Wednesday, November 30, 2005

FF 1.5

Mozilla Firefox 1.5 is out! I have been using this browser since, may be, a couple of centuries, when it started out as 'Phoenix' beta1. They changed the name to Firebird (still vaguely meant phoenix), because somebody had a copyright on the name 'Phoenix'. Later they found that Firebird was also taken, so they changed it to 'Mozilla Firefox'. Luckily it stopped there, otherwise we would have had to use a browser named Firedog or Firecat or Firerat, which would have been very un-cool.

I dutifully downloaded 1.5 version immediately and tested it out. It looks the same UI-wise, but the beast inside seems to be faster. But I am not moving just yet from my 1.06 version. I want all my favorite extensions to be available on 1.5 before I move. Also it would be nice to have an rpm compiled for FC3 ;-) I may have to wait another week for that.

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Shop like a man

No, you don't hear this very often. Shopping is often attributed to women, because only they can visit 10 stores to buy a handbag, find good ones in at least 5 of those stores but still walk out without buying one to the 11th store. Men are often known to dread shopping. It is even considered 'unmanly' to admit that we like shopping.

But I am more and more convinced now-a-days that men are not too behind in this artform. It is true that we men don't visit too many shops, nor are we very good at window shopping. Ours is more of a targeted attack - we know what we need before we enter the store, we find the shortest way to reach the counter in question and just go for the kill. We men consider ourselves especially knowledgeable about electronics stuff. We pretend to make wise and informed decisions about buying high-tech stuff. (Oh boy, this toaster is both firewire and bluetooth enabled. I must buy it). But ask a man to buy non-electronics stuff like handbags, jewelry or beauty care products and see him be as clueless as Lalu after recent elections.

So in essence, I think both men and women spend equal amount of money on buying things we don't need, but we men do it much more efficiently without wasting a lot of time visiting tens of stores ;-)

Monday, November 28, 2005

Last week in Austin

This is my last week in Austin before I travel back to India next Sunday. When I started here 6 months back I had never imagined I would end up liking this place so much. It is one of the newer tech capitals of the US, a place with moderate climate for most of the year, one of the safer cities, a city with enough desis to ensure we get good Indian food and grocery ;-) and a place to meet some of my old friends. I am surely sad to leave Austin, though I am happy to go back to Bangalore. It is amazing how I can be both happy and sad at the same time. I am a nostalgic person and I am sure Austin will be a big part of the nostalgia in the days to come.

Black Friday

With the thanksgiving weekend, the holiday season begins in the US. This season is the favorite of retailers, because this is when people shop like crazy. You ask me whether it is any different during rest of the year? Hmm... yeah, but not much!

This thanksgiving weekend I decided to join the shopping mela, so that I do my bit to help the economy. Country's that is, not mine. I had distant memories of trying my luck at a day-after-thanksgiving sale in Salt Lake City 5 years back. I had gone to Wal-mart at 8AM and had found such a mad rush, there was absolutely no way I could get into the store, leave alone shop. So I knew I had to go early, but I was not prepared for what Gururaja told me - reach our neighborhood electronics shop "Fry's" at 3:30 in the morning! Fry's was running a 'Black Friday' sale on Friday, where many electronic items were selling with 'deep discounts'. This is when a typical shopper feels obliged to buy things he/she doesn't need, because after all, they are on sale. I used to think that most people, after eating turkey the previous day, wouldn't even be able to wake up by 3:30, but decided to trust Gururaja's advice, coming out of experience.

When we made it to Fry's at 3:30 I could not believe my eyes - the queue was already around 100 meters long! Some people seemed to have arrived with tremendous preparation - camping chairs, food, water, etc. It appeared to me that some had camped there since Halloween. By 4AM, it was difficult to find parking in the vast parking area. The store opened at 5AM and people rushed inside like they were running for their lives. I wasn't far behind, and luckily, I was able to get the stuff I was looking for. But the checkout queue was at least 10 times longer than a typical queue for 'darshan' at a temple in India. This shopping was nothing like the one typically enjoyed by women - browse 100 shops and in exceptional cases, may be buy at one. This was instead for the sophisticated male shopper. One had to know his targets in the store well in advance (having studied the catalogs), run as fast as possible without caring for any bodily injuries incurred or inflicted on others and go for the kill as soon as the target is in sight.

Rest of my day was spent visiting other shopping malls and stores, but nothing like the initial burst of 5 to 11AM shopping, when many stores look like K.R.Market. I read that the retailers have expressed optimism about how the holiday season is gonna go for them this year. This is a funny time of the year - if the shopping season goes well, the retailers are happy, product manufacturers are happy and not to mention, customers are also happy! But common sense says not all of them can be happy at the same time, such a win-win situation doesn't apply to sales. But the shopping season is when common sense of shoppers takes a hibernation. And economy booms :-)

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Funny news of the day

I happened to see too many funny news today, so I can't resist blogging about it.

First of all, a woman tried to open the door of a flight while it was flying! Apparently she wanted to smoke and it said "No smoking" inside the flight.

Next, I saw an interesting news about a scam by match.com and Yahoo personals. match.com "wrote him romantic emails and even sent him on a sham date with an attractive employee to encourage him to renew his subscription". Huh, he got a date with an attractive woman (I assume it was a woman, website doesn't mention explicitly), but he is still complaining? What else did he expect from match.com anyway?

The last piece comes from our neighbor across the border. As I was reading cricket news from Pakistan, I saw that there was more explosive action in the stands than on the pitch. "The England innings was suspended for nine minutes when a gas cylinder exploded in front of a packed stand." Oh man, what was the gas cylinder doing in the stand? Reading further, "It was purely accidental. The explosion occurred because a carbonated gas cylinder exploded as it could not take the pressure, senior police official Amin Watoo told Reuters." Hmm... a lot of explosive action under high pressure conditions.

50 posts!

I just realized I have made 50 entries in my blog, this is in fact 51st! When I began I had not thought I would reach this 'milestone'!

Friday, November 18, 2005

Thanksgiving lunch

Today there was a unique event at office. I think it happens at all offices in the US during this time. It is the annual thanksgiving lunch, a free lunches provided by the employers. Needless to say, employees make maximum use of it.

Today our annual thanksgiving lunch was at 11:30AM. Unfortunately my breakfast wasnt't even be half digested by then. But as all loyal employees, I did not want to miss the lunch. After all, it was free! A few of us reached the cafeteria at around 11:25AM. In fact we just _tried to_ reach the cafeteria, but could not go anywhere near it. That is because, by then the queue for free lunch had grown so long, it appeared that the end of the queue was somewhere near Houston. All the people, including the ones who complain about the quality of food in cafeteria looked to be in the queue. My veggie lunch obviously excluded the traditional thanksgiving turkey, so it was like going to MTR and not eating dosas. (or buying rice-sambar in a Gujju restaurant;)) The live music and the cheerful atmosphere made the lunch enjoyable. While asking for veggie lunch today, I became nostalgic about my life at Salt Lake City 5 years back. I and my friend were the _only_ vegetarians in the *whole* office during then! But the lady who managed the cafeteria never forgot to get two special veggie meals for us. People gifted us wonderful home-made cakes and pies during these festivals. Hmm.... those were the days!

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Expensive haircuts

Indians visiting the US quickly learn about the cost of living here. In recent years, people from Bangalore visiting smaller cities in mid-west US do not get very surprised when they see price tags at stores. Heck, this time around I felt that Bangalore is costlier than Austin for most daily use items. (Of course, you aren't making the mistake of comparing the price inDollars against equivalent Rupees, are you?). It is not just about petrol, for which we 'poor' Indians pay twice as much asAmericans do. But when it comes to anything involving manual labor, there is no comparison in costs! India is order of times cheaper. Of course, cost of whatever we have in large quantities will be lower. We have a lot of people!

One of the best examples of this is the cost of a haircut. I have seen desis who, even after having lived in US for 5-10 years, still plan for two haircuts during their 1-month India visit - one just after landing and one just before leaving India. So when they land, they normally have enough hair on their head to appear in Dabur Amla hair oil ad, and while leaving, just enough not to show their skulls. So desis still find the cost of a haircut unfathomable. Another complaint I have is the quality of haircut. After having paid 13 dollars for the haircut and 2 dollars in tips, I am disappointed with the skill level shown by the hair cutters. They have diplomas in hair cutting, for godsake! Oh, I may be missing something. They may be preserving their skills for the 'special' haircuts I see in their catalogues. But I am not going to spend upward of 20$ for a haircut!

May be one day hair cuts will be outsourced from the US. The only hurdle is finding a way to get the haircut done over a telephone line running all the way to India.

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Perfect friday evening

I had been to Main Event this Friday night. It is an entertainment place, where we can play a number of funky games like video games, rock climbing, laser tagging, not to mention bowling. I like the racing games. Most people like them, because they get to do what they would love to do on the real roads, like riding a 18-wheeler smashing up all cars in the path, driving a Ferrari at 250mph, carelessly hitting the curb on the side. Many like the shooting games, where they get to kill enough people to make an army of a small country. Later we hit the bowling alleys. The lane next to ours was occupied by a bunch of girls in 10-12 age group. Every time one of the girl bowled, irrespective of whether it was a strike or a gutter ball, they all used to start a celebration ritual, which included a little dance and more importantly, a high-pitch scream at a volume high enough to scare the cattle in nearby farms.

At beyond 1 in the night, Manju didn't want to end the day yet, so we went to Mozart's, which is a coffee bar, located on the banks of lake Austin. It is close to downtown and is one of the tourist attractions in Austin. It has all the old-world charm intact and the wooden benches on the lakefront offer one of the best places for spending a casual evening chitchatting with close friends. Since it is close to UT Austin, a number of students spend time there, some doing their homework and some surfing the web on the free wifi connection Mozarts offers. A place not to miss if you are visiting Austin.

Tuesday, November 08, 2005

Chronic overeating

The last three days have been like a festival season as far as eating is concerned. On Saturday I had been to Houston again, this time with Manju and Sandhya. Our devotion to Goddess Meenakshi and our commitment to the food court there pulled us all the way to Pearland on the southern periphery of the city. We then spent the afternoon at NASA space centre, where we learnt the following:
*) Moon has rocks, they are called (you guessed it) moon-rocks.
*) There are cattle inside NASA campus.
*) The girl who was our guide in the tram through NASA facilities was really cute.

We then put considerable effort spotting the Gujju restaurant 'Thali' that Manju had made a note of. But the fantastic dinner buffet was worth all the effort. The restaurant owner's insistence that we taste more of the delicacies there was just one of the causes of overfeading. The only other thing we would have liked was a place to crash for the night, rather than
drive 200 miles to Austin in the night.

Yesterday, lunch was at our local favority Madras Pavilion, resulting in another dose of overeating. Balaji came from India yesterday and with him, some yummy home-made snacks! Going to the Mozart's coffee bar in the evening was really not the antidote we needed.

To stretch the perfect weekend into Monday, I went to a Vietnamese restaurant today, where 95% of all food had some coconut as ingredient. The most delicious of all was the coconut drink. Oh, until today I had never eaten a dessert than had 3 types of beans.

Since I have been eating so much for 3 days, I know it is not a good time to check my weight now. Of course I am going to start exercising any day now. After all I stopped exercising only a couple of weeks back!

Saturday, November 05, 2005

Speaking of customer support...

While on this subject, I called Air India's toll-free number last week to get my return tickets confirmed. I was expecting to interact with a dumb automated phone system for 5 minutes, choosing various options before reaching a human to talk to. (You know how it is, "If you are calling about flight ticket confirmation, please dial the biggest prime number between 2317 and 5234"...) But surprise! Before I could even hear two rings, a human somewhere in a call centre in India had picked up the phone and asked me how he could help me. I was startled and astonished at first, but delighted at the same time. Either Air India has too good a customer support division or they hardly have any customers. Looking at how full their flights get, I think it is the former. Go AI!

Hoping to return from stone age!

My call with Vonage went way too well today. I was able to speak to a representative without any wait at all, which made me initially suspect that I dialed a wrong number. After I convinced the representative of my plight, she made me go through the usual drill of rebooting every equipment from the cable modem to the toaster and microwave. There was also the usual "hold down the reset button for 45 seconds", "Pull the power cord out while holding the reset button", "take two deep breaths", "Imagine yourself in a beautiful garden", "put back the power cord", "pray to your favorite God", "observe the little LEDs on the router", etc. Finally she said "We have determined that your router has gone bad". Phew, I knew it for the last three days! So they are sending me a replacement quite soon. Looks like the ordeal is finally going to be over.

Friday, November 04, 2005

Stone age, here I come!

Vonage's banner ad asks us to get rid of our stone-age phone service company. After the trouble I am going through in the last couple of days with Vonage, I am ready to go back to stone age myself.

Most phone companies in the US, both traditional and mobile, don't care too much about people like me who need a phone connection for only a few months. They would rather go after the customers who are ready to pledge their souls to them. So I did not have too many options when I needed a phone for a short duration. I had to end up with Vonage, the new, cool, hep and happening VOIP phone. I was indeed surprised about the ease of obtaining the connection and setting up the equipement.

Two days back their LinkSys router started giving problems. Without being instructed, as if it has a soul all by itself, it is rebooting itself every 30 seconds or so! After having gone through all the diagnostic information available in their manuals (as a true engineer), I decided to call their customer support. I know some of you are already grinning. Though I knew the ordeal wasn't going to be smooth, I was not prepared for how it actually turned out. I ended up waiting 115 minutes (yes, almost 2 hours) waiting for a customer support representative to talk to me. Instead of at least playing some music, they were content in playing a message that repeatedly said they were 'sorry' about the delay I was experiencing and they 'value my loyalty' as a customer. I think they were trying to push me to some kind of trance by playing a repetitive hypnotic message. But after listening to this message a gazillion times in 2 hours I decided to hang up.

Not all was lost, though. They have e-mail support facility. So I shot off an email to them describing my situation, hoping they would sympathize with me and do something. Of course I received immediate replies to my mails, but their help was not even as valuable as the paper on which I printed out the procedure they asked me to perform. (Stand on one foot facing East and chant "Vonage" three times. Now turn North and walk two steps and so on ...) I know I am not a networking wizkid, but I am sure I know more than their 'experts'. But to be fair to them, I guess they are used to talking to customers who cannot tell their zip code from their IP address. So after two days of struggling with the router, it is still rebooting every 30 seconds and I am watching it's little blue LEDs blink all the time. I have no hopes of the situation improving any time soon. Unless I am ready to listen to their trance inducing message for another couple of hours. Meanwhile I wonder how people used to communicate in stone age. Smoke messages?