Attendance & Proxies

Well most of you might think this is about an entry on attendance that is taken in a class when you are in school or in college, well then you are absolutely wrong. This is more of the attendance and the proxies that you have to deal with in your real life. One of the best situations being that of a wedding / marriage in our culture. Now this is a real pain in the ass (at least for me it is), most people don’t care about it.

A wedding in our culture is like in most culture the union of two people (99% of the cases are Men and a Woman but as we all know there are exceptions these days). The united people ought to live the rest of the life with each other sharing each others’ burden, sorrows, pleasure………. and all that crap about life. I got to blog about that topic later on but the topic for today is the process of photographing a wedding day mostly.

Now most people around here ask camera men to come and record the events on a wedding day. Apart from this the people from the Bride’s side start recording on the day before for the reception at her house and in case of Bridegroom’s side usually till the end of the wedding and the following reception at the Groom’s house.

Ever since the advent of photography things have gone major changes in a usual wedding. You can see photographers from both sides of the families photographing almost all the events taking place on that very auspicious day. Most of the photos include group photos of the family members and friends with the bride and the groom. They do provide a good memory of events that took place everyday. This is where there problem arises after the photos have been processed. It is used as an attendance register by both the families to see who all were present and NOT present in the ceremony =)). Many a time I have felt this a bit hard on me since I am a kind of a camera shy person (. Anyway I do pose for a couple of photos since this is a one time event.

All this is fine until the advent of a video camera and let me tell you its no easy trying to keep up with excuses for not coming up in the photos. Before you could say that the photographer missed you out, now since you are no longer in the video camera it’s harder to make the proxies.

That’s just the beginning of the story. What is even worse is when they photograph you!!! Right at the moment you are having food. In our place is not some kind of buffet dinner party it’s most of the time a full fledged Kerala Lunch and let me tell you its no small thing and these photographers just capture you at that moment of you eating. These guys also carry a bright light with them. I feel that its very rude when somebody photographs you when you are in the middle of a lunch (I usually loose my appetite when these guys come by and most of the time I try to avoid the lunch). They specifically photograph each and everyone of the people and this serves as the “attendance” register for the wedding. You are not in the lunch implies you dint eat lunch. Now this is kinda bad manner in our culture.

Now the same thing happens in the reception. What is worse thing is this is usually a buffet dinner party. This time too they photograph each individual person who comes and goes in. But this is the problem I see with these wedding parties. The photographers must concentrate more on the event in general and less concentrate on every individual who comes in and goes out during the party.

All they want is to make a 4 hr long video about the wedding so that the people who missed it can see the entire thing uncut. LOL all the people want to see actually the Bride and the Groom and the events happening around them. Let me ask Who the Fuck wants to see people eating food at the wedding party? I don’t think anyone wants to. After all I have seen people watch the video and just fast forward the entire thing and see the important ceremony. These cameramen just use the video camera as some kind of still photographic equipment with the ability to capture sounds. These assholes just mix some filmi songs with the final video and give it to the people and they think it’s some kind of a big thing to do this. I fucking hate this. These assholes essentially destroy all the conversation that take place before, during and after the wedding, all those precious moments in the day that take place.

I hope that a day will come when people realize the full potential of a video camera and use it fully in auspicious events such as a wedding to preserve their memories of a wedding.

Disaster Strikes Again

Yup this isn’t the first time that HDD disasters have struck me. But this one was a pretty nasty one. Talk about 60 GB Data loss, it’s a nightmare so it speak. Movies, Downloaded programs, books, songs etc all lost in the blink of an eye. To make matters worse you haven’t even tagged them or made record of the lost items and remembering the items (yeah right 60 G.B of data) is not an easy task.
It was a pleasant morning got up, brushed my teeth, just when I was about to start up my computer Narayan came with his HDD to copy some data. I plugged his HDD and powered up the system all went well till windows popped up. Then I noticed that my 60 GB HDD was missing. I hurriedly copied the data for Narayan and then it was back to troubleshooting techniques. I noticed in computer management that the drive appeared as unpartitioned and then it stuck me HDD FALIURE!!!

But this time I had more experience dealing with failed HDDs and I own a more powerful p4 based system to recover my files compared to the p3 I used to do the stuff on. So I unplugged the drive connected to the p4 installed GetDataBack v2.81 for FAT32 and then began the recovery procedure.

The main use for my 60 GB drive was transport / storage so I had just 1 partition of 60 GB which implied just 1 partition to recover the data from and it is much better than recovering from multiple partitions.

• The 1st phase of recovery was to Identify the drive / partition.


• Then select the identified partition from which the data has to be recovered.


• Detection of the missing files (The longest boring phase)


• Showing the various missing files

• Recovering the files on user demand

The p4 showed a 45 min search time to go through the drive to find the missing files and my p3 would have shown at least 2 hours.

It was during this time I gave a thought to my previous experiences with disasters. I point out the most important of them.

• Recovery of Data from a friend’s “Accidentally” deleted partitions of a 10 G.B HDD


• My own 17 G.B HDD that developed bad sectors


• My own 60 G.B HDD that developed bad sectors


• A 40 GB HDD of a friend of mine that developed bad sectors (in the boot sector I think because the drive could never be repartitioned again)

The Last part of the Recovery.
This is the most pleasing when u see all the files

After 45 min it showed the partitions I recovered all the necessary files about 50 G.B and put them all into my 120 G.B. Then wrote some of them into DVDs to reduce the space overhead. Repartitioned the entire 60 G.B as an NTFS drive and then put the data back and verified it using CHKDSK and one whole day was wasted for the entire procedure. Man such disasters can be very frustrating and more than that time consuming.