Some jottings which relate to my life and worries…
On Saturday a few of us hired a car to visit Raigad Fort. On the way, we stopped for a bit at Mulshi Dam. We wouldn’t be meeting Aanjhan and Barkha for a while now and so, even though the day wasn’t perfect for photography, it was the day for fun. More pictures are here.
I left the monsoons back at Pune to land up into what is being called across news channels as the “4 days of unusual high heat” in Boston. And, to add to it, the locals say that this isn’t summer yet (officially that is) although the temperatures are across high 90s (in degree F) at Westford. 🙁 It wasn’t a completely nice experience flying to Boston via Heathrow with the terminal at Mumbai not having air conditioning, the plane being late at the gate and other associated issues.
Shall put up photos later. The visually striking thing here is the abundance of the “red-brick” buildings. Being used to be looked down upon by steel-glass-concrete highrises in the Indian cities, the uninterrupted line of sight did take time to get used to 🙂
Next move, Westford -> Boston for FUDCon among other things. Now back to reading up stuff.
This (a highlight by Kurt Hanson) is a small bit of good news that was waiting to be shared. The RadioVeRVe folks have been doing amazing work in taking independent music from India to the rest of the world.
If you know of an independent musician or group, you should get in touch with RadioVeRVe.
Yesterday a few of us decided to visit Sinhagad to catch the sunrise. The last time I had climbed / walked / hiked to anything that remotely resembled steep ground was around 2 years back at Yeur Hills and even then the road up was nicely paved. Without having any idea of what to expect I tagged along for the fun of it. And it was awesome. The sun came up when we were around 25% of the way up, but the breeze blowing off the tops was worth the climb.
The climb is supposed to be the “easy” one, but it did not look that way for the first 20 minutes to me. I did the big mistake of letting others decide my pace and try to wriggle out of the “traffic jam” on the trails. Once I ran out of breath I realized that it was not a good thing to do and settled into a steady pace of walking up the slope. Thankfully enough, the knees and the calf muscles did not buckle under the hammering they took. Stopped for the occasional glass of nimbu-paani and then chugged along merrily, all the while giving way to excited youngsters competing to reach the top in the shortest possible time. That’s for them … not for me 🙂
 
We roamed around the bit at the top of the fort, indulged in some oily snacks and managed to crack all sorts of poor, lame jokes at various folks who did not come with us.
Photoset here.
Climbing is one thing, coming down is fun of another sort. It took me a bit to get adjusted to the momentum and from then on it was a nice, slow and steady pace downhill. It was nearly mid-day when we came down, so the sun did its bit to burn up my bald patch 😉 but that was fun too.
I don’t recall why I looked up Pankaj Mullick, but once I did, I recalled one of my favorite songs. Admittedly not one of his best renditions but there was something about the LP that made it special. Please excuse the formatting.
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I noticed (as did others as well) that in recent times I have been doing a whole lot of purchases online. I generally buy books and a little bit of music so I thought I can share some experiences with online retailing and a few retailers in India. In no particular order, here goes:
Most of the portals seem to suffer from not being designed with the “online” experience in mind. More like the traditional over-the-counter experience being somewhat morphed into the semblance of online. The other additional aspect is that none of them work on creating a social network around their portals which would lead to a community of loyal users. Which in a way is very strange given that it is a good thing to do.
And in a completely unrelated news, SCIM is up for translation.
Spent last evening chewing mails, reading up Quality Improvement in Volunteer Free and Open Source Software Projects [PDF link thanks to Kartik] and listening to music from Soulmate. Mail chewage is a necessary evil and one of these days I am going to write down how to “get it done”. Got “Shillong” off MusicYogi (that awesome site which is making me sing praises for them) and was surprised by the quality of their oeuvre. I quite like Blues … , St Valentine’s Day Blues, Shillong (Sier Lapalang) and My Baby. Having never heard them, I didn’t know what to expect and they are good, real good. Wouldn’t mind at all to watch them perform live.
Waiting for this book to land up. Meanwhile finished Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country – doesn’t say anything new other than arranging the old facts in proper relational sequence and tying them together in a journal like form. Too much actual dialogues being written down which comes in the way of a good read. Speaking of which, if someone uses Goodreads.com, I am “Sankarshan” there – perhaps you would like to connect.
Looks like Microsoft is doing an IndiBloggers meet at Pune tomorrow. Agenda being showing off the LiveWriter thing. Hmm… time for Kushal to work on his offline blogging application I think 🙂
In the not-so-good-news department it turns out that the industrial growth has dipped to 5.3% as per news reports. That of course will set off the usual cascade of dips in various indices and pundits on television proclaiming about “the fundamentals being tested“. Which, by the way, is a phrase I can never make anything out of. Add to that the alarming news about global food stocks and things don’t look to be rosy at all.
ps: Haven’t seen potential SoC candidates from India for GNOME – wonder what’s wrong ?
A mate at the office has a WiMax connection from Reliance Communications.
His connection has been “supposedly active” ie, the Reliance folks claim that it is, he cannot ping to any place on their network and surprise ! the bill shows zero on utilization of bandwidth (the bill does land up on time :)).
So what does our intrepid hero do ? He raises a complaint / support ticket.
Actually, he raises many since each ticket is closed without any intimation. The series of tickets increase – 61992323, 61993181, 62105605, 62111172, 64334042, 64333585, 64476745, 64377287, 64828709.
And they also seem to have a support system with a funny sense of humor. The stock response ? “With reference to your complaint regarding internet not working (64333585), please note that as per our records your request is already provisioned from our end, the issue has been resolved and the same has been confirmed to you”
If anyone has has similar predicaments with these folks or, $DEITY bless you, have found a solution, can you please drop a line to sbathe at gmail dawt com ? I am sure he would be happy to get this annoyance resolved.
