Funny Snippets

Last weekend my parents visited my new [ rented ] house. Not that they wanted to see the house, but they came to collect the goods and chocolates that i had bought for them from Norway. Unfortunately i could not purchase anything significant for them in that expensive Kristiansand. But, then i had the numerous pics that i had collected there that made them very happy.

We visited quite a few shopping complexes, Bangalore Central, Forum and also spent good 4 hours roaming on that small Commercial street, just because my sister did not get some "chicken design" clothings. Well, all that time spent ended well with she getting what she had started out to purchase.

We also went to a new restaurant in Koramangala. Its called "Hyderabad House". We decided to have some good biryani there. The half an hour we waited for a table was worth it with we getting some real authentic Hyderabadi biryani. But still, it was nothing to beat the biryani my aunt prepares in Hyderabad. :-) Thats a class apart !!!

There was one funny incident that occurred at Hyderabad House that i wanted to write about and then thought why not write about all the small funny snippets that i came across in this week, and hence this blog. [ All that you read till now was just the prelude :-p ]

Hyderabadi biryani is always served with a curry [ usually made of brinjal or chillies ] and some chutney made from yogurt. When the bearer was serving us the curry and chutney, his supervisor was unhappy with he serving us a huge quantity of chutney since the crowd that day [ on a Sunday !!! ] was more than what they had expected and the chutney there could not suffice for all the customers. So he asked the bearer to dilute the chutney and serve it later to us. Unfortunately for them, i saw this :-) Once we started eating, the bearer brought us the diluted chutney and i did not agree to being served with that diluted chutney. He asked us to adjust for which i replied that he would have to adjust with the money and that i would be paying him less. He couldnt help it and said that he would talk to the manager. After we finished the lunch with that diluted chutney [ it actually spoilt the fun of having some authentic Hyderabadi biryani ] the bearer brought us the bill. I paid him 20% less. While we were leaving they asked us to talk to the manager who after hearing the episode agreed to give us a rebate and was ok with what i had already deducted. After all this, i did fill bad about it, but if i did not do it, then probably they would repeat this again. I hope they dont repeat it again !!! [ I am eager to go and have a look at that restaurant again to see if they would repeat this thing again ;-) ]

Yesterday, sush came across a situation which gives us one more reason to stop using Winduhs. Sush was playing around with Active Directory and kerberos authentication for some customer solution. She ran some kerberos utility and rebooted the machine as was indicated in the documentation for that utility. Unfortunately for her, the machine could not start AD services since the domain for that machine was not set properly. [ The machine was also a Domain Controller ]. And so she had to reboot the machine in Safe Mode to debug and fix the problem. After trying out a hell lot of things suggested by our friendly google.com, we decided to call up the IS people to help us out with this. After they also could not find a viable solution to fix the problem in hand, we decided to uninstalling AD from this machine. That's when the fun started. Winduhs would not allow us to uninstall AD when we were booted in safe mode. We had to boot in normal more to uninstall AD. And it would not allow us to boot into the normal mode since it could not start AD services. Great ... now thats what i call a deadlock !!!. We finally had no choice but to reinstall the whole OS !!! One more lesson to be modular :-)

I just remembered some funny exchange of dialogues between our very own Michael Meeks and Harish. Michael is a great C/C++ programmer and Harish has newly ventured into C, after being a great Java developer in the past. On our way to Agder University in Kristiansand, Harish was talking about his current and previous work experiences.
Harish : I am new to C programming, i have been working a lot in Java before moving into Evolution.
Michael : What ! what did you say ... go wash your mouth

[ You would really laugh as we did, if you hear it from the man himself. ]

Today evening, while travelling back home, i was surprised to see a poster about "Basha beedies" sporting the smiling face of Aishwarya Rai !!!

An advertisement in Radio City ... "Malaysian Airlines .. taking you beyound expectations" ... If i would travel in that airlines, i would definately expect to reach my destination, and i hope they dont take me beyond my expectations :-)

Disgusting Bangalore traffic

Reaching home now-a-days from office feels like eternity. Bangalore roads are being flooded both by water and vehicles. Just a couple of days of continuous rain in the evening and we can see complete chaos over the roads. My drive from office to home took a cool 90 minutes yesterday. I remember reaching home in 30 minutes in the early days of 2001.

Yesterday, I noted down the time we spent waiting for the traffic signals to have mercy on us and i found that we spent close to 30 minutes just waiting for the signals to flash green. And to add the morning delay of 10 to 15 minutes, gives us a nice 45 minutes of wait/delay daily in the Bangalore traffic. So, on an average, we Bangaloreans [ ok, not all, but just the few?? unlucky ones like us ] spend 22.5 hours a month just waiting for the signal. And if extended, this means about 270 hours a year !!! This sums up to spending more than 11 days a year simply waiting for the traffic lights !!! This is 50% in excess of the world average of 7 days. [ Yeah, on an average, a person spends one week every year waiting for the signal to splash green :-) ]. But then, Bangalore is all set to shift that average towards a higher number.

The only good thing that i could do while waiting for the signal was to close my eyes and doze off and think of such silly calculations as above, listening to any damn song that plays on Radio city ...

Firefox rox !!!

Found a cool new feature in firefox 0.9 .. Open all links in tabs

Daily when i logon to my machine, i usually visit the same websites. Firefox helped me remember those sites more seamlessly now. I created a folder called "Daily visited sites" under the "Bookmarks toolbar folder". So next time when i bring up firefox, i click on this "Daily visited sites" tab and in the dropdown list showing me the list of websites bookmarked it also gives me an option to all the bookmarks in this folder in separate tabs !!! This is just awesome.

To add to this, i browsed for some more cool features and came across a sleek toolbar shortcut for gmail notifications !!! You can download it from this link. Once u click on this shortcut and login with ur gmail user name, it keeps refreshing and tells you the number of unread new mails u have in your inbox. Oh boy, things start getting better and better on firefox. I would love to write some xuls to extend this feature to access my other imap accounts and have a sweet mail notification shortcut right in my browser.

Home Alone ...

Well, its been a very very hectic week all along. Came back from Norway on July 4th. Was a very pleasant trip in all. I have to write a blog about all this trip before it evaporates from my volatile memory. [ For a quick report on the trip you can read my report ]

I have been spending quite some time on catching up with the things going on in office and fixing some bugs. We also had a gnomebangalore meet [ gbmeet ] on July 10th, which was very good. People [ basically graduate and post graduate students ] from various parts of India had come to attend it. It was a good start. We are starting off something like a revolution here in India with the "nosip" chapter at gnomebangalore.org. Hope this helps in leveraging the huge amount of programming potential we have in India. [ What good is this huge population if we cant contribute to a noble cause as open source :-) ]

Well, apart from all this, on my personal front, i have started my experiment of staying alone. But, i am making a conscious effort to not to ever bring the thought of me being alone at home. I havent found anything boring till now. Lets see how long i can survive like this. Well, i just realised that there is life even without television :-). Its strange, but if you know how big a TV fanatic i am, i myself cannot believe that i have stayed without seeing the television for 10 days !! [ well a week ] ... Thanks to my cable operator, i still do not have a cable connection at home.

Ok, for those few trusted people i have already sent my photo album i collected at Norway :-). If you also have the time and patience to watch my pics, you can mail me and i shall think if i can send those pics to you ;-)