Archive for March, 2005
By the time i got back home, the phone line was set right, and now my DSL is back online! This is one good thing about Airtel. The service so far in case of problems has been pretty good in our area. I hope this problem wont repeat in the future.
It was a pretty normal day in office today. Nothing special. I was the only guy in our department @ office today. Some of my colleagues were out of station and others were on leave. So, was kind of all alone today.
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March 14th, 2005 at 09:02pm
Party-Presentation-Engagement and a broken connection…are the words that summarize my weekend :)
I would say this week end was very hectic…. its passed over like a breeze. What did I do? hell lot of things!. Saturday, we had a computer awareness session in the office for security guards. It was a small intro kind of a session telling them the basics of computers. We also told them about the uses of computers, MS Word..etc.
Had a haircut in the afternoon, and then I had to work on a presentation for my uncle. Had to scan some photos, and design a PowerPoint template etc. In the evening, we had to go for the birthday party of chitra’s 4 yr old cousin niece @ chitra’s house. After the cake cutting, our entire family gang went out for dinner @ The Maharaja.
The Maharaja is a pretty good restaurant in Mangalore, specially if you like spicy non-veg. My favorite food there is chicken ghee roast! :) hmm…. Anyway.. do visit it to get a taste of it. Our crowd was of around 30 people, and we did make hell lot of noise. We had a full hall kind of booked for us. And other people would just peep in the hall, and move out to other location after seeing what is happening inside… Finally, everything went on smoothly, and we were back home by 10.30PM. I had to work on the PPTs, but just could not sit in front of the machine. So, crashed off to bed.
Sunday morning again, started working on the PPTs, and they finally got some shape. Afternoon, we had to go to Puttur to attend an engagement function. 1 hr drive. Attended the function, and got back to Mangalore by around 8 PM. One more stretch on the PPT, and finally finished it off at around 11 PM, with all the photographs, graphs etc. Burn the PPTs on the CD, and slept.
One stupid thing that happened over the weekend was, my touchtel (Airtel) broadband connection was down. I guess, this happened somewhere around Sunday noon. The land line was dead, and upon investigation I could find some wires broken nearby which were exposed to the entire world. According to airtel folks, the wire should be dug in deep inside. But, this is sheer negligence on their part. I have raised a complaint, but since it was Sunday, they did not have anyone to repair it. I hope it would be repaired by today EOD.
So, yesterday, I had to connect to the net using the old dialup method :)..and it sucks :).. My BSNL account had also expired, so I was forced to use the NET-ONE service of BSNL. Anyway.. it was kind of a life saver,… I could atleast check my mails!
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March 14th, 2005 at 09:56am
Yesterday, finally we said good bye to our old TV ! That’s the end of its 19 yr old journey. It did its job pretty well till the last minute. By origin, it was Onida, but over the years, our TV has had components from almost all the companies. :) Philips to Videocon to Hitachi :).. So, it was kind of an assembled TV. Anyway, its history now.
Yesterday, we bought a new Philips 29″ flat TV along with a DVD Player. The TV is a typical flat TV with some fancy Eye-Fi feature. It has N number of sound modes, 200 channel support etc. The quality of picture is great. No problems. Only problem is, it takes a couple of seconds to start up. Almost all the new 29″ TVs now have that behavior. The manual was somewhat shady, not that great.
We also bought a Philips DVD player, which can play almost any disc :).. Audio CD, MP3, VCD, SVCD, Kodak PhotoCD, DVD (R, RW, +R) and just plain JPG files.
Yet to fully experiment with the player. The manual is pretty decent and is elaborate.
If I come across any new feature worth mentioning, will definitely post it here.
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March 11th, 2005 at 05:12pm
Check out google news. Now you can customize the google news home page.
You can change the layout, and select the sections/editions (like indian edition..etc). You can also add newsitem of your choice, based on the keywords you supply. You can also control the number of news items displayed on each of the sections. Cool!
Again, its fully DHTML based.
Would love to see support for RSS.
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March 10th, 2005 at 02:56pm
Instant messengers or IMs haven been offline in our office due to the recent virus attack. So, no more windows messenger nor yahoo messenger for a couple of days.
I was doing some work, and all of a sudden, a message popped up from a friend in pune!, it had link to a .pif file on the net, and a message..saying “lol! see it! u’ll like it!”. First thing I noticed was, it was a file with .pif extension ..which alerted me! and second, this person was marked as away. So, I preferred not to click that link. I wrote to him, asking him what was going on ?.. and the response that I got was… ” something is wrong here,.. I clicked a link, and now, its sending the link to everyone”… Wow! :)….a typical virus attack!
Lessens to be learnt : Never Click on a file with .pif extension, unless and until you know what it contains. There are couple of such extensions, which are considered to be executables, apart from .exe’s
What next, within minutes, I got similar messages with links from around 5 to 6 users on my contact list. .. I immediately called the service department, and alerted them about the same., But by then, the damage was done…. and quite a lot of machines were infected. Although, the virus did not have a heavy payload, but, its an eye opener.
As a precautionary measure, all the IMs have been disabled for a couple of days now, till the infection is taken care of. The latest virus signature now takes care of this, and clears off the infection. So, in the next couple of days, IMs should be back.
Now that the IMs are not there, I realize how important they are ! :)……….. mailing someone for some small stuff is really a killer.
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March 9th, 2005 at 06:41pm
My cousin, and more importantly a very good friend, Prathamesh has finally decided to formally launch his own company, Transducent. I have seen his work for years now. Just one single word - “superb!”
So, if you are looking for *any* web related work look no further…. may it be design of your blog, company sites, personal webpage or web application…. he is the guy!
….Click here…. to access his site
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March 8th, 2005 at 08:39pm
Today, it has been 25 years since i was born ! :)…
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March 7th, 2005 at 08:00am
Saturday is almost over. This week has been pretty much ok. Not too busy. But, I was sick all along. The normal cold stuff. If you get cold, what ever you do, it take a min of 1 week to get rid of it. You take medicines or not…. its bound to be one full week.
Lot of things on the website front are pending. I.e., changing the layout of the main page..etc. Hope to finish it off soon. Version 1.0 of the Quentin theme that I am using is out (I am currently using 0.9). Version 1.0 is a true wordpress 1.5 theme. Upgrading should be pretty simple, but I have to make some changes to the new set of files.
You might have noticed that now, I have added a Google search option on the sidebar. Right now, Google is yet to crawl through my blog. Once that’s done., we should have decent results!
@ office, Veena, our librarian became a happy mom of a 8.5 pound baby boy! :) cheers veena! :)…. All my colleagues did go to see the baby, but I opted out since I had very bad cold, and did not want to take the risk. Anyway, will see the baby next week, once I am out of cold!
@ home, nothing major happening as such… my mother is now transferred to kankanady branch (10 mins from home). Earlier she was posted at Gurpur branch (18 kms from mlore).
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March 5th, 2005 at 06:56pm
This is how yahoo used to look when it was incorporated in 1995!
http://promo.yahoo.com/birthday10/incorporation/
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March 3rd, 2005 at 11:40pm
As usual, I had some spam in my spam box today. Sometimes, being curious, I do check out the spam mails.. to see the current trends/patterns. So, today, i came across this “phishing mail” .. the usual bank account verification stuff..
I had reported some phishing mails to gmail team earlier using the “Report phishing” feature. But, today, while I opened the above message, I could find a red box with a warning message on it from gmail !..
The best part is, the message is plain text. Even the link is plain text !. So, no question of clicking it. No URL !!
Check out the snapshot!
Thanks to the gmail team! Great feature.
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March 3rd, 2005 at 08:32pm
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