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.