Santosh's occupations

Santosh is now employed full-time in flirting with Youtube, Orkut and Wikipedia. Ever since I helped him discover the virtues of streaming video via Youtube, he has been busy entertaining himself with the choicest of streams, mostly Indian. Uploading some videos from his own computer was to follow soon, and it did so with fanatic regularity; even though the bandwidth-hogging exercise tried our patience. And if the connection is severed in the middle of the upload, it's back to square one! But my dear roommate is not to be deterred by such tribulations.

Here's an idiosyncrasy that had vexed us no end. Mani's computer acts as the proxy server for Santosh's PC. Each time sometime toggles a switch in his room on/off, there's an electrical disturbance that disconnects the systems from the Net. Now you can well imagine how irritating it is for us to put up with the frequent disconnections. The remedy is simple. We simply have to physically disconnect and then connect the modem! What a crude thing to do in cyberage!

Anyway, some guys scared the hell out of Santosh saying that blatant copyright infringements (by way of illegal uploads to Youtube) would land us all in trouble. Santosh was visibly upset and almost rebellious to the suggestion that the big guys would come hunting for him through his IP address. Ya, that could happen!

What's endearing is the heartening comments he has been receiving from strangers for the videos he has uploaded. That's yet another way of experiencing the novel phenomenon of social networking. Which brings him to yet another site that's dedicated to glorifying people-networking: Okrut. Orkut seems to have a strange hold on newbies. It is now a regular feature on Santosh's Firefox tabs! Often Santosh's network manages to take him to a fellow who stays no further than the next-door! But what the heck, it's more fun to do mundane things via cyberspace, right?! Not all contacts live nearby, I must confess. And this is where Orkut really shines. Needless to say, Santosh is on the lookout for guys who share his own ethnic background here too! I guess the pull of soil is too strong to be nullified by personal engagements!

Wikipedia still reigns supreme on Santosh's daily agenda. His spirited inputs for Jhanjharpur (both textual and multimedia) would soon make the village look more illustrious than Paris! Well, almost!

So what does my roomie do when there's no Net connection? Romancing Picasa, of course! He spends his precious offline hours cropping, highlighting, rotating, color & contrast balancing, renaming...literally glorifying his image! How late into the night does he endulge into this covert hobby, I'll never know. But it's long after I've drifted asleep.