Jacques does it !

Oz-RSA games always put me in a spot of bother. I support both teams, and Oz have a habit of thrashing RSA which I find a bit painful.

Anyway, I had predicted a scoreline of 3-0 favouring Oz for this test series. One cannot criticize a line of thought which concludes that Oz would dominate and decimate SA. And, till the final day of the first test, this thought would have been correct.
The first test in WACA, not unlike a sailor with a broken compass, changed course a number of times. Periods of domination were interspersed with periods of submission. Teams took control of the game, only to relinquish it in a matter of overs.. that is, till Hodge took control of the game, with a brilliant unbeaten 203. This enabled Ponting to declare, and set SA a target of 491. The expected result ? An SA collapse.

For a while it looked on the cards. 2 down for not much, with a day left to bat out, one would have thought SA’s chances of survival slim. The question would have been “How long would they last”, not whether they would last the day. Probably someone forgot to tell Rudolph that..
He almost did not play in this test. A last minute replacement for his namesake, Rudolph did not do much in the first innings, did his stuff in the Aussie innings’ with those dropped catches, and was on line to be dropped for the next test. That is, till the last day.
In what must be one of the greatest knocks in recent times, he defied Warne and Co on a wearing 5th day pitch all day, and was still at the crease unbeaten, when the last ball was bowled in the test. A magnificient knock, appreaciated even by the Aussies, as demonstrated by the congratulations from Warne and Ponting to Rudolph when he got his hundred.
And, Kemp, who was sledged by Warne in the first innings, and given the nickname “Daryll”, gave good support to Rudolph. Kemp had the last laugh though… . His partnership with Rudolph saved the game for SA.
On to test 2.. hope it is another close one .

My Radeon 9800 Pro…….

Its been a little over a year since I bought my pc. All the components were hand picked. An intel MB (the most decent desktop board available here), 2.8 Ghz Prescott, good amount of SDRAM, 17″ monitor, 5.1 speakers etc etc. But, the most beloved member was my display card, the Sapphire ATI Radeon 9800 Pro with 128 MB RAM.

This was one of the best cards available at that time, and a friend of mine who was returning from US got this about a month after I bought the PC. A month, every minute of which was spent fantasizing about Doom3 and other FPS games on the Radeon. I had downloaded the demo version of Doom3, and played it on the very night I got the card.

Then, increasing work load, an OS crash which wiped out all my saved games, and some other stuff did not give me time to play. I was looking forward to getting back to games (Doom3, HL2, maybe Quake 4) after Xmas. Was just counting days till 28th Dec… that is, till today morning.

Started out as another normal day. Got up, brushed, made some tea and started reading some news in google groups. Noticed a couple of spots on the monitor that had a funny color. Refreshing the screen did not remove them. Attributed that to a display driver bug, and continued reading. However, the spots did not vanish. If anything, they became numerous, and reading content off screen became harder. Rebooted the PC, and still no luck.

Some loose connection, I thought. Opened up the case, pulled the card out, and installed it again. Still no change. The display is full of strange characters and colors. Thats when the truth hit me, rather hard, in the solar plexus…. I have, inadverently, fried my Radeon…

(

Crying buckets.