Tittle-Tattle

This is my first visit to the US and past 6 weeks have been a nice experience. I have these many things to write about, not sure if my schedule here will allow me to write on them - The Journey to the US Driving in US Snowfall Sight Seeing One good thing about the place where I am staying here is that I wake up every morning with this view outside the window - It doesn't snow every morning here. And sleep with this view outside my window - The Gateway Arch has been my prime subject in photographs so far. And I guess I would be uploading various photos of it if I manage to post all my blogs I mentioned above. When I was starting from India, my friend told me about this and it still struck me when I landed here in the downtown of St Louis. You feel like there is some curfew imposed in the city. There are very less people on the street. All you see is cars (if at all). It can also be due to the cold weather. In this city, I guess ...

Luck! Drama! Nail biting finish! Climax - Anti-Climax! Fantastic! Unbelievable! I have been trying to think about words which can describe today's F1-2008 finale@Interlagos. I started watching Tennis when Boris Becker's won the 1985 Wimbledon at the age of 17. I started following Formula1 keenly when I noticed blogs@my office and newspapers mentioning a young rookie doing podium finishes race after race in 2007 season. I actually became a fan of Hamilton right from the moment I saw him (a rookie!) holding Kimi all thru the race right from the beginning which Alonso won with McLaren 1-2. Prior to that my interests in Tennis or Formula1 was limited to newspaper sports columns. Today I think I am sold to formula1. I uttered a thousand swear words to Kubica when I saw him doing those maneuvers between Vettel and Hamilton. I also for a moment believed like the Ferrari team that my favourite Racer has lost the title again till I heard Karun Chandhok shouting at the top of his voice ...

I used to use Fedora till I fell for Ubuntu sometimes back. I have never been loyal to any particular Linux distro till I started using Ubuntu a year or two back. That instinct of "switching distros" was probably on a high yesterday and I thought I should check how is Fedora doing these days. I checked Fedora website, currently Fedora 9 is available. Let's download the DVD so I went for the torrent way. I noticed that some 700 seeds were available and some 250+ users were downloading Fedora 9 with me. I was amazed and I thought probably Fedora 9 was released recently. So I checked the schedule . Some more amazement for me, Fedora 9 was released on May 13 this year. And Fedora 10 is just a month away. Hmmm, I am totally out of touch and it seems Fedora is quite popular. But I cancelled the download and will wait for Fedora 10 to get released. The Ubuntu upgrade is just a day away anyway! I am really very interested now in checking the torrent data on Fedora 10 release ...

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 cl...

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.

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.

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

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 i...

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.

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 especial...

10 year boy burnt alive in Delhi 70-80 strong mob molests 2 women in Mumbai We the barbarians!

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