple of extra trips to the service center for the rear brake screeching but other than that the bike was running okay.

At the first paid service I changed the spark plug, air filter as well as the engine oil. Now after a couple of weeks the bike started giving starting problems, the RPM meter used to get stuck sometimes and the rear brake was screeching again. I went to the service center again and they replaced the fuel filter this time and cleaned the rear brake. The bike seemed to be working okay there so I took it back home.

That evening the troubles started again, the starting problem had gotten even worse when the bike has been parked for a while so I have to keep pumping the throttle in neutral to keep it above 2000 RPM otherwise the engine shuts down. The rear brake started screeching within a week and the bike's average nosedived as well. A new problem that cropped up is that the fuel meter displays empty when the bike starts and it takes around 3-4 KM traveling to get it to report the correct amount of fuel left.

Now I don't know if all Bajaj Pulsar 220 bikes are terrible quality or I am being robbed by Bajaj's Pro Biking service center but one thing is certain - this is my last Bajaj two wheeler.

Oh and I didn't want to post a picture of the piece of crap Pulsar 220 so I posted an image of a bike that isn't.

Fahrenheit 451

 

Ray Bradbury has written a really thought provoking book in Fahrenheit 451. I initially thought it would be about how children have stopped reading but this book has a much bigger scope. Not that that's much of an issue these days with the Harry Potter books making reading cool again worldwide (and that five point something book for teens in India). Otherwise people only read books from the bestseller list so that they could talk about something at parties (socialites preferring non-fiction).

The story is about a fireman who's having second thoughts about his job but the twist here is that in the book's time line firemen have become instruments of destruction of books. Their job is to burn any books found along with the house they were found in. The protagonist is influenced initially by a flaky teenage girl whose family moves in to the neighborhood, he is forced to take stock of his life during fairly innocuous conversations with her. The catalyst to his eventual disillusionment is an old lady who chooses to burn herself with her books rather than leaving them.

The book points to some interesting trends that led to the banning of books. People wanting instant gratification and hence preferring TV to reading, the dumbing down of popular media to appeal to a larger market and removing offending books to appease minorities. All in the name of easing the everyone's mind.
Even though the dialogue can be a bit melodramatic at times this book is recommended for everyone with the hope that the events in the book don't turn out to be prophetic. Oh and if you are reading the 50th anniversary edition of the book then don't forget to read the coda section.

The State of PC Gaming

 

Having recently purchased three PC titles in quick succession I was surprised by the amount of effort that was needed to start playing these games. The titles in question being Grand Theft Auto 4, Dawn of War 2 and Call of Duty: World at War. Yeah I know these games released last year but I was waiting for my ill fated CPU upgrade to finish before playing these.
Anyway lets go through the effort required one by one, patching World at War to v1.4 requires downloading and installing 3 huge patches with a cumulative size of over 700MB. Of course one of the patches adds more multi-player maps but its still huge. On starting the game you have to create an account with the developer and you can start actually playing the game.
Dawn of War 2 was unbelievable in this regard, it installs Steam (then Steam updates itself), then it installs the game itself, then it installs Games for Windows LIVE (GFWL), then Steam updates the game, when you finally launch the game GFWL updates itself. Whew... then you can finally play the game after signing into Steam as well as GFWL.
GTA 4 requires online activation after installation finishes (in addition to SecuROM) and requires an account with Rockstar Social Club before playing and on first start it updates GFWL as well as the game itself while the status is shown as updating GFWL. So after creating all these accounts and downloading the patches it almost feels like setting up a new system from scratch and installing all the drivers and updates.
What is going on here, are all these companies into email address harvesting or something? You can't properly play a single player games without signing into three online services.
Now to the actual single player games themselves, since when did single-player gaming become an add-on to games and multi-player the main component? GTA4 is the only game out of these which can be called a single player game, others contain small single player campaigns with the main focus on multi-player gaming and maps (as the change logs suggest).
Image courtesy VisualPharm.