Traffic report on radio stations

What is one common program across all FM radio stations in Bangalore? Something that they play tens of times every day? Something that the radio stations want you to believe you cannot live without? Something that claims to make your life easy every day? Something, in spite of all these claims, is roughly as useful as navel lint? It is none other than traffic congestion report, of course.

First of all, the methodology used to obtain traffic congestion information is the biggest culprit. I have seen traffic reports coming out of helicopters in the US. Here in Bangalore, radio jockeys ask the commuters to send out traffic jam information to them and they in turn broadcast it to the entire city. The concept is nice, but sadly it doesn't work. The people stuck in a traffic jam often have no clue about the cause of the jam. Often, they don't want to or cannot get out of their cars to find out. However, they cannot control the urge to send out an SMS. Hence you hear reports like "The outer ring road is blocked all the way from Sarakki to Mysore Road". Hey, that is around 7KMs of jam. How does any one person know that the jam is that big?

Secondly, the information is often incomplete. In the evenings I always get to hear this: "Huge traffic pile-up reported in Madivala". Alternatively how about this: "Slow moving traffic on Airport Road". Well, where on Airport Road? Eastbound or westbound? Which parts of Madivala? This information is meaningful only when it is qualified with more details, like "Huge traffic pile-up on Hosur road, heading towards Electronics city, at Bommanahalli junction".

Lastly, in most cases, there is very little you can do with the information, even though it is accurate. In most areas on the outskirts of Bangalore, which are hardly planned, there are no alternative roads. For example, if I hear in the morning that Bannerghatta Road is choked north-bound, I still get on to that road, because I have no credible alternative. This would be true for most roads heading out of the city and the outer ring road. The only use of this traffic information would be to mentally prepare in advance to suffer. That is not much of a use, is it?

My Nokia thinks the headset is connected even though it isn't!

My old faithful Nokia 3230 showed the first real illness today. Well, first, if you don't count the hangs and instantaneous reboots sometimes seen, because that is almost a 'feature' of Symbian OS. The other thing to discount is the slowness. The phone is notoriously slow. How slow is it? From the time you power it on, you need to wait more than a minute to make your first phone call :) On the positive side, this phone has the best build quality I have seen. It has fallen from all sorts of places without showing any signs of damage, including one incidence when it was rolling down the Savanadurga hill.

Today, the phone claimed that the wired headset, which is both the hands-free and the FM radio device, is connected to the phone, even though the alleged headset was nowhere within 10 feet distance from the phone! The phone refused to send out voice through the speaker, turned off the built-in mic, instead expecting the headphone to do these jobs. Now phone was useless without the headset.

A bit of googling led me to all sorts of suggestions, like the rebooting ritual, hard power cycling ritual, firmware upgrade ritual. None of them worked. The other possibility was liquid ingression (scary terms which just means water getting into the phone) and malfunctioning of the data port pins of the phone. Finally, I left the phone in sunshine for an hour and voila, my phone had cured itself! All it needed was some Vitamin-D :-) The rituals of debugging mobile phone problems is very similar to debugging your computer problems (especially Windows), except computers don't need a suntan.

Does this ever happen to you?

I used to visit my grandfather's house quite often during my childhood. Of late, I go there quite rarely, because nobody lives in that house. Every time I visit the place now-a-days, a strange feeling happens to me. I feel the whole place is much 'smaller' than what is imprinted in my mind. The whole house, rooms in it, the surroundings, the private lake nearby, the front courtyard, everything seems smaller. Further, the distances to nearby places seems much lesser. Distance to the nearby temple, to the beach, to the paddy fields, to the neighbor's house, everything. This has happened to me at a number of places I used to live in while I was a kid. When I visit the towns where I spent my childhood, did my schooling, everything seems to be smaller now. It appears as though the impression in my mind is the relative sizes of these objects to my own size and since I have grown now, the places now appear smaller. This does not seem to happen with places I lived in after my teen years. My college in Mysore, the surroundings, my hostel and so on seem to be of the same size as before.

For a long time, I used to think this happens only to me. Recently, I came to know that I am not alone. Now I wonder whether this happens to everyone. If you read this blog, could you please comment on this?

IPL and royalty

Well, why is IPL so terribly obsession with the royalty? I mean, really. Out of the eight teams, four of them had a name that contained word referring to the kings. Rajasthan Royals, Chennai SuperKings, King's XI Punjab, Bangalore Royal Challengers. Even Kolkata had Knight, a related term, in the name. Of course, Bangalore had a good reason to use that name. I don't know what reasoning other teams had to choose their names.