Long Overdue - Part 2

I'm sorry to keep you waiting, oh stranger who takes keen interest in my updates. Got stuck up with the happenings of life but I promise you that this post is going to be quite interesting as I did things that I've never done before in my life. Had a quite an exciting month - November.

I'll start from where I left off. My sis finished her holidays and went back to college. Kept bugging her about the results. Finally got it in the first week of December. Not bad. Considering that she stands fourth in the class despite her marks :P

And about the web hosting. Still not enough money :P I'm still saving up but it I already see another expenditure coming up in the horizon. As for work, I've been assigned (and I've taken it quite interestedly) a pet project to build a private social networking site. It going quite well. Amazing how you can set up such powerful sites with so much ease these days with the help of ready-made software with just a few tweaks for customisation.

Enough of Tech talk, you say, and I agree. A lot more happened on the cultural side. Had a lot of "firsts" and a few more in the coming week.

Finally got out of my shell and attended the Live concert of Mandolin Padmashree U. Srinivas at the Ambedkar bhavan conducted by the Times of India as part of the Times Bangalore Festival. If you know me, I'm usually the lazy and the stingy kind so you may wonder how I decided to attend this concert. Well, in the past month, something has bitten me and I've become quite inclined to attending public functions and besides, got a free pass to this concert so thought "Why not?". Yes, you caught me there.

After that had a pretty hectic couple of weeks and then just rested for the last couple of weeks. Had a good rest. If you've read my earlier blog then you'd know how much I love my sleep and did quite exactly that - sleep! Got a good night's sleep every single night for the past week.

Last Thursday, my friend Vinny dropped  in at my house and during the conversation suggested that we visit Fantasy Lagoon at KR Puram the next morning to shoot some birds (I mean the actual birds of the Avian kind, not the other kind). I agreed. Decided to leave home by 6 but finally left by 6:45AM, reached his uncle's place at 7:15 to borrow his tripod and then went to Fantasy Lagoon. This is a lake, a little after crossing the hanging bridge at KR Puram. They have boating and some other activities that I didn't know of because I had never been there before and the place was closed at the time we had reached. They open at 11AM and are open till 7PM. Anyways, we hadn't gone there to boat so, we went around the place and found a hind-side entrance. Entered the banks of the lake, with the pleasing morning breeze, the chilling cold of winter and the beautiful scenery, we were mesmerised. Started shooting, spotted a few birds and a lot of fish in the lake. Learnt that Videography is quite an art. We had to meddle so much and had to respond so quickly with the zooming and focusing to catch the bird on the recording. Finally, after having spent a good half an hour, we were very refreshed and satisfied and were getting late to office. Hit the road, returned the tripod, went back home, got ready and left for office and you know - the usual stuff happened after that.

Next day, read about a play by Evam at the Alliance Fracaise de Bangalore in the Saturday's newspaper. It was Rs.200 per ticket. Yes, I immediately denounced it from my mind and carried on reading the rest of the paper but throughout the day, something in me said I got to attend this. One of the reasons for this was the cast of Karthik Kumar (a familiar face from his tamil movie roles and sis is a big fan of his. Read that the tickets are available at some book stores near MG Road but the venue is quite close to my place. Again, me being me - LAZY, didn't want to go so far. Found a phone number mentioned there, so called. A girl named Dhanya answered and found out from her that tickets are available at the venue. This was another BIG reason that made me go.

Wanted to go for the 5:30PM show but was late because of my mechanic who had delayed my scooter service. After paying Rs. 200 I didn't want to miss even a single minute of the show. So, brought my scooter back home and asked if my sister wanted to come. She jumped in joy hearing that Karthik's going to be there. Told my mom not to cook dinner as I'll be late and that I'd eat outside.

Took my sis, entered Alliance Francaise, the parking said full but apparently it was only Car parking that was full. Bangalore is becoming choked with cars. RTO needs to stop issuing new registrations or at least limit it. Anyways, that topic is for another time. The watchman there was my ex-neighbour (he moved some years ago), so with his directions, parked my scooter inside the venue.

Remember, that I had many firsts. Entering Alliance Francaise was a first. I'm pretty embarrassed  to say this but I've never been inside it though it was so close to my home. Anyways, having done that now, I feel a little less guilty. The premises is quite large. It doesn't look that way from the outside. We were just 5 minutes earlier to the event so the my ex-neighbour watchman uncle asked us to rush in. We did and bought the tickets and immediately there was a queue entering the auditorium. Expected it to be big but wasn't quite what i expected. The crowd was overwhelming. Hadn't expected that. There must've been about 200 people at the least.

The show did not start for a while and there was a power-point presentation being played explaining what Evam does and how we can help them and some western music playing in the background.  This was all quite nice fo the first few minutes but then got a bit irritated with the delay. Anyways, waited patiently and the show began.

First act was of Karthik Kumar. What a guy! Followed by Shanon, Rabhinder and TKM. The show was named "Urban Turban - Tall tales from the top of our heads" and quite aptly the utterances of all the four artists were spontaneous (at least looked that way without a hint of it being rehearsed) which made it intriguing. Both the Karthiks - Karthik Kumar and TKM were absolutely phenomenally funny. Laughed my stomach out. Shanon was intelligently funny and Rabhinder told us a story that touched our hearts. Before we know it, we had spent more than an hour and the show had come to an end. "What a show?" both of us exclaimed. Then thought to ourselves that all good things come top an end, a big sigh and we left the auditorium to reach back home. My sis wanted a pic taken with the artists but they had disappeared behind the stage and there were no signs of them coming out. So, I told her "Next time". We collected all the literature about the Alliance that were kept outside for public consumption (I being a hoarder of such literature) and then went back home feeling very satisfied. Mom had cooked despite me asking her not to, but good that she had(How do Mom's have such instincts?). I was very hungry and had forgotten to eat outside :P. Had a satisfying dinner and went to bed.

Then came the Sunday Reunion that I had planned with my old school friends. One my friends - Gautam is leaving to Canada in January and he's going there with no plans. So, we don't know if we'll ever be able to see him again (in case he decides to settle there) so we wanted to have a get together. So, 4 of our closest friends from school - Madana, Gautam, suhas and Avinash got together at Star City, bowled a match, played a match of Air hockey and then Suhas very kiddishly, played a few arcade games which was then hogged by the other kids around. Sad that we wouldn't get another chance for a while and we being in a hurry, the day coming to an end, almost, had a few pictures taken on Madana's insistence. Then, we argued about entering Fun world but then majority decided against it as we were not too keen on paying Rs. 200 (unlimited no. of rides which won't be possible) for just 2 hours. Thought of going to Urvashi Cinema to watch Final Destination in 3D but the called them to find out that they've changed the movie to "Rocket Singh" and besides, it was around 3 and the next show wasn't until much later in the evening. Then, Avinash, very thoughtfully brought along a greeting card for Gautam (with him leaving and all, got very senti), all of us signed it and presented it to Gautam. Then Avinash went his way after his Good Byes and we hit the road to Madana's home for a (very) late Lunch. On the way, being what he is, Madana lost his way and we had to make a stop until he could find us. When he did, co-incidentally we had stopped near our School. He suggested that we go inside. After some initial hesitation considering thatwe might not be allowed inside on a Sunday, we gave it a shot anyways. Luckily we found the watchmen "Rana" who was familiar to Madana during our school days. He happily allowed us in. We did some crazy stuff inside like playing "Pen Fight", remembering our old jokes and laughing our a**s off. Felt really nostalgic. Took a lot of pics with the Nokia 5800 Xpress Music's camera. I know, we need to get a digicam but haven't yet, so made use of what we had. (By the way, I'm not getting anything less than a digital SLR.) Watch this space for pics and a video.

After our wandering the school, went to Madana's house where his mom had prepared some lip smacking B3 (Bisi Bele Bath), Rasam and Thayir Saadham, a salad and Raita. Filled our stomach to our heart's content (this was around 5PM) and after a round of Singing by Gautam and Madana, said our Good-Byes and went back home.

Reached home by 6, skipped  dinner, hit the bed straight.

Returned back to the usual routine of Work and home from Monday onwards with the exception that I get up early these days and get ready quite in leisure.

Another interesting development is that I might be out of town and am going to experience a  few "firsts" in my life this coming week. First time to visit the Bangalore International Airport, first time to travel by a plane (yeah, I know, how lame is that), first time, I'd be going north of Tirupati.

Have gotten a long leave approved from the 24th to the 3rd for the New years. Will be visiting Trichy and Madurai. Again, a pilgrimage. Seems like I'm becoming very spiritual with all these pilgrimage trips that I'm going on these days. Well, call it what you want but I want to visit these places to know their history and admire their marvelous architecture and planning and to celebrate our culture.

So, until next time...

Long Overdue - Part 1

You may wonder why no post for more than a month. If you know me, you'd know my schedule. If you know that you'd know that I like my somnolence on weekends. A reason why I haven't been able to  complete reading the Rs. 4000 worth books that I bought some time ago.

Why a post suddenly now, you may ask.  Well, I didn't want you oh regular reader to feel ignored.  So, here goes...

A lot happened over the past month. I'm writing this for my own record although oh stranger, you can bore yourself by reading this journal of mine.

Let me go in reverse chronological order.

Today I got an SMS from BSNL offering me an upgrade to  1Mbps from my current 256kbps unlimited at Rs.1499 and 2Mbps at Rs.2999. It asked me to check www.bangaloretelecom.com for details which I want to but the internet speed currently is so damn slow that I'm just able to write this blog and nothing else.

If you are a regular reader, you'd know that I've been wanting to move this blog and my site altogether to a paid host and have been procrastinating because of financial problems and not able to find the right host. Was talking about it to a friend and he has been using this host called ZnetIndia.com and vouches for their service. So, have decided to try them out once I accumulate enough money.

Earlier this week, got to seeing the Harvard lectures of the CS50 course which came on this month's Digit's DVD and have been hooked to it ever since. Also, looking at Prof. David J. Malan, even I want to get a Mac Book Pro but again, I'm broke. So, if you, the reader feels especially altruistic and want to help a fellow human being, then please donate towards my MacBook Pro Fund by shooting an email to me. :P

My sis has just finished her semester exams and has started making me envy her for she is in her holidays now. College re-opens only 16th next month. That's 20 days of freedom to her. I wish I could rewind a few years and go back to my school days too. Miss it.

In the good thought of not making you strain your eye, oh reader, I shall write the rest of the update in the next post. (Excuse for being lazy, don't believe me.)

Vodafone validity

Just got a message from Vodafone:
"Hello! As a special Vodafone customer, we have extended your validity to lifelong. You can now enjoy incoming calls free for life! Keep talking!"
Wow! This is the first time that something like this that I've got. Yay! :)
I'm elated!
Perhaps this is the result of being their loyal customer since 2005. Whatever the reason, I'm not complaining.
Of course, lifetime means till their license expires, which is 25-09-2021.

Bluetooth Blueprints

There was one day when I visited my friend’s house when he showing off his newly arrived Bluetooth Stereo Headset. He asked me to try it on but I was indifferent towards it saying “A headphone is a headphone, how different can it be from all the others that I’ve tried on?” and declined his offer.

It was later, much later that I realised, when another friend of mine forced me to try it on, that THIS is indeed something different. It wasn’t just different. The difference was mind-blowing. The reception was crystal-clear over Bluetooth and the best part was that with Windows 7, it just works out of the box. It was this way right from Windows 7’s beta days. My friend and I fancy things that do not require drivers to be installed manually. We would readily confess to the fact that we have an obsession for collecting products that either has drivers on Windows built-in or gets it from Windows update. Our collection of product right from the AMD Motherboard & Processor to the Hauppauge Win TV PVR 150 – MCE TV Tuner card, the Xbox 360 controller for PC, to our Microsoft Keyboards and mice and HP fingerprint reader would all stand to prove this.

Both of us recommend to our friends & family and to anyone to buy products that would work out of the box. There might be other products out there, better products than the ones we recommend but  without integrated drivers, not only on Windows, but essentially any OS, the products loses its value and many of the features that it may be capable of which just get lost on installing the drivers that came with it manually.Also, the ones that have these drivers on the OS by default, have a better integration with the OS and with the software that comes with the OS which gives a seamless, intuitive, no non-sense experience with the device.

The other irritating part that we both hate while installing drivers manually is the whole load of bull crap software that get installed which I don’t need. For example, when I install my webcam, all I need is for it to work with my IM client software that I’ve already got installed. I don’t want a whole lot of crap to get installed enabling me to view myself and record video. These software are usually crippled with very basic options. If you are from a company that makes these drivers+software packages – listen carefully: We don’t need it! Just give the “.inf” files with the relevant “dlls” and be done with it. Perhaps for the non-geeky audience an installer to install the drivers. If you still want to give your software (which mostly is anyways third-party) give a choice to install it or not while installing the drivers.

Now back to my initial topic of the Bluetooth stereo headset.

After upgrading to Windows 7 RTM, for some reason, my Bluetooth headset has stopped getting the drivers from Windows update. I thought may be, my ultra-low-cost Bluetooth dongle (that I got for Rs.120, hehehe) had some problem with it. So, i tried with the other dongle (Yeah, I have two dongles, don’t get J already), it still didn’t work. So, finally I decided to take it to my friend’s house to test it with his setup. It still didn’t work. It didn’t work with my two cheap dongles and neither did it with his X-Micro ultra-costly (Rs.1800, no, you read it right that is eighteen hundred) dongle. He asked me to leave it with him for a while for him to try again and also try his headset (exact same model The Dell BH200) with my dongles and I did.

View Full Album

Yesterday, I went back to collect it and asked him for the result of his experiments and guess what, all combinations of setups worked just fine and neither he nor I have any idea what the problem is. Now, I’ve brought back my hardware to carry out the same testing experiments at my house once again before I re-install the OS (Yes, I screwed it up while installing Office 2010 yesterday and it now needs a re-install damn it). Let’s see how it goes.

Now off to become the mad scientist and on with my experiments. See you all later with the results.

P.S. Wow, I just realised that this is one of my longest posts.

Weekend Wingding

Nice title han? It has to be. Scoured around the information super highway for it. “Wingding” means a kind of a noisy, exciting celebration or party. i bet you didn’t know that before now.

Well, narcissism aside, this is the long overdue post that I was supposed to make about my adventures two weekends ago. Twitter makes bloggers lazy. Those of you who follow me ( which is probably only me :P ) might recollect me tweeting the gist of this post. I hear you saying “enough already”. OK, without further yack yacking, here goes…

It was an innocent little, typical laid back weekend and I decided to visit my friend's house to check the speeds of my newly acquired BSNL EV_DO Data card. First, we started off with all the usual yada, yada, yada and then started the speed tests with a known fast and reliable Microsoft server, downloading the Windows live installer (the offline version of approx 118MB). We used Reget as our download manager, our favorite one since the first time we laid our hands on it. And FYI…We're still use the same old version (whichever that is, don’t remember :P ) and never have upgraded. The download started off and hit 50KBps (multiply by 8 to get kbps-kilobits per second) easily. It occasionally touched 100KBps and rarely even touched 150KBps. That was half of the speed that my friend had got when he had tried it earlier with another card.

We thought, may be the room has got something to do with it and started looking at things that might affect the signal reception. First thing we noticed was the Wi-Fi router being ON. We turned it off and… no difference. Then we kept the card closer to the window. And? Still no difference. Then we took out our final weapon – our Dell Inspiron 1535 laptop, plugged in the card and Windows detected it and installed drivers automatically after downloading it from Windows Update. We then took it to the terrace and tried it. Still… No difference.

By this time, it was mid-afternoon and we were undeterred at finding out the reason for slow speeds. Although we knew that it depends on the contention ratio, the time, the day and a whole lot of other factors, we still wanted to find out if the locality mattered. This is when we decided to take a ride with the laptop. With my friend zipping his Kinetic access scooter with me behind holding the laptop, we were drawing some weird stares from people on the road. They must’ve probably be thinking that we’re some crazy idiots showing off our newly bought laptop to the world. Well, all that did not matter. The only thing that mattered was the speed. We went north, we went south, we headed east, then we headed west. The speed averaged 50KBps and at some smaller lanes with concrete jungles, it was worse, it hardly touched 20KBps. This is when I uttered out saying that I wouldn’t move to this locality if ever I were shifting house. A random utterance at that point of time but a significant fact about the changing priorities of a house hunters. Realty agents, watch out. Along with the promise of Bijli, Sadak, Pani and Mosaic the Aam Aadmi now needs broadband internet access too. Wow! what a change in just a decade!

Then finally, we headed a little away towards the New horizon school on 100ft road, Indiranagar and Bam! the speed went straight up above 100KBps and stayed there. We kept moving around the school and the speed did not drop. Owing to the fluctuating nature of the connection, we decided to stop and observe the speed variation for sometime at this place. We thought that we were just lucky and expected it to go down, but on the contrary, it just refused to go below the 100 mark. That’s not the max promised (of 2.4Mbps = 256KBps) but its decent. This is supposed to be used on the go, right? Who on earth would want to download massive files on the go? Armed with this inference after our wacky experiment on the roads of Bangalore, I was relieved to know that my expense on the card was not futile.

Now comes the second part to the story…

The day after I got the data card, my BSNL Broadband DSL connection at home stopped working. Being what it is, I thought this is a typical disconnection that happens occasionally and rectifies itself in a couple of days max, but… I think the people at BSNL thought now that I have the Data card, I don’t deserve the DSL home line and disconnected it permanently. Until this moment, my DSL hasn’t been working. The modem status says “"PPP Down”. The lineman had come to my house to have a look at the settings and spoke to me over the phone saying “What is the problem sir? the DSL link is glowing and working”. I said “I know that I have the DSL Link. I never complained about the link. The modem says PPP down. The call center person said that it is a server side problem and even I think so, so go rectify that”. He said he'll check and rectify. This was on Friday and then came the weekend. Grrr…. Being the bureaucratic bull-sh** that BSNL is, he hadn’t checked anything and is probably enjoying his weekend thinking “I’ll go check if they complain again”. Gauging by his way of talking, I'm sure he knows nothing. As long as there isn’t a problem, it works just great with BSNL, but the moment a problem shows its face, it just refuses to go away until it has boiled all your blood away.

It has started raining now ( one of the advantages of staying in Bangalore), so, I shall stop with this and am going to enjoy my well-earned weekend. Later people.