BIAL Visit...

Last Saturday, we went to the Bangalore International Airport. I have uploaded some of the photographs from that visit at my flickr site. While we were there waiting for our guest to come, we noticed a huge group of school kids visiting the airport that day. All their teachers did is to divide them in two different groups. One group stood near the departure terminal and the second group near the arrival terminal. We were sitting close to the arrival terminal. 

These kids were having fun. And they have their unique ways of having fun. Whenever some foreigner (especially white skin) was coming out of the Arrival terminal, all the kids would in chorus say a Big "Hi" to them. I am sure those guests would not have expected such huge welcome when they land India. Not sure what all their teachers showed to them that day, soon our guest arrived and we left the airport. There is one good area though to watch the happenings on the runway etc next to the departure terminal. 

One can climb on top of those small sand deposits which are thrown carelessly in that area and watch the inside of the airport for free. 

Rumours...

During the recent Bangalore Bomb blasts last Friday, I was tracking the happenings at various places on the web. One such update caught my eyes, I was a little late in doing the print screen but still I managed to get a fading view of what I want to show here (inside red enclosure below) -















The text is - "Guys hate to break this, but info from sources well placed whom I cannot reveal : 5 more blasts to happen in Bangalore".

A very serious rumour, I gathered this at around 7pm in the evening while all the Bangalore blasts happened in the afternoon. I still remember we were getting news of two more blasts that day which didn't happen - one in Iskon temple and another somewhere near Hebbal on the new Airport road.

Major fire near my apartment...

There was one major fire near my apartment on Bannerghatta road...

In the background is the Mantri Elegance apartment. It must be somewhere close to Mandovi Motors junction.

Phishing...

Today, I checked the junk folder for one of my personal mail box and noticed a mail like this -














I never open any mail like this leave aside opening the links given in this kind of mails. But today I got curious and thought of just checking out exactly what these websites look like. And was I amazed -
















Exactly same as how ICICI bank's website looks and these smart people are asking for your whole world there. Normally the ICICI bank's infinity website prompts for User id and password only. Check it out yourself -
















Awesome work! Note the "Important Security Notice" in the original website also.

~mks

Ubuntu 8.4 LTS

Today I upgraded my home PC to Ubuntu 8.4 LTS. Almost a month after it was first released. And I am pleasantly surprised to see that they have packaged it with FF3b5.

I like change and this change indeed impressed me. I have been using FF3b5 for some time but never expected it to be packaged with a stable desktop operating system. Actually before upgrading from Ubuntu 7 I was wondering which FF version they will provide in 8.4 LTS as FF3 is almost getting finalized.

I am yet to get the feel of this new version but from the first impressions I find it a bit sharper than the previous version. The desktop effects are smoother given that I was facing GUI freeze problems just before the upgrade. I see the search feature pre-configured on the top panel, somehow I fail to recall if it was there earlier. I never used it even if it was there. I will have to reconfigure Automatix as the current one says it works only with Ubuntu 7. Lets see, more updates as I use it more...

My Windows XP installation will have to seriously work on startup time to get me back there... I am anyway in Love with Ubuntu already!

My Pics in Google Image Search...

Whenever I look at my flickr statistics, I notice that I have frequent visitors for my Infosys Mysore photos. I wondered why and today when I did a google search for "Infosys Mysore", I understood why.

When we do a google search on "Infosys Mysore", my photos are there on the top of the page (as of today). If you do a google image search for "Infosys Mysore", again they are on the first row. And it is not just the flickr photos, I get traffic to Tittle Tattle is due to these results.

Nice, I like it!

~mks

PS - This is my 100th blog post! Century during the IPL season.

IPL Telecoverage

This IPL's television coverage is all screwed up. What a sentence to start a blog! But really, they are messing it up a lot. The host commentators are all amateur including Ajay Jadeja. May be I am so used to Harsha Bhogle. But surely, Max thinks that putting pretty faces can do it for them. They started with one face earlier (Yeah, Ms. Bedi) and now there are plenty. And they all slip and flip on their words, switch overs and match each other in asking silly questions. I wonder why I have not seen Sunil Gavaskar in the studios.

Coming back to the point, there is no sync between there various departments, including the audio and video department. Once we could see Symonds and the commentator talking but couldn't hear them and on another occasion the video showed players warming up while the audio was from the toss. And then it seemed that the host commentators heard and saw everything correctly, no apology for the mixup. The camera men frequently lose track of the ball especially in the Mumbai-Bangalore match today.

Another thing, I am not sure why MAX is using only one channel to show the matches. The schedule is so packed up, the half hour gap between two matches gets eaten up and then they eat up the post match ceremony of the first match. If these guys are going to cover the world cup matches then we sure are up to some pathetic coverage.