What's in a name

Somehow naming your child feels like a huge decision. Thankfully we've not had much debates over the choices. We are naming our daughter Mansi this evening with a small ceremony at home.

Potty Celebrations

Last night our baby daughter pottied all by herself for the first time since she was born. We actually screamed with joy!

Parenting Worries

Our new born baby has been crying regularly giving us the jitters every time she breaks into a bawl. Hoping to take her to the Doc later today. Parenting worries have just begun

Its a baby girl!

We are proud parents of an angel who came down at 9:15 pm last night. I was there all through and it was the most exhilarating experience of my life!

Datacenter Blues

Though our planning was good given the constraints, Darwin's theory kicked in, nevertheless. Shit happened but thankfully not lots.

There are still some odd ends to be sorted out. Looks like Open source installations are not as easy as Windows. Its times like these you bless Bill Gates though the # of times you curse him probably is a function of how frequently your PC hangs.

We struggled with pHp quite a bit. The rest were a breeze, especially once we got our hands on the original RedHat media.

4 days to finish the setup. We should make it, me thinks.

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Busy May leads to a June delivery

May is turning out to be quite a busy month. Got a bar & CD rack done at home. Parallely getting our Mulund house renovated. Setting up our new office at Marol. Building our datacenter for the launch. Also on the cards is the probable booking of a new car and the last month of my wife's pregnancy. Talking of which I am faced with 3 deliveries in June, of which only one is a baby. The other two are our product delivery on June 10th and the new car which might come in the first week of June. Phew!

Blackberry Ahoy!

Am on the blackberry bandwagon once again. I got on it a few years back but didn't fancy the device. Borrowed oned & used it extensively during our Europe trip. Looks good on the E61i so far.

I started a new job a few days back. More on that sometime later.

Long Due Update

Wow, we are nearly at the end of the month. Where the hell did February go?
The month started off pretty well. Infact really well. We spent 3 evenings at the Kala Ghoda Festival Watched a lovely play called Afsaneh: Bai se Biscope Tak, shooped a bit and ofcourse ate a bit

We caught up with some cousins over dinner. It was really good to huddle up together at the dinner table, like old times. It got to be really cold in the first week and that took its toll on me.

I am quite vulnerable to sudden weather changes and this time I was hit real bad. I am just about recovering from the cold/cough and I have been quite sick over the past 2 weeks. Hopefully this should be the end of my illness for sometime.

I was a little successful this month in getting to my daily walks. A success that barely lasted 4 days after which I was down with the cold. So I hope there are more of the walks in the coming months

Worst Medical Bill

Not that I preserve or collect any sort of bills. But I came across this one while I was putting together all medical bills which I need to submit.

This one really take the cake. Other than the numbers, I can't read a thing on it.

Going to the gym

Got this from Indiauncut.

Nice video. In your face

By Road, By Air

Just read that Pune Airport is closed for 2 weeks starting Feb 12th. Interestingly Jet has tied up with Raj Travels to get you to Mumbai by road in time for several connections. Quite a neat service extension

Photoshop

I've always wanted to learn Photoshop. This is hilarious. Got this via Crunchgear

Caricature

IMG_0136
Originally uploaded by Vijay Basrur

We got this caricature done in Florence. The lady finished it in 20 mins flat. We got it framed once we returned. Snehal wanted to write a short memory of our trip along side the photo. It makes for pure nostalgia for us.

New Year Purchases

Since I lost most of my gadgetry I had to start shopping and play catch up. This year I also ventured a step further into my paid digital world. More on that later.

For starters, (thankfully) my office replaced the laptop since it was insured. But it took me a while to get all that data back. Also for a change I downgraded from Vista to XP (and am I glad!). In fact I will post about it some time later.

Second on the list was the iPod. I got my self the Classic iPod 80 GB from Heera Panna. Ironically the premium for picking up the laptop from Heera Panna is down to a measly $22 (Rs. 880) which is a steal from the official price from Apple India which is nearly 75% of the original cost in US$. I had the 60 GB earlier which was much thicker than the 30GB which was also available. The new 80GB is now the lighter option (God knows what'll happen in another 2/3 years). The interface is much slicker and so is the entire body. Since both iPods that I lost earlier were white, I bought the black iPod hoping to change my luck with iPods.

Fortunately the black iPod fits like a glove on the iVoice iPod speakers I got as a hand-me-down gift from an office colleage. The iVoice sound is pretty cool & it comes with a remote as well which handles basic iPod functionalities. Since it works only with an iPod & given that my colleague doesn't own one & is also not into music much, I was more than happy to take it. We used it recently at a picnic and it was wonderful.

Next on the list was a camera. I was going to stick to my Panasonic Lumix which I lost but I was seriously recommended the Canon IXUS 750 (also called the PowerShot 750 and I haven't been disappointed. The quality of snaps is wonderful but I am still to get to know all the features since there are quite a few and I haven't yet got down to reading the manual. An excellent review is here.

That pretty much ended my real world shopping list. There's still a laptop bag & glares left on the list which my wife has promised to buy. We plan to stock up on that some time next week.

On my paid digital world I upped the ante a little bit. Firstly I went & purchased the license for MultiNetworkManager 9.0. I have used a cracked version of this on my Sony Vaio. Its a boon for roaming laptop users. I travel to many of our offices and setting multiple IP's, proxies & printers really gets my goat. I was missing this on Vista and since I downgraded to XP, I bought a the license for @ $29. And now I am a happy man.

This morning I purchased a PRO account on Flickr. I have been toying with it for quite a few months last year. Though I have been a Picasa Web Albums fan I thought that the features on Flickr are way too amazing and hence the decision. Another trigger was that I had not discovered any site which allowed unlimited storage of photos. I know that Zooomr does, but the features are just elementary. And since I lost a few precious snaps when I lost my laptop I decided to back up my photos online. A Flickr pro account does just that. I am just about uploading my photos, so will post a few once I have managed them online.

So there we go. Quite a bit of shopping for the New Year

Merry Christmas

Its that time of the year when you just feel the holiday spirit. Last year I played Santa in office and exchanged gifts. In true Christmas spirit Santa didn't get any. But the whole event was quite a bit of fun.

This year we are in Kumta for Christmas. It also happens to be my inlaws wedding anniversary today. There's plenty of sea food on the menu and maybe a long drive along the beach in the evening.

I have never been able to concentrate on work in the last week of the year. Either its the planning for the New Years get-together or its the holiday spirit in office & with the vendors. This year its both.

New Years is going to be with some old friends and their kids. So it will be some good fun over 2 days. The location is a good 60 kms away from Mumbai nestled in the Khopoli forest.

Happy Holidays!

Fish platter in Goa

We had no idea how much of fish would be there in a fish platter when we ordered one for dinner. We were at Ritz Classic in Panjim, a place we have frequented in the past years whenever work has brought us to Goa.

Considering it was pitiable that we were in Goa on work rather than pleasure, especially at this time of the year, we decided to splurge a little on sea food. Well the little was a bit too much.

A normal platter would at best get you @ 12 to 15 pieces of meat. This one came with more than 30, not counting the prawns & the squid. I missed carrying the camera else it would have made a lovely photo post.

There was Pomfret, Surmai, Bombil (Bombay Duck), Chonak (a local fish), Rawas, Bangda (Mackrel), Prawns, Squid and 2 more varities which were unidentifiable but tasty nevertheless. The two of us could do justice to only 3/4th of the platter.

I would highly reccomend it but with a gang of at least 4 people & you should be able to polish off the platter easily. It is priced at a weird 267 bucks. A downright steal.

A memorable dinner indeed.

Data Management

This is the 3rd laptop I am moving to this year. I moved to the company paid HP Pavilion TX1000 series from my personal Sony Vaio in June. I got my replacement of the lost laptop last evening. Its the same TX series.

Each time I have spent hours trying to build my data, which is huge. I have several email accounts, many rules on as many folders in Outlook, standard bookmarks and whole lot of addon softwares like Firefox, Google desktop, Picasa etc. To say it has been boring and frustrating is an understatement, not to mention loss of productivity.

There is too much data which keeps getting changed or updated and its impossible to keep a track of the backups. Files & email are easy but bookmarks, outlook rules etc need to be constantly backed up and there's no single tool which takes care of it all.

We sure have landed in the age of information overload. God knows whats in store ahead.

Losses

This is the first time ever I have lost something so valuable, on my own.

I have lost my Timex Indiglo, my Ray Ban & my iPod at different times but all have been stolen in some or the other form. BTW my bag contained my iPod too, so there goes my 2nd iPod.

Honesty & Decency are long dead and buried and you only hear rare cases of things returned by sincere people. So I had no hope of getting my bag back. But what amazes me is that the generation before us never loses hope and sincerely believes in some divine intervention which will return any lost good.

There have been numerous prayers offered by loved ones, all of them for my lost bag and for a moment I really thought that it may work. But GOD has different plans.

Thankfully I have been at peace ever since I was told that insurance will cover most of the losses. The rest will be funded by some of my stock market gains.

So as the adage goes..paisa aata hai..paisa jata hai..Money comes...Money goes.

Come Monday, I will be busy trying to get my material world back on track.

Holiday Woes

The week long break to Kumta started on a bad (disastrous) note. I forgot my laptop in the train while getting down at Kumta at 4 in the morning. I realised only after I woke up at 9 in the morning.

All efforts to get it back were in vain. My cousin even went to Mangalore station to see if anything could be done. And the loss was not only of the laptop. My haversack had my wallet with my driving licence, my credit cards and cash and my digital camera too.

Though I was a bit nervous initially but I cooled down after a while since there was nothing much we could do. Fortunately my office folks should be able to claim the insurance since we managed to file a FIR at the local police station.

My brother managed to block all my cards. So next week is going to be co-ordination & getting back to normalcy week.

Till then I am going to relax and try and make the best of the holiday. Thanks to my new phone and a blazing GPRS connection I am connected!

More later

iPhone yearnings

The more I see the iPhone the more I yearn for it. But the more I play with my Nokia E Series and the myraid applications on it, the yearning dies down.

I love the Gmail App, Fring and the Moneycontrol application.

But I will move to the iPhone eventually. There are rumors that it will be launched in India in January.