Terrestrial parachute

"A poet was once asked, If his house were on fire, what would he save ? And he said, 'I would save the fire. Without fire, nothing is possible.' "
Robert Ludlum's The Sigma Protocol

Samsung SyncMaster 2033 TFT Monitor bought

Bought a Samsung SyncMaster 2033(SW Plus 50 cm) 20" widescreen TFT LCD monitor after some (much?) deliberation at Anandit Infotech, S. P. Road for 7500/-. The 19" Samsung was 7100/- and the 22" was 9400/-. The monitor has VGA and DVI inputs.

linug glinug

Read the threads, not specifically just those posts:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/vrlinug/message/1071
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/vrlinug/message/1068
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/vrlinug/message/1259
'nuff said.

The sketch shop at Eat Street

The small computerized sketch-and-frame guy near the entrance of Eat Street (off the Hussain Sagar lake, Necklace Road, Hyderabad) was quite frank when one of us wondered aloud about whether is was the rent that caused him to charge us what he was asking for. "My shop's rent is the cheapest in Eat Street", he says, "25,000". Given the size of that miserable square box, we exclaim about it. "I sell for about 1 Lakh a month". The other make-shift shops go for 35k and the actual eateries are rented out at 1.5 Lakh a month apparently. My friends and I walk out, the two sketch copies gotten at Rs. 250 a piece - 100/- for the print (down from the 150 he initially asked for) + 150/- for the frame.

Dominos: Cheesy or Fishy ?

Menu off here.

The world's best photo site

Off the Flickr login page:

"Flickr is almost certainly the world's best photo site.
Not only does Flickr make you smell better, it also makes you more attractive !"

Goodbye Axe, Park Avenue and Rs. 35/- haircuts.

Tale of the Dos's

It's been some time since I saw four 5-rated funnys nested on comments with a Slashdot article.
Off:
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/08/169226&art_pos=12
titled R.I.P. MS-DEBUG 1981 - 2009 which talks about Microsoft retiring debug in Win7.

Slumdog and Twilight

Just read this off the first page of Digg:
(http://digg.com/movies/Only_MTV_Can_Pit_Slumdog_Millionaire_Against_Twilight)

Only MTV Can Pit "Slumdog Millionaire" Against "Twilight"

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/news/e3ifb8c14aa44b9217711321ef409482ea4

hollywoodreporter.com — Mark Burnett, who produces the freewheeling ceremony, said either film has a great chance of winning best picture. ARE THEY KIDDING?


The funny part was that I needed to go read the first ten comments to to know in exactly which way they were kidding.

New laptop, broadband and landline

Phew..

The laptop, a Dell Studio 15 (1555 something or the other) that I got a quote for on the 24th of Feb, paid for on the 25th, and the payment accepted laptop-in-for-manufacturing was on the 27th. However, it took appx. 30 days at their factory and finally the status on their site went from manufacturing to shipping on the 27th of March - it reached my delivery address on the 28th. I collected it on the 30th.

The Airtel broadband installation was lightning fast, not something I can probably say about the speed of their internet connection, but considering that I opted for a 256 Kbps unlimited over a 2 Mbps 8 GB plan, I think I'll have to live with it, at least for a month.

The Airtel deal went as:
Get number from friend - call guy at 6:15 - Sir, I'm sending a guy to your office to collect your papers in 1/2 hour.
Guy doesn't turn up - I leave at 7:30. Guy calls at 8 - I tell him I've gone home - he comes home and collects the docs - I ask him when more progress will be made - he says 3 more days. Next day, another guy calls and says that he's going to send someone to install - I ask him to send a person at 8 p.m. - he says that it
ll take some more time than that because the wires need to be connected - I ask him to come at 5 - guy turns up at 6:30, finishes wiring by 7. Another guy comes at 7:30 with the modem, phone etc., and finished installation in under an hour. And tada, I am now the proud(ish) owner of the internet connection on which this blog entry is being written. Amazing!


Laptop cons immediately noticeable:
The 15.6" screen over the 15.4" means that the screen LCD height has decreased by about a centimeter; however the width has increassed by a bit more than that - so I'll have to be content.
Also, the function keys F1 through F12 need to be pressed using the Fn key because by default, these keys are used for other operations like changing the brightness / volume. However, my friend who ordered his laptop just a month before me got a proper set of touch-keys above the function keys that did the volumes, etc. Also, the 15.4" screen (though he would have liked the width for the movies). The only plus is that I got it a thousand bux cheaper than him, speaking of which, I should mention that by the date of my laptop's delivery, the price had further fallen by a couple of thousand bux.



p. s. : Hurray for Blogger's auto-save - I closed another tab in IE and the browser crashed - I got back dreading having to write all the above crap again but to my surprise, I didn't even lose a word.

A difficult judgement

Out of a mail; if any of you know the original source, please let me know:

In a small town in India, a person decided to start his bar business right opposite to a temple. The temple & its congregation started a campaign to block the bar from opening with petitions and prayed daily against his business.
Work progressed. However, when it was almost complete and was about to open a few days later, a strong lightning struck the bar and it was burnt to the ground.

The temple folks were rather smug in their outlook after that, till the bar owner sued the temple authorities on the grounds that the temple through its congregation & prayers was ultimately responsible for the demise of his bar shop, either through direct or indirect actions or means.

In its reply to the court, the temple vehemently denied all responsibility or any connection that their prayers were reasons to the bar shop's demise.
As the case made its way into court, the judge looked over the paperwork at the hearing and commented:

I don't know how I'm going to decide this case, but it appears from the paperwork that we have a bar owner who believes in the power of prayer and we have an entire temple and its devotees that don't.

Chutneys

Passed (the somewhat newly opened) Chutneys on Road No. 36, Jubilee Hills (, Hyderabad) today while running an errand and made up my mind to get back to eat here.

It was 11 in the morning when I got back in (and I expected the place to be empty - however, it turned out to be nearly full, but possibly the day being the V-Day had something to do with it.) And before there is any speculation on this, I was (unfortunately) alone.

The prices on the menu were high, but given the locality, and possibly the quality, I should have expected it - Rs. 89/- for a butter masala dosa, 35/- for a coffee, plus 12% tax (and tips).

Six types of chutneys were placed before me. Sambar was poured into a container from a transparent plastic mug. A smallish masala dosa with a big lump of white butter on a very decent stainless steel plate with a banana leaf over it was then brought.

Decent sambar, well-cooked potato-onion masala, decent dosa, and fine yummy butter were individually adorable but the combination of dosa with the chutneys was really heavenly.

The chutneys - urad dal, peanut, tomato, ginger and spicy coconut were all superb; the plain rich white sweet coconut sheer delight.

The coffee, while perhaps not heavenly, was nothing to complain about. This was, however, large in quantity as well, unlike the dosa.

Lucky, I was, to get into this and not 36 Jubilee or Santosh Jubilee for my breakfast. Next time is time to try one of their specialities - this includes Babai idlis, MLA Pesaratus, and so on.