Moving Home

Instead of managing 2 blogs, I finally decided to set up my own home on the Internet and start blogging at a central location.

One click on www.basrur.net will get you to my new blogging destination

Cheerio

70 lakh sq ft of empty space

Well not really. The South China Mall is probably the worlds largest mall with another distinction. Its the emptiest mall too. This blog post has more details. There are quite a few of these kind of big, bigger, biggest malls coming up in India and one can't help but wonder if some will fall prey to something similar. Deepak Shenoy has an interesting take.

Gold

So India managed to get a gold medal at the Beijing Olympics. Whoopie!

Hats off to Abhinav Bindra.

Second Life

A few ex colleagues met up for a drink last night. While we were excited that we were catching up after a really long time, I was more excited to meet Suman. Suman met with a near fatal accident in Delhi a few months back and had his head fractured at 52 places. He went through 3 plastic surgeries and was in the hospital for over 2 months. Ironically other than his head he didn't suffer any other injuries.

He was conscious through all these times and it was nerve wracking to hear him recount all that he went through. But the greatest joy was to see him sit up there confidently, laughing and smiling. He is all geared up to enjoy his second life.

I really admire his guts and salute his spirit of life.

Free annual report

This one surely beats me! Amongst the multiple annual reports that I received over the past 2 weeks the one that surprised me was from Hotel Leela Venture Ltd. It came with 25% discount coupons on a purchase of Rs. 6000/- at any of the Leela Hotels. I was impressed. Even more so since I do not own any shares in Hotel Leela Venture Ltd. I checked my demat and then again rechecked my demat account. And it was true I didn't own any Leela shares.

I plan to write in to the folks and request them to allow me to retain the 25% discount coupon :-)

Online Reunions

As you go along you make many friends and as time goes by you lose touch with quite a few of them. You never mean to but that's how it turns out. Infact Shoba Narayan has a good take on friendships in yesterday's Lounge.

So it was great to bump into some of my 12th Std classmates on Facebook. Some of these folks I haven't heard of ever since we passed out. That's 18 goddam years back. Man that suddenly feels old :-) Would be great to meet up with the gang and head to the canteen for some bhurji pao & cutting chai.

Nirvana baby, all grown up

Remember the naked baby on the Nirvana Nevermind album. Turns out he's grown up to be a normal guy. Interesting to look back upon times. I wonder how he feels :-)

Phew!

For the past 2 months the work pressure has really got to me. We've been at the edge trying to fight a problem which was difficult to find. Thankfully the fight seems to have come to an end and my entire body is easing with relief. What I need most is sleeeeep.

Startup Pains

Its always fun working with start ups. Infact my current job is my 3rd. But hidden inside the fun part is a lot of hard work and some frustrating times fighting fires which just don't get doused.

I am currently fighting such a fire and it has left me exhausted over the past few weeks. My eyes are dropping dead as I type and hopefully I will catch a good share of my 40 winks tonight to come back tomorrow fresh. But these fights are great learning experiences and have been the cornerstone of my confidence.

We are currently faced with a herculean task of launching our online business. But there are chunks in the code which are rendering the site unstable and we are working very hard with the developers to fix the problem. This has also helped expose certain holes in the product which are critical for to address in the long term.

So while the fight goes on, I am working hard to keep our team motivated and pushing myself very hard not to get beaten down. It is turning out to be more difficult than I thought.

But what the heck! Shit happens and we gotta face it.

Atta boy!

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