Aaaarrgghhh...stupid download...

Aaaaarrgghh

With much pomp and fanfare I joined the league of people who download interesting stuff from the internet. Spending days and days and nights and nights downloading such gems as all of the top all time great 250 movies as annointed by IMDB ( http://www.imdb.com/chart/top ), or all the seasons of Friends, Wonder Years, Desperate Housewifes (not me, not me - a friend does this as well) was how I had dreamt my days were going to be like in the coming days. Vast dreams of buying a 100 GB external drive which would soon be full by my phenomenal efforts of day and night downloading were dreamt of. Great collections of movies were thought of and carefully tabulated.

Finally I started on my first download that was to become the cornerstone of future super movie collection. After much deliberation I decided to download 'Rashomon', the Akira Kurosawa all time classic that I wanted to see for a long time ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042876/ ).

And now comes the stupid part.

Torrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing software. So you see a number of files of the same item out of which you choose one to download. For Rashomon I had some six or seven files showing up. I finally zeroed in on two of them by evaluating the size of the file. 600 to 800 MB is the size of any normal movie of decent picture quality. One was 620 MB long and the other was 700 MB.

* My thought process:
- First movie download
- Should be high quality
- Screw the time it takes i'll get the bigger, and so obviously better quality file.
- Yay! that was a good decision Swapnil. Excellent choice. Has anyone ever told you that you're amazing and oh-so-decisive? - yeah, yeah, I get that a lot :)

SO the gist of this entire thought proces piece was that I started the 700 MB download.

I nurtured it like a new born baby, I did! Making sure that it was fed well with internet bandwidth. Kept checking up on it to ensure that it is all right and its growing (file download progress) was on the right lines. Before the second night of downloading it gave a lot of anxious moments as it took a lot of time to start the download process. Two anxious and sleepless nights I spent monitoring and caring for my new baby.

And this morning it finally gave its first joyful gurgle when I played the file on my media player. Much rejoicing was in the air as I hugged my laptop, danced around on the bed. Whoops rent the air as I leapt around punching the air. Dreams of a huge and amazing movie collection seemed just on the verge of realization.

And suddenly I paused.

The first gurgle, much like baby talk, wasn't understood by me. I cocked my ears and listened again. Yes, it was some language quite alien to me.

Indeed, it was in Japanese.

(no, no, this can still be salvaged. I'm sure there are english sub-titles. I won't let all this effort and blood and sweat go to waste. )

Yes, you guessed it. The subtitles were in Swedish.


So ladies and gentlemen I spent two effing nights in downloading a Japanese movie with subtitles in Swedish!


AAARRGGHHH...I could kick myself


Corollary: The 626 MB file (remember the one I disdainfully rejected? You do remember it, don't you?), in sharp contradiction is in English.

Corollary: I've got it! I shall not let the effort go waste. I'll learn Japanese instead. Ah, what a brilliant idea, as simple as iti ni san !!



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