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Today, I felt nostalgic about my 80286 which I had used in the 90’s to learn C, GW Basic and play games like digger, prince of persia 1. It was one of the “fastest” processors available at that time. It had an Intel 16Mhz 80286 Processor, 1 MB ram, 5.25 Inch Teac Floppy drive, 40 Mb Seagate Harddisc and a 80287 Math co-processor. It was a “decent” machine at that time.

I used it for hours to play prince of persia 1 where you play the role of a prince to rescue a princess from the evil vizier. There were limited number of packages which could run on that machine. Turbo C 2.0 from borland and Dbase 3 plus were some softwares I had used.

What are your experiences with antique machines such as the 8086, 8088 or 80286, if you had used any?

Most people are wondering what “Du Bist deutschland” is about .It is a feel good PR campaign running in Germany. This was a feel good compaign meaning ,”you are germany” which started its mission of trying to increase optimism into people who were not so happy because of unemployment and weak economic growth of the country.

Apparently,it is a top entry in some search engines.

Du bist Deutschland is a message to every german that every one of them has a responsibility for the well-being and future of Germany.

Several people from Germany have indicated that the “Du bist Deutschland” campaign is not government created, but sponsored privately. Moreover, an outcry about the campaign in the German blogosphere is generating scornful responses from the German mainstream media, which are said to have a stake in the advertising campaign itself.

After looking at the official website of the campaign “Du bist deutschland” and the tv advertisemet ( which can be found on the web) , The advertisement sends a message to all people to move ahead and do something which is everything one can do for their own country. This campaign has hit the german blogosphere and everyone seems to discuss about it since last november.

Recently, I saw the movie Hostel – Part II [Blu-ray] and was appalled by the violence in the movie. This movie is about the “dark side” of the human psyche and we see how one would get pleasure by tortuting or killing others.

According to this movie, the wealthy can get anything and some neurotics are interested in buying the priveleged or the wealthy for a high price and use them for something which you wouldn’t expect: for torture and killing.

The plot of the movie seems to based on real events and the dialogues can be real.

Hostel follows young Americans Paxton (Jay Hernandez), Josh (Derek Richardson), and Icelander Oli (Eythor Gudjonsson) as they embark upon a backpacking trip through various European countries.

The girls are really part of an elaborate (or plausibly elaborate) business called Elite Hunting” designed to seduce young tourists into partaking in certain activities which lead to them getting drugged up, unconscious, and relocated to a desolate, abandoned warehouse where they are chained to a chair and tortured to death by clientele. These people are really sick.

There is a significant amount of violence, nudity and visuals which are disgusting .You can also see the extent of corruption which has penetrated into our society. The writer probably wanted to create tension or fear with the visuals but it had the opposite effect. I was bored with the violence rather than thrilled. There is no thrill in this movie..and the plot is bland even though it seems realistic. Some scenes dont have any meaning such as a bunch of children beating up adults who come in their way and not comply with demands of cigarettes or chocoloates etc. Also, there is no explanation why the slovakian policemen are stopping cars and beating up drivers on the freeway.

Cutting a Fine Figure: The Art of the Jigsaw Puzzle, a 1996 exhibition at the Museum of Our National Heritage in Lexington, Massachusetts, surveyed the history of the jigsaw puzzle beginning with the first known “dissected map” from the 1760s and ending with a three-dimensional magnetic globe puzzle from 1995.

The map puzzle, a staple of childhood play, exemplifies the initial educational mission of jigsaw puzzles. Virtually every American child has tried at one time or another to assemble the puzzle map of the United States. It is relatively easy to put Florida and Texas and California into place on the edges, but making sense out of the jumble of states in the middle involves some real concentration and knowledge of the country’s geography. The idea of combining learning with play achieved general acceptance after the publication of John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education in 1693. The development of the jigsaw puzzle “to facilitate the teaching of geography” was a natural outgrowth of those ideas in the eighteenth century.

John Spilsbury, a London mapmaker and the best documented of the early puzzle makers, is recognized by most scholars as having invented the jigsaw puzzle around 1762. Competing claims for possible earlier inventors (Coven & Mortier of Amsterdam around 1740 and Dumas of France around 1760) are still being debated, but there is no doubt the first jigsaw puzzles were made from engraved maps pasted onto wood and cut into pieces along political boundaries.

Spilsbury’s trade card advertised many dissected maps, including the world, five different continents, England, Scotland, Ireland, and more than a dozen other individual countries. His puzzles were so successful that competition sprang up quickly. William Darton, a prominent London publisher of children’s books, adapted the jigsaw to teaching history by issuing the “Engravings for Teaching the Elements of English History and Chronology” in 1787. Each piece depicted a king or queen with a brief description of his or her reign. The solution required putting the monarchs in their proper order.

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