Tittle-Tattle

We recently underwent the domestic change management exercise of sending our young daughter to a play school. Although we have been thru this once (our son), but still the anxiety was no less. It is very difficult to break a young kid's heart. Hand her over to a teacher unknown to her while she is still crying... And this actually happened when she exchanged laps between me and her teacher although against her will. In the first two weeks, it was all cries, sobs and such for - स्कूल नहीं जाना! ( I don't want to go to school)...  Two weeks later, again cries, sobs and such for -  स्कूल जाना है! (I want to go to school!) That was a quick transition, we thought. It was heartening to see her performing in the school annual day function as well, doing a butterfly dance -  When I left my home for the first time to join my job, I wrote a letter to my parents. The content more or less said that I am that kid-bird which has grown up and has left its nest. It was written in a...

Young kids always come with some interesting observations from the way they understand the world. In their playfulness they bring out their interesting interpretation of things. My kids are no different and I used to quote my son a lot when I was regular in this blog earlier. Now my daughter does that quite often. Like she gets really excited when our car undergoes some underpass. She starts shouting with joy the moment she realizes we are going to go thru a tunnel like underpass. My son always wants us to go atop a flyover. I try to avoid them as it could be a detour, as well as many of the Bangalore flyover land you right into a Jam point! Anyways... Recently, when we were standing on a red signal, my daughter started singing the rhyme "London bridge is falling down", all of a sudden and with great enthu and all. And when we paid attention we noticed that she was also trying to point to something. It was this site - Needless to say, we couldn't st...

I recently bought this Nokia 5800 XpressMusic mobile phone. Recently as in, a few months back! I have been exploring it a lot and with time I have come to like it a lot. This guy is a full screen touch mobile phone from Nokia with GPS, 3G and wifi capabilities. It has got dual camera, so the front camera helps in making video calls. For full specifications you can always refer to the Nokia website . I have also taken a BSNL 3G connection on this phone so I have got a fast access internet connection in my hand all the time (well, almost all the time). This mobile phone has become very famous so much so that many of the meetings I have gone to, almost half the attendees san this phone. Its almost two-thirds the size of any of the world famous smartphones (read iPhones and Androids), but I have behaved like any of the price conscious Indian consumer and gone for this smartphone which comes for half the price. Nokia has poured in many of the goodies with this set, when I boug...

How would you handle this? So far my 6 year old used to say I will become this, I will become that when I grow up. Today he said - "मैं बड़ा होके smoking करूँगा!" (Means: I will do smoking when I grow up!!!!) Out goes our reply with a long listing of our entire family tree trying to make a point that no one smokes because its not good (for health)... Added with some lecture on smoking hazards... Comes another statement - "But friend's grandpa smokes..." Discussion closed - No, its not a good thing to do... Think about doing something else... so many better (cooler) things to do... I am sure so many people would have thought about this for themselves when they were kids, but its always like "reinventing the wheel" when you become a parent and see your own kid going thru the same cycle; and trying to save them from what's not good and encourage them to take up what's good... PS: Cigarette smoking is injurious for one's health... ...

Today's Hindu features a house panel report on the shoddy workmanship exhibited by the builders of the Bangalore International Airport . There are two news articles in the print edition today and I tried looking at the elaborations of shoddy workmanship in those articles, but I couldn't find any. Its a 124 page report it seems, but all that the news media has picked up is following - 1. Profit making by one of the promoters by trading BIAL shares 2. The facade of the exterior of the airport not showing the culture of Karnataka or India for that matter 3. Hold Narayanamurthy, Rajiv Chandrashekhar et al responsible for such lapses I have looked at the google news results for BIAL also, but seriously I don't find anything else in the news reports, and I am especially interested in looking at the elaborations of the poor workmanship. I would also like to the see if the house committee looked at the delay in building the approach road(s) to the airport (Why am I asking ...

Today, I was reading an article on Windows 7 on indiatimes. An ad showed up on the website indicating (Nikon) Digi Cams are available starting Rs 5800/-. Sounds interesting, so I clicked on it... The click took me to the camera section of the seller website but the first page showed lots of Kodak and Canon cameras. Where is that Nikon of the Ad? So I checked on the checkbox on the left to see Nikon only section and here's what I got - Lesson Learnt (Again) - WYSIWYG rarely works in the Adv+shopping world. Indiatimes needs to catch up on Google Chrome. My suggestion to Indiatimes - You may want to put a "* conditions apply" tag on those ads.

I see many "Go Green" campaigns running around me these days, be it the ads on TV and Radio or initiatives at work. I have consciously done a few things to abide by the advices given in these campaigns -  Cut down on the number of print outs While I was on a small time assignment in the US, I did not configure printer at all. This led me to request a friend of mine to take the printout of my return tickets for me! Recently, at work, they change the print server configuration and I have survived so far without configuring it.  Switch off the car at signals My inner self reminds me to switch off the car at the signals but I fail to do so many times when it is hot outside and the car AC is on and all the other vehicles which are not switched off, puff out smoke clouds into my car.  Take public transport for commuting  Recently the municipal body started monsoon preparations in my locality and they have blocked and dug one side of a very busy road near our house to complete a dra...

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!!!