Google personalized homepage

Google has come up with a new page called personalized home page. Its accessible at : http://www.google.com/ig

This page gives you a snapshot of your Gmail account, Google news, Weather, Word of the day, and Stocks.

Its fully customizable and looks cool, but not as polished and refined as my yahoo.

1 comment | May 20th, 2005 at 10:05am

MIT, Manipal - Trip to Arishina Gundi falls

This is one trip that most of us would not forget about!. I guess this one was in 1999. We all started off to Arishina Gundi falls (near Kollur). We were supposed to trek in the jungle and reach the falls. One of our guys assured us that *he* knew the route. We finally ended up being lost in the jungle, with tons of leeches stuck to our legs. Yuck.

On the way to Arishina Gundi (Click to enlarge)

Lost in the jungle!, but happy :) (Click to enlarge)

Finally found a some civilization (Click to enlarge)

After a few hours of walk, we finally managed to see some civilization! and found our way back.

On our way back (Click to enlarge)

Fun at Maravanthe beach (Click to enlarge)

On the way back, we went to the Maravanthe beach and had some fun out there! We never made it to the falls, but it was real fun!

3 comments | May 19th, 2005 at 02:36pm

Karkala Carfestival & Wedding

Me back in office. After a long time, i stayed away from a comp!. No mails, no net, no blogs, no bloglines for full four days. Really surprised at the speed at which these four days passed by!.

Ok. Let me quickly describe my mini vacation.

We left for karkal on 13th May (i.e., Friday). Initially, we had planned that we will start by 8.30 AM, but somehow we could start only at 10 AM. Reached Karkal by around 11.15 PM. Directly went to Uncles house at Sanoor (3 kms from karkal)

This time around, we decided to stay at a hotel in Karkal. There were lot of guests at my uncles house due to the wedding celebrations that coincided with the carfestival. So, we had booked a room in Hotel Prakash @ karkal (near to Ananthashayana temple). The room was decent enough, but the building plan sucked big time (a pillar in the middle of the room!. think about it ! :) ). But service/facilities/food etc were decent. We checked in at around 2 PM.

At around 4 PM, we went to the temple area. Friday was ‘Hod-Teru’ (final day of the car-festival). The crowd was quite a lot and we decided not to take the camera. :( So, no snaps of that day. The function went on gracefully. It has its own beauty!

The next day was “Vokul” (holi). This time around, i did take my camera along with me. I got some good close up snaps of Lord Venkataramana.

Lord Sri Venkataramana of Karkala : Abhisheka @ Ramasamudra : Vokul day (Click to enlarge)

Devotees taking the holy dip along with the Lord (Click to enlarge)

Lord Sri Venkataramana of Karkala : Alankara (Click to enlarge)

Lord Sri Venkataramana of Karkala : Alankara (Click to enlarge)

Lord Sri Venkataramana of Karkala : Alankara (Click to enlarge)

Panoramic view of Ramasamurdra (Click to enlarge)

One more Panorama (Click to enlarge)

At home, things were getting tuned up for my cousin sisters wedding on 16th May. On Saturday (14th May), we had a small Mehendi function at home, followed by some fun! :).

Mehendi on one of my cousins hand (Click to enlarge)

On Sunday, there was a function at the Groom’s house in the afternoon (Udida Murthu). So, all of us went there. Evening we had the Phool Muddi function at the hall. It was fun. Some of the kids performed some dances (and then even the bride groom danced! :D).

Stage at the Wedding hall : Fully decorated (Click to enlarge)

Coconuts used during the wedding rituals (Click to enlarge)

My experiment with light bulbs :) (Click to enlarge)

Monday, 16th May was the wedding. Around 1500 people turned up. Crowded. Hot. The function went on smoothly. We could have our lunch only at 4 PM i guess!. We could reach home only at 5 PM. After spending some time at my uncles house, we started back to Mangalore at around 7.30 PM. Reached Mangalore at around 8.30 PM.

Now back in office. The four days passed by quite fast. Now back to work. Had quite a lot of mails in my inbox. Cleared almost half of them. Still have lots to clear.

26 comments | May 17th, 2005 at 07:34pm

Satisfaction at work | other updates

Done with todays work. Hectic day, but a nice one! It kind of feels nice when you have done something that would be of use to others. The reason for happiness today is some code that i wrote which would be used by our department and the entire org!

Basically, I came up with a feature for our department portal which resembles a blog. i.e., people from our department can post updates/news/info etc. Our department is spread across geographies, and a blog is one of the best means to know ‘whats happening at the other end’, provided, people participate! Anyway… the module as i mentioned is a bare-bone blog. No support for comments. People can post, update and delete entries for now. In future, i plan to provide RSS feeds too. So, thats the mini project for the day.

Now, coming to other news………. I would be on leave this Friday (i.e, tomorrow), and next Monday. Saturday, is Karkala Car-festival. As I had mentioned in one of previous blog entries, this is one function that I wouldn’t want to miss!. Will be taking my camera along, and will post some pics/snaps once I am back.

Monday is my cousin sisters wedding at Karkal. So, I will be in Karkal for the next couple of days. So, no entries on this blog till then! (or may be not!…..cybercafes are all around!)

1 comment | May 12th, 2005 at 07:18pm

Unsolicited calls, Junk SMSes

You are concentrating on on your work, and suddenly your cell phone rings. You take the call, only to hear a pre-recorded message being played in Kannada!. Dhud. Its real painful.

I am not sure from where these folks get our mobile numbers from! Sometimes, when I get such calls, I ask them from where did they get my number. And most of the time, the response i get is, “From our database, Sir” ! Wow.. What an answer !!… Excuse me… “Who put the data in the database ?“……… “We don’t know Sir“…….

I get calls from almost all companies, mostly financial in nature. HDFC, ICICI, Citibank (the most painful - stay away from this group!), SBI, Credit card, Club membership, holiday packages etc. You name it! One should be very assertive while speaking to these people. My Standard response to these “Sorry. I am not interested. Thanks“. Hangup. Done in 10 Sec. But sometimes, its fun. One of the funny conversations that i had:

Sales Guy over Phone : “Am i talking to Mr. Shyam (some guy xyx)”
Me : “There is no one called shyam here.”
Sales guy : “May I know whom am i talking to?”
Me : “This is Arjun, Who am i talking to ?”
Sales guy : “Sir, which company do you work for?”
Me : “xyz …………………….”
Sales guy : “Sir, i am calling from SBI cards, Bangalore. Do you have a SBI Card?”
……………………………….now starts the fun…………………………….
Me : “No”
Sales guy : “Why don’t you take a SBI card, Sir ”
Me : “Hmm……….. I already have other cards “ ………. bla bla bla
Sales guy : “Its free…….” …………. more bullshit…
Me : “But I am in mangalore…………” ___Dhud! for the sales guy!.
Me : “Can you come down to Mangalore and explain me the details ?”.
Sales guy : “Sir, Are you coming to Bangalore in the near future?”
Me : “No. I wont”
Sales guy : “thank you sir”.

—hang up—————-lol———–

Poor fellow. Anyway, sometimes its fun/time-pass talking to these people :D lol
Even if its a wrong number, these people try to get some business!

The next category of nuisance is the Junk SMS, and in my case, Airtel is the king in this! We have totally two airtel mobile connections and a BSNL mobile connection in our family.
BSNL is virtually SPAM free. The BSNL folks are just too lazy to send junk SMS i guess :). Good for us! But Airtel is a pain. They constantly spam your mobile inbox with JUNK SMSes, ranging from contest to astrology to dialtones to music to pizza to jackpot to what not! Its very annoying.

I just couldn’t tolerate if further, called up their customer care, and logged a complaint recently. After that, the amount of Spam SMS is come down. But will have to wait and watch.

This one was the worst ever :
I have a Airtel Land line at home for my broadband access. Now, during one of the service calls, i had given my BSNL mobile number to them so that they could update me about the status of my service request. And guess what?., After some days, I started to get Junk SMSes from Airtel on my BSNL cell!! So, be careful! Again, in this case, I have raised a complaint. As of now, they have stopped the SMSes, but will have to wait for sometime to be really true. We never know. In future, they might again pick it up form the database and use it for their next campaign!

5 comments | May 11th, 2005 at 10:15am

Happy Birthday to….

… my blog! :) Its one year since i started to blog! Here is the first post that i made on this day one year back. Never thought that i would go so long. Now its kind of addiction!

Started off with Blogger, which started to suck big time. So, did some R&D. Moved over to wordpress in Feb ‘05 and started hosting this blog over my own domain. Total Posts so far : 132. Which averages out to around one post for every three days, which i feel is decent enough!

5 comments | May 10th, 2005 at 08:39am

Last day at MIT, Manipal

These snaps were shot on the last day at MIT of our batch (Cool Comps 2001, Sec A). I still remember that day!. Our whole class went for a movie (Pearl Harbour), and then we went to RC for lunch.!

Here are the snaps!.

Shot on the last day @ MIT, Manipal outside VC (Click to enlarge)
Joy, Ashwin, Manmath (Vinayak), Me, Nandita, Beena, Sunita Bhat, Prima, Shvetha, Seema
Bruce, Winston, Vivek, Dunny, Erwin, Rashmi, Chitra

Dinner at RC on the last day @ MIT, Manipal. (Click to enlarge)

Would love to be back at MIT again! :) Mity Mity MIT!

22 comments | May 9th, 2005 at 06:14pm

Dance, White Boy, Dance

Came across this video while browsing.

This one is shot by a guy who’s roommate does this dance when he comes back home! :)

Nice dance!. You will love this candid video! Link : Dance, White Boy, Dance

Wasn’t it cool :D ?

63 comments | May 8th, 2005 at 12:04pm

Google hacked?

Update 1: Google wasn’t hacked. Just a DNS glitch as mentioned by google. Everything is normal now.

Update 2: As pointed out by Fred Foobar in the comments, the whois output is sort of joke played by other folks. As mentioned in the comments below : “Some whois services will display all matches for the search string, not just the one you thought you were searching for”. So, these bad guys actually have subdomains like google.com.something.something.com, which shows up on a whois search.

Saw this story on Gizomodo and Om Mallick’s blog.

Everything seems to be fine now, but the Whois records for google looked really wired.

(Please read update 2 above)

Google says its a DNS issue, but i feel that the domain has been hijacked. How did the text “GOOGLE.COM.SUCKS.FIND.CRACKZ.WITH.SEARCH.GULLI.COM” come in above DNS info?

Here is the full Whois from whois.directi.com :

Domain Name google.com
Whois Server Version 1.3

Server Name: GOOGLE.COM.HAS.LESS.FREE.PORN.IN.ITS.SEARCH.
ENGINE.THAN.SECZY.COM
IP Address: 209.187.114.130
Registrar: INNERWISE, INC. D/B/A ITSYOURDOMAIN.COM
Whois Server: whois.itsyourdomain.com
Referral URL: http://www.itsyourdomain.com

>>> Last update of whois database: Sat, 7 May 2005 20:27:29 EDT < <<

4 comments | May 8th, 2005 at 10:06am

Ice Candy seller

Shot this one at the Someshwar Beach last week.

Waiting for buyers

Selling, while the sun sets in the background

4 comments | May 7th, 2005 at 06:44pm