New Camera

So I finally bought a new camera. Its a Cannon Powershot. It is my costliest possession here. Last time it was the photo-frame I bought for my parents(Photo-frame before Camera!!!! Weirdo) But yeah I spent a good 5 days in deciding which one to buy.

Jagdish gave me a lot to look for when buying a camera in our Saturday morning discussion. The guy has like a bagful of cameras( wonder why??). He told me a lot of things 'grain size', 'shutter speed', 'aperture size', 'focal length' etc etc. After a lot of research,( my favorite word now)I boiled down to two models SONY DSC-S950 and CANNON A480. Meanwhile my Papa was coaxing me everyday since I told him that I would buy a camera soon. And finally on Saturday, I bought the SONY after reading a lot of online reviews and digging the saleswoman in BEST BUY for half an hour.

The camera kind of makes a weird sound when giving a flash but all in all the picture quality is great. 10 megapixels. What do you expect? But the story does not end any soon. My Papa woke me up early on Sunday to shoot photo of the campus and send to him. Sunday was probably the "HOTTEST" day on Campus. And there was no bus service available. I had to loiter around in bright Sun all afternoon to get pictures for him. Tried some nature photography but I am not to great at that. I guess when you first get a new gadget, age hardly matters. You become a kid having all the energies to conquer the world.

Sooner I realized that GOOGLE has a software PICASA for uploading the picture. I hate GOOGLE. Has everything you would ever want. No scope for artists like me. Anyways its always good to have a camera. Helps capture the moment as it is.

Badminton Update

So the good news is that the club is back up in the summers. The bad news is that the fee is 30$ instead of 20$, which was the amount charged for the birdies in the spring. Yesterday was my second day at the club in the summer session. I am possibly in the worst ever shape in last 5 years. I have stopped doing yoga. Though I plan it every night, the morning after the plan gets dropped. And so.

Anyways I find this chapti to practice with. She is taller than the normal once and one of the most beautiful once among the pack. Yeah probably the best of the worst good looking females in State College. But she seems to be also the fittest. She hits the shuttle probably much harder than I do and is very quick on her feet. I tried to match(typical Indian male, won't take it lying down from a female). But you can't GG. Look at her she looks like a professional. But GG won't listen. GG never listens to anybody not even to his rational half. End result. GG sprains his BUTT. Who the hell sprains a BUTT. Among all the 'decent' muscles  down the body, I had to find the most indecent and most spoken stuff here to sprain and sprain badly. Gosh this 'thing' hurts as I write. I am out of breadth soon(hardly 15 minutes). But thankfully AJ invited us for a doubles. Some relief for the poor butt.

The club meets three out of five days, which is great. Now I do not have to look for anyone's company in the evening. After 2 hours of exercise the body is just too tired to think and do anything. I barely make it back and stuff myself with some food. All in all a great time pass.

SECURITY IS WIERD AT TIMES

What do you make of the following email that you see one fine morning:-

-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (Darwin)  hQEOA5g61IjEEzlGEAQAs5akcfv5V/4npxDMHDKbqKMy0wGak8RLt0zaGNgXe2iy rfFmx1/quLU4wAM2TVLhXGwzcTVASecIluTPrSTjhlvHwfpcwZKPjAAahAL+3FBZ 17Fkg/c4SbGnlA3lE1EVNlhDf85skkbHWhtUBo1Aw3QOdwSZ+SV4HePEMK9D8vYD /1Kn/Hdaod5592D5V3Szwe7tQpa57qPYS5juH4tghM8qrvVp/gwktZKWWU37MZHy uugv6TRvv8svHndpulmss3p4BWwvkIvmnTX84ZieMvtp/2v9JrjDZlt5EJZwpSA0 KWljaawtOmz03+I2M7yCBlyS0F1kL38NCnDD4edJUsdVhQIOA4J5yeSWW+a3EAgA mXxMEZf5ls0RNb7ZdT4JTbUeNP/XTB38XNThzWEobodPRqmczKOqN64goff3Dlvw vP22QWhMw6nbVLfUkbYu4Cozek7sOLoIWqSGB4zmOf3s6Fnd7g6Edr6heeGSzzwE D21qkVs55A2SlN/ZGjO7SvDoAzql5OSHxo8IrfDLHlUXwyi4LULA/k1cI5Di2unR cegw2529I7BiBzmI/O1xH1pq0DEYUjUCVLH5M6d1s/yaxFltc0VF2KMopYlEoyss 4uspIrZyPF0krE7y8baD660oPrXwzeWk1TAaJwvfSzqtCBB8E7PlhI5qKl4zsvb3 eImixbwhvR9K/ZW3czU5rgf/VrMGbf1wuMFnzh52PT+njvb+yFsxjK/HUsSfrx0+ NDrHWeVB8gDj59kIztZOlOFCic9bVTVBejQnZ9I7dAClNgmXYDBfuw4cjazT5zmK y9eiOeITjAkIgmCMUeSvV2v9gVikY5oKw3qpjE/zITxdGcEYc4cpWVGHTfGOanDQ 3SmyXM3rabjL7fK+vzMlTc6XRwD36hZwRL6RNeyyisucHCCCFYu+t2mxeejnNbgx +j/ggyoyKAmZkPxUKrNDKIIloDIbqr8dX1CiCh/EbOyMRLVv3AosJYivlNTaOegQ n8aaMXuZvA0ntMdn4POnkZgS1mC2hmlifWRE59HczERnHNLpASiMGVWGA/IaTzgP Ub4FJrQS4IkqZwYMGUl9/B22PSuyLrnR88yk2AMxIhfE2IoJQmjDbMY6kHOE2fwN RtBn5OXaCbFDvNOiqZ0kegPT4pp5DBUHvXvYeZH1JMNqIbmxWNICFq0Oc1tpp5re R8nmBQ23PO1mVIe0jQYdRwe6alfmBfzoNBh0MVjWqgc+LHTufjEE/M+gXUf2cuun htHhDcvUQbZRr8flVfxmc4ZJYhGL+aX0EvTX4ISKjF3rbs3Q5riyKuA3VincEr08 BLYkVMwuFoIGU2SZT/Mwd780uM4yIsy4gRM3E2ZtQ5iqaifF6ls/quN8Y2/FCZvK D5n58a5oNYuKZE02XDiLdlcyr7ztClB1gVrBZvAyqQObGxAz54Pjz0H18MhsMriC HJ5nI3Ja1d5YairFTvJyNc8+Ir36Bu5hUVdhAIgzx8TpGIBNmVGLUaae7sAiD8as RWVTGZbv7V7B5IJPTRIhC/b35LJqHc/rHCPaCF+Oq6xAAju0Jk/0m1TsyRhCRFNx iwEvdlcKyKvPonDqPTsk2rnEWflOUuleo0p6hKGbmVWG1RcWL37h/6vS9tv8bDsJ WRwJfsdYkThh57nIzKWtx4jdMdODZ/9VwjCQG/0lH43JOncpJk0a7vM9s1HlZGdX AzO9YJfmDqTU1co/DpAqmaNxhhElZmypfEkxNqfG7Ozlm0y+Yc3ElUHeoffV0UAT fRQUXG5ZcOqTCA== =EmX6 -----END PGP MESSAGE-----

Some alien!! World coming to end!! Frankly I thought the person screwed something and send me someone else's message. I went up to the 'person' and asked if he sent me the details that I wanted from him. He said yes. I asked him how do I see the message. He said DECRYPT the CIPHER with your PRIVATE KEY. Oops!!! Come again. Its been 5 months away from SECURITY. But this is weird. Who the hell encrypts the email with your public key.

So early morning its time to exercise my all the "knowledge" gained over the past two semesters to find out how to decrypt an email message and searching the file system in my small USB(read brain) for the private key. Its kind of interesting that I used only one password for all my accounts till 2008 and beginning of 2009(when I fell to phishing attacks!! DO NOT TELL MY ADVISER). But now have I do not remember some 5 different passwords. Still I was confident enough of the passphrase that I finally located to work. But as things are in UNIX nothing comes for free. I had to painstakingly google for "pgp" initially(which was wrong) and then "gpg" tutorials to find the commands for decrypting the file. Finally I was able to decrypt only after SSHing to a linux machine. This also wasn't that simple. SSHing for some reason gave the following SECURITY WARNINGS:-

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

@    WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED!     @

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY!

Someone could be eavesdropping on you right now (man-in-the-middle attack)!

It is also possible that the RSA host key has just been changed.

The fingerprint for the RSA key sent by the remote host is

98:2f:2c:60:35:c7:f7:1c:b6:5b:30:0f:74:cb:ee:36.

Please contact your system administrator.

Add correct host key in /Users/gaurav/.ssh/known_hosts to get rid of this message.

Offending key in /Users/gaurav/.ssh/known_hosts:2

RSA host key for horta.cse.psu.edu has changed and you have requested strict checking.

Host key verification failed. 

Now if you are new or an amateur in security, Man in Middle attack is the most nasty kind of attacks. Its like the old witch, who listens standing outside your door. This put me off. Finally I managed to log into one of the LINUX machines somehow. MAC really sucks at times. Not all UNIX commands run on it. "gpg" is just one of them. I was finally able to decrypt his email and find the Virtual Machine login and password.
The exercise took around 45 minutes. Too much overhead for a security application!!! But then who encrypts an email after all. Email is password protected. Security is great to have but if it complicates life so much then perhaps we are better without it!!! Well I am not suppose to say that!! If people in Security won't ENCRYPT an EMAIL then who would!!! Fair enough.

Semster Ended

So finally the semester has ended. Almost. Just the last two days of TA work. Again Hopefully. Yeah I know I won't get a TA ever or maybe an RA next semester. Monday I have meeting my adviser. Hopefully I would get some project for summers. Yeah summers. Again I think I would spend it all by myself alone in this office fighting my insecurities and myself. Worse still the badminton club does not meet in summers. Worser perople are going out of town. People are going to California, New Jersy and India as well. But GG is stuck here forever. Same R bus, same Balaji to contend with. God!! send something or someone wich wwould change something in this boring life.

I am just worn out. Four months of a gruelling semester are more than enough. I guess I need some counselling badly. Body had gone out of shape a little. Confidence is petty low. There is an intermitent fear in mind. Same like that of the recession for people. I fought it throughout the semester but can't seem to get over it anyway.

Hope to find a swimming trainer soon. Maybe that would fix somethings. Badly need someone's company or some activity.