2012

Of late, I have been hearing a lot about the twitter effect, where tweeple determine how good or bad a movie is, by just tweeting. Well, I have to say you can trust it on how people judge a movie. All the movies which got a trending in the twitter Inglorious basterds, Paranormal activity were good to watch. I ended up watching 2012 thanks to the same hype. This time the venue was VR complex, nice cozy evening ( break from miserable rains , that have been following me where ever I go Bangalore or Cbe). Call it the outsourcing effect most movies in hollywood seem to have indian connnection now a days. This ones no different, where the movie starts with an Indian scientist discovering abnormal activity in Solar flares. The neutrinos from the sun are reacting with the earths crust and it is boiling inside out. An american colleague of his , gets this information to US government, so as to enable the world governments plan for the so called apocalypse in 2012.

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Aadhavan Movie Review

Another Diwali, bunch of films that are releasing. When you have a group of friends getting together, the foundations of visit to a nearby theater are laid. Since his last film Ayan was good, I was looking forward to Aadhavan , plus the Director KS Ravi Kumar makes you think it must be at least worthwhile watching it. Invariably when you visit this theaters during the festive season, they try to rip you of in something, in this case it was Parking ticket, they charged Rs 8 per vehicle,People who didn't have change gave Rs 10 , since the guy who was collecting the money had no change what so ever. Basically he was ripping Rs 2 for every vehicle. Now for the much awaited movie. It started of with a stereotypical feel good,enjoy life song pretty much like his last movie Ayan. Surya plays the role of a hired gun, Aadhavan to take out people. After the intro song , he takes out a Foreign Priest. After this assignment, He is hired to take out a Judge investigating organ trade case in Kolkata by the villain. He misses his target for the first time in his entire life. What follows is a scene to show of his Marchoness, where he vows to take out the Judge in 10 days. Of course the heroine Nayanthara who plays the role of Tara, happens to be Judge's daughter. He gains entry into the house posing as a relative of Servant Vadivelu. Did I forget to mention the heroine intro song??? which tests a your patience so much, I started people getting out of Theater for a smoke. If anything holds the first half together hiding the flaws in script, its the humor between Surya and Vadivel. For most part , it leaves you in splits. Multiple attempts by Surya to take out the Judge, end up being futile during first half. In between he finds time to woo Judge's Daughter too.

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Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince Movie Review

Well, its been quite some time since I have written a movie review. Its not that I have been seeing less movies but rather its hard to find quality movies that make you sit up and watch. Last night , I was pretty much yearning to see Harry Potter, unfortunately I was finding no takers for the movie. I cant understand if people are ready to see Vijay film on PVR for 180 Rs. Why not volunteer for HP6??? Though one of colleagues was interested, it was rather for Transformers 2 ( you could call him typical indian movie goer who are interested in no brainer action movies like Hulk and Godzilla, rather than quality movies ). As luck would have it, within 2 hrs of being at my office , One of senior manager's came and said you could take the day of for all the hard work you put in. I was like wow, Let me escape from office. But on hind sight, even for the last release, they had given me a day of plus Ice creams. I guess the ice creams were a casualty of the recession. Coming back to the point, I managed to cajole my tentative cubicle mate for coming with a movie (at least he has read the book, most other's just watched movies ). It was short walk to Inox across the road ( love this office cause you have a mall and a mutliplex all at a walkable distance ). The movie started and thankfully I did not have to contend with sintex ad or Kumaran silks or Sri devi silks ad before the movie like theatres in Tamil Nadu.

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Micheal Jackson - The King of Pop

It was usual day when I woke up, opened phone to check my twitter account There were a lot of tweets with regard to RIP - MJ. As most people love to tweet what they are tweeting, my natural intuition was that they were listening to RIP by Micheal Jackson. It was latter that I found that the Micheal Jackson had passed away. I was in somber mood to begin with. There lots of people who are in their teens and early 20's who grew up listening to his songs and trying to copy his dance moves ( Prabhu deva probably made it as a hero because of him ). He made dance such a raging phenomenon as much to do with singing. And who can forget the eternal thriller album, the first time I listened , I got goose bumps from his music.

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Geek's Pick Up Lines

Alright, I picked few geek pick up lines from tweets... decided it to post it on my blog, since it was really funny...

(I realize this is an email forward, but, if anyone knows an originator, I'd like to give credit where it's due?)

Geek Pick-up Lines : Part 1

1. Tell me of this thing you humans call *dramatic pause* love.
2. If you turn me down now, I will become more drunk than you can possibly imagine.
3. They don't call me Bones because I'm a doctor.
4. Your name is Leslie? Look, I can spell your name on my calculator!
5. What's a nice girl like you doing in a wretched hive of scum and villany like this?
6. You must be Windows 95 because you gots me so unstable.
7. My 'up-time' is better than BSD.
8. I can tell by your emoticons that you're looking for some company.
9. Is that an iPod mini in your pocket or are you just happy to see me.
10. Want to see my Red Hat?
11. If you won't let me buy you a drink, at least let me fix your laptop.
12. Do u have an unlimited data connection at home,looks like you have downloaded all the beauty in the world?

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Election Day Tweets

Indian elections are always entertaining, with so many parties begging for people's votes (Pardon me, if I lost count of the list of parties ).It after all the biggest reality show anybody could muster up.I always felt a two party system as in US which gives the government stability, is far more better than having so many parties. In case you choose to have multi party system, then in that situation where no party gets a majority, the top two parties should have run off election, where the winner is chosen. I was watching CNN IBN on saturday morning , also following the elections in the world of Twitter. Decided to compile a list of tweets on the election day. Here are a few good ones

1. Wonder what happens to all the astrologers - do the losing netas ask for money back? or go bash them up?:-)
2. Congress sweeps Delhi! Can you CLEAN the streets now too?
3. But just now they said chidambaram lost & after recounting he is declared victorious they recounted not reverse counted right?
4. UPA will be forming the government.. advani's expressions must be a kodak moment.
5. I hope the BJP figures out that there's work to be done (beyond polarizing ppl) when not in power too. Grassroots stuff.
6. Advani needs to take rebirth as Rahul's son to become future PM.
7. Sun is Shining in Tamil Nadu today.!!!
   
8. Singh is set to become King Once again.!!
9. BJP is like Liverpool and Congress is like Manchester United. They kept attacking Congress and claimed they will win but look what happened.
10. Why cant people remember a basic fact that Left is NOT RIGHT before voting. Wipe them out I say!

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Dummies Guide to Software Engineering

I am not going to beat around the bush for this topic, its going to be straight forward and as blunt as possible. Its almost a year since I entered this industry, I did finally manage to be a part of a product release . You may not find most of the things that I have mentioned here in any Software Engineering book. If you can learn everything from reading books, then work experience has little value. To start of, the whole information technology(IT) industry in India is based on one word "Out Sourcing". Some people might feel this word applies only Service based IT firms and not Product based ones. American firms that are present here rarely if at all allow you to take ownership of Products in India. If at all they allow, its because the Product has reached its end of life, you will end up taking ownership for the Product in the name of sustainance. If you're part of brand new product development, consider yourself very lucky. The optimism of youth is often is greatly under estimated, I loved writing code in college. Being software engineer you would be expected to code , its one of the basic things your associated with. After entering this industry, at least in India I found out there more jobs here on which you can make a living without ever bothering to write a single line of code. Unfortunately the job titles companies give have engineering associated with them, which makes mockery of what a Computer Science Engineering is.!!! I would like call this jobs as Glorified Customer Support (GCS) or So called Engineering jobs. Now, how do you make out if you ended up in this jobs?? If somebody who doesn't have anything in relation to Computer Science , who hasn't bothered to master the essentials of programming, can do your job after the initial training as well as you can, then YES, your job is a GCS. Now here are a few myths and facts which I observed

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Luck by Chance, Perfomance & Position.!!

I know its been a long time since I have posted anything here. Most of my time has been eaten up in my office work or other personal issues. 7 months into work, it makes you aware that college is way more fun than your stereo typical office. To the people who follow my blog, I have not abandoned the world of blogging, but taken to the world of micro blogging of late. This my Twitter profile http://twitter.com/gkmaestro for you to follow. Now two things which I passed through recently which I feel are fact of corporate life. Lets start with two stories which recently came across

Luck matters ;-)

With a pile of 300 resumes on his desk and a need to pick someone quickly, my boss told me to make calls on the bottom 50 and toss the rest. "Throw away 250 resumes?" I asked, shocked.
"What if the best candidates are in there?"


"You have a point," he said. "But then again, I don't need people with bad luck here."


- Becky Horowitz(Reader's digest)

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Yamming & Tweeting

Its a week where I read in the newspaper that Paris Hilton wants to stimulate the world economy by shopping more (Hmmm, I dont know about her stimulating the economy, but she certainly managed to stimulate a lot of men by her videos ) . On a more serious note now, one of the events that happened during this week, made me think about the kind of work one ends up doing. It all started in a meeting, where my manager stressed on the need of increasing communication. The topic here was site called Yammer , it basically your Twitter modeled for your office, communicating with your colleagues. Personally I have never moved beyond FaceBook and Orkut with respect to Social Networking. It was one of those days in office where I had time to myself, that enabled me to try out Yammer. I found it interesting, when I joined it. So went ahead and joined my Team's private community on it. (PS : My team's community on yammer was owned by Software Development Director in US i.e, SDD for short). What happened was,I used my actual name as in most of my official documents G@#@!# K#@!#!. But in MCE( my company) its screwed up as G@#@!# R!@#!@#( Apparently when I joined here, they wanted the name as in Passport, which was G@#@!# K#@!#! R!@#!@#) . Taking the first name and last name, they made it G@#@!# R!@#!@#, again nobody knows me by this name outside MCE.

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Escape to Ooty

Well, after a turbulent start to the New Year I couldn’t wait to get myself out of Bangalore. Things change with time, but its ability to cope with change which is tested. As with most of my outings rarely do, I end up planning. Within 3 hours of me landing in Coimbatore, the plan for two day outing to Ooty was already chartered out by my friends. The next day we started early by 7 30 am to Ooty. Here I need to make a word of caution about our chauffeur; He basically thinks he is Michael Schumacher’s prodigy. People normally speed up when the highways are free. But he was traveling at 140km/h in road in between the forests. I knew something was going to go wrong, when I saw the speedometer. As it turned out, a poor deer took the wrong moment to cross the roads, it tried to squirt its way across the road, as we were moving. I thought the deer may not make it across the road, but it may end up in heaven for sure. But Luckily thanks to some superb Scorpio braking, the deer was able to cheat death (Thank God for those Scorpio brakes). Not the greatest of starts to the journey, midway through I knew something was wrong. The weird feeling was getting stronger with every hairpin bend we took. Finally in 4th one I had to take a call from one of my friends, as soon as I finished the call, I knew it was coming out. A bang on the door ensured the car was stopped and I rushed out to puke. Not a pretty site, when you have to go, you have to let it go. Another hour we finally reached Ooty. We managed to get some well deserved rest thanks to our friend’s guest house.

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Look back at 2008

As the year draws to close, I thought it would be nice to have a nostalgic view of the year gone by through the eyes of my blog. I have highlighted top ten entries selected as links in red , you'll find them as you read through . I am not going to rank them or do any sorting among the ten. entries I rather leave the job of picking and telling me the best entry to the readers. So lets start

• January: Had the best birthday this year, after coming to my college. Used to think a lot about how I would end up in company, since I had got placed in dual. Now I have learnt that you should never expect too much.

• February: Started serious blogging this month, probably one of my first sensible entries i.e, Irony in the Great Indian Premier League Auction was also in this month, then there is always the humorous side in me that pops up resulting in the following two A Funny Thought - Girls Live in A Fairy Tale World, Lunch hour At Lisieux N Avila ( School days , never short of fun ).

• March: I knew things were coming to an end in college soon, so this one is pretty close to my heart End of College Life (Memorable one) and my first technical blog Microsoft, Yahoo and Google .

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Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi Review

Well, it was a testing week with the work, team outing and a few other things. A sleepless Thursday night helped by some singing that made no sense to me, put me of into sleep mode in the morning itself (though I usually sleep post lunch, there was always an option of sleeping in the tunnel or bunker). As far as the rest of the day, I don’t know about team building, but it certainly brought out the killer instinct within the guys (the women were laid back at the game as expected). At least I could relate myself to the good old college days, where I used to play Age of Mythology and Age of Empires. Probably call it the tiredness; I had the best sleep in days on Friday night. The following day was even more terrible with me having to search for BSNL commercial officer's office to get my over charged phone bill sorted out (I am totally pissed of with BSNL by the way, cause their site still shows my bill has unpaid, though the money from my account has disappeared in an online transaction).The need to relax and enjoy was strong during the next day, so all was set for a Sunday night movie. I cannot reveal the circumstances under which I watched the movie (the plans that I had in mind for this film was a bit different, than what actually happened), but nevertheless no harms in writing a review.

For starter’s, I was expecting a lot out of this movie. Since the last SRK film i.e., OSO was such a fulfilling experience. Here you have SRK playing dual roles of Surrinder and his alter ego Raj. Surri goes to his headmaster’s daughter’s marriage and ends up being the bride groom himself, thanks to the accident of the guy who is supposed to get married. What are the odds of that happening? To continue, the newly wed couple of Surri and Taani make their way to home in Amritsar. Surri is madly in love with his new found wife, but only to find out his wife doesn’t love him back. She just about fits the bill for doing his wife duties. Surri decides that he needs impress his wife and make her love him. Thus he goes about creating his alter ego i.e Raj. If Surri is a common man tentative, reserved in his approach to life, you have Raj, the direct opposite outgoing, flirtatious Punjabi dude wearing tight jeans. Raj meets Taani at the dance class she joins, in fact as it always happens in bollywood films they both end up being partners in dance competition. One problem with Aditya chopra’s direction is the difference between Raj and Surri is just a slender moustache. You have dumb wife who doesn’t recognize her hubby with moustache removed (Kind of on the lines of Rajni’s classic comedy Thillu Mullu ). As always dispel your logical part of the brain on watching bollywood films. Moving on, Raj relentlessly flirts with Taani during their dance classes (familiar terrain, I guess). You have heroine rebuffing him initially, but as they work together they get along with each other, Taani admiring his flirts (That sounds too familiar for comfort). Finally Raj wins a day out with Taani over a bet on Panni Poori eating competition. Blah Blah another wooing song, at its end, Raj proposes to Taani confessing his love for her. He shuts down the power of half the city and then lights up the city so as to make I LOVE U appear from a hill. May be Tamil Nadu Electricity Board should consider this as a marketing product for wannabe youngsters who want to propose. See they are shutting down power 6 hours a day; they might as well use power cuts for helping people propose their love.

Coming back to the story, Taani explains she is already committed in marriage, so she could not do anything for Raj’s confession of love. Surri decides to kill Raj’s persona since he had won his wife heart, but is worried she loves Raj, something who he is not in his life, compared to Surri who he is. Now he decides to woo his wife as himself instead of somebody else, but Taani is having serious troubles forgetting Raj. She secretly visits him, confesses she too loves him. They decide to elope away after the dance competition finals. (I make it sound real dirty, Don’t I?? Well, that’s the way it’s in the film). Surri decides if Raj is what her wife wants instead of him, he will give her that. Now throw in some sentiment in the temple, where god puts sense into Taani’s head, who is on the verge of infidelity. She backs out with Raj in the last minute before dance competition for eloping with him. It’s the dance finals, she has made her entry, but Raj doesn’t show up. Not surprised Taani decides to withdraw from finals, but to her surprise Surri shows up and dances amazingly. Now she realizes Raj and Surri are one and the same. God, heroine doesn’t realize the hero with moustache and without one, reminiscent of old MGR films where the difference between characters was a mole on the cheek. I guess a moustache is a better candidate than a mole for disguise. Of course, as expected they hero wins they dance finals too and both live happily ever after.

SRK as Surrinder is impressive. Its one of the roles he hasn’t played yet and he does it pretty well and Raj, of course is the standard SRK role in films. The funny thing as SRK keeps getting older; his heroines seem to be getting younger. Deepika in OSO was 21 with SRK being 40 year old. Now you have Anushka Sharma, 19 year old teenager playing his object of interest. Anushka just about makes the cut for a wife; she is decent in her acting. And the most important thing of all for heroines, they must look good, irrespective of the fact whether she knows to act or dance. Here other than that she also gets to do wheeling with the bike, so its better I guess.Then there is one nostalgic bollywood song with five heroines from bollywood, again repetitive as OSO had one song of the same type already. With Yash Raj films, you at last have a film that is firmly rooted in India, instead of some NRI location such as New York or London and people living in houses where lavish bathrooms are size of a hall. Songs are good for the most part. There couple of sequences in the post interval where the films lags behind, you can’t wait for the film to reach its climax. As a whole its worth while watching it once.

Rating: 2.5 / 5

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Faces Of Recession

"A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain..!! "

- Mark Twain

I am no Paul Krugman or Amartya Sen to talk about economics. The only economics paper that I have ever read was for my Management paper in my 7th semester, that too at the eleventh hour before the exams. Nevertheless, I decided to dig deep into causes of this recession (you start looking at things seriously, only when the impact zone is nearer to you). For starters US economy has officially started shrinking, 0.5% for this quarter. What amazes me is the failure of Big Corporations in US you name it Goldman Sachs, Lehmann brothers, Merrill lynch, AIG Insurance, Citi Group, Bear Sterns, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These are A-list corporations that attract the best management talent in the world from Ivy League, Wharton and IIM’s in India. Just to give an idea, there only 10 countries in the world whose Gross Domestic Product is larger than their combined losses (Thank God, India is one of them). So the mistakes that have been done are not only big, but it’s also done by pretty smart people ( Now , they don't look so smart, after posting losses of billlions of dollars, do they??? ).

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Vaaranam Aayiram Review

It was one of those arduous weeks, where nothing seems to be going right. First couple of my favourite t-shirts got ruined, due to mixing of wrong set of clothes while washing. Next the visit to PVR cinemas got cancelled due to the lack of tickets. Not a great beginning to a week, but finally ended up doing some serious work at office. Coming back to the movie, this one was on my list of movies to be watched, ever since I heard the songs. But I never planned it for watching it in Bangalore. As things would turn out, on a dull Thursday where random power cuts seemed to be more erratic than women’s mood swings, I fell asleep on my table and my mind drifted onto a dream. It was a multiplex theatre; I was standing there not able to get tickets, while one of my friends pops out of nowhere showing of her credit card and tickets that were bought by her to me. Thanks to show of antics, I snapped out of my dream and sleep, it was almost like a challenge laid out to me, whether I could tickets in a multiplex without a credit card on a Sunday. Well, the next day after I walked around my area to find the new multiplex in my neighborhood. As with most things I life, you keep searching for things far and wide, when it’s actually near you all the time. In fact the Inox multiplex was more near to my house then my office, yet I never seemed to realize it. It was all set for Sunday night show at Inox theatre (never mind the fact I paid 180 for this movie i.e., I am sure a few of my friends jaw would have dropped on reading this). The only dampener being one of my friend who would have showed up with me, failed to come cause of his illness, leaving me a loner at the multiplex. As the say, if one door closes, the other door opens, at least it did for some time before shutting altogether. I had my seat number next to a decent looking girl (I couldn’t make out the details in darkness of theatre though). Just as I thought something was going for me, her dad who was next to her, exchanged the seats and sat next to me, moving the girl out. It’s not as if I was bothered about it, may be I should have said to him, if your daughter had just come alone, she wouldn’t have minded sitting next to me at all. But seeing movies alone is boring affair, though this was a Tamil movie, there was no need for translation, nevertheless a willing translator next to me as I got for ‘Rock On’ would have made it more pleasurable.

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Yes, We Can..!!!

Well, for the most this week when ever I had managed to get my hands on the newspaper or watched TV, one man has been all over the news i.e., Barack Hussein Obama. I could not lay more emphasis on his name than this (Forget about the fact his name rhymes with Osama, there were even jokes linking him to Osama). Four years ago, no body could have dreamt that a man with a Muslim middle name, who is black with a Kenyan father who had spent his childhood in Indonesia, could be posted to the most powerful job in the world. Obama has many firsts to his name; the first black man to get presidential ticket nomination from any party in the US, the first black man to be elected has the president of US. The roots of his success were laid four decades ago. If it were not for a fifteen-year-old school girl, Claudette Colvin who refused to get down from the bus for a white man, Martin Luther King would not have launched the civil disobedience moment against discrimination against blacks. If Martin Luther hadn’t delivered the famous “I have a dream “ speech which made , then the President Lyndon Johnson sign the Civil Rights Act which outlawed the racial segregation, Obama would not have been able to run for the US Presidency. The Neo Conservatives always define a typical American to be a white educated Christian with a catholic background. By electing a black president Americans, have shattered their own myth. This is very relevant to India, where I find so many people have an obsession to look white. Especially those face cream ads in TV where a dark skinned woman always looses and the white colored woman is always looked upon as a winner. I consider those ads racially demeaning that try to create an inferiority complex among women. What’s even worse is people falling for those Ads, buying these products. I guess things like this happen only in India.

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Perseverance Pays Off

Well, ever since I moved to Bangalore one of my top priorities has been to get a broadband connection. While rest of the world defines a minimum speed requirement 2 Mbps as broadband, in India we have conveniently lowered that standard to 256 Kbps to suit our poor quality standards. Anyway, among the handful of ISPs which provide service to home’s here, I decided to go for BSNL. The reason of choosing BSNL was obviously speed. Back in college days, my friends used to boast of download speeds of 200 – 300 Kbps. With me working during week days and Sunday being a holiday. It just gives me Saturday for this stuff, where I had to take care of washing my clothes plus the visit to the nearest BSNL office. The ordeal of getting BSNL went like this:

• Week 1: On this Saturday, I got a photo for my application ready, with my passport has address proof for applying broadband and went to the office to apply. But only to be rebuffed, that I needed a local address proof in Bangalore, not from the city which I am from. As I recently moved to Bangalore, I had no local address proof leaving me to scratch my head.

• Week 2: I think, I had a holiday coupled with the weekend, so had gone home. So no visit to BSNL office this weekend.

• Week 3: I talked to my seniors, in this week about the problem. They suggested that a letter from my Company HR stating that I live in so and so place in Bangalore would do the trick for address proof. I had gotten the address proof and application form ready this time and went to the office. But this time, it turned out to be second Saturday i.e., a holiday. A wasted trip to office.

• Week 4: Well, it turned out to be my lucky weekend. The office was open and also there was special offer for two days where if I applied, I did not have to pay any installation charges or the cost of WiFi enabled modem. But the only worry was that there will be two different guys coming for first LandLine phone connection and then the Broadband connection .If both this guys show up during the weekdays, I will be at office with the house locked, they would just move onto their next work. Leaving me to scramble to office on the following weekend to ask them come back to my house, to give the connection.

• Week 5: For every problem, there is a solution. It’s just that everyone can’t see the solution. While bouncing of ideas with my roommate, I thought a poster on my house door in kannada, asking the BSNL guy to call me at this phone number would do the trick. Since my house was few blocks from my office, I could show up in 10 mins of the call at my house. With help of my well favored friend, who gave a lot more attention to my request, then what I had expected, I got that done pretty fast ( I wish she was the Manager for BSNL in my area, at least I would have got my Broadband in no time in my home with attention like that). The following day that too within 1 week I got a call from Landline guy, thanks to poster saying that he will come tomorrow, which luckily turned out to be holiday. So I was at my home when he showed up. But I had to pay him a compliment amount for showing up on a holiday. (Why do people in government expect compliments, for doing their jobs, for which government also pays them as salary???)

• Week 6 & 7: It was elusive waiting game with BSNL. For every call that I get in mobile, I used attend to it that it could be BSNL guy. I never looked forward so much to get a call, even from a girl. The only calls that I kept getting were from annoying bank people asking me to take loans and investment plans. One of the calls was like my asking me for retirement plans. I barely completed 3 months in my first work; they’re talking about retirement, stupid banks.

• Week 8: I had completely lost my patience, a frustrated man. To add fuel to the fire, I was simply bounced of from one table to another table when I needed to enquire about the broadband connection. Finally, as if that wasn’t enough, the guy in charge of connections for my area was on leave on that Saturday. But I didn’t budge, I met divisional manager, got the installation guys number. I called him in the morning, but as my luck would turn out there was power shutdown in Bangalore that day. So that guy couldn’t finish installation, he had already had gone to. He nevertheless said he will come, once the power comes back. The power came back; the next one hour seemed like an eternity, with me standing on the balcony looking out for that guy. Dogs, Cats, Pigeons, bikes, Auto’s , Good looking girls everything came in the road expect for the BSNL guy who never showed up. I was so frustrated the next day, that I started getting dreams about BSNL modem and browsing (I hardly get any dreams about any girls, so getting dream about BSNL modem was weird).

• D-Day: Finally, after a number of calls, after that disappointing weekend. I did manage to get that guy to agree to come on Wednesday. To make matters worse, it was raining the whole day. But I didn’t want to give up, call after call and loads of bugging him. BSNL guy at last agreed to come at 5 30 pm. I had to skip a meeting in the office and run from my office to be at my home in rain. Then to add another twist, he backed off saying he will come tomorrow since it was raining. I had to entice him that I will even pay for his auto charge, if he comes. But he was like if you don’t mind pick me at office. Then I decided I am going get this broadband today, no matter what. I wanted this so badly. So I borrowed a bike, went to BSNL office, had a close call with skidding in the rain. But I did manage to bring him to my house and install the modem. I even attended the meeting that day via online. Seriously, if I had put half the effort that I had put in wooing that BSNL guy on a girl, I think she would have said yes to me. I guess perseverance pays off whether it is your boss, work, girl friend or in this case BSNL guy. To add final twist, I found out I was in Business Unlimited 15000 plan to my horror. I was not prepared to pay a bill of 15000 per month. But it later turned out that since I had taken the broadband in offer, for the first 15 days I will be getting free BUL 15000 service and then later will revert back to Home 750 plus. Finally, the modem I ended up was a type 4 modem (which is better one i.e. three more Ethernet ports than type 2 modem), though it was type 2 which I ordered. May be, I needed this final bit of luck for all that I had gone through.

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Desperate Microsoft

Have you heard of the saying desperate circumstances call for desperate measures? Well, I read recently, one of the interviews by Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft that his company was not giving up on search in its fight against Google. He went as far as saying that it was like David vs. Goliath, with Microsoft being the David (This is funny considering the situation in mid 90's where Microsoft was the software bully making every other company play by its rules). Now you have the bully being bullied around. He went onto say that he was going to give the much needed push that Live Search needed. Well, now I understand what he meant by push, the Microsoft marketing team has come up with a desperate measure to combat Google. It’s called “Search Perks”, where you get gifts in the form of music downloads, air tickets, books, X-box games for every search you do on Live Search.

For people interested in how it works, you need to download and install MSN toolbar on your IE. For every 25 searches you do, you will be eligible to get points or tickets. When you accumulated 4950 points you cash in using the tickets for a prize. The top prize X Box wireless game controller, for which you have to get 5500 points, but there are only 198 days from the date of launch of service (Which is October 1) for it to end. Even with the maximum of 25 searches per day you get only 4950 points, which means nobody will ever be able to get the top prize. It seems Microsoft think tank, didn’t get quite work out the details when they launched the scheme. When somebody pointed out to this Microsoft spokes person that nobody can win the top prize. A pale faced Microsoft spokes person had to come up with a not so prepared answer that Microsoft will look into extending the Search Perks service depending on its initial response. To be frank, offering freebies ain’t going to drive people to Live Search. Poor Microsoft, they have all the money in the world, yet they seem to be short of innovation and inspiration. Of course you can’t forget how Microsoft flirted with Yahoo to buy the Search engine, only for Google to come in between and sweep Yahoo of its feet by making Yahoo use Google Ad Sense. I shouldn’t be complaining about this, since I do for work for company, which itself believes strongly in the motto, “If you cant Develop them on your own, Buy them ..!! “ .

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Journey of Love

(Disclaimer: All incidents mentioned here are from real life. Any similarities you find with people from real life are purely intentional and congrats you might have actually found the person in the story( The person in the story is certainly not me..!!). I am not a male chauvinist, but I am a guy so I can write only from a guy’s perspective so put up with it. Last but not the least, I am not encouraging anybody to drink (neither do I), Alcohol kills…!)

I told one of my college mates, that I would pen this entry down before I left for Bangalore. Unfortunately it never happened. Well, at least now I feel about writing this down. Let’s start, how does love start in the first place. Many people talk about love at first sight (Well, I know two of my friends, who claim to have fallen for each other at first sight). But it’s hard for me to accept it, how could you know she/he is the right person, when you haven't spoken or know anything tangible about the person. At the most what I can think of here is, it’s just the case of mutual attraction combined with teasing of friends leading to love. It makes logical sense this way, consider a situation where a girl has to ask a query to two unknown guys (whom she has never met before). There is a pretty good chance that the girl will end up asking the better looking guy. Hence you can conclude, looks are initial token for people to fall in love. I believe that you don't fall in love with a girl because she is beautiful; the girl looks beautiful because you’re in love with her. Just try answering this question before you confirm you’re in love with the person. Take a picture of your girl friend the first thing when she wakes up in the morning (That’s when all the illusion of beauty that the make up creates is least effective). Take a hard look at the photo. If you really feel like seeing this same face for the next 50 years of your life day in and day out, as the thing first thing in the morning, may be there is a good chance you have fallen for that person. People in love often seem to have serious issue with accepting some other girl/boy is better looking than their lover. Even when it comes to looks, people have different tastes. Otherwise, there will be loads of guys wooing a single girl and vice versa.

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Heaven or Hell Rock On

What do you think; it’s like experiencing heaven and hell at the same time. Nah, I am not talking about the philosophical stuff (Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody is wants to die). Last week, I was in the middle of oracle training (just back from a demanding weekend at home) thanks to the vagaries of Bangalore weather, I got sick again. This time it was fever combined with body ache which made even sitting in cushion chair miserable for me. As the Tamil saying goes “ Kaiku eatunatu , Vaiku eatala “ ( You can touch the food with your hand, but not eat it with your mouth ) , that’s when my manager called me said we have a big team outing tomorrow, so come to PVR multiplex and after that for a dinner party. The thought running through my mind was, Why now God??? Why can’t they have the outing when I am feeling as cool as cucumber? Well, I was in dilemma that night, whether I should skip my first team outing or not because of fever. Eventually I ended up going to the movie and party, thanks to temporary relief provided by crocin. On a brighter note, I was able to hitch hike a ride on my manager’s car to PVR, rather than take a bus from my office. As far as the movie was concerned, it was ‘Rock On’, a Hindi movie (I hardly know any Hindi) so it was pretty much going to be a good sleep for me at the theatre. But as luck would have it, I got my seat next to one of my teammates who joined MCE along with me, who happens to know Hindi and also tries to speak ‘Taamil’ ( like Tamil heroines say “ Ennaku Ennaku Konchum Konchum Taamil theriyum “).

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ABCD

ABCD… I m not going to talk about English alphabets here, though the things I am going to talk about start with this letters. Let’s start

‘D’ for Dress or dressing sense to be more precise (If your friend of mine, I ought to be surprised for your raised eyebrow by now). Back in college days, I used to have really flashy, eye catching style of dressing. Well, as I have mentioned in my previous blog entry, liberal dress codes is one of many advantages at my office. It’s funny how people make use of this new found freedom with regard to dressing sense from college to office. The other day I was using the lift to move to the cafeteria. As the lift was moving up, my eye caught hold of a t-shirt. Natural intuition on my part was to read it, it said “I am a party girl, don’t Force me to Study ...! “. When I finished reading it, the other guy standing cross to me in the lift was giving me a really weird look. Then it struck me, what must have gone through his mind. I thought to myself, for God sake I was not staring at the women’s boobs, I was just reading the quote. First of all, people (guy/girl) who wears t-shirt with quotes wants other people to read them, so they shouldn’t be complaining for getting extra attention to their things. Another interesting thing I notice here is, people wearing socks with chapels which I thought was ridiculous in the beginning, but most people seem to do this in Bangalore. Then I see plenty of women wearing jeans and sleeveless t-shirts (Whether it looks good or not is entirely a different question, sometimes they bring out the wrong features to the fore, I seriously wonder what their boy friends say about their dressing sense..!!), I wonder why men don’t wear sleeveless t-shirts to office (What’s good for the goose, must also be good for the gander going by the feminist views). Sometimes it’s confusing with the jeans and t-shirts, like one of friends finds it hard to differentiate between guy and a gal from the looks at the back. Cant blame my friend for that, it gets even more difficult when your dealing women with short hair. Another interesting and unique style, I observed was the hippy style (to make it clear it’s the costume you see heroes wearing when they sing songs of advice in old tamil films), where people wear shawl over their t-shirts, just add a head band to this costume with a guitar, you will start looking like a hippy. Last but not least, its important to know your body when you dress, just because a dress looks good on Hirtik or Katrina doesn’t mean it will look good on you also ( though the self image that we have of ourselves is like that). To keep it simple, your dress should accentuate your right features and attenuate your anomalies, as a whole make sure your body looks symmetrical.

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