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.

Online Photo Printing

I read about the launch of Zoomin and decided to give it a shot by trying these guys out. I got an additional freebie of 10 free prints over and above the usual 15 more. So I grabbed it and tried the first free 10 prints. I just had to pay 30 bucks for shipping. The snaps came neatly packed and I thought the service was pretty darned neat.

Though I had registered on Printo earlier I never used it. I am also registered on Snapfish as well. I find the idea of a photo calendar quite interesting and I am planning to give it a try next month and surprise a few people next year.

The Eagles are back

Sameer gifted me Long Road Out of Eden, the Eagles studio album after nearly 3 decades, on my birthday. I've already heard it 2 times over on my drive to work & back, over the last few days.

Though its nowhere close to the Vintage Eagles, I really enjoyed the easy pace, the acoustics and the moderate variations through the 2 discs. Guess Don Henley's voice brings back memories of some classics and incuding his album End of Innocence, which at one point was my favourite album.

Another thing is that few songs are really long. The title track is nearly 10 mins. Thats long but the nice part is that its paced well enough for you and you don't realize its a long song. Eagles seem to do that pretty well. Remember Pretty maids in a row from the HFO disc?

Overall I think this album is going to appeal to folks who have grown up on Eagles, not for someone who's buying their music for the first time. Having said that, it also directly reveals that I am indeed safely placed in the "middle aged" category now.

Cheers!

Crab & Wine Festival @ Mahesh Lunch Home

The Basrur brothers will do anything for a good crab meal. So the family headed for the festival together. To say we pigged out would be an understatement. The ladies ordered for fish biryani, paneer chilly & rotis.

For our menu, please watch the slideshow



Whatta meal!

18 till I die

Tomorrow marks 35 years of my existence. The coming years promise to be even more enriching than the ones gone past. Though the body shows signs of aging I like to believe that in my heart I will be 18 till I die.

Cheers!

Photo blogging

This painting was gifted to me by Sachin who used to work in the design team at Baazee. I recently bumped into him and it was a pleasure to revive some old memories.

Phone Blogging

So finally I get my GPRS activated and this post kicks off my phone blogging experience

GSM to CDMA to GSM

So its back to square one. My mobile story started with Maxtouch in 2000. Maxtouch became Orange which became Hutch and which is now Vodafone. I stuck by like a strong loyalist but had to move to Reliance (CDMA) since we got kick ass rates on a corporate plan. That advantage is shrinking since the GSM players are getting aggresive coupled with the fact that the handsets are not keeping pace with the GSM ones.

Besides GPRS allows so much flexibility and power usage from your phone that the CDMA ones pale in comparison. So while I am still hanging on the Reliance connection, I decided to hop onto the GSM band wagon once again. And this time I am going full hog on the GPRS front. So that brought me to a point where I had to buy a new phone.

My jaws dropped at the sight of the iPhone the unlocked version comes with a lot of riders and hiccups. So the acquisition will have to wait till Jan 2008. So I narrowed down on the Nokia E61i. Besides the slightly uncomfortable form factor, the business use of this phone rocks.


More later

Google Reader Offline

This is the first time I used Google Reader in the offline mode. And I think its a great concept if you are stuck in a place with no Internet access and time to kill. I think I am going to use this more often to utilize my time.

Google Gears is making all this happen and I've been reading that its going to extend to GMail too. Cool

Led Zeppelin

Though Black Dog was one of the first songs that introduced me to Led Zeppelin, it has hardly remained a favourite after owning other Zeppelin works. Zep actually grew over me. My prized collections being the 4 CD set covering most of their work (digitally remastered) and the Led Zeppelin DVD which has rare concert footage. Considering that most of the digital remastered editions of all their music has already been released, it was nice to know that they are finally embracing the digital age by releasing all their music in digital, available for download.

On another note, folks are paying an arm & a leg to see Led Zep reunite for a sellout concert on Nov 26 at London's O2. Tickets start at 125 pounds. Damn wish I was there!

Windows Live Writer

Spotting a post on Digital inspiration, I downloaded the latest version of Windows Writer to check out remote blogging. The single most feature upgrade in this version which I love is the image upload feature.

I think I am going to use this product regularly

R.I.P. Business 2.0

I spotted the news on the net & read it in the Mint too. Business 2.0, my favourite tech magazine is folding up with all the staff moving to the parent organisatio Fortune. I subscribe to both Fortune & Business 2.0. Though Business 2.0 delivery was extremely erratic, I loved the content. I have been a reader since the past 6 years.

I hope Josh Quittner who is moving to Fortune can spice it up a little.

R.I.P. Business 2.0

Figs in Honey

While in Raipur, I spotted an interesting item at the breakfast buffet. I had a bite. It was figs but they tasted wonderful. So I called the captain & enquired. He said it was quite easy. Take a bit of water, add some honey & a bit of sugar and boil the concoction. Drop some figs in it & zats it.

Should try it some time.

Music on the drive

I have been travelling quite a bit in the last few weeks, but for the few days that I was in Mumbai, I managed to listen to some albums I had not heard for a really long time. I had picked Is there anybody out there? The Wall LIVE, The Best of Barclay James Harvest & LIVE LIVE LIVE - Bryan Adams

Am not such a fan of BJH but they are a bunch of nice guys. The Bryan Adams CD brings back memories, especially the chorus for Kids Wanna Rock, at one of the Rock Machine (Indus Creed) gigs at Rang Bhavan, when we were in Engg College. Though the studio version of The Wall is of much superior quality, the live version is not that bad at all. But I loved the sleeve notes that came along. They have personal notes by Waters, Gilmour, Wright & Mason.

Infact sleeve notes are the one big thing that make me buy original CD's. I read the sleeve notes for the above albums admist Mumbai traffic jams!

First Date

I met Snehal exactly an year ago. Little did we know that one year later we'd relive the moment with so much nostalgia. 5 months of courtship & 7 months of marriage have passed by quickly, that it just seems like yesterday that we went on our first date for a nice dinner at Great Punjab, Pune.

We celebrated our first date anniversary, if I were to use the word, with a nice dinner with my family.

My nephew was the most thrilled with the cake cutting as is evident from his 1000W smile. He loves blowing candles and then having an audience clap. We do this routine at least once every weekend that he comes over. We love it as much as he does.

Traffic & Rains

In monsoons, especially in Mumbai, Traffic & Rains are very much related. This friday was no different. Got stuck in one for nearly 3 hours. A flyover that usually takes a minute to cross took over 1 hour. I managed a detour to my uncles place and stayed indoors, hopeful of the rains subsiding. But no go there. So it was back home a few hours later.

Although it was raining cats & dogs outside, I least expected it inside the car. Yeah, INSIDE! There are these micro pores on the windshield, one of which is rather macro than micro, and under the barrage of torrential rains, water trickles inside and falls on the drivers lap, which is yours truly.

Got the problem fixed, albeit temporarily, I might have to get it attended to, in my next servicing.

Café Mondegar

Its always so nostalgic to step into Café Mondegar. Ever since 12th Std (1990), Mondis has been a great hangout joint. The place continues to be status quo. Other than a giant screen (used only for special sports screenings), a new large Heineken refrigerator & a wine list to the menu, everything is the same.

Me & Snehal decided to have a few beers there last night. Before getting to Mondis, we stopped by at The Bombay Store and picked up a few curious & the elusive soft cloth coasters.

We polished off a pitcher & a bottle along with 2 plates of garlic toast (good), fish fingers & chips (pretty good) & a plate of steak boti (excellent, as usual). The steak boti at Mondis is quite a treat. As like the ambience, I think the food has also been consistent over the years, consistently good. Though we had plans to go to Bade Miyan, we skipped it since we were reasonably full. So we actually opted for some dessert. Fruit Salad with Ice Cream. I am sure that was a rare order in Mondis but hey, what the heck.

The long drive back through the rains didn't seem like a hassle, given that we had such a good time. will try to do these town binges more often

House in Order

There were 2 things missing in our new home. A comfortable sofa set & a shoe rack. After humungous research & analysis and countless visits to numerous furniture stores, we found something which fits our multiple conditions, last week. All of it got delivered on Wednesday. We also put up a few paintings, curios & our Firenze caricature. And now our drawing room really looks nice. Well one would think the shopping list is finally done. But no! Alas! The elusive side table still haunts us, but we shall resume the search after a brief break, which includes a holiday to Goa and some weekend parties.

Email Posting

Just trying out email posting which seems to be quite convenient to send across thoughts to the blog. Since email & Internet are the only things pervasive at work

Subscription Woes 2

Further to my Mint woes, to speeden things a bit, I wrote to the Editor of Mint

My email

Dear Editor,

At the outset, I must commend your entire team in serving up a crisp business paper which, with its uniqueness, has captured quite a readership since the launch. I myself have been quite satisfied with the content and some of your columnists are indeed good. I have also gone and suggested many a friend to subscribe to your paper.

But unfortunately, that's where the biggest roadblock is. Subscription! If anyone wanting to avail of the Rs. 299/- offer, like me, tries to subscribe, it is actually impossible. I subscribed through the Internet about 3 weeks back and I am yet to receive even one email confirmation regarding the acceptance of my request, even though the entire transaction was completed successfully after debiting my credit card. Frantic calls to your subscription call centre on 67764242, results in nothing. After being kept on hold for a record 32 minutes, I was asked to send an email, to which there has been no response.

Your success lies in an increasing readership base, which is stifled due to the inability of being able to subscribe to your paper.

I sincerely hope you help customers like us to enable a smooth subscription service, the benefits of which are entirely yours.

Regards,

I got a response in 20 minutes flat

Mr Basrur
I am very sorry to hear about this. I have alerted several key people and someone should contact you today. If you don't hear from anyone within 24 hours please email me directly. Again my apologies

Editor

2 hours later, 3 people call me, take my address and promise that my subscription booklet will be couriered today.

The wonders of email :)

Airport Woes

After the subscription woes, it time for some Airport woes

Bah!

Hindi Posting

अब मेँ हिंदी मे भी ब्लोग कर सकता हूँ

Subscription Woes

Not sure if you've checked out the latest business newspaper Mint, which has hit Mumbai & Delhi. It IS a nice business daily. Quite crisp, lovely layout, nice size and pretty good syndications, most notable being the Wall Street Journal.

They have a kickass subscription deal, Rs. 299 for the entire year. But they have an awful subscription interface. I subscribed a few weeks back. They took my payment, using a credit card gateway, but that’s ze end! No email confirmation, nothing, zit!

Their call centre number dials into the black hole, since no one EVER picks it up. I have emailed to everyone around there but still no one’s replied. I guess I will have to write to their editor if nothing comes of it.

But meanwhile, I subscribe to the print edition, paying 2 bucks a copy, and am quite happy. Wish Mint could make me happier

Ping Ping

Well just another ping to check if my blog is active. Also this is an email post. So hopefully the convenience will overtake my lethargy in updating the blog. Having said that I've tried and been moderately successful at updating my travel blog, whenever I travel. So lets see!

Here Goes

Ok!
So here goes another effort to revitalize the blog.

Over & Out