What a fantastic play by the Indian cricket team under the captaincy of Dhoni. No one has expected this much from the team with all youngsters who don’t have any previous experience with Twenty20. India reached the finals by defeating Pakistan in the preliminary round, England and South Africa in the quarter finals and the world champions – Australia in the semi. Pakistan, defeated by India in the preliminary round, reached the final, defeating NewZeland in the semi. Among all the plays, the final was the best. India – Pakistan matches were always among the best but this time it was more special as both teams have more youngsters than experienced players.

India, who won the toss and batted first, scored 157 with the loss of 5 wickets. Yuvraj Singh, the hero in the matches against England and Australia could only score 14 runs. It was Gambir and Rohit Sharma, who helped India to achieve this score. The score was not a pretty good one but, they were able to defend it properly. Till the end, chances of winning for both teams changed time to time, and at last India won for 5 runs, making Pakistan all out for 153. In the last over, Pakistan needed 12 runs. Jogindhar Sharma, who was not much experienced was to ball the last over. First ball was a wide, second one – a dot ball and the third one was hit for a six by Misbah, who was on form. In the next ball, Misbah tried to hook it back and it ended safely in the hands of Sreesanth. It was a pay back from Sree for being among the expensive bowlers.

24th and 25th were the dates for students, for joining the collages after second allotment. Today morning itself, I and my father went to AWH to buy the TC and certificates. Even before we reached there, they have made everything ready and it took only about 45 mts get back the certificates and the money. After that, we reached MES at about 1.45 PM. I was happy to know that 6 students from our class, including me are there in MES for different courses. The admissions were not as arranged as in AWH and there were many to join for various courses. Krishnaraj and Vivek who reached there at about 8 in the morning, admission procedures were completed only after 2.30PM. My admission was complete almost by 5.30PM. By the time we reached Valanchery, it was raining heavily.

At last, the allotment results were published today morning, relieving the tensions of many students. As I hoped, I got a seat in MES Engineering Collage, Kuttippuram for Computer Science Engineering. My best friend Krishnaraj has also got a seat there for the same course. Some other students from our school has also got seats there. The collage is just 40mts journey by bus from my home and another plus point is that I know many of the students studying there.

Today, in the shop, Reliance broadband connection was fully configured. The service person said that we could start using it from tomorrow or day after tomorrow. The connection is so easy that plugging a wire to the LAN port, we can access net. The connection is similar to a prepaid mobile as we must recharge it using recharge cards. Also, a phone was provided with it, for free from which all calls to the Reliance broadband users in our area are free and there will be incoming facility until the broadband connection is in use.

Another crazy thing that happened today was that I got some server error from Google. Their popular services including Search, GMail, Orkut, Adsense, etc were not accessible today evening. Its the first time I came before such an error from Google.

The date for the publishing of 2^nd allotment for engineering and medical courses in the official website were scheduled today, 5PM. From 5PM onwards, I tried to know about my result. Every time I got the same page saying “The site is Withdrawn for Reallotment”. At last after 6PM, I got the page saying allotment is postponed for tomorrow. What a model for punctuality from the government…! There are many such instances. If its not ready, why can’t they say it a little bit early? I am not the only person who suffer this. More than thousands of students, wasting more than an hour of “the valuable” time and money…

Today was a great day for me. I configured my internal modem in linux at last. My modem chipset is from “Conexant” ans is a HSF softmodem. I got a free driver of it from Linuxant. The free driver provides only 14kbps but, still its good. Thanks for the support from all my friends who gave me the instructions.

What I did was that I downloaded the latest version of ScanModemtool from limodems.org and used it to get the details of my modem. It generated some files and by reading them, I got the idea of where to get a free driver. I went to Linuxant and downloaded a debian package of my free driver(about 1.3MB) and installed it using the package manager. During the installation, I was asked to provide some paths and I did so and it worked…

Also, today installed the Lalitha keymap for Malayalam developed by the Swathanthra Malayalam Computing group. Its nice, similar to the keyman in windows and working perfectly.