Tittle-Tattle

We recently went for a Trip to Coorg on the Jan 26 weekend. It was an interesting trip because it happened in a very unplanned manner. We have been thinking for sometime to go out, go on a long drive, go somewhere sorts. So we thought, we will go for a day long trip on Jan 26 weekend, starting on Saturday morning and coming back on the same day. And we finalized on Hogenekkal for this day long trip. Saturday morning came and we started for Hogenekkal, we heard that there was no good place to eat around Hogenekkal so we packed lots of food as well. When we reached the Silk Board Flyover (Bangalore), a discussion started and this idea to drive to Coorg instead was thrown in and everyone agreed. We had no stuff to change to for the overnight halt, no hotel bookings and no places decided, I had just browsed thru a traveler's guide the last night, noted a few places (in mind) in Coorg and then I forgot picking that book up in the morning haste. By the time we decided to go to Coorg inst...

And I thought why my system is running so slow!!!

A few friends and ex-colleagues of mine have come up with an interesting idea about travel search. First a little background - The Indian Railways operates around 8700 passenger train trips but still these many trips are not sufficient to give you point to point connectivity to around 6,856 railway stations. So we have this practice of connecting trains. To go from point A to B, you first go from A to C then from C to B. You can have various options depending on your fare, time and location preferences. And you may want to check about the availability on these routes, the pricing, time taken etc. To this, if you want to add the options provided by the fast growing air travel industry of India, you will have even more options to compare for. So what my friends have done is that they have come up with a website called http://www.90di.com , which lists all the connection options from point A to point B in India. One can select modes like Train, Flight and Train+Flight and it fetches inf...

This blog is for people in Bangalore , who happen to travel on Hosur Road every weekday or more to reach their offices in Electronic City . I have tried to create a tour in Google Earth of an alternate route from Wipro Office in Electronic City to Bilekahalli-Bannerughatta Road junction . The latter junction is a few hundred meters away from the Bannerughatta Road and Outer Ring Road junction. This route will be a wee bit longer than the regular BTM-Hosur road route but the time one would take on this route is always close to 30mins (in almost all weather conditions!) unlike that on regular route which varies from 20 min to 4 hours. To check this route, you will have to install Google Earth and open the .kmz file using that. The route starts from the Wipro Office gate in Electronic City and takes you thru some villages although the road thru them is mostly wide and tarred and in very new condition and rarely used. This even avoids the NICE road whose exit to Bannerughatta road is...

Its been a long time, lots of things to post but never posted. Workplace changed, blogs labeled Infosys will decrease and those labeled Accenture will increase! Apparent changes in web presence - AOL becomes primary IM. MSN is also there to some extent. And came to know about this nice thing called trillian . Sleek one, useful if you use many instant messengers and you actually chat using all of them. Supports AIM, MSN, Yahoo and ICQ. My home PC recovered from a near crash situation. Its working fine right now, touch wood! Reason being, switching it off from the UPS directly instead of normal shutdown (There's a four year old in house!). Ubuntu is totally unusable now, is not booting up at all and I saw it going from bad to worse while trying to recover. Windows looks normal now after a system restore and multiple chkdsks . Had to buy additional USB harddisk for backup. You get a 160GB Seagate hard-disk, vendor assembled in a Tech-Com casing for Rs 3328/- (tax included) in Bangalor...

I was trying to search for some Movers and Packers in Bangalore today when I noticed this call thing in the sponsored links. So I dialed out the first result and it actually connected me to the movers and packers listed there. Its another thing that I was trying to call at 10pm in the night and this movers and packers guy didn't want to talk and disconnected immediately. The feature as such was a pleasant surprise. I will test this out tomorrow during working hours. ~mks

First Joost and now pownce , thanks to Techcrunch . The joost invite I got directly from Techcrunch courtesy this post . And today I stumbled upon this news item about Techcrunch acquiring Inviteshare . So I checked up Inviteshare and immediately signed up. And placed myself in the queue for invitation for pownce. And vow! Within 10 min one Mr. Maverick sends me an invite. I am amazed. Come to think about it, inviteshare is good, one way it fetches you invites for new happening type sites and other way it tells you which are the sites which are of happening types these days! Coming back to pownce, some of my friends who have been powncing for sometime now, must have noticed new friend request from me. Getting into pownce thru this method was interesting, now I have joost invites and pownce invites which I am going to send/share now thru this inviteshare. So if anybody is still looking for them, please sign up on inviteshare, and then I will invite you for joost and pownce :-P....

I have been watching Joost for some time now (Ok, few weeks!). And all I can say that its been an experience so far. The ad-free viewing experience is great (save for that Coke text-ad which I noticed yesterday evening). The other day I and my son were watching that continuous burst of cartoons when my wife came and remarked - "No Ads!". Apart from the No-Ads thing, the choice of channels is also good. So many things to watch and explore, Joost has the potential to revive my interest in watching TV (on computer of course). And my 2Mbps connection is also managing it well, now I need one with no limits on downloads/uploads ! By the way, going by Text-Ads thing, why can't the TV channels do the same thing for themselves. Tickers are already part of the news channels these days. This way they can have ads coming on the screen all the time while the programs carry on with their stuff in the main viewing area. At least the channel which starts this experiment can boast of...

When I checked for the source of traffic to my blog today it showed one link from Yahoo! OurCity . On exploring it further I was pleasantly surprised to see that Yahoo! OurCity for Mysore contains my Mysore Trip blog . Yahoo! posts the results of this Technorati Search in the Travel Blog section. That was cool anyway! ~mks

Last Saturday we went on a trip to Mysore. We drove all the way from Bangalore and came back on the same day. We used SH-17 (Bangalore-Mysore State Highway) for our travel. Our first stop being Sangam at Srirangapatna . A Sangam is a sanskrit word meaning confluence. At Allahabad its the confluence of three rivers Ganga, Yamuna and Saraswati. This sangam at Srirangapatna is different. Actually the town of Srirangapatna is an island and is enclosed by the river Kaveri . So the point where the river Kaveri meets back again is called Sangam. The river Kaveri is sacred for the people in this part of India. And the people you see in the photograph above were actually going to perform some puja on those small islands in the river. Our next stop was the Dariya Daulat bagh. It used to be summer palace of Tipu Sultan built in year 1784. As the description says, its made up of wood and work done on those wood is huge and amazing. Imagine something like that, wholly made up wood and still stand...

I have started a separate blog page in Hindi today. You can check my posts in Hindi at Manish Uvaach ! ~mks

नमस्कार, अभिषेक को देख कर मैंने भी सोचा कि एक ब्लॉग पोस्ट हिंदी में भी करूं। यह तो काफी आसान है। गूगल नें तो ये सुविधा मार्च में ही दे दी थी पर मुझे अभी पता चला। काफी सही है ये तो! अरे सही, इसमें तो गलती करने पर सुधार के लिए उदाहरण भी देता है, वाह! किसी भी शब्द पर लेफ़्ट क्लिक कीजिये। अगर आपको भी हिंदी में ब्लॉग करना है तो Settings में जा कर Basics में देखिए वहा पर आपको Transliteration का drop down दिखाई पड़ेगा. सही है ना! पर अगर हिन्दी व अंग्रेजी मिला करके लिखनी हो तो फिर थोड़ी समस्या है। editor थोडा slow हो जाता है। मुझे लग रह है कि editor का "Write Hindi" option click ना करके सीधे शब्द पर लेफ्ट क्लिक कीजिये उस से आसान रहेगा। और समस्या तब हो रही है जब मैं कुछ गलत टाईप कर दे रह हूँ। खैर दिमाग तो काफी लगाया है गूगल नें उसमें कोई दो राय नही है। वैसे मुझे अब लग रह है कि मेरी हिंदी लिखने की आदत अब छूट चुकी है क्योंकि कोई भी वाक्य पहली बार में बिना अंग्रेजी के एक शब्द इस्तेमाल किए हुये पूरा ही नही हो पा रहा है। १ - "option" को हिंदी में क्या बोलते हैं? ...

Have you tried the Rail Enquiry using the number 139? This one is IVR and it allows you to type in the train number or speak the train name. There is an option (in Bangalore) where you can enquire for either train bound to Bangalore station or elsewhere. For elsewhere you have to speak the station name. Today when I said "Yasvantpur Jn", the IVR lady said "I **think** you said Yasvantpur". The "I think" struck me hard. Vow! To make the software sound more interactive/human they have used the word "think", cool! ~mks PS - I use the Train Enquiry website . Todays was an exception.

My son has this peculiar inclination towards reading text from right to left like we do in Arabic/Farsi/Urdu. Yesterday, when his Mom asked him to spell Apple, he said "E L P P A"! If I try to read newspaper to him and start reading "The Hindu" like "T H E H I N D U", he will say "no read it like 'U D N ...'". My grandfather was a teacher of Farsi so that could possibly be one reason. But its interesting, like they force kids to use their right hand we will make him read from left to right. ~mks

We went to one "Hemadri Cermaics Shop" near Silk Board in Bangalore . I parked the car with enough space for parking two more cars on the left. But one lorry driver had other ideas. While we were inside checking out the bathroom accessories, he apparently while backing up his vehicle, did a huge smooch with the rear left door of my car - He could have stopped while the lorry just touched my car but that has not to happen, the lorry's rear stuck at this point in my car and dragged the car till its front bumper hit the boundary wall some 3 ft ahead of it - The lorry driver ran away after the incident. The shop owner who owned the lorry as well has promised to bear the cost for the dent. But lets see if they hold their promise when I tell them the cost of repair tomorrow. When I showed the damage to service center they were suggesting change of door. I am going to claim the insurance for this and hope they pay the part which will come to me. ...

A tip is a payment to certain service sector workers beyond the advertised bill or fee. It was a sad day yesterday. One of my relatives passed away. The family decided to take him to the native place Lucknow. The air travel required the body to be embalmed and casketed. There is an agency in Bangalore which does this. So we went to this mortuary where this was to be done. The guy over there could speak in Hindi and he very clearly explained us everything. He was very forthcoming in giving all the information and he assured us that everything will be done on time. While all this was happening, the youngest son went to a corner and was crying. We went to console him. And suddenly this guy walked over to us and asked for a tip . Apparently he was going to bring dinner and he was asking for a tip to get the same. We were shocked. We gave the money but the shock stayed and probably this is one of those events which will reside in my mind for all my life. Later we discussed the same and we ...

Watching formula1 is dangerously infectious, it gets into your driving immediately! I have watched two Alonso won races (KL and Monaco) till now and he must be really thankful to Hamilton for blocking the Ferraries for him all the way till the end. Such consistency! When LH starts getting the pole position... Monaco race track is crazy, you start from Residency road - St. Joseph School Crossing, take right at Bangalore Central, take right again on the Richmond Road at Lifestyle crossing, go straight, climb up the famous dissected flyover of Richmond/Residency road, take a U-turn on the flyover itself towards Residency road... That's Bangalore Formula1 race track for you. If you want, you go from under the flyover, that will give you the tunnel like feeling. ;-) ~mks

Sunil Gavaskar came to our office campus today for some promotion. And we got a chance to hear him. Me and Veetrag went together to see him. We didn't bring our cameras and we didn't have anything appropriate to take autograph on (and not even a pen). Luckily, people arranged for some notebooks and pens in the audi and Veetrag's w700i worked as our camera. Since Gavaskar retired some 20 years ago so the junta which turned up on time was mostly from that era when he played. But later on the hall was full with people from all ages. The Gavaskar I saw right there speaking in front of me was a little different. When I looked up at the screen behind him, the Gavaskar in that looked familiar. I am so much used to his on screen presence I must say. Some very candid discussion on all aspects of (mostly Indian) cricket happened. He fielded all the questions very coolly and I felt good seeing and listening him. I asked a question (why no triple hundreds from Indians (only one ...

After buying the car , I gave my bike to my cousin. He visits me often, and today was one such day. When he left, my son got curious and this happened - Son - Papa tum car kisko doge? (Whom will you give the car to?) Me - Nahi beta, car hamaare paas rahegi. (No dear, car will be with us) Son - Main chalaunga. (I will drive) Me - Haan, jab tum bade ho jaoge to car chalaoge. (Yes, when you grow up, you will drive the car). Son - Tum peeche baithoge? (You will sit on the backseat?) :-) ~mks

Microsoft agrees to buy aQuantive for $6 billion, compare this with google's acquisition of Double Click for $3.1 billion. Other such acquisitions I heard of - Yahoo Inc. buying online ad exchange Right Media Inc. ($680 million), and WPP Group PLC buying ad firm 24/7 Real Media Inc ($649 million). Baba re! kitna paisa hai advertisement mein!! (Gosh! there's so much money in advertising business). This one is from GigaOm - Alltel, one of the smaller mobile carriers has decided to go private in a deal that values the company at $27.5 billion ($71.50 a share in cash), a 23% premium over Alltel’s closing price on December 29, 2006. The company is being acquired by two private equity players, TPG (Texas Pacific Group) and GS Capital Partners (private equity arm of Goldman Sachs). Baba re! Mobile business mein aur jyada paisa hai (Gosh! Mobile business involves even more money). Vinnie Mirchandani discusses salaries and billing rates of Indian Offshoring companies in his blog po...