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New york meet up

2010-09-04T20:08:00.006+03:00

Couple of weeks back, had a small meet up with college friends in new york. It was nice catching up after college. long time ..

On saturday evening, after some shopping for kris, we went to Edison,NJ to have hyderabadi biryani at paradise. The place was packed, lots of take out. It has been a really long time since i had such nice biryani. It was so heavy we ended up walking around the locality for half hour before i could drive back to hotel.

I had not heard of Edison being full of desis earlier. We walked around a residential colony (hidden valley apartments). We saw three old ladies conversing sitting on the footpath. There was another small group on the lawn. Further down we saw a house (two storeyed) with people sitting all around in the veranda and talking. Then there was a group at the laundromat. It brought back some memories. "Edison is gentrified" as sujith put it.

The next day we went to Venkateswara temple in Bridgewater,NJ. Had a really nice darshan, it was calm. As it was raining outside heavily, we decided to have food at the kitchen in the temple. It is run by volunteers. Really nice tiffin we had (upma, idly,vada, dosa , pongal etc.) and after some shopping , i got back on the road to montreal.

It was raining like crazy all the way. Luckily traffic was moving and hence no delays .. By the time i reached the Adirondack reserve, it was pitch dark and the rain was fully on.. 2 lanes .. the dotted line between the two lines was hardly visible. The white line on the right and the yellow one on the left were visible and showing the curvature of the road ahead. The road is full of ups and downs and curves. It was challenging and fun driving alone then ..

Got my quebec driving license

2010-07-24T16:40:00.003+03:00

Before i came to montreal, i was not able to get my IDP (international driver's permit). So i landed with my recently got indian driver's license. I tried to lease a car and dealer said it would not be possible without IDP. Hence i went ahead to buy my current toyota echo. The dealer would not let me buy until i registered myself with saaq (the regional transport authority) in quebec. They have a rule that my license can be exchanged with a driving test only if my license was one year old when i entered quebec. As this was not the case, i could not exchange it and get a quebec license. So i drove for 6 months with my indian license (as i am on a work permit). Then i had to have the IDP to drive. So i started driving again after i got my IDP from india. I actually got it twice and have been driving for around 2 years now in quebec.

With my status change, i could not drive with my IDP any more. Also i became eligible for license exchange and hence i got myself an appointment for the road test. I had 90 days before which i had to get license from quebec otherwise i cannot drive again. Luckily i got an appointment within a week.

I took a few driving classes just to make myself clear of the things to expect in the test. Then the big day came. I was slightly apprehensive due to my record of failing thrice at road tests in cyprus.

I along with the examiner sat in the car and after the intial checks , we got going. We got out of the parking lot and onto the road nice and easy. The test got off to a smooth start. The examiner cautioned me twice about not looking for the blind spot correctly. Each such note was a line on the back of the examiner's evaluation sheet. The examiner went on to see how i changed lanes, stopped at STOP signs , reverse parking etc .. I was more or less sure that due to my blind spot errors, i am going to get a retest. But once the car came back to the testing centre, the examiner started a discussion on the blind spot and why it is important. I am more used to using additional small convex mirrors stick-on my rearview mirror. However i need to make it a habit to always check for blind spot. To my relief the examiner said that i passed (84 was written on the sheet .. not sure what it is ..) and i will get my class 5 license to drive a passenger vehicle.

Getting a license has always been complicated for me. Anyways mission accomplished.

Lesson learned : Always check blind spot

Wierd dream

2010-01-22T14:57:00.003+02:00

I was in a garden kind of setting in RECW. There was a group of students there. Few from each year i guess. I was in third year. Saravanan was there. There was a bird which was injured and down and students were trying to help or something like that. I see Rajiv S. , my intermediate (11th class) friend. I am surprised as he did not study with me in RECW. I walk forward in the garden and then i suddenly saw two of my old school friends Niran C. and T. Anil with whom i had studied 3rd/4rth class. I could not believe my own eyes.

Then i walk past Niran C. his face has not changed a bit since i last saw him. I say to myself, i will come back and talk to him after i speak to T. Anil. I go to T. Anil and then i think why is he in RECW. I think i may be in a dream as this does not look possible. I ask a few questions about childhood to T. Anil and he clarifies correctly and i am happy that finally we met again. Now i was sure i am not in a dream :-)

The wierd part of the dream was i was a grown up and my friend T. Anil was still only as tall as i had seen him last. So i was holding him like a kid asking him to hold tight my hand and not let go of it and also i was leaning down to talk to him and carefully walking him around the campus. Then i see Vamsi KVS giving me a very confused look. I walk on. Then T. Anil tells me that he is doing a DFS course (DFS - a subject in B. Tech. ?) in the college and then he would do post graduation in the college.

Then i suddenly wake up. I dont remember from where i enter the garden setting. Just jotting the dream down while it is fresh in my mind.

Looking back at 2009 and forward at 2010

2010-01-01T16:03:00.001+02:00

Wish you all a very happy and prosperous new year 2010.

I did a lot of travel by car in 2009. Met friends and visited places in Canada and US. Work was more busy due to a big release, had fun in the get togethers of the montreal MAYA group.

Looking at the resolutions i had set last year
- Being more in touch with friends
I did some progress on this one. Travelled more and met more of my old college and amdocs friends.
- Organize and upload pics
No progress at all. Did some bit of organizing of the photos clicked. But none were posted.
- Organize my contact list
Organized around 15 contacts into a central list. That's it. No progress here as well.
- Learn Swimming and Ice skating
No progress. Did not go either place even once.
- Improve on skiing
Did some skiing in the new year and the snow melted away.
- Improve in photography
Did some reading and progress. Yet to explore a lot.
- Back to active hacking
Did not do much on this front as well
- Close andhramahabharatam unicodification
Did about 1200 verses. Need to complete it this year.

The end result the year swept by and i did not do much on the resolutions. Not so good ..

I plan to do the following this year (more or less copy paste from last year) and spend more time in completing them
- Being more in touch with friends
- Organize and upload pics
- Organize my contact list
- Learn Swimming
- Improve in photography
- Close andhramahabharatam unicodification

Ramayanam in 30 seconds

2009-11-10T06:22:00.003+02:00

I was talking to my niece paddu over weekend .. My Anni and Annen hinted to her and she started saying something which i could not understand fully in the beginning. Then she said
" ....
Lord Rama broke Shiva's bow and married Sita. King Ravana kidnapped Sita and Hanuman helped Lord Rama to find Sita. Lord Rama fought and killed Ravana and brought Sita back.
Moral of the story .. ....... "

End of Ramayanam !! The shortest version of Ramayanam i have heard.

The moral of the Story only paddu understood .. nobody else could comprehend what she was saying .. :-) May be i will be to understand it clearly the next time i meet her.

Vaio recovery

2009-04-11T20:14:00.003+03:00

Prashant got a sony vaio recently and one fine day it stopped booting up and started to give a blue screen. He and Mahesh tried to recover it using sony vaio recovery center but it failed with a mysterious error 320/330. The restore of C drive was happening and in between recovery fails leaving the windows o/s files in unusable state (cant boot into vista). Mahesh tried to do a XP installation as well which did not succeed.

I took the laptop and tried the same recovery and also tried to recover using windows vista recovery CD. I had to download SATA drivers and load them initially for the disks to be recognised. The recovery using recovery CD failed as the vaio recovery had left the windows o/s files in a unusable state. I tried to launch the vaio recovery process after loading the recovery CD but could not.

Then i tried to install ubuntu linux from CD. The copy kept failing then installed it from USB drive. This worked and the installation went fine. So atleast we can have linux running if nothing else runs as well.

Next option we thought of was to install XP. To have XP installed (which by default does not come with sata drivers), i got a XP home CD. Slipstreamed sata drivers and SP3 using nLite. Then tried the installation using BartPE cd with sata drivers loaded. The XP SP3 installation copied the installation files and when i booted back , it did not copy the sata drivers so the installation never began after pre-installation copied the files. So was thinking of copying the driver files and modifyig the txtsetup.sif to load sata driver on startup while installing.

Sumit also bought same laptop. So another option was to reimage prashant's laptop using sumit's laptop. The partitions occupy whole disk. If i had to copy partitions, i will have to shrink Sumit's partition first and then use g4u or gparted live cd or other tools to copy the partiiton to temporary USB drive and then copy it back to Prashant's laptop. Instead i tried to copy all files from Sumit's laptop (arond 30 GB) to USB drive and then copy it over to Prashant's laptop and try booting. I used live gparted CD and then mounted the two disks and then started to copy everything in C Drive to the USB drive. The USB drive has a fat32 filesystem where as Sumit's hard disk partition was ntfs.

I initially tried the copy with vista running. It did not copy OS files. Then i used gparted and mount and the copy failed. I tried the copy by booting into BartPE. It failed as well. Both failed due to errors while copying files from winsxs directory which holds the manifests and .NET related files. The problem was the directory in FAT 32 filesystem seems to have a limit on no of files/dirs - ~7500. This caused the copy to fail. So had to zip the winsxs directory and unzip in Prashant's hard drive after copying rest of the files.

Then after a startup recovery with the vista recovery CD to set the windows folder and boot partition , vista was up and running in Prashant's laptop. It has been a good learning exercise.

Still i do not know fully why the XP slipstreamed drivers did not install even though it worked with BartPE.

Totally three full days of work and finally we have vista running in exactly the same way it did.

Resources used: BartPE/PE2USB , GParted , Vista recovery CD , nLite

Back from vacation

2009-03-07T15:32:00.000+02:00

I came back this week from a nice short three week vacation to India. Spent time with family, friends and had a good time. Travelled a lot - bangalore , chennai , tirupathi , devakottai and kumbakonam. The temperature variation was huge -20 to +27 when i left from montreal and +27 to -11 when i returned back. Most of the snow has melted since i left and not much of fresh snow.

I went by Emirates to bangalore. The new bangalore airport is nice and big. liked it though it is far from city and actually 90kms from hosur. The flight from JFK to dubai was almost full of indians. The journey on A380 was nice. It carries 800 passengers. It is spacious and the 13-14 hour journey on it did not feel so tiring. Surprisingly did not have much of jet lag this time when i returned back. Generally when going to a diff location, i dont have jet lag. But almost always i have jet lag for a week when i return back to my living place. It was different this time.

Back to regular routine in montreal.

Resumed tweets

2009-03-07T15:00:00.004+02:00

In Jan, i resumed to tweet after i was not updating my blog regularly. Both of them took a pause during my vacation to india. In Jan, we had lot of fresh snow and driving was tricky at times. Tried cross country skiing.

Visited New york and caught up with Sujith and Ashuthosh. It was nice to meet Ashuthosh after a gap of 6 years (after college). We played in the fresh snow. Had a good time in New york.

Also met my old colleague Ahilan in NY.

Welcoming 2009

2009-01-02T05:46:00.003+02:00

Yesterday night we went to place jacques-cartier for the new year countdown. There was music and lot of people despite the cold of -18 with a wind chill which made it feel like -25. We joined the crowd and some bit of dancing on the ice to welcome the new year. There were nice fire crackers at the old port. We were there for an hour. By that time, the face got cold and kind of froze due to the cold. Then came back and dozed off.

Today it is pillayar nombu. So went to temple today to pray to Lord Ganesha. I saw that the temple was crowded and i came to know that special poojas were happening on the english new year. I was a little surprised.

To celebrate pillayar nombu, i went to Prof. Kannan's place. After the pooja and ellai ethi eduthukuradu, we had the nice soft vadas and idli made by his wife. I had prepared gajar ka halwa as prasadam and everybody liked it.

Then i started to update the blog after returning home. sleeping now. That brings the first day of the year to a close.

Wish you all a very happy and prosperous new year.

Todos: 2009

2009-01-02T05:32:00.004+02:00

I generally dont make a resolutions or todo list every year. But i want to pen down this time and see how it goes. I will keep posted how the todos are progressing during the year.

I plan to do the following this year
- Being more in touch with friends
- Organize and upload pictures taken since beginning of 2005. This has been a long pending task and photos keep getting clicked and piling up.
- Organize my contact list into one central and keep it updated. I want to maintain a centralized one online.
- Learn Swimming and Ice skating
- Improve on skiing
- Improve in photography. Take good pics with DSLR.
- Back to active hacking
- Work more on andhramahabharatam and close it

Update: Added the missing ones.

Looking at 2008

2009-01-02T05:18:00.004+02:00

Just jotting down about the year so that i can read it later. It was a busy year which just passed by fast. It was an important year.

- Moved base to Montreal after first two months in cyprus.
- Did sky diving and River rafting
- Made another attempt to learn swimming with some success
- Very little of hacking this year except for few small tweaks
- Workwise, new project , new people , new location - got comfortable.
- Back to skiing after a gap
- Visited Quebec city, Niagara falls , Toronto , Montreal.
- Got out of the laziness in cooking induced in cyprus

What i have been up to

2008-12-16T07:25:00.002+02:00

It has been almost 2.5 months since i last posted. I have been busy with work , visiting friends , visiting quebec city and mont royal and other places around montreal and doing much needed winter shopping. I completed my swimming classes.

It is good to see snow back again. After a kind of active summer, looking forward to a good winter.

Feeling tired afer swimming class today. Hitting the bed.

Snow in montreal

2008-12-16T07:05:00.003+02:00

This is my first full winter in montreal. I arrived in march here during the end of winter.

The first snow fall of the season was on Diwali (it was a mix of snow and rain). Then it really snowed on 25th November. It was a nice walk on the fresh snow and a slow drive back home. All of that got washed away. It was cold. The winter is here. It is going to be white for the next 4 months.

Last week (09 Dec), we had the first real snowfall of the season. Lot of snow, i guess more than 10cms of snow. Then the temp dropped and all the snow froze and there was freezing rain. We did not venture out in the morning as we did not have winter tyres (mandatory in quebec starting this winter) and stayed at home. All the snow froze and we had around 1-2 cms thick ice on the car. We had to scrape the ice from car. It was a tough job lasting for over an hour. If freesing rain happens daily, then it will be too much of work than i can take. Lucking freezing rain happens only once or twice during a year which is good to know.

After that we have been brushing away the snow on the car daily. Today the temp rose and there was rain and then in the night, the temp start to drop again. Due to this the melted snow became a layer of ice and all the roads had a glossy look on them. Hard to walk but too nice to enjoy.

The temp has varied from +6 to -18 (+ wind chill) till now.

Coming to the winter wear, we are coverted from head to toe except for the face. Once you wear the full winter wear, you dont feel much of the cold. Only the face can feel how cold it is out there. Only ice and melting ice makes it hard for driving and also walking on it. Sambhalke walk on ice.

Never fill air in the car tyres with bare hands at -12 degrees centigrade even if you are going to be out for under a minute or two. I learnt it the hard way. My hands were red and numb for a good 10 minutes.

We also went to ski bromont. We were there on the opening weekend and as bunny hill was not there to start practicing, we took to the top of the mountain and came down the green trail. The snow was being groomed constantly but the ice was becoming ice. This was making it hard to stop with the skis. Lot of screeching and not much grip to cut through the snow. We went up and came down twice. The first run took around an hour. I was skiing after a gap of two years. The second run down was quicker even though i got too tired. There was lot of pressure on the knees and the legs as it was hard to stop to slow down. We had fun. It was good being back on skis.

Last swimming class

2008-12-16T05:20:00.003+02:00

Today was the last class for the swimming beginner's course. I still am gonna drown if thrown into a deep pool but will go down after a few kicks and few bubbles. Despite the very slow progress and low motivation due to that, we still kept going. I have got better than when i joined. I kick more relaxed now than i began with.

The instructor told me to continue kicking relaxed and more longer kicks not fast short ones that i currently do. Then i will move to do some breathing and then moving arms and then all of these in synchrony .. to fultoo swimming. Not sure when that day is going to come :-D

The last day at swimming was eventful. After the class and the shower, i come back to see my locker is locked by somebody else. We had to call the civic center people who came promptly and broke the lock with a cutter. Then i got my clothes and shoes which are for sure needed for the gusty winds which were waiting for us outside the civic center.

Till advances in technology happen, i would be joining my beginner's swimming class next season as well :-)

Had an interesting thought on the way back. In future there will be programs which can be loaded to the brain (like in Matrix) which give you the knowledge of swimming. All you need to know - keep kicking relaxed , longer kicks , breathing out , breathing in etc.. We capture all the information related to swimming from the best swimmer around and store it and be able to replicate it onto any brain. Everybody will be expert swimmers.

Skiing was easy to learn. Swimming is not so easy to learn. But liked the experience. I will continue to learn to swim.

10 years since we began

2008-09-28T04:38:00.005+03:00

On 15-Sep-1998, we (Vamsi Krishna KVS , Xavier Pulla and me) travelled by the Golconda express to reach Kazipet to join RECW. We belonged to the 1998-2002 batch of RECW consisting of 324 students who came from all over the country. The next 4 years we would spend together shaped our future and the bonds we made will last forever. The fun times we had will always be in vivid memory. Those 4 years were the best years of my life.

Thanks to everybody who has been part of this journey. It has been 10 years since it all began.

I spent whole day chatting with some college friends. I stay in real good touch with a few. The others - an occasional chat , a scrap on orkut or a mail. Some i have lost contact. Need to get back in touch with as many as possible and do have an occasional chat.

Happy decade of friendship.

Google chrome

2008-09-21T17:26:00.002+03:00

I have been using google chrome right from day one. It is simple and brings the search like interface to browsing history / bookmarks / downloads. The isolation provided with the multiple processes for the tabs is nice. You can kill a tab and still keep the browser running. It is cool.

It has not crashed any time but has got hung multiple times when i have opened multiple flash videos. Sometimes the pages do freeze.

I have not verified if it uses more memory than firefox with no extensions for the same number of tabs. I have stopped using firefox with extensions for my day-to-day browsing. I do have a different profile which has extensions which i use occasionally.

It will be interesting to see how the chrome evolves as it is just a new entrant in the browser market and has made it's presence felt.

Yahoo mail considers mail from google as spam

2008-09-21T17:22:00.003+03:00

I have seen mails from @google.com going to spam folder in yahoo mail even though the header has the Domain Keys signature which yahoo can verify. Yahoo brought this anti-spam standard which google has also implemented. It is kinda strange. However my mail from my gmail id goes fine into my inbox.

I dont know the reason behind this peculiar behavior of yahoo mail.

Made a century

2008-09-13T18:06:00.003+03:00

I scored over a hundred yesterday in bowling. I have tried many a time to cross it starting from 17 and reaching 99 couple of times. I try to throw the ball straight at the pins knocking none , few , some , all - at different times. Some amount of spin and the ball goes straight into the gutter. But the balls keep getting heavier after the first game.

Coming to the other bowling (cricket) , i can only throw not bowl !!

Ravi's bday

2008-09-11T08:14:00.005+03:00

Today is Ravi Vidhani's birthday. Prashant Paliwal and I started to plan a surprise for him. It started with the buying of an extra bday cake box as suggested by Prashant. We returned to my house with the Chocolate Caramel cake and an empty box. I assembled the empty box. Then we took a cake lid (plastic one) and filled it with cake rusk. Then we thought of putting some (fake) money (Ravi is a Sindhi :-)) . The first option was some chillar (pennies) and then we put some houses/bungalows from the Business game

(Monopoly). Then we thought of putting paper

money from the Business game of Pratik Doshi. I had only coins in my game so we preferred the paper money. Then suddenly it came to my mind that we have a printer and we can print some fake money. It will be more realistic.

Last week i got a printer along with 4 other friends and i was yet to open it. We started to look for A4 sheets and could only find some one sided ones. So the paper was there. What money to print ? We turned to google. I remembered reading about the inflation in zimbabwe and how millions of dollars of zimbabwe currency is of not

much use. We looked for the pics and got theseand printed them. Then we also printed some indian currency (1000,500,100,50,20). Then it was time to cut them. Mahesh Jadhav who was helping us all along started to cut them while i had my dinner (choley - they came out really nice today). Then Mahesh arranged the notes in a circular fashion (less hifi than this). Then we decked the millions of dollars on top. Then we put a big page with a collage of notes as a cover. In addition i wanted to give ravi a 501 or 101 (ek sau ek). So i printed a big 500 ka note (which turned out to be exactly like the original one) and a big One (ek rupee) ka note. I put them in my purse. Then we were off to Ravi's home. We parked the car a little far on the road and walked and reached his house just in time. Right at 12.

Mahesh J entered the house with the money cake. While Prashant and Vivek Garg were giving cover, i brought the actual eatable cake in and put it on the stairs. Then the money cake went into fridge with everybody thinking it is the cake !

Then the wishing started and he got a few calls. Then the kicking started. Three of us lifted him and there went the first round. Lot of kicking. I only held one of his legs up in the air while others held him. He is heavy and there is lot of body movement. I do not kick any body these days. The days of kicking in college

are long gone. I was lucky that i got off with just a full body lift by Tarun Setiya on my birthday. Everybody spared me :-) . But for ravi it was not the case. Soon the second round started. I lifted him up on the leg side. Had i held him for some more time, i would have dropped him. Ravi is heavy. Bix came and gave support and i went back to holding one leg up. There was lot of kicking - some touching by Prashant , Kicking by Mahesh Mehta , Tarun.

Then we got the fake cake. Then Ravi opened it and saw all the fake money. Surprise !! Then i seriously took out my wallet and took the 500 ka note. He thought it was real for a second. The big ek rupee came next. Then he realised both were fake. Then the real money showed up in the cake lid - the pennies. Beside them was the 'cake' (rusk cake).

He even broke one of the pieces (cake cutting) and gave to Vivek. It was fun.

Then the real cake came out. After his face and hair tasted the cake, he was on his way to get himself cleaned and got ready for the third round. Then came Ravi Vutla, he wanted a share of the hitting - revenge time :-). Then the third round followed. Now Ravi's body needs lot of cushioning for the next few days.

While we were sitting and analysing who hit and how much, Abhyudoy sarkar made a comment. He said i lifted ravi today and tomorrow i will get sick as my hands will be paining. Funny. I actually took a sick leave after i went back to gym for two days and did more weights. See my body is sensitive to too much of physical work.

Then we dispersed. I will attach the pic of fake cake when i get it from Mahesh Mehtha (our DSLR dude).

Happy Birthday Ravi. Have a great day. Good night.

Update: Added the below pics

Four years

2008-09-11T08:03:00.003+03:00

Today morning Sumit Dubey pinged me and Prashant Paliwal and said Congratulations. I was wondering for what and for whom. Then he said it's been 4 years since we met.

It's been 4 years since i joined my current company, my second one after college. I realized after joining that if i planned to exit from this company, i should do it in the first year. If not i am going to stick around. I am still around !

The time has been good. It is a different work culture than my previous company. Met different people from different nationalities , visited places outside of India , having more work-life balance. It has been an interesting journey.

I dont know for sure how long more before i will be out of this company.

One more water adventure

2008-08-24T05:10:00.003+03:00

After the drifting experience in dead sea and scuba diving in red sea last year, it was again water time today. we went to do water rafting today. It was full day event where we had lot of fun. There were simple to comlex rapids where your boat flips and you just get carried away by the huge current of water.

It started with a nice drive in the morning from montreal. After bfast from Tim Hortons, we reached the place. As there was a slight delay, we sat down and started to play dumbc. Then we got briefing on what to do on the river. We were a group of 15, so we split into 2 boats. My boat had 8 people + guide. We got onto the boat with our life jackets. It was to prove a lot useful later during the day. He started off with basic stuff - paddling forward , backward , stopping , getting down while holding onto the rope. After the basics, we were off to a start on the river. It was a run of 8 kms with 3 rapids. Initially we got into water. I still was holding onto the rope of the boat while i was in water floating with the help of the life jacket. Then everybody hopped on again and we started to do rafting.

The weather was good , water was not too cold , the current was strong - very favorable conditions for a good day of rafting. We crossed through the initial small rapids with just the boat going up and down and lot of water gushing in and hitting us. It was nothing when compared to what was going to come next. The washing machine rapid - this was the 90 degree fall which causes your boat to flip and throw everybody out into gushing water. We navigated it fine and the boat did not flip. After that the guide asked us to flip back and then forward strong right into the washing machine against the flow of water. so we were climbing a mountain of water against the flow. Then the flip happened. The two people in front (Bix and Pratik) were thrown into gushing water when the boat started to flip. Chaitanya who was to my left also vanished. I got pushed to the other end and then boat flipped fully. I got down into water. My eyes closed , i had the paddle in hand and i was hit by two three things donno what they were. Then there was darkness for few seconds - i did not open my mouth or try to breathe - otherwise panice would have kicked in instantly. I was going down with the gush of water and then after few seconds due to the life jacket and me making my body straight up with head facing the sky , i seemed to reach up to the surface. After those dark few seconds, i saw sun light and the sky. Instantly i took some water into my mouth as i had to breathe then and then i hit a rock when i realised where i was and i was very close to the rocks on the right side. This is where we were to swim if we fell in the washing machine. I got up and helped myself out of water. I started to walk towards my guide and slowly more people from my boat started to be seen. Ravi and Harjot were no where to be seen. We saw Ravi far holding onto a rock happily. After a while he got on top it and sat there waiting to get picked up by a boat. All around him it was gushing water. Harjot got swept away even further and hit some rocks and got up and stood on the rocks. We picked him up later as well. Both of them got swept by the strong tide before the rope which is thrown into water for people to catch. It was a bit scary. After that we got into our boat - less people and less oars. Then we picked up Ravi and Harjot. It was a 'experience' for every one of us. Then we got out of water for lunch and then the second run started.

Now the water was gushing more and the initial rapids also got more bumpy. Pratik got kicked out into water in the Elizabeth rapid and he swam really nice with the life jacket on to the right side along the same direction as the strong current. Then we picked him back up and then proceeded for the washing machine. Some wanted to have the boat flipped others did not. But there was a huge wait as the boats had to go through the washing machine one at a time. Initially we were not aware of what we were getting into. Now we know and the waiting time increased the tension. We ventured in and did not get flipped. This time everybody held onto the rope. Then we tried to go through the rapid again without flipping. Then we did multiple drier flows around the same place. Then we got out of it and hit some low lying rocks and eventually went to a beach. There we halted for some time and then we started back to go to our final stopping point. People wanted to swim and float in water so some people got out and headed for the shore. There were only the guide , pratik and me paddling the boat. We had to stop and we were drifting away from the shore into the seven sisters rapids (which are meant for insane kayakers during low water only). So the guide caught and got everybody on the boat and we paddled hard to reach the shore. It was a nice team effort. Then we were brought back to base camp and we had a shower and a nice dinner.

After dinner, there was the video session for which everybody turned up to watch. The video session was fun. We saw all the boats go through the washing machine rapid. There was the team where the whole team got into water when the boat flipped except the guide - perfect execution. Then there was this guy who showed the finger to the camera and in few seconds he alone got flipped off the boat while crossing the washing machine rapid. It was funny. Then there were the kayaks whose flipping was interesting to watch. We saw how it all unfolded for my boat flip.

It was nice fun. I will be doing it again next summer. Hopefully i will know how to swim by next summer.

Truck driving

2008-08-18T15:02:00.002+03:00

Last week my colleague Bixapathi Varaganti was moving. So he hired a 14 foot truck. We helped him with the move.

Luckily i got to drive the truck (Image). It was big. Initially it took a while to get adjusted to the height and the size of the vehicle. But after sometime, it was a comfortable ride. It was fun driving it. We did not hit the highway though.

One more vehicle adds to the list of driven vehicles after the 4-door sedans and mini SUVs.

Status update

2008-08-17T02:31:00.002+03:00

Again i have not been keeping my blog updated.

After a flawless successful deployment of my last 5 months work, i am going little bit relaxed on my work load at office.

Life is moving on in montreal. Caught up with some movies. Hancock - just a time pass movie. Watched Wall-E - really really liked the pixar movie. The Dark Knight kept me excited all the movie but i dont think it deserves to be the top # 1 movie on IMDB. Mongol ended up to be a love story while we were expecting a war movie. Got to learn more about Genghis khan's life . The scenery was good though. Latest is Singh is Kinng , a OK comedy with not much sense in story. Atleast my visit to Egypt got refreshed. Never would the pharoahs have thought in their wildest imagination that Katrina Kaif and ... will come and dance a bollywood number on their grave.

Learnt a lesson - Never watch IMAX experience movie from the first few rows. We ended up little late (around 7 pm) for the 7 pm show. So we got to sit right in front of the big imax screen. A bullet shot from one end of the screen travels faster than you can move your head and see where it went on the other side of the screen. Also your neck starts to pain. The sound feels gibberish. The point to be taken is to reach the theatre half hour before and take your seat for movies which are going to be houseful.

Also went and met Kannan Krishnan (a prof. in univ. of montreal) here in montreal today. I was supposed to meet him around 4 months earlier. but today just happened to be the day. I went to his place and had a nice long warm chat about a lot of things. I look forward to meeting him and his family again sometime.

Joined gym again and after two days of hectic workout, letting the body to relax. Let's see how long i continue to go to gym this time - a week , couple , a month , couple ??

Six years

2008-07-01T06:58:00.002+03:00

It has been six years since Ora0107 met and became friends. We all joined Oracle on 01-JUL-2002. Some of us are still with Oracle and some of us including me moved out.

It's been six years of work life. New people , new experiences all along. This last year passed real quick. I went home in november and was sick in jan/feb and then moved to montreal. It is already been 4 months in montreal !! Time passes by too quick.

All the best Ora0107 and keep flying.

Photo on Schmap

2008-07-01T06:52:00.004+03:00

My photo of Harrison lake and hot springs was picked up from Flickr and used by Schmap as part of their canada travel guide (Lakes, Rivers & Beaches). I gave permissions for its use to them. It was initially short listed and then finally got selected.

I have get back to clicking. It has kinda come to a stop after summer came in.

Update: I modified the link as there were a set of images for Harrison lake. My photo is one of them. Thanks to Vikesh who tried to find the photo from the original link.

Moving weekend

2008-07-01T06:47:00.003+03:00

It was moving weekend last week. Lot of people in montreal move around July 1st. You will see lot of stuff being sold/bought on craigslist during this period.

We helped our friends move to their new house this weekend. It was tiring. There was two truck (17'' U haul) loads of furniture being moved and i also got my sofa to my home as well during the same time. Still my body is aching from the hardwork we did on saturday. I need to get some rest this week to be back to normal.

Jazz fest has started in montreal. Need to listen to some live jazz before it is over !

Life in montreal

2008-06-16T04:45:00.006+03:00

It has been over 3 months since i moved to montreal. I can say i am kind of settled now. I have the basic amenities - a place to live and rest (rented an aparment) , a means of conveyance (bought a toyota echo car) , a means of survival (started to cook in the apartment). Need to get some other nice to have stuff.

Work kept me busy during the past three months. I am having more personal time during the last few weeks during which i finally moved out to my apartment and started to live out of my place. Till then my colleagues Ravi Vidhani and Prashant Paliwal took real good care of me in their house. I was lazying around with work and not getting any personal stuff done. (as usual)

The time to settle down is totally different from cyprus and montreal. In cyprus, we got a fully furnished apartment. All you needed to buy was a car and you are fully settled to lead a normal life in cyprus. It is different here. You need to shop around here and get all stuff needed to set up the house. It is fun but also time consuming.

Weather has changed in montreal. All snow is gone and summer is finally here. Once in a while we do have showers or thunder storms but that is needed to chill it. It can get really hot here like in india.

I have started to explore the place - very little. I had been to mount royal and saw the city during the night and day from the top. Other than that drove to kingston and toronto. It was nice to meet some old amdocs colleagues after some time.

I went with some of my new friends (new colleagues) to toronto and niagara during the victoria day long weekend. We went to wonderland in toronto - there were nice thrilling rides. We could cover only one section of the park. I guess we would need two more trips to complete the rides in wonderland. Then we went to marineland in niagara falls - the free fall ride was really nice. You could see niagara falls from the top. We did it three or four times as there was no real bheed. It was fun. I will be headed soon to the amusement park in montreal - getting myself a season pass.
We went to Ottawa to see the tulips. There were many and it was nice. Lots of colors.

Also it is good to see your pay check come in every two weeks. Month seems to be long now :-)

Coming to food, you get all indian stuff here in montreal. I ate drumsticks after a long time here in canada. You get more stuff than in cyprus. You get everything here just that you pay in dollars. You have lot of indian restaurants around. I now go often to Jolee restaurant which is a sri lankan tamil restaurant. I ate kothu roti there. Really liked it. Very nice dosas. The sambhar taste keeps varying.

We went to saravana bhavan in toronto and really enjoyed the food. It just tastes so good as always. Nothing comparable. Awesome as always.

You have many temples in montreal. Some have the gopuram as well - like proper temple structures in india. There is pooja , aarthi. The same calmness exists here as well. We occasionally go to the temple.

The city is a vibrant one. You should go to downtown to really feel the vibe.

What else.. as always i am clicking with my camera and piling up the images in my hard disk. I will upload them some time soon (hopefully).

I am back in Ravi and Prashant's place and we cooked a lot and for lot today evening and now i am being called upon multiple times to come and have the dinner. So signing off this post now.

That's mostly the updates from my end here in montreal. Sorry blog, I will try to be more regular.

Fresh mangoes

2008-06-16T04:41:00.002+03:00

I have been drinking mango juice only for some time now. I did not eat the fruit since i moved to cyprus. I was in india on vacation during the time when it is not the season of mangoes. So was missing it for a while.

Now in montreal, today i had mangoes. It tasted really nice. Liked it a lot.

Bye Bye Cyprus

2008-04-21T14:19:00.003+03:00

Last few weeks in cyprus were hectic. I was working from home. My last date was fixed and things started to roll into action. But my leg was still recovering. My stomach was getting better. With the treats and the food in the treats, it again made itself heard - "Don't mess with me ! ". With the travel to montreal coming closer, my left leg was still in slight pain.

As i was still recovering from my leg pain, i could not enjoy the last few months in cyprus as i wanted to. I was mostly at home. I could not go to troodos to see the snow this winter.

I got a really memorable farewell from my team. I received very nice feedback. They suggested me to stick to timings in office and leave office early. I will try to implement that !! Asheesh (who sits next to me) even planned to get me tickets to go to troodos on a day trip as my team's farewell gift to complete my wish. :-) The farewell card was the best.

I did not feel much that i am leaving cyprus as a place. It is a practical relationship with Cyprus not an emotional one. It is a nice calm place where i would like to go back any time. It is a stress free and laid back life there. May be i am not attached as i did not make an effort to mingle with the local population. I felt bad about leaving few nice friends i made in cyprus.

I moved out of cyprus on 01-MAR. I dont know when i will be back there.

Adieu Cyprus.

Q & A

2008-04-19T17:02:00.003+03:00

Tagged by Skely

1. LAST MOVIE YOU SAW IN A THEATER: i don't quite remember .. it was in cyprus 6 months ago or more ..

2. WHAT BOOK ARE YOU READING: Arabian nights (started during my flight to montreal .. will continue reading in my next flight trip)

3. FAVORITE BOARD GAME: Trade

4. FAVORITE MAGAZINE: National Geographic

5. FAVORITE SMELLS: Petrichor , good food

6. FAVORITE SOUND: Wind while driving and on mountains , sounds in forest in the morning

7. WORST FEELING IN THE WORLD: helplessness

8. WHAT IS THE FIRST THING YOU THINK OF WHEN YOU GET UP IN THE MORNING: Try to recollect fully the dream i was in.

9. FAVORITE FAST FOOD PLACE?

Not much of a fast food fan.

10. FUTURE CHILD'S NAME? It is too much into future to think about now.

11. FINISH THIS STATEMENT. "IF I HAD A LOT OF MONEY I'D...? do space travel, invest in research

12. DO YOU DRIVE FAST? i mostly drive within speed limits .. but at times surely break it (current max is 175 kmph need to better it) :-)

13. DO YOU SLEEP WITH A STUFFED ANIMAL? No

14. STORMS-COOL OR SCARY? cool.

15. WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST CAR? Mazda Familia

16. FAVORITE DRINK?

Filter coffee / Tea

17. FINISH THIS STATEMENT, "IF I HAD THE TIME I WOULD....." complete all the pending tasks (personal/work related) , travel around the world, help people

18. DO YOU EAT THE STEMS ON BROCCOLI? Yes

19. IF YOU COULD DYE YOUR HAIR ANY COLOR, WHAT WOULD BE YOUR CHOICE?

None

20. NAME ALL THE DIFFERENT CITIES/TOWNS YOU HAVE LIVED IN. Guntur,Warangal,Bangalore,Limassol, Montreal (now).

21. FAVORITE SPORTS TO WATCH? I like to watch Cricket - 20-20 is quick and nice.

22. ONE NICE THING ABOUT THE PERSON WHO SENT THIS TO YOU.

Very lively and funny and sensible person

23. WHAT'S UNDER YOUR BED? Dust.

24. WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE BORN AS YOURSELF AGAIN? No. I want it to be different.

25. MORNING PERSON, OR NIGHT OWL? Morning person.

26. OVER EASY, OR SUNNY SIDE UP? Sunny side up.

27. FAVORITE PLACE TO RELAX? Home preferably on a mountain top.

28. FAVORITE PIE? None.

29. FAVORITE ICE CREAM FLAVOR? ButterScotch.

30. OF ALL THE PEOPLE YOU TAGGED THIS TO, WHO'S MOST LIKELY TO RESPOND FIRST?

All the people have already been tagged/responded.

Chettiar Wedding on screen

2008-02-23T16:07:00.002+02:00

When i was in India last november, my mother told me about the movie "pirivom santhippom" and that the movie has a song which shows the happenings in a chettiar wedding (weddings in my community). The movie has a message on joint family system and the family is from the nattukkottai nagarathar chettiar community.

As we (my family) have stayed mostly away (in guntur) from devakottai (my native place), i did not attend many of the ceremonies/functions. I had been to 3-4 weddings (attending them in full as they happened in my house in devakottai and one of my uncle's (my mother's younger brother)) and some more in part (just attending them along with my grand father and have one of the palaharams served ). I did not know the rituals in detail and i vaguely remember them. I always used to wonder what each one of them were meant for. This movie was an opportunity to learn more and have a reference.

It was a nice movie to watch. Then i did some searching and found this link on the rituals and their explaination. I can always ask my mom if i am not sure of some ritual. The below is the video of the wedding ceremony from the movie.

Be Invisible in GMail Chat

2008-02-23T15:53:00.003+02:00

GMail chat has now the invisible status. I always missed this feature in google talk. It will be rolled out soon in google talk as well. For now return back and use the gmail chat instead of google talk for chatting.

Last attempt in Cyprus

2008-02-06T19:01:00.000+02:00

I attempted one last time to get license in cyprus before i leave cyprus permanently. I was not fully feeling well. Hardly i was able to walk properly due to foot pain. Still i went to give the test. I did make mistakes and again i was failed. The examiner became a little emotional and said you have already attempted some times and i know it is hard but we have to be strict. I did not care much about the test - pass or fail was fine with me.

I was waiting for a long time for distant coming cars to enter a lane. The examiner said i was too slow. This was mistake # 1. Then we went to roundabout. I took the correct lane and was going. There was a lady in the behind who jumped lane and came into mine. The examiner said that i was to give her way. This was mistake # 2 even though i was abiding by the rules. Then he asked me to do parallel parking (last two attempts i failed in this). I did it perfectly fine. Cool. Then he took me to a narrow road and asked me to do 3 point turn. I tried and could not and attempted to do in five point turn. Then the front of the car hit the pavement. Grave mistake. Doomed. That was mistake # 3. He asked me to drive back to test center. He put some 1's in a sheet full of greek and explained my mistakes to me.

Good that i did not faint during the test due to my illness :-) Finally the curtain fell on my attempts to get a license in Cyprus. I started to drive very late in this country after almost two years of coming here and my 3 failed attempts to get a license.

I already have a license from India. so am now licensed to drive. Now i need to get license in Montreal. That is the next license challenge.

Gmail is now Google Mail

2008-02-06T18:52:00.000+02:00

Suddenly i noticed a change in the gmail logo. It changed from gmail to "Google Mail".
It has been there for a while i guess as i see the images from posts of google related blogs.
After a restart of my browser, the old logo is back. It is also there on google mail help page. But the title says "Google Mail" not GMail.

Old One

New One

Recovering in Cyprus

2008-02-06T18:40:00.000+02:00

At the end of first week in cyprus, i got flu and a throat infection. It took 10 days to go off. Then i got diarrhea and foot pain (tendons are hurting). So basically was taking rest at home for the past 3 weeks. I started to work from home this week only. My mobility is restricted due to the foot pain which is taking its own sweet time to get back to normalcy.

The foot pain was really painful and it kept me awake in the initial days during the night. It was really painful. Now it is better. Doctor wont give me a medicine for it coz it will meddle with diarrhea and aggravate it. He just asked me to give hot water treatment and let tendons relax slowly. He said you never know how long they take to get back to normalcy. I did not have any accident or anything and suddenly after my flu was over, i got this foot pain. strange ..

I did not get to go to Troodos this time. No snow in cyprus this time. Well my passport with canadian work permit will be arriving this weekend mostly. May be in couple of weeks i will be off to Montreal if i get well and recover fully. It will be bye bye Cyprus. Let's see how it goes.

Scraping in spamming

2008-01-06T12:05:00.000+02:00

I got a spam mail claiming to be from paypal and asking me to verify some information about my paypal account.

Gmail did not mark it as spam. Looking at the mail id from where it came it was clear that the mail did not come from paypal.com. The mail was asking to click a link (text was of www.paypal.com but the link was pointing else where) and verify some information by logging in. I knew it was spam but went to the site and looking at the url suggested that there was some scraping happening. so went and checked it out.

The content was being scraped from paypal page and very few changes were made to the content. The form submission url was changed and some image urls. Rest of the content was from the paypal page with actual links. This is not a fake page which you can make out by looking at the page. The content was scraped so it was exactly like the original one. The verisign logo was also pointing to actual paypal site so you would get a proper verified page when you click it. As the form submission url is changed, the spammer can happily capture the user information.

The page was same as the original paypal page exception for the form url and the actual page url.

Always check the url in the address bar to be sure what you are visiting. Check the spelling properly and also the site security certificate to be sure.

Back to Cyprus

2008-01-06T07:54:00.000+02:00

I am back to cyprus after a nice vacation at home followed by a business trip in pune (total two months). The time was long enough for me to get my driver's license. I got to catch up with lot of friends which i generally dont get to do. I flew with my parents to Pune and they saw me off to cyprus yesterday morning. They were in Pune with me for 10 days. It was nice to spend quality time with parents and it was also relaxing for them. We had a nice darshan in Shirdi and Narayanpur and Shani shignapur. As always my mom made real good food which i relished a lot.

Thanks to Prady, we were able to move around in and around Pune. He improved his driving skills. My father was impressed with his calm, tension free driving.

I caught up with Ora0107 (old oracle colleagues) and recw classmates. I met some of my intermediate friends after a very long gap. I met friends in hyderabad whom i could not meet during Harsha's wedding.

Overall it was a very nice and satisfying trip. I had nice time with family and friends.

Coming to the official end of it, i got acquainted with the new project i would be working on in Montreal. I did KT on it while learning to the folks in India center in Pune (in magarpatta). Initial three weeks were very hectic. Last two weeks was holiday season (christmas and new year) and it was bit relaxing.

Kishore's credit card came in handy as i booked all my air deccan flights via his card. The service and timing has improved since i last flew on Deccan (Sep-2004).

It is cold here in Cyprus. From tomorrow on, it is again back to office.

License to Drive

2007-12-29T18:17:00.000+02:00

Did you give a test in India ? You failed a license test in India ? You failed in driving test in India despite going via a driving school ?

These were the questions friends were asking me when they came to know i dont have a license from India. In cyprus, i made two attempts which i failed due to parallel parking mistake.

I made a fourth attempt to get a license (one in blore , two in cyprus). I applied for the license in chennai for two-wheeler and car driving. I arrived from pune in chennai for the christmas weekend and was to take my test on 24rth.

For the bike test, you have to make a 8 (ettu poduradu - driving the bike to make shape 8) without putting your foot down and bike engine should not go off. I guess the days of driving the bike and showing hand signals and then stopping to pass the test are gone in Chennai. For the car, a lap with the car during which the engine must not turn off and then do a reverse is part of the test.

I had to prepare myself for the tests to come. I drive a automatic car in cyprus. So i took driving classes in Chennai so that i get familiar with using the clutch. They went fine. For the two-wheeler driving, i practised making a 8 in Hosur. I practised making an eight between 2 rocks. The 8 used to come in different shapes - the rounds were circular or mostly elliptical.

Before the test, i wanted to check where the eight is done in chennai. So my brother and i went to the anna nagar RTO and i saw a concrete 8 there. The 8 had two perfect circular rounds (Eight) . It was difficult than the open one with elliptical rounds. I tried to do the 8 and i put my foot down 5 times. I was surely going to fail the test :-) I practised for the next hour or so and sought advise from friends who got license in Chennai. Out of the around 45+ attempts to navigate, i made around 15 8's without putting my foot down. I was not sure of repeatability of it. If i managed to start on 8 at speed of 10kmph and maintain it, i will complete the 8 properly.

Also for the car driving test, there was a ramp which was pretty steep, it scared me a little as i was not sure if i will be able to go up without engine restart. So i left back for home half sure if i will get the license next day.

The next day i woke up. My father came with me to the test. He had told the driving school guy to take care if some sort of help/intervention is needed in getting my license as i had to leave the next day to Pune and i wont be able to apply and get a license in India again in near time.

People started to arrive at the test center and they were practicing. There were utter failures and perfect smooth 8s. I tried twice and i did once right and second time it was a failure. The driving schools got the cars and climbed up the ramp (the steep one) and parked the cars inside the test track. Now there was space only to do the elliptical lap with a S. So i was saved :-)

First it was car driving test. The examiner came and asked me do the lap. I did it fine just with first gear and 90% clutch. Very slight use of acceleration. I completed the lap without issues. I was not asked to do the reverse. I completed the test :-D cool ! For sure i am going to get one license issued today.

I waited for my turn for the two-wheeler 8 test. The examiner came and called my name. I started the bike and got it onto the start of the 8. I made it almost fine. I put my foot down once and it was clearly seen and completed the rest of the 8 fine. I had flunked. I was not sure if i will get the license or not. I had to wait. The examiner did not give me another chance. Even if i was given, i was not sure of getting the 8 correct !! so i was fine. After some talking which my driving school guy did with the examiner and .........., i finally was given the license for both car and two-wheeler.

Finally i have license to drive. It feels so good !!

I flew back to Pune the next day as planned with a license. Mission accomplished. I have one last test in Cyprus on Jan 30th. Let's see if i get my driver's license there as well.

My scrapbook is private

2007-12-11T20:14:00.000+02:00

Finally orkut made the change i wanted from Day 1 of using Orkut. The scrapbook can be made private.

If you are not a friend of mine, you would not see scraps on my scrapbook anymore !!

I mostly used to send private messages when somebody scrapped in my scrapbook. May be now i will start scrapping more. I would definitely not start chatting using it.

Alive post

2007-12-10T20:46:00.000+02:00

Just to let you know that i am alive !!

I am fine and kicking in Pune. Back to work for a month long business trip after a nice vacation (3.5 weeks) with family and friends. After last minute change of plans, i reached home in time for Diwali with family and enjoyed bursting crackers.

I met many friends during the vacation. Generally i end up missing meeting somebody everytime i come to India. This time it was Vijaykiran.

The vacation is kinda still continuing. Last weekend i was in mumbai to meet Vikramaditya Kidambi and Prashanthi. Vikram is my intermediate college friend and was part of the "tana tandana" batch at Masters Educational Academy in Guntur. It was very nice to meet him after a gap of around 7.5-8.5 years. I had a nice time talking to him about lot of things and i was treated with great hospitality and good food (vikram cooks really well :-D ). I went to see Gateway of India and Marine drive and had the famous mumbai pav bhaji as well.

I had plans last month to go to Hyderabad for Harsha's marriage. But could not make it. So planning to go to Hyderabad over the weekend. It all depends on my project.

The project i just joined last week went into Production the same day i landed in Pune (02-DEC) and i am already being stretched. I am spending long hours these days. I hope i won't be supporting production over the weekend !!

More on Pune and my vacation later. That is it for now. Got to sleep now.

Google changed my identity

2007-10-13T17:01:00.000+03:00

On Thursday debu pinged me close to midnight. I was chatting from google talk and debu was chatting from google mail.

Read the chat conversation below ..

11:23 PM Debarun: yo

11:24 PM me: hello

abhi kya kar raha hai ..

so ja ..

assignment ?

Debarun: woh....when did u learn hindi

11:26 PM me: अभी क्या तेरे को पूरा हिन्दी में टाईप करके दिखाना पड़ेगा क्या

11:27 PM tu bata .. gandhi se mila ?

11:28 PM Debarun: omg

suki?

11:31 PM me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6f73o3iGwv8

oh my god !! suki ??

11:33 PM Debarun: abbe

asking if its suki effect

;)

me: nahi

8 minutes

11:42 PM me: did u see rupsa's snaps ..

Debarun: yeah i did

me: she added some more on orkut

Debarun: i saw

me: biju changed his status to "married" on orkut

so when are you studying ..

Debarun: wat r u doing at this time?

11:43 PM me: like this late in night

i shud ask you the question

it is only 1143 for me

for you it shud be 230 Am

close to

Debarun: huh?

where r u man?

11:45 PM me: i am in cyprus

what abt u

Debarun: oh i dint know

since when?

me: tu kisi bhi sawal ka jawab theek nahi de raha ..

11:46 PM kya huwa tere ko ..

call karoon kya ?

Debarun: abe bola na timepass

waise tomorrow we have a biz fest :)

Debu was asking questions as if he was surprised to see me chat in hindi. I was thinking what is this "suki" effect .. He was surprised that i was talking about Rupsa. Why will Rupsa share photos with me .. He was surprised when i said i am in cyprus. The whole conversation looked as if Debu and i were not chatting. The conversation was getting funny and both were completely surprised.

After that i called and then it turned out that Debu was seeing the mail id of rajesh as the person sending the messages. I did ask for proof and got the snap below. He was right. I asked my friend Vijaykrishna G working in google to report the case and he did.

Google silently changed my identity !!

Update: I chatted with DD today and she also sees me as Rajesh Vasudevan. I had a similar conversation and in between suki came :-) then i knew for sure she was seeing me as Rajesh. I donno why only with people who know Rajesh and me. My brother, my other friends all of them see me as prakash. She was also chatting from Gmail chat.

DD also told me that google sometimes mis delivers emails to wrong mail ids. That is a little too crazy. Google, fix these !!

Cartoon on SQL Injection

2007-10-13T13:54:00.000+03:00

SQL Injection

I did not realise it was sql injection the first time. I thought the kid hacked into the system and deleted student records. When i read it again, i got it.

Oracle's bid to takeover BEA

2007-10-13T13:26:00.000+03:00

I don't know from how long Larry wanted to takeover BEA. I used to hear it 5 years ago. Now it happened. BEA has rejected the offer of the hostile takeover. But they seem to be under pressure to sell as well. Let's see how it goes.

Oracle made 30 rival company acquisitions in the last three years. It seems to have paid off as well with around 25% increase in profits.

Will Larry go for SAP as the next target ?

Oracle keeps it cool

Dilemna

2007-10-12T23:44:00.000+03:00

Most of the week was spent in dilemna at work place. I have to choose between two options. One in hand and other few feet away but steadily progressing towards me. It is a career related choice. I will post about it once i decide.

Also i joined a ball room dances class. Yesterday was the first lesson. The teacher is going to teach us basics of 8 dances (4 slow - tango , foxtrot , rumba and waltz and 4 fast ones). She taught us one step in all four slow ones yesterday. I don't know how much i will learn.

In tango the basic step is ,
left foot forward
right foot forward
left foot forward
right foot forward
left foot forward
right foot forward to the right
join the left foot with right
and then again from the beginning.

In foxtrot, the basic step is
left foot forward
right foot forward
left foot forward moving to the left
join right foot with the left
left foot backward
right foot backward
left foot backward moving to the left
join the right foot to the left
and then again from the beginning

In rumba, the basic step is a small square. It is
left foot forward
right foot forward moving to the right
join left foot with the right
right foot backward
left foot backward moving to the left
join the right foot with the left
and then again start

In Waltz,the basic step is a big square. It is
bend your knees and do a big left foot forward (fall)
right foot forward moving to the right
join the left foot with the right and also becoming straight (rise)
right foot backward (big one) bending your knees
left foot backward moving to the left
join the left with the right and also becoming straight
and square is complete and then again from the beginning

It will be hard to remember 4 dance steps at the same time.

We were asked to keep the hands in air as we will have to hold the partner in later sessions. But due to lack of practise, the hands were paining a lot.

The dance session was nice. I liked it.

Game in Cakes

2007-09-22T09:18:00.001+03:00

Every week on friday, we have cakes meeting. This is a semi-official social meeting of the entire team in regular office hours. We have some snacks. There are team/company level updates/presentations. These days we have started to have some games.

This week it was a word game. People have to sit in a circle and start. The first person starts with saying a word starting with 'A'. The next one says the previous word and a word with next letter 'B'. The game goes on till the word with letter 'Z'. If somebody misses the word in chain, they are eliminated.
The game will be fun if it is quick and also not bound to letters. It should be any word. Anyways these were the words we got finally.

Alpha
Beta
Castle
Deka
Elephant
Fan
Gamble
Horse
India
Joker
Kleptomania
Lymphosarcoma (this was spelt wrong i think)
Mesozoic
Nazareth
Oracle
Peacock
Quintessential
Reminiscent
Synagogue
Trespassing
Ubiquitous
Venezuela
Waterloo
Xenophobia
Yahoo
Zeus

Vinayaka Chavithi

2007-09-22T07:57:00.000+03:00

It was Vinayaka Chavithi (Chathurthi) last saturday (15-SEP). As usual i woke up and checked mail. There was a mail from Kalyan regarding vinayaka chavithi. He had wished us and sent link to a mp3 file which had the vratham and the katha.

In cyprus, we dont have any temples. All pooja happens in the house only. I wanted to do some saami kumbuduradu (devudiki pooja). I called home and took bath. I cleaned the saami pathams (pathaalu) and lit the scented candle (don't have deepam). I put sugar as naivedyam to swami. I lit a agarbathi. I played the vratham and the katha and heard it. Tried to do as many things possible which were mentioned in it. Then put akshatha on the head and completed the pooja.

Puneeth invited me for dinner that night. As Anupama and Puneeth had not heard the samanthaka dosham katha, i told them the story and they put akshatha on their head. Now they won't get into any neelapanindalu. After that we had our dinner. Anupama had made bholi (bobbatlu). It was very nice.

I have taken a resolution on that day that i will not do something (undisclosed). Need to see how long will i hold on to that.

India Won

2007-09-14T22:54:00.000+03:00

What a match !!

First the match does not get washed out because of rain. Then we make a very competitive score thanks to Uthappa and Irfan. Then we do a very good job of defending it. Then once Afridi is gone, we give out 27 runs in next seven deliveries and the match gets the second turn. Then the final one with the run-out, then we tie. The match goes to a bowl-out. We choose most spinners and all of them hit the wicket while all of pakistan bowlers. We win in the bowl-out.

All this when i am watching a match fully after a really long time. It was very exciting. Enjoyed every moment of it.

I feel it was a match which could have been won with little ease after Afridi was gone and we took it to a very very close finish. In the end it turned out to be a very good selection of spinners for the final bowl out.

I still don't understand why do we have to take everything to a really really close finish. Can somebody tell ?

3 years in cyprus

2007-09-12T10:50:00.001+03:00

It's been three years since i came to this small beautiful island. I thought i would not stay here for more than a year but time just passes by very quick.

Cyprus gives you that cozy comfort relaxed life. I like it that way. But i guess it also makes me lazy. Working with Amdocs has been fine even though i don't feel the same sense of belonging which i felt in Oracle.

I feel time started to run from around 10th class. Till then i felt time was going slow then it never stopped being fast. I guess it is just the perception. :-)

Bijesh is getting married tomorrow. Congrats Biju !!.

Dream logging

2007-09-09T10:09:00.000+03:00

I am getting all sorts of crazy dreams these days. Sometimes my friends during intermediate (+1,+2) and friends in cyprus are all in the same picture interacting with me which is not quite possible !!

My sleep generally breaks around 5:30 or 6:00 once and then i go back to sleep to wake up an hour or two later. When i wake up first, the dream is still quite clear in my mind. But when i finally wake up, most of the dream vanishes.

Like blogging why not start to keep a log of dreams ? But i would be giving a long break to note down the details of the dream still fresh in mind and then go back to sleep.

Any comments ?

Lookout Outlook Addin

2007-09-05T20:52:00.000+03:00

As googledesktop is not upto mark with finding all my moved outlook emails, i started to use Lookout outlook add-in to index all my outlook emails. It handles the moves just fine. I am not sure what it does with deleted outlook mails. (never checked).

Lookout was bought by Microsoft and Lookout does not work when you upgrade to Outlook 2007. It gives a nice message saying "Sorry!! It looks like another Outlook Plugin has installed an unofficial version of the Outlook libraries which breaks Lookout. Lookout will not be able to load. For more information, see this link: http://www.lookoutsoft.com/Forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=10"

When you go to lookout site, it leads to windows desktop search. So basically i had to upgrade to windows desktop search as lookout was not supported any more.

I did not need windows desktop search as i use googledesktop search. I initially told myself to use the improved search in outlook 2007 and also use my googledesktop to find the emails. But the issue of moved mails got me to a stop.

I checked why lookout is not loading in Outlook 2007. It basically looks for a particular version of outlook interoperability assembly which if not found prints the message and does not load. I found this enabling debug on loading of assemblies in .NET.

May be the code which loads and checks the assembly version can be made to ignore the change. Then it would not crib and just load the new outlook interoperability assembly and it might run just fine.

Do any of these changes at your own risk. Don't forget to read the License agreement of lookout which says that "a) You may not reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble The Software.".

Captcha rendered of no use

2007-09-05T15:36:00.000+03:00

I was checking yahoo mail and saw a Ad of BigAdda.com and clicked on it by mistake.
I was taken to http://www.bigadda.com/yahoo/y_register.php
It is their registration page and i saw a captcha (word verification). The image had the characters "NXMRX" and i checked the image url -- http://www.bigadda.com/system/wordverification/verify.php?T=NXMRX

It already has the verification word. Any computer bot can now defeat the captcha happily :-D

So all computer bots if you are interested to register on this networking site, go ahead !!

Photo Competition

2007-09-04T21:36:00.000+03:00

There was a Social Club photo competition in my company. I made some submissions.You can find them on MyFlickr.
The first word (before hyphen) in the name of the photo is the theme.

Do comment if you have any thoughts/like/dislike on the photos/shots.

USB safely remove hardware

2007-09-04T20:28:00.000+03:00

When you plug a USB device, a icon appears in the system tray. This is the safely remove hardware icon. I used to wonder what is it needed for. May be the OS is writing some journal information when i am just performing the read. I would not want to try to plug the disk when some copying of files is happening to the USB disk.

I got into the properties of the device accidentally and saw it. You can get here by double clicking on the safely remove hardware icon, select the device, click properties, go to policies tab. The image explains it all. I guess all devices should be set to "optimize for quick removal" by default to enable anytime plugging out.

Now i know that i run zero risk of losing data when i pull out my USB disk from the computer. Still i would suggest, if you can safely remove it, do it. If not, you know that you don't run a risk of losing data.

Also sometimes when you try to safely remove hardware, there is an error saying that "there is some process still using the device or it is busy" or something like that. If you do have anything using it, close it. If you don't, kill the explorer.exe process and you should be able to remove the device safely.

Installing Google desktop in custom location

2007-09-04T19:49:00.000+03:00

I have been using google desktop in office for over 1.5 years now. I basically use it to search my files and my history (web history , deleted files , deleted emails). I am more interested in the history part. Google Desktop comes handy in searching the deleted stuff.

I use lookout to search my office mails. It does a better job of indexing moved items. Google desktop fails to open the item in outlook many a time. But that is fine.

Recently in my company, google desktop became an illegal software to use. I am not supposed to install it and use it. In my company they officially support microsoft desktop search to be used. But i have too much of "history" information in my google index which i dont want to lose. So i do want to keep running google desktop on my company PC.

My company has an internal monitoring tool whose job is to ensure that only allowed software is installed and running on the computer. It blocks the installation of googledesktop. So to install it, we temporarily kill the process, complete the installation. Then start the monitoring tool again. I wanted to have a better way to do it. I found that the monitoring tool does not touch stuff in folders with "recycle" as part of the name.

But google desktop does not give option of choosing the folder to install. It must be picking up and using a default folder. I found that it uses the folder setting of registry key ProgramFilesDir in "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion" path. So i changed the registry entry to point to a folder with "recycle" in the path. I installed Google desktop, it got installed fine and the monitoring tool did not touch it. I also set the %ProgramFiles% environment to this path (just to be sure). I now have googledesktop in a non-default location. I reverted back the setting after the installation was done.

This change applies for all google applications (i think - did not test it). So now you can install google applications in non-default locations. Do add a comment if you find this tip useful.

It still is not configured smartly to kill the running processes of google desktop and remove the files. It is fairly simple to do. Hope they don't do it soon. I will keep running googledesktop till that day and may be another hack will get over it as well !!

What's happening

2007-09-04T19:33:00.000+03:00

I just completed a delivery to customer last friday. After spending 1.5 weekends in office, i finally managed to be on time for the delivery. I should do better to organize my 8-9 hours in office. I should not get dragged too much into helping others and random research which spoils the work schedule. Even after 5 years, i still struggle to prioritize stuff :-)

Any ways i am back to regular schedule. Left office at 6:30 PM today. Hopefully i will stick to it. My "To Write" draft in gmail is growing big. I will try to clean it up and eventually delete it.

In Cyprus, summer is dragging. It is still pretty hot. Even though we had our end of summer party over the weekend, it is not end of summer yet. It should be over soon.

I tasted Champagne and Red wine during the summer party. I did not like them. I expected them to be sweet (atleast red wine) but they were not. Atleast they did not leave a burning sensation in my throat like coffee liquor which i tasted back in january.

Ants in Harddisk

2007-08-12T21:15:00.000+03:00

This was a few weeks ago ..

One fine morning i saw a line of ants entering my external hard disk through the gap between the USB port and the plastic around it. Oops .. seems like my external hard disk has become a new ant hole.

Sometimes i do eat while watching a movie or reading on google reader. May be i would have spilled some food on the table cloth on which the laptop and external hard disk were placed. The food got the ants and they saw my hard disk and thought it is a great place to stay than the ant hill in the walls. So they made a move. I guess i caught them while they were shifting houses.

Now that scared me a little bit. What are ants doing inside my harddisk ? I also checked the laptop for any ants and found some inside the battery holder of the laptop. Then i cleaned the place and put my hard disk and laptop in direct sun for sometime to get rid of the ants. Then brought it back and killed the ants if any came out of the disk and laptop. I guess they did not like the laptop location much. The laptop was cleansed of the ants.

I opened the casing of the external hard disk, the components inside were packed very tight and i would have to disturb the circuitry if i dismantled it. I could not see any more ants around, they were hiding somewhere deep near the circuitry. So i kept the disk in sun for short duration over the next few days and killed the ants which came out. This continued for a week or so, finally they stopped coming out. I guess there were no more.

I still dont know how the ants survived for over a week without a supply of food. Did they eat anything in the hard disk ? But my hard disk still runs just fine. Otherwise my hard disk would have stopped working due to (real) bugs (are ants bugs ?) not software bugs ..

So food items are a complete no no near the laptop. Always ensure that you cleanup the eating place after your meal.

Sad that i had to kill the ants !!

Fasouri Watermania

2007-08-12T16:48:00.000+03:00

Some time in july we went to fasouri waterpark in limassol. It was a nice break from the summer heat. The slides with the tubes were ok. The wave pool was cool. They generate waves (big ones) in the pool and we just hold on to the tube (i yet dont know how to swim) and drift along.

The best slide was the kamikazi slide (3d-view). Really enjoyed it. You just lie down and slide down straight (check the photos from the links). Except that however hard i tried to keep the legs crossed, they got split wide open at the end. If they get opened earlier, there will surely be an injury i guess.

Check the video if you want to see the slide down the kamikazi (from 1:45 mins)
Fasouri Waterpark video

Hot Summer in cyprus

2007-08-12T16:26:00.000+03:00

This time summer has been very hot in cyprus. We had anal kaattu (heat wave ?) at 8 AM in the morning. There were forest fires and cyprus got help from other countries to put it off. Due to the hot summer, the demand for electricity went up and we had power cuts as well.

Now the weather is becoming more pleasant and summer is also coming to a close.

My body also took the beating. I had been not working out regularly for three weeks due to work pressure. Then on one fine saturday morning, i got enthused to start back. Raj (a colleague of mine) and i went to the gym around 12 AM. I did not have any breakfast just had a glass of water as i woke up late.

Went to the gym and started with the treadmill. After brisk walking at 6.5 kmph and running for 10 minutes, was sweating like crazy. Then drank some water and did two abdomen excercises. Next i started with excercises for upper back. I was into the second set and i started to feel dizzy. I stopped and sat on a table. I felt dizzy and Raj helped me to get upstairs to the washroom.

On reaching upstairs, i just fell unable to walk further :-). Then the whole world was moving around .. I was kind of losing consciousness .. Raj went down to call another guy who was exercising and carry me down and then to home/hospital. But by the time he came back upstairs, i regained my consciousness and was back awake. Those two minutes i did not know anything that was happening around me. I was fine.

Slowly i walked down and we went home. So heat,exhaustion and dehydration all produced the effect. Lesson learnt is to drink good amount of water and not to get too exhausted.

Cool Header - Automattic

2007-08-12T16:02:00.000+03:00

The other day i was in VJ's blog. I saw a private password protected section.
I initially thought Vijay had added some password protected page to his wordpress blog. Later searching the net, i came to know it is a feature of wordpress. I don't think blogger has any such feature.

The pages's headers had this nice http header. :-)

"X-hacker: If you're reading this, you should visit automattic.com/jobs and apply to join the fun, mention this header.
"
Automattic is a virtual company. No office. Interesting. They are the guys behind wordpress.
http://automattic.com/about/how-we-work/

Form Auto completion

2007-07-30T19:31:00.000+03:00

I am on gmail home page and i type "p" in the username form field and i see my username in the autocomplete list and i press the down arrow key and it is filled in the username. I save a few key strokes. It also helps sometimes when i forget the username on certain sites ! It is too hard to remember all of them. It helps me autofill. It is a nice feature.

All browsers by default store form information. You can always disable it.

I was paying by my card on a particular secure website and it asked me my Card number and CVV number. I had done a transaction on this site before. When i keyed in the first digit of my card number, it showed me my card number in the autocomplete list. That is ok. Then i went to next form field to key in my CVV number and i keyed in the first number and i got my CVV number in the autocomplete list. This is not at all good.

My card number and CVV number are in formhistory.dat (under firefox profiles directory) and will be accessible to any form field with same name for any user to key in. Ofcourse it cannot be accessed by plain javascript. Hence it is safe. What happens if somebody breaks in ?

Those fields were to be marked with "autocomplete=off". If you are making a web form and feel that certain form field would not need autocomplete or has sensitive information, switch off autocompletion.

I actually went and checked the formhistory.dat which has been there in my laptop for almost 2 years now. I was surprised to see the kind of form field data stored in it. There was a lot of it. I deleted the formhistory.dat and i do make it a point from now on to delete it often. But it is still a nice feature. I will use it.

PS: Always make it a point to clear all history and prviate info from any browser once you are done using a computer/laptop outside.

Money as Debt

2007-07-15T21:20:00.000+03:00

I watched this interesting video on money. I was surprised with what i saw.
I am confused about the whole thing. But this is a working model and simply it works except for the odd economic depression of 1930s.

Read more about it here
http://www.moneyasdebt.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_requirements
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_currency

Ora0107 got more older

2007-07-01T20:59:00.000+03:00

One more year of professional life has gone by. It's been 5 years since i started 'working' in IT.
Skely gave a call and congratulated on the 'achievement' ..

Skely, DD, Gandhi , Rajiv , Biju , Anu , Chells , Debu , San , Prof , Rupsa , Swati , Sangeetha , Anuj , Guneet , Preethi , Murali , Manish -- All - Congratulations !
(i was missing manish's name for quite a while and finally remembered his name)

This day last year ..

Asimo

2007-06-27T23:00:00.000+03:00

Asimo, the most advanced humanoid robot around. He has made lot of public appearances and is a big traveller. He has travelled more places than all of us !!

Check more about him.
Warm Technology Ad - "More Forwards"

.name domain

2007-06-23T18:54:00.000+03:00

Today i came across a domain name ".name". I did not know such a domain name existed.
Any person or entity (not fictional) can register under this domain.

Read more about it ..
Top Level domain on Wikipedia
List of Top Level domains on Wikipedia
Whois info for .name domain

Click Handler - Hanging

2007-06-23T18:27:00.000+03:00

Sometime back in my office PC, double click and right click on any file type (except exe and dll) started to hang and used to return back after over a minute. Right click on folders was fine. It started to get annoying. If i open the files by double clicking from other apps (started to use total commander and 7z file manager more), they open properly. By mistake, if i do it from explorer -- boom -- it hangs.

So I started to use drag and drop. To open a excel file, i would open excel first. Then drag and drop the files onto excel window. This continued for a while. I was getting used to it that i started to do it while on my laptop as well.

After some time i was getting to use "drag and drop" instead of just double click or press enter to open file. I was desperate to find the reason and fix it.

I knew this was due to the context menu handlers in shell but could not find the culprit menu handler which was hanging.

I used filemon and regmon to see which was the one which was causing the issue but there was no trace of any issue but just it hangs. I have many context menu handlers and i know all of them are proper and they dont hang. Wanted to debug the explorer process as well !!

I googled on right click handlers and landed on a page which suggested i might be accessing an unavailable network resource. I read it and disabled my lan card and tried to open files by double-click and wow !! it responded so fast. So now i knew that something on the network was being accessed which was not there (possibly). so i opened my registry and searched for network resources - "\\" -- guess what , i found that the culprit. It was a program (docsopen.exe) which was being accessed from the network and it was in the "open with" list of programs for man file types. Also some file types were to be openend by docsopen. I got rid of all entries of docsopen and used ccleaner to clean up any missing references and other stuff from registry. Now my PC responds back normally !

Now I can interact normally with it. One more problem solved !!

Unlimited storage

2007-06-23T18:18:00.000+03:00

Recently i noticed that i have unlimited storage in yahoo mail.

Even though i knew about the announcement, i did not know when i was going to have it. It is fine, i dont have to worry about my mailbox size any more.

i use gmail more over yahoo mail for the interface experience and also tagging.

Also yahoo integrated chat into the mail interface. It is a cool thing like chat in gmail where you dont need the client.

Google Gears

2007-06-10T16:20:00.000+03:00

Google gears enables web applications to provide offline functionality. It is now in Beta and the early release happpened in last week of may.

The first application to be gears enabled is Google reader. You can download 2000 posts and go offline and work with reader in offline mode (read posts /star items) and when you come back online, it synchronizes the changes back.
Oh Sam I Am, can I read it on the tram?

It is an interesting thing. Once gmail application enables the offline functionality, all my mail will be downloaded and i can still search and check my mails in gmail even when i am offline. There will be many more apps which will provide the functionality and it will be cool.

Check out the gears session in google developer days
GD Day London: Building better AJAX aps with Google Gears

So i thought i will get a feel for it. I downloaded the installer on windows and tried to install on my office machine. I started the installer but it erred with code - 0x80040800. It basically means that it could not connect to google site to download the gears setup. Seems like the GoogleUpdater has some issues with downloading gears - working behind corporate proxy servers. I got my proxy settings right for WinHttp api which is used by GoogleUpdater and even then it continued to fail. Finally i tried to install it on my laptop where it went fine and i got hold of the download link for the Google gears setup.

If you also face the same problem while setting it up, download the gears setup file directly instead of using GoogleUpdater to download the gears setup and install it.

On linux you just get an xpi and install the extension in firefox and you are ready to go.

I will read more on gears api and play with it.

Lump in Eyelid

2007-06-10T16:15:00.000+03:00

I am having a lump in my upper eye lid for over a month. It does not pain like a stye does.
I went to the doctor in india and he gave me eye drops to use and advised me to consult a doctor in cyprus if it does not go off. As it still exists, i went to a doctor in cyprus and he diagnosed it as Chalazion. He asked me to put drops and ointment in the eye. Doing it regularly.

Hopefully should be gone soon.

Read about it and do cleanse your eyes and eyelids regularly.

Invited Guest

2007-06-10T14:22:00.000+03:00

On 29-May (i think) , Ram Kurvakat and i were heading to the parking lot to go home. When we crossed the road we heard a cat's sounds. We looked around and found a kitten in a bush. He was small and cute. He was trying to call his mom i guess. Ram said that the kitten might get hurt and we should take to my house and take care of it till it becomes big. So fine, lets do it.

We first put him in Ram's car but he started to move around into the front. So we decided it would be safe to take him in my car's back. So we placed him in my car dicky. Ram followed me in his car and we reached my home. It is not so good to be in solitary confinement for long time in dark. When we opened the dicky, we saw that he had retracted to a corner inside it and was not willing to come out of it. Ram got hold of him and carried him to the back of my kitchen. I was still a little afraid to hold him. Ram was more knowledgeable about cats so i let him handle him.

He was always running around our feet and trying to rub against our feet. Donno why they do that. He tried to explore a little bit still making lot of meows. I brought him some milk and soon he started to drink it. In the meantime, ram made him a cozy place to stay using a quilt and tried to get him used to it. Soon he got used it and was returning back to it.

Ram told that we should leave him alone and observe him. He was making the meows and was standing close to the kitchen door. In the meantime, another big cat arrived and seems like they were about to fight. At that time, Ram went and saved the small kitten and the big cat went away but was still sitting at a distance. Santhosh at times feeds this cat and hence may be it felt the new kitten as a threat to it.

Anyways it was not safe outside now. So We went in and started to look for a cardboard box to make him rest in the night. I had one from the cargo to cyprus and we put the milk bowl inside and placed him inside. We closed it leaving only one side open. He did not stay inside for a minute. He tried to jump and got out and continued exploring kitchen. Then onto my room and prof's room. Then he was lead back and this time i put him in with the box fully closed from all sides. He tried hard and finally made it out.

Ram started to play with him using keys and cricket ball (plastic ball would have caught his attention better !!). He did not seem so interested in the cricket ball but the swaying keys amused him and he was standing on his back legs to catch it.

In the meantime, Santhosh also came home. Then we decided that we will let him play for some time then give him more milk and put him the stairs for the night. Ram left for his home. Then san was playing with it for some time.

San said that the kitten was not too small that he would die and after growing up at home (rather outside home - as we dont want any pets in house) , he would not be able to find food for himself and also he was too healthy to have survived without his mom and also may be his mom was looking for him. So instead of domesticating him, we decided to leave him back. So san and i drove to office and left him inside the parking lot.
After that we did not see him. Hopefully he would have found it's mom.

Forgot to add, Ram named him Kittu. Bye bye Kittu. Hope you are safe and healthy. See you later.

Gen. Updates

2007-06-10T14:08:00.000+03:00

Last two weeks i have been planning my israel trip. I visited Israel over the last weekend. It was a very nice trip and adventurous. I will write about it next week.

Also i have been watching a lot of movies over the past few weeks. Basically clearing my backlog of movies. I watched the following (long list)
kabul express (hindi)
johny dangerously
jaane bhi do yaaron (hindi)
Life of Brian
my cousin vinny
oka oorilo (telugu)
Unnaale Unnaale (tamil)
Ullam ketkume(tamil)
Mozhi(tamil)
Paruthi Veeran (tamil)
As good as it gets
Honeymoon travels

I liked the Unnaale Unnaale song (முதல் முதலாக ... ) very much. I have been listening to it a lot of times. I also liked the "Sajnaji wari wari" song from Honeymoon travels.

I liked the picturisation of Paruthi Veeran. Just too good.
Priyamani was brilliant in the movie. The two kids performed very well.
I liked the "Ariyadha Vayasu" song.

Otherwise work is getting slightly busy with more requirements from customer.

Driving License Test: Second Attempt

2007-05-23T22:59:00.000+03:00

Today i went to give the license test again. I prepared well - did lots of left reverse, right reverse, three point turn, parallel parking. I was hoping that cyprus will be the first country where i will get my first driving license. But not yet.

I failed again !!

When we go for the test in cyprus, there is a lottery to chose the examiner. I chose Constantinou - the same guy i chose last time. I went to him and he seemed to remember me. He started checking for something in his computer. May be he wanted to see what mistakes i made last time. He then asked me to identify some traffic signs.

Once it was done, we hit the road. I was driving fine. We approached troodos Round-About. He asked me to take the 3rd exit. I waited for traffic from the right to pass by. Then when one car was around the corner, i entered the round-about but the examiner was not happy with it. He tried to turn my steering wheel to the left. What the hell ? who is driving ? He later told me that it was too risky to enter at that time. I thought it was not so. But he is the examiner - his word is final.

Then after the round abouts, we came back and he took me a place we had been to last time as well to do Parallel Parking and 3-Point turn. These were the same tests he asked me to do last time as well. He took me past a red-mazda in a small lane and asked me to do parallel parking. This is the same lane and same car (may be it is his car or a car stationed permanently) where i messed parallel parking during my last test. To add more spice, there was a car behind the red-mazda. So i was going to park in between the two cars. I thought it was little difficult. I wanted to be careful that i will not hit the car in the back.

I turned the steering wheel to full left in reverse gear and when i was turning full right to return back to straight behind the red-mazda and when i was about to be fully straight, i felt it, the wheel hit the pavement. That is it.

The examiner told me continue straight and do a 3-point turn. I did it fine. But i failed the second test. Better Luck next time !

He said apply for test again. I am thinking if i should apply once more. I am thinking on it and waiting for my learner's license to expire in end of june. Let's see how it goes.

Lights and Indicators not working

2007-05-22T22:49:00.000+03:00

Recently we had lots of mud rains in cyprus.so the car was dirty. And also i have my second driving test tomorrow , so i got our car washed. After the wash, i realised that the indicators and lights stopped working. I did not know why they were not working. The indicators for fuel, hand brake etc are working.

It was 530 in evening and generally all garages should be closed. I had my test tomorrow morning. I was wondering if there is some electrical issue which cannot be fixed soon i might end up failing the test (for a no show).

Pradeep enquired and informed me that due to car wash - may be some water is left over and once it will dry off, it will be fine. I was hoping it is the case.

I tried to see if our mechanic who used to service our car was there. Luckily i found him and he came and saw the car. He listened to me and pressed the hazard lights button once. Then he asked me to put on lights and indicators. Amazing they started working. It seems like sometimes the hazard light button sometimes get struck and then lights/indicators will not work. Learnt a new thing.

I will show up for the test tomorrow. :-D
Now as it is fixed, i have to prepare for my test !!

Hatching eggs from shop

2007-05-16T00:26:00.000+03:00

Boy hatches chick from shop egg
Customers hatch rare 'blue' eggs
After reading the above, I have to rethink on the statement - egg is vegetarian. This statement eventually comes up when some veg vs non-veg discussion happens.

Even though chances are very very rare , there is a chance.

SMS from Lukas

2007-05-13T21:30:00.000+03:00

On friday evening, i got an sms from a number not in my phone book.

I am putting the sms conversation which happened between me and Unknown (Lukas).

Unkown: Privet,How are you alla ? Lukas
me: who is this ?
Unknown: Lukas Nicosia
me: Hi Lukas. I don't know you. I dont recollect knowing you.
Lukas: I give you mobile nokia and sit yesterday with gabriel eat soup
(that guy was genuinely trying to make 'me' recollect)
me:I think you got a wrong number.

Not just on phones, we can get 'wrong number' on sms as well!

I called up the guy and told him that he got a wrong number. He apologised for the confusion.

Nokia N95 Ad

2007-05-13T21:13:00.000+03:00

I liked the ad of new nokia nseries N95 mobile. It was too simple and too cool.
Check it out at nokia website.

N95 is a cool phone to have. Costs around 750 USD. I am thinking of changing my phone. Lets see if i buy this or the iPhone or something else.

You can win a N95 every week by making a video of "a thing in your pocket" and uploading it to nseries.com.

Going to gym

2007-05-09T23:17:00.000+03:00

Finally finally i joined a gym. After being lazy for so long, i finally pushed myself to join it. I have been there for three days now.

Currently my body is aching a lot. Still i guess i will keep going. I guess my body will take a little time to adjust to the new rigour after so many years of laziness.

Also yesterday and today we had a session on stress management with yoga. The yogacharya lectured us about cleansing processes and also asanams to keep the body in fit condition and to excercise all the body parts. He made us do some asanams and also meditate. It was cool and relaxing.

With a proper trainer, i would prefer to switch to yoga than go to gym or may be i will apply the yoga principles while i will be working out in gym. Let's see how it goes.

Popping Candy

2007-05-09T23:05:00.000+03:00

Ever felt a blast (not a real blast) in your mouth ? I felt many.

i felt the tingling sensation when i had a candy which my colleague brought from Israel. I never tasted a popping candy before. It produced popping and sizzling sound. It was like crackers bursting in the mouth. I liked it a lot.

Buy some and do taste it.

Read more about here

Belated Birthday Post

2007-05-09T21:07:00.000+03:00

Like people send belated wishes, i am writing this belated post about my birthday. I turned 26 on 3rd May. I had a nice birthday bash with good number of bumps. My face was decorated with chocolate cake and my head with mayonnaise. Afterwards i read that mayonnaise is good for hair !! Family and friends called and wished me.
Otherwise it was a normal day. I went to office with a new Levi's T-Shirt.

Got lots of scraps on orkut. This way orkut is cool as it reminds us of the birthdays. It also means that lot of ppl are spending a lot of time in orkut as well.

Update:: A photo created by Kalyan for my birthday. Thanks Kalyan.

Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn)

2007-04-24T21:36:00.000+03:00

I am making this post from firefox browser running in ubuntu !!

I installed the latest version of ubuntu today on my laptop.
I wanted to try the upgrade distribution first but it failed not being able to download a package constantly. Hence i switched to full install as i wanted to clean the system as well.

The install was smooth as usual. I was up and running with a new linux installation in ~20 mins time. I was happily browsing the net on the live system while the install was happening in the back.

I still have windows also. I did not try the windows migration wizard part of the installation setup as i felt i would not need that data in linux.

I did not have any restricted devices which needed the restricted devices manager.

Straight out of the box installation played a flv file. This was cool. There is better out-of-box multimedia support and easy to use codec download wizards. Anyways vlc is there to play everything.

I am yet to try the 3D effects.

Wireless support has been made better. It detected my router password settings and automatically got connected after i gave the password. In edgy, i used WPA supplicant package to enable the wireless support with WEP-TKIP encryption. It is integrated better in this version.

Network sharing is made easier. I have got nfs and samba installed. But i will be rarely using them in my local wireless network.

Also virtualization support is better in feisty fawn version. I am yet to use it. I will try it sometime.

I just experimented with Microsoft virtual pc and check if it will run linux and it did. It was ok. I was surprised. My mouse did not work - need to check why.

Try ubuntu and enjoy !!

Back to cyprus

2007-04-24T20:41:00.000+03:00

I came back to cyprus from my nice short vacation two weeks back. I spent good time with my family and friends. I had a very nice time with my annan's kids. Had a nice darshan of Lord Venkateswara in Tirumala. Been to my native place and visited my grand fathers and temples near by.
I got less time to spend with my friends than i did last time when i was in india.
Had nice muttai and kothu parotas while i was there.

Yesterday i had invited friends over for dinner. It was farewell dinner to Ravi who is going back to india permanently from cyprus. I made dosa. The dosas came out very well - thin crispy. We had a nice dinner and a chat on the terrace.

We planned to sleep on the terrace some time during this summer. The climate in cyprus is still cold in evenings with occasional showers over the weekend. I still remember the few times in college when i used to sleep on the terrace and the chats staring at the sky.

I attended a greek reception over the weekend. A indian colleague got married to a greek lady here. It was cool. The reception was pretty much same as it is in india. Come, greet, gift , eat , socialize and leave. Here people (99%) gift money so that the couple can spend it the way they want. The extension to an indian reception wud be that the couple and close relatives would remain after the guests leave and there will be dancing till late in the night.

Other than that back to routine life.

I am yet to upload the photos from my various trips. I will be doing them soon. (god only knows when is 'soon' coming !!)

In India

2007-03-17T16:29:00.000+02:00

I am right now in india enjoying my home vacation.
I landed safely yesterday morning. Took rest yesterday and today i am in bangalore to meet up with friends. Met vikesh, skely , debu, kalyan, vb and naveen.

Yesterday night i drove my brother's bike. It was interesting the bike after a gap of 2.5 years. It was puzzling and i was cautious to drive in the night. Still i am driving with no license !!

Forbes Feeds and "Guru"

2007-03-11T12:16:00.000+02:00

I subscribe to two feeds of forbes - most popular and most popular slideshows. They capture all kinds of statistics and come up with lists.

I came to know of certain facts that oprah and jk rowling are billionaires and that sergey and larry are the richest billionaire bachelors. Be it top travel destinations, or hotels or anything else , you will find a list of the top ones on forbes.

World's Richest People

Lakshmi Mittal , Mukesh and Anil Ambani are on the list too. Reliance market cap has grown after both the brothers split.

Last week i had watched "Guru", it was a nice movie. It was inspiring. Everybody had performed well and the music was nice. I respect Dhirubhai for the following -
1) building a huge global company Reliance
2) create collective money for everybody (all reliance shareholders will agree)
3) making the mobile communication affordable in india
All this despite the fact that he was a very shrewd businessman and he did resort to unethical means of business sometimes.

50 most important people on the web

2007-03-11T12:07:00.000+02:00

50 most important people on the web

This includes all of the people who changed / changing the web. With no surprise, google executives top the list.

Why is Tall Small ?

2007-03-11T11:57:00.000+02:00

When i went to Starbucks, the smallest coffee cup was "Tall". I found that there was no small-medium-large coffee. I was a little surprised and took the "Tall" coffee and moved on.
While browsing, i found the answer.
Why is Tall Small ?

There are lots of other snippets from 60 minutes program in there. You have video content from news channels as well here - BBC , CNN , ABC , CBC.ca , Reuters and more. Do check them out.

'Un'licensed driver

2007-03-11T00:45:00.000+02:00

I started to drive in cyprus from november. I applied for my driving license test and got date in february. i got it postponed as i went to canada during that time.

I gave my license test this week. I did all my preparation well. But during the test which lasted for 40 mins, i touched the pavement while doing parallel parking. I forgot to lower my side mirrors which i use to exactly see where i am while i reverse in left and hence ended up going too close to pavement and eventually touched it. The examiner told me politely that i did not pass the test this time and i should apply for test again.

So my second attempt at getting license has been a failure. Right now i am a lot more confident in driving than i used to be. Let's see in which country i will get my driving license !!

I still have to be more cautious while driving. Tonight i entered roundabout without looking properly on the sides. I could have got hit. Big mistake.

-1 unread messages !!

2007-02-15T22:37:00.000+02:00

I switched to Yahoo mail beta some time back. I did some organization of mails and oops - i have -1 unread messages in my mail box. Negative unread messages !! looks like an inconsistent state to me ..

Take a look at the screenshot (the account info has been blackened purposefully)

There are other small issues which i noticed as well ..
1) once my session is restored in firefox, i am forwarded to a url - login.indea.yahoo.com - which leads to 404 - page not found. i guess it shud have been india
2) It keeps returning back to login page even if i give my right password - this is kinda strange

It is still in beta and all these will be fixed. I love new yahoo mail as it has autoload feature and easier access to mail features.

A street named after you

2007-02-15T22:29:00.000+02:00

A village in Hungary is offering streets to be named after people who are willing to pay for it. The cost is around ~520 USD per metre. The street names will remain unchanged for 300 years. Very long time indeed !
The shortest street in length is 242 metres .. the cost is 125944 USD

More info can be found on
http://ivad.hu/index2.html
http://www.freeweb.hu/ivad/ujdonenglish.html

Also as per hungarian laws, a street cannot be named after a living person. Hence if you decide to have a street named after you, the name change to the street will happen after your death.

The most important clause is that the person must have been famous/prominent in his/her sphere of life.

Interested in immortality ?

Start the week with great news

2007-02-14T22:58:00.000+02:00

On monday, when i logged onto yahoo mail, i saw 17 new mails in my inbox and wondered who is sending so many mails to me on my yahoo id and waited for it to load. The originating mail was with subject "News" and all others in the chain were replies to it.

It was one of my friends informing us about his marriage dates being fixed and then there was another who also informed us about her marriage dates being fixed and then there was the news that one of my friends gave birth to a baby girl. Lots of great news .. As per rumours, there was one more person who was to tell us something surprising but no one came forward.

Congratulations !! It was a nice way to start this week with lots of great news. It was nice ..

Talking to an old colleague

2007-02-14T22:03:00.000+02:00

Christopher and I used to work together on oracle files and content management sdk projects while i was in oracle. I had met his wife lakshmi while i visited san francisco. We all went to dinner on a day when it became dark at around 930 in the night and also i remember having rice wine as per the hosts wishes.

It has been around 2.5 years since i left oracle. I wanted to contact him by email for quite sometime but never wrote any mail (lazy). Today in the evening, i started to write a mail to him to get back in touch with him. When i googled for his name, desktop search also returned a result. I opened it and found his phone number (thought i had lost it). I had taken it from debu a long time ago to give him a call. Instead of the mail, i gave a call. A familiar voice responded on the other end. He also remembered me instantly when he heard my name. It was a nice surprise to him.

We talked for a while before he got on with his work (it was evening my time which was morning his time). It was nice talking to him after a long gap. i will visit him if i visit the bay area in near future.

Gmail Signup

2007-02-14T21:27:00.000+02:00

Gmail was launched on 01-Apr-2004 and it allowed signup only by invitation. Then there was sign up for account from mobile phone. Then gmail became free for sign up in some countries. Now it is fully open for free sign up without any restrictions.

From google help, Can I sign up without the invitation code? Or without a mobile phone?

Oracle DB - Rename a column

2007-02-14T21:19:00.000+02:00

Changing the name of column in oracle table used to be a cumbersome thing to do in 8i and pre 8i days. I was under the impression that oracle never introduced such a feature.
I suggested my colleague to add a new column,copy the old column contents and drop the old column for performing a rename. This is a pretty easy thing to do starting 9i.

alter table rename column to

The feature has been around for long time now ..

Time to brush up my oracle db skills. I used to work on oracle db more while i was at oracle than in amdocs. In amdocs, i am only a end user modifying data in tables.

Cool advertising

2007-02-14T21:14:00.000+02:00

I logged in to meebo.com and did a view source. In the source at the end i found the following comment

"interested in joining meebo? we have full time and internship opportunities available including front-end software engineer (JavaScript/DHTML/Ajax/C/C++), back-end software engineer (C/C++/networking/databases), and visual designer. email secretjobs at meebo dot com with your resume and cover letter. thanks!"

Interesting way to advertise to developers to join meebo. i liked it.

Currently reading

2007-02-08T00:14:00.000+02:00

I am reading some interesting stuff (from blog feeds).. i do want my friends to take a look at them. I will have to figure out a better way of doing it (links/articles which i want to share) - may be i will create a feed out of the feeds which i find interesting like my friend vijaykrishna did.

Truth about food
Camlin Ad
Mobile surveillance rocket
Video games are good for eyes

Back to Cyprus

2007-02-08T00:08:00.000+02:00

I reached cyprus back safely after a month long business trip to vancouver.
It was a very nice trip .. i did more skiing , learnt a bit of salsa dancing , did some snow shoeing , driving and visiting places and enjoying great food in many of vancouver's restaurants. Oh forgot, i also did work !!

Trying to get out of jet lag and 11 hours of tired waiting at frankfurt airport. I always find it easy to get adjusted to vancouver's timezone and i find it hard to get adjusted when i am back in cyprus. Like i kept alarm to wake up morning at 930 and i ended up waking at 3 PM when a colleague of mine called. I am having a nice headache and i am typing this and i am not feeling sleepy yet. I guess i have to force sleep on me now.

Apple iPhone

2007-01-10T08:04:00.000+02:00

Awesome phone .. phone , camera , music player , ultra sleek ..
advanced sensors is too much ..
no more keypad - just touch
widescreen .. lot of space ..
safari browser ..

what else do you need in a phone ?

http://www.apple.com/iphone/

big competition to blackberry ..

Skiing over the weekend at Mt. Seymour

2007-01-08T06:57:00.000+02:00

On Friday, we had good snowfall in vancouver. This means lot of fresh snow to ski over the weekend. On saturday morning, i woke up and saw that sun was there. It was not cloudy. Very good conditions for skiing.

Stefan and I wanted to go to cypress mountain to ski. It has more trails and also longer ones than seymour. But as we were going to the resort, we were waiting in a long queue and saw a lot of cars returning indicating the crowd level and we turned back and headed to seymour. In Seymour also, there was long queue but the wait was not that much. This is where i learnt skiing last winter.

It was good to be back on home ground. Lot of fresh snow to ski on. I am in semi intermediate stage and i ski on green runs currently. Unknowingly sometimes i end up on a blue.

I was more confident this time and i improved more. Skiing on fresh snow is more enjoyable than on screeching ice. Sometimes it is still kind of uncontrollable if i pick up too much of speed. Going uphill then reduces the speed and i continue down again. It was so much fun.

At one point, i skied down and wanted to return to another path. So took off my skies and started to walk. Suddenly my leg sinked into the snow. I was knee deep in snow. As the boots were heavy and snow was soft, it did not give me enough support to stand on. I ended up crawling as each step was sinking in till i reached the trail path. It is hard to keep walking if it keeps sinking and you continue hitting your leg against the snow when you try to move.

The same thing happened while we were returning back to Stefan's car. We did not exit properly out of the parking lot and entered the toboggan area. We continued on the edges and snow was soft as well. This time when i took the steps , my whole leg was going in. We managed to slide through some distance and finally reached out of it and headed towards his car and back to the city.

It was an interesting day. I enjoyed every bit of it. After coming to hotel, i felt completely tired and my body was aching. Hopefully i will ski the rest of the weekends here in vancouver. Let's see how it goes.

Snow and Skiing - First time

2007-01-08T06:24:00.000+02:00

Brought up in guntur in Andhra pradesh, i never saw snow in my entire life till i came to cyprus. I first saw snow when santhosh and i went on a drive to troodos in night in beginning of second week of november 2004. We went to troodos city square and observed a round white ball (cotton ?) on the road. We moved on and saw something white on either side of the road. We were not expecting see snow. We stopped to see what it was. The ball was actually snow ball. It was snow on either side of the road. It was very exciting to feel it. We made some small snow balls and threw them. It was very nice.

I always liked the white snow. Snow covered mountains and trees look just too beautiful.

Next time i saw snow was in troodos in cyprus in jan 2005. This time we saw lot of snow. We took a sledge and came down too fast and missed a tree but ended up with a fully wet jeans. Some of the friends made a snow man. Also we rented skis. Payal put on the skis initially and made an attempt to ski and gave up. Then i put on the skis first time in my life. I did not take any classes or did not go on any rides. I watched small kids take the chairlift to the top of the mountain and ski down. I was amazed. I knew nothing about skiing - did not how to stop or how to turn or anything. I knew just the fact that you go down when you are on the skis and you are at a height - simple right. I only know that skis let you slide down on snow.

Santhosh(San) and i were on skis. We were a little away from the chairlift. I carried the skis uphill to a place where it is flat (around a tree) and put on the skis and then slide down. I slide down for may be 30 seconds and then i reached end of snow and slowed down and stopped. San helped me to stop sometimes. I did not know how to stop. I did not fall down i guess. I continued the same routine - carry skis up and put them on and slide down and again. It was fun and skis were heavy and walking with the boots was difficult. Still i managed it. I enjoyed it thoroughly. San was better - he carried the skis lot higher than i was going to and was able to stop by himself.

(Do i look like trying to ski in the snap ? haha .. )

After sometime, it started to snow and visibility was reducing and we went back to our friends. That was my first skiing experience.

Weather this winter

2007-01-08T04:57:00.000+02:00

This winter has been somewhat different. In Europe, the winter is mild and very less snow in ski resorts across europe. In cyprus, there is no snow till now. Hopefully it will be full of snow by the time i return back in february from vancouver. I will try "proper" skiing in cyprus.

In America, it is all reverse this winter. New york and toronto are experiencing pleasant summer kind of temperature - 10-15 degrees centigrade. Montreal recorded its highest winter temperature after 1946.

Denver is having lot of snow storms and my team lead is doing a lot of shoveling these days trying to clear up the snow. As he works from home, he does not have to drive the car to work.

In vancouver, it is not so cold generally. In winter, generally it keeps drizzling and cloudy weather throughout. This winter has been different. There were heavy rains and it caused lot of mud slides and contamination of drinking water. It also snowed more in vancouver - in vancouver city, it rarely rarely snows.

I came to vancouver on wednesday and on thursday night, it snowed a lot. The city was fully white and it was very beautiful to watch in the morning. I enjoyed my 7 minute bus ride to office from metrotown station. All trees fully covered with snow and in park, all grass was covered with a layer of snow. The pavemenets were full of snow. The roads were cleaned and vehicular traffic ensured that the roads are wet with melting snow. It is more cold these days.

I took two snaps of how it looked in the morning right outside my room window. I wanted to take a walk later in the day to enjoy the snowfall but could not make it. I did walk down to hotel from work in the evening. The footpath was full of snow and my shoes were wet when i came back to hotel. It was becoming more warm and snow started to melt down.

The good thing is it brought fresh snow for skiing.

Accounts and Passwords

2007-01-08T04:35:00.000+02:00

How many online accounts do you have ? So many username and passwords to remember. It became crazy for me after i enrolled to frequent flier programs (hotels and airlines). You get "points" for everything these days. As everything is online, you can check everything online. but it also increased the number of usernames and passwords to remember.

I would prefer a "SSO" - single sign on for "everything". You login to a host of services using a single username/password. We have it already partially. Only that it is for all services provided by a particular entity - google or yahoo. But it did reduce some passwords to maintain.

Some websites need you to register online. Here "bugmenot" helps me in removing the need to register to many websites. There is a firefox plugin which makes it even more easier to use it. It reduces the number of accounts i have to keep track of.

Even if you forget your password and in some cases your account name also , you can get the information emailed to you on most sites by giving the email id which you gave during registration. It is easy to retrieve information easy this way.

With many accounts, i thought it is becoming messy. I started to organize and i have most of the accounts back in control. Soon i will be using a password manager and use it to manage all the passwords.

Start using a password manager and manage all your accounts. Choose a open source application and use very good encryption on the password files. Dont store the password in plain text form. Have a small note which will remind you of the password you gave to that account. This adds more security that even if the encryption on the password file is broken, it would not make much sense to the user who is looking for passwords.

In Vancouver again

2007-01-08T04:06:00.000+02:00

I am back in vancouver. I have spent significant time in vancouver. Nice to be back in canada.

My journey was good. I transited via frankfurt. I had some 6-7 hours of transit time in frankfurt. So i had taken some books from santhosh to read in the flight. I started to read "Cat o nine tales". It is a short story collection. It is a nice, small light reading book. I was good time pass. I read books not so often and this time i completed it in one journey .. it is good considering my reading habits.

I read slow .. may be few pages a day.. as soon as i start to read a few pages, i go to sleep. Still a very effective technique to go to sleep. I started to read the "chamber of secrets" - harry potter book and it is a pretty small book .. ~300 pages i guess. I read it for months reading a few pages a day. Finally i sat thru one night and completed it in one night !!

Coming back to my flight journery, i was served "still water" on the flight. When i asked the flight attendant to give me water, he asked me which one i wanted - "still water" or "sparkling water" (soda). It sounded familiar. I answered "still water". In cyprus office, we have a vending machine in cafeteria where we have lunch which had one outlet marked "still water". I used to think it is "still" water (meaning simply water) and not in the literal sense of "still" water (water being still). Now only when the attendant posed the question to me did i really understand the meaning !!

I reached vancouver and the climate was cloudy and it was cold outside. I reached my hotel - holiday inn in metrotown. I was not happy that my company did not put me in hilton which is more close to office. But when i entered my room in holiday inn, I liked the hotel room. It had all i needed - decent room , internet , breakfast. Also a oven and fridge completed my needs. I dont need a full kitchen. Just happy with my room.

I am in vancouver for a month. I have tried the food in many indian restaurants in vancouver. So i am planning to do some cooking this time with my microwave oven. Let us see how it goes. I will start with just making plain rice and get the curry from a take-away.

Last time, i made soup in a coffee mug .. It came out good. This time i am more equipped. I went to dollarama store and bought some bowls,plates and spoons. I need to get rice and salt and spices.