Jaggu's blog

Toshiba Thrive : Comparision with the ipad

2012-01-08T22:26:00.000-08:00

People who know me well are aware that I am one of the biggest admirers of the ipad. Though I was very sceptical of the ipad before it launched and openly pooh-poohed it after the unveiling , I had to eat crow once I got my hands on it. I was in love and over the past year and a half, have been dellighted and amazed by the device on innumerable occasions.

But, I'm not one of the ios fanboys, or the more Indian term, a member of the iMafia. I've been using an android phone as my daily driver for the past year and find a lot of areas where Android is far superior to ios. This is reflected in the sales numbers, where android has taken the lead and is pulling away. But, in the tablet market, the ipad is dominant, the 800 pound gorilla in a room full of tarsiers. So, I was very curious to find out why. Are Android tablets really that bad that they haven't been able to make any headway against the ipad? Opportunity came knocking in terms of the Thanksgiving Black Friday sales, where the retailers had heavy discounts on the Android tablets. I was able to pick up a Toshiba Thrive for around 300$. My brother, who lives in Boston, picked it up and I finally got my hands on it last weekend.

The Thrive was(is) one of the most unappealing of the Android tablets. It's bulky(looks like something made in Soviet Russia), was plagued by quality issues at launch and was expensive to boot. A perfect trifecta which caused it to quickly sink to the bottom of the also rans. But, my reasoning went, flaws that are killers at a 500$ price point could be bearable when the price drops to 300. They had also cured the sleep of death issue and it had a few redeeming qualities like a full sized USB, HDMI and SD card slot plus a replacable battery. All these factors made me choose the Thrive over the competition. And the fact that the discounted price was a full 100$ less than the others. Never discount the importance of a good bargain.

The Short Verdict
Now that I have it, what's the verdict. The short answer is that If the ipad 2 is a 10, I'd rate the ipad as a 9. When I first got my hands on the thrive on saturday, my first impression was so negative, that i would have given it a 5. But as I got used to it and understood it a little better, I'll change it to a 6. With the release of Ice Cream Sandwich, which fixes a lot of the issues that have plagues Honeycomb, that'll move to a 7. But, it is a big question mark whether the Thrive will ever get ICS.

Does this mean that Android tablets have no chance, if even with the latest software, they don't even come close to the ipad? I don't think so. Remember, the Thrive is not even the best tablet, there are tablets like the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and the Asus Transformer Prime that have far better screens and build quality and would rate a 8 or 9 with the ICS build. But, the issue is that Apple is very close to releasing the ipad 3, which going by past history, would rate as a 11 or 12 at the minimum. How will the manufacturer's be able to counter that? I'm glad that it is someone else's problem and I do not envy them.

The Longer Version

Here's the long version of what I thought of the Thrive

Size (B): My brother had bought the original Toshiba case and boy, was it a piece of crap. Contrast to the original ipad case, which is a piece of art and looks as good as new even after 18 months. The case made the already thick tablet even thicker and was a pain to actually use. I got rid of it and found it quite usable without the case. In terms of thickness, it is not too different from the original ipad. The ipad2, however, takes it to a totally new level.

Sound (F C): I have never heard a speaker that is as bad as the Thrive. It gives the word tinny a whole new meaning. I think 2000 rupee mobile phones have better sounding speakers.

UPDATE: I discovered that Toshiba has its sound enhancement on this tablet and be default, the bass is at the lowest level. Once, I turned off the default and turned up the bass, the quality and volume improved significantly. I'd have given it a B, but toshiba should be ashamed to have set the default this low.

Display (C): I didn't have high hopes for the display as it wasn't an IPS screen. I was pleasantly surprised, as it looked quite nice. Here are a couple of comparisions with the ipad. The ipad has much better viewing angles, though.

Thrive on the left, ipad to the right

Thrive at an extreme viewing angle

ipad at an extreme viewing angle, is far better

Software (D): There's no other way to put it, Honeycomb is unfinished software and should never have been released. In just a couple of days of usage, I had multiple apps force closing, including standard apps like Music. Performance was very average, and wasn't much faster than my ipad 1G.

App Selection (D): Android does scale better than ios to higher resolution, but you still need apps that are designed for the larger screen. Simply stretching out the app to the wider screen is not sufficient. A few like Plume had resigned the app to make use of the wider screen, but they were few and far inbetween. I was very surprised to see the Google + app have a lot of issues just displaying the stream.

It wasn't all negative, though. Here's what I liked
SD Card: I was able to pop in the SD card from my camera and view the pictures immediately
HDMI/USB: I connected my wireless mouse and the tablet to my TV and was able to get a fairly good video watching experience
Sadly for the Thrive, I cannot think of many more positives at this point.

Trip to Munnar

2011-12-29T16:36:00.000-08:00

We travelled to Munnar for a 4 day trip from 25/12. We decided against the train as even the train would require a 3-4 hour journey by taxi, having seen the way the tourist taxi guys drive, I just wasn't prepared to take my chances and decided to drive.

Some memories from the trip

- We left Bangalore at 5:45 am. At Hosur, there was a massive jam caused by an accident where a bus was blocking the entire highway. But, we got very lucky as we hit the jam just near a break in the road divider. We crossed over to the service lane on the other side and rejoined after the accident scene.

- I have a lot of memories of the Bangalore-Salem road, as we used to drive to my uncle’s place in Thanjavur regularly during the 80’s. More recently, we had a nightmare drive from Krishnagiri to Salem, when the 4 lane was being constructed. With the construction complete, the drive was a pleasure. I was easily cruising at 110-120 kmph, which enabled us to reach Salem in 2.5 hours.

- We took the Perundurai-Kangeyam-Dharapuram-Udumalpetai-Chinar-Marayoor-Munnar route to avoid any potential problems due to the Mullaperiyar dam issue. There were absolutely no problems and we crossed over into Kerala with ease

- The forest section through Annamalai Tiger reserve and Chinar national park was a bit of a disappointment on the way out. I was hoping to see some wildlife but some birds and a chameleon that I almost ran over was as close as we got.

- The Club Mahindra resort is almost 20 km beyond Munnar. Since the Marayoor and

Theni routes to Munnar are almost the same distance, going via Theni means that you save almost 45 km if you’re going to the resorts at Chinnakanal. No wonder, many of the people at team-bhp were recommending this. Atleast, we got to see some of the spectacular views over Lockhart Valley

- We stayed in a small hotel unit room for the first 2 days and then shifted to a 1 bedroom unit. The resort was good, but not very kid friendly. My son is at an age where he gives up and wants to be lifted whenever he feels like. Usually, this happens when there are steps to be climbed or a steep slope. Lifting a 15 kg child and walking up a 25-30 degree slope is no fun. I can’t wait for the day when he is embarrassed to be lifted.

- As the driver, I hardly got to see any of the views. So, we decided to take the tour offered by the resort. This had another advantage, as we didn’t have to worry about parking the car at the spots.

- The tour was a little disappointing, we went to an area with elephant rides which was quite nice. The next spot was the Mattupettu dam, we were really looking forward to taking the speedboat ride, but it had almost a 3 hour wait. Having already waited 1.5 hours for the elephant ride, we decided to skip and left after taking a few snaps.

- Day 2 was spent mainly at the resort, where we visited the model village set up by the resort.

- On Day 3, we went to the Erivakulam National Park, home of the Nilgiri tahir. We found a huge traffic jam as we neared the NP. Following the cue of other vehicles, we parked right there itself and walked the final 1 km to the entrance. Near the NP entrance, the cause of the problem was clear, the road was only wide enough for a single bus, but there were 2 huge buses on either side of the entrance wanting to get through. On reaching the park, we found a huge line which extended halfway up the side of the mountain. On enquiring with people, we found that it would take almost 4-5 hours to get the bus and decided to just head back. Our decision to park away proved a blessing as we could easily reverse and head back avoiding the jam completely.

- Club Mahindra resort was excellent as always with good food, generally great facilities. However, the activity room was very poor compared to their resort in Coorg and Goa with almost no facilities for infants. As a result, we avoided it completely.

- In view of the jam at Erivakulam, we decided to start back early hoping to avoid the Erivakulam jam and see some wildlife on the way. Till we entered the Annamalai reserve, we did not see even a single eee-kaaka. To our luck, as soon as we entered the reserve, I spotted a movement on the right and sure enough, there were two elephants making their way up the mountain. Further on, we hit paydirt, there was a single wild elephant on the side of the road eating his/her breakfast.

- On the way back, we stopped for 4 hours at Tirrupur, got some good bargains on clothes at a factory outlet and ate a big lunch at Sree Saravana Bhavan. This delayed our return to late evening, and as I am not very comfortable with night driving, dropped our average speed significantly. We finally made it home at 9:45 pm.

- I was very happy with my car's mileage during the trip. With all the high speed cruising and the ghat roads, we still ended up with a little over 14 kmpl. Not bad for a 1.6l engine.

An ode to the n82

2011-07-05T02:49:00.001-07:00

Why a post on the n82 out of the blue? After all, it's been 8 months since I stopped using it full time and around 4 months since I gave it to my mother. Something happened in the last few days that made me realize that there is no turning back.

That something was a little option hidden in my Galaxy S camera app, the anti-shake. Until now, most of my photos were blurry, mainly caused by the fact that the SGS doesn't have a dedicated camera button and when you tap the on-screen shutter, it shakes the phone a little bit. But once I enabled this option, my photos became much sharper.

What does it have to do with the n82? Well, the camera on that little gem is a piece of art and a part of me always missed it, no matter how much I like the SGS in other respects. But now, I've realized that it is time to move on.

But there was one last hurrah for the n82. Last sunday, we bought a new cycle for my daughter. Like any normal kid, she wanted to ride it "Right NOW". It was around 6:15 pm and unfortunately, my camera's battery was out of charge. So which phone did I pick up? You guessed it.

F1 - the season so far

2011-06-24T05:35:00.001-07:00

I wrote this post after the Monaco race, but forgot to post it. Well, better late than never...

We are now 6 races into the F1 season and we’ve had 6 crackers with lots of overtaking, I cannot remember a time when there was so much happening all at once. Why was overtaking so infrequent in F1? What changed to make such a drastic difference? Here’s my take on it. DISCLAIMER:I don’t profess to be a technical expert, just a passionate fan who has been following F1 for the last 25 years .

Firstly coming to overtaking, I think there are three main reasons for why it was so uncommon in F1

Aerodynamics: The most common method of overtaking in a straight line is slipstreaming. Slipstreaming occurs when the car behind occupies the hole in the air created by the car in front before the space is filled up by the displaced air. Due to the reduced wind resistance, the car behind is able to go faster and overtake. You may well ask why slipstreaming has reduced? When a car moves, the air that it displaces has to go somewhere. The goal of the F1 car designers is to direct the air as they pass through in a way that it presses the car down and gives more grip, thus enabling the car to go through the corner faster. It’s the reverse of aeroplanes where they try to achieve lift. That is why the F1 cars have these big wings in the front and back. The downside of the aerodynamics was that the air that exited the back of the cars was so turbulent that the effectiveness of the aerodynamic design was greatly reduced for the car behind. So, the effectiveness of the wings was reduced and the car could not go as fast and fell behind enough to not be able to slipstream

Cornering speeds: In the olden days, the cars would be going 300 kmph on the straight but when they came upon a corner, they would need to reduce the speed to 80-90 kmph to have any chance of making it through the corner safely. Since the tyres and brakes of the day were not that advanced, cars had to brake 50-100 m before the corner and this gave the opportunity for the car behind to delay their braking by 10-15 metres and overtake the car going into the corner. However, with the advance in tyre technology (and aerodynamics), the speed that the car could carry through the corner increased and with the advent of carbon-fibre brakes, the braking distances reduced significantly. As a result, the opportunity to “out-brake” someone into a corner reduced significantly.

Strategy: One of the biggest changes in the sport was the advent of Michael Schumacher and the usage of pit-stops as an overtaking mechanism. He figured that since modern technology can make it so difficult to overtake cars on the track, why not pass them in the pits? The strategy involved staying out for a couple of laps after the car in front had pitted and driving to the maximum speed so that when you pitted for new tyres, you would come out ahead. He did this with astonishing success during his heyday. The downside to this was that it was very boring for the average spectator who could not understand the intricacies that went into the overtaking.

The FIA has been trying to remedy the situation and put up a good show for the spectators for a while now. In 2010, it banned refueling and made the usage of two tyre compounds mandatory. The hope was that teams would adopt different strategies and we would see cars with varying grip levels on track together, thus promoting overtaking. However, it did not work out as the tyres proved very durable and most teams stuck to one or maximum two pitstops, most of which were in sync with each other. The aerodynamic issues remained as before.

So, for 2011, they came up with 3 really bold steps, Drag Reduction system, high wearing tyres specification and KERS. Let’s look at each of them

DRS is the most controversial of the three rule changes. Basically the rear wings on the car are inclined at an angle when viewed from the side so that the air flowing over them presses the car down. This is most useful in the corner. However, in a straight line, the wings create more drag. That is why in circuits like Monza, which is a series of straights, we see the cars with wings that are almost parallel to the ground. DRS basically allows the teams to change the angle of the rear wing on the straight so that the car can go faster. Simple really. But, this is F1 and nothing is as simple. The catch is that DRS is only available if the car is less than a second behind the car in front and only on a specified area of the circuit. So, remember when you could not slipstream because you were falling behind on the corner? With DRS, you now have much lesser drag and can go significantly faster than the car in front and hence can get back into the slipstream and overtake.

The importance of aerodynamics had overshadowed the role that tyres played in providing the grip to the car. Historically, tyres have tried to strike a balance between softer rubber compounds that provide more grip but wear out faster and harder ones that last longer but aren’t as fast. The idea behind making the use of different compound tyres was the softer compound With the single tyre supplier rule in effect, Bridgestone had no real pressure to innovate. As a result, their tyres were so durable that 2010 saw many races reduced to a single stop race. In 2011, Pirelli won the contract to supply the teams with tyres and they were given the brief that the tyres had to wear out enough such that there was a marked difference in grip between the hard and soft compounds. In tracks like Spain, the hard compounds were two seconds a lap slower. But the soft compounds would wear out quickly, thus requiring more pit-stops. So, you had an option, lose 20+ seconds in a pit-stop but make up the time at 2 seconds a lap. An added twist was provided when top cars (Webber/China and Heidfeld/Spain) were knocked out in Q1. Since they had not used their soft tyres at all in qualifying, they were able to go much longer on these tyres, thus making it possible to gain enormous amounts of time on the cars in front of them during the closing stages of the race.

The least impactful change was the re-introduction of the KERS (Kinetic Energy Recovery System). While braking, the energy is dissipated as heat, KERS allows that to be transformed to electrical energy and stored in a battery. This gives an additional 10% “boost” over the engine power thus enabling the cars to go even faster. KERS can only be used for 6 seconds over a single lap, so the driver must choose the spot carefully.

So, what has been the impact of these changes? We’ve had lots of overtaking, some thrilling come from behind drives (Webber from 18^th to 3^rd in China, Heidfeld from 24^th to 8^th in Spain) and a huge number of pit-stops. There is so much action that it is impossible to get a complete view just watching it on TV. My usual practice is to have my laptop open with the Live Timing in one window and a twitter feed (where I follow some of the prominent F1 journalists) in another. The live timing gives you wonderful insight especially in the mid-field that rarely gets much coverage. It was fascinating to see the gap from Webber and Heidfeld to the driver in front come down by 2-3 seconds a lap. And just to prove a point that it’s not all about overtaking, we’ve seen Vettel soak up enormous pressure at Turkey and Monaco and still keep it together.

With all this excitement, I can barely wait for the next race to come on.

Customer Service...What's that?

2009-12-22T03:33:00.000-08:00

I recently replaced my sneakers with a top of the line pair of running shoes from Reebok that cost me 8000 rupees. I started using it on my daily run and on the first day, noticed a pain in my left leg. I attributed it to running-in difficulty and thought it would go away after a couple of days. But it only got worse on the second day. When I inspected it closely, I found that the seam where the flap under the lace was joined to the shoe was not proper in the left shoe and was pressing onto my foot causing the pain. So, I took it to the shop where they acknowledged the problem and said that they would replace it in a day or two. So far so good.

I gave them an extra day and went three days later, expecting to pick up the replacement. They said that the approval for the claim had still not come and may take a few days more. I blew my top and told them that if it wasn’t done the next day, I will place a hold on the payment through my credit card company. That seemed to help matters, as I got a call the next day stating that the claim was approved. But, when I went there, I was told that they did not have another piece in stock. I gave them another extra day before I went back. They had got the shoe but they found a similar problem in it. I had enough and demanded my money back, but there was no refund. I had shortlisted a second pair initially, but even that was not available in my size. Finally, I settled for another model that cost me 6500 rupees. Wherein, I was told that they could not return the balance and I would need to purchase something. I finally ended up with a couple of t-shirts that I didn’t really need and paid an extra 400 rupees to those idiots.

I was trying to think of how the experience would have been in countries where the customer is truly king:

I would have been able to return it anytime without any reason (defective or not)
I would have been given a replacement on the spot or my money back
They would have paid me the difference in cost and not forced me to buy something else

- To add insult to injury, I would have paid less than half the cost. Yes, the same shoe is available for 70-80$ in the US through amazon.com

Change of gears - running replaces cycling

2009-12-16T02:17:00.000-08:00

I’ve made a lot of really bad decisions in 2009, but the one that hurts the most is the decision to sell my Trek 3700 bicycle and replace it with the Merida 40V. At the time, I had intended to buy a hybrid, but due to the lack of choice in the market, I ended up buying another MTB. For sure, the Merida is a superior cycle, with far better components. But, four months later, I have come to the sad realization that the Trek was a far better bike for me. Where the Trek fitted me like a glove, the Merida has continuously given me grief. The things that I dislike are

Seat: the stock seat is just too firm and far too narrow. I was never able to get into a comfortable position on the bike. I replaced it with a seat from the Cannondale quick 5 which is far more suited

- Geometry: This is far harder to fix. The Merida has a slightly stretched riding posture compared to the Trek. As a result, I either have to lower the seat or move it forward to get a comfortable position for my arms. But, this results in the extra load getting transferred to my legs. A solution that has been suggested is to get a shorter stem to reduce the reach.

As a result of this, long rides have become painful both during and after the ride. So much so, that it has been a long time since I have gone on a long ride and most of my rides have been restricted to short 20-30 km ones. Add to this, my Chennai visits in Sep-Oct and the fact that since Mukund was born, I’ve had to shift my exercise routine to a little later in the morning(by which time the traffic is too heavy to cycle), the net result is that my cycle mileage has gone down from 400 km to less than 100 km a month.

But, I am far too hooked on the exercise bug and the space vacated by cycling has been replaced with cycling. I’ve gradually increased my running distance from almost nil to around 50 km a month in Oct/Nov and should cross a 100 km in December. And I plan to keep it there till the cycling bug returns…

Fiesta is here

2009-11-08T16:00:00.000-08:00

I finally took delivery of my new Ford Fiesta 1.6SXI last Saturday. It has been a long journey that started way back in 2004 when having come back from Australia, Vidya and I were decided on a car. In those days, we were staying in Mangalore and our options were a little limited due to the limited number of dealerships. Having owned the original Santro, I was set on buying a C segment car and had almost finalized on the Baleno which had just been relaunched. Somehow, I allowed myself to be talked out of it by one of my “friends” who convinced me that the cost of ownership and service would be too high. We finally ended up buying a Santro Xing. I have no complaints with the Santro, but whenever we go on a highway trip, I think wistfully about how much better it would have been in a Baleno.

Anyway, cut forward a few years. In that time, a lot has changed. With Mukund's arrival, we feel the need for a larger car, especially for outstation trips. I wasn’t too particular about it being a sedan or large hatch. So, I set about looking for various options in the 6-8l bracket. The cars I shortlisted were

1.Hyundai i20

2.Fiat Grande Punto

3.Honda City

4.Maruti SX4

The first one to be eliminated was the City. It was way outside my budget. I didn’t even want to take a test drive, because I know that none of the other cars would match up in terms of performance or refinement and I would always be thinking of what I was missing by not buying the City. Maybe at some other time, but right now the big H was out of reach.

I test drove the i20 twice. I loved its looks and the general interior quality. But the power and performance of the 1.2 l engine was disappointing. With 3 of us on board, it struggled with the acceleration. This was addressed to some extent with the diesel, but I wanted a petrol engine, as the premium for a diesel engine is not funny. They do have a 1.4l petrol version, but it only comes with the automatic transmission. So, the i20 was out as well.

Next up was the Grande Punto. I had a lot of expectations from this car. When I saw it in person, it was a disappointment. The interior space was limited and I felt that the quality of the interiors was not up to the mark. I test drove it right after launch, so the time in it was limited, but even in a brief drive, it made a very good impression. But, the quality and lack of space was a definite deal-killer. While at the Fiat-Tata showroom, I briefly looked at the Linea, but having read enough reports on how the 1.4 petrol was underpowered, I decided to hold on for the 1.6 launch.

The final car that I test drove was the SX4. I was extremely happy with the car, it looked good, handled well, had adequate power, good ground clearance etc. Then I learnt that a facelift was imminent and decided to wait it out.

I’d left out a few cars from my list for a number of reasons

Indica Vista: space inside was massive, but boot was too small, plus there was no version with airbags. I wasn't very happy with the interior quality as well

Swift Zxi: never liked the looks of the car

Aveo: one of my favourite cars lookswise, but again airbags were not available.

Fiesta: felt that it was a little too small, not much of an upgrade space wise from Santro.

So, there I was in September, without a car and in waiting mode. Waiting for the new SX4 to be launched. Then I met a friend of my wife, who’d come over with his family. I knew that he had bought a petrol Fiesta a couple of months back and was curious to find out the thinking behind his decision. I went down to have a dekko at his car. The cabin did look small, but seemed big enough for my needs. I then took the car for a small drive and was bowled over by its power (though I couldn’t really test it out as it was in the running in period) as well as its poise on the road (or what remains of it in HSR Layout). Then came the clincher, he said that as employees of a Ford supplier, he and my wife were eligible for special supplier pricing, which was almost 70K less than the regular price.

That piqued my interest and I decided to explore more. I started out naturally at my favourite ~~timewaster~~ automobile site team-bhp and found a world of really passionate enthusiasts who were totally in love with the Fiesta. Satisfied, I called Lathangi Motors for a test drive. I took a 15 km drive through the ORR and some of the service roads and came back totally impressed. This was followed by another round of test drive, this time with Vidya and Nisha. Ultimately, everyone was onboard that it was a good buy.

But there was still the decision on whether to go with this or wait for the SX4 to be launched and then decide. I thought about it a little bit and felt that it was just a case of putting off the decision. They were not comparable pricewise (SX4 is 8.6L OTR, I was getting Fiesta SXI for 7.5L OTR), plus SX4 would likely be even more expensive when it is relaunched. So, the Fiesta it was, a decision made not just with the heart but with the head as well.

What I liked about the car

- Looks (some may say that Fiesta looks dated, but it has a classic feel to it, especially side on, it looks very proportionate unlike other cars in its segment

- Engine power

- Ride, felt really composed over the bumpy HSR roads

- Handling

- Interiors on the SXI, those leather seats are awesome

- Loaded with airbags, ABS, chrome everything

Things that could be better

- ICE, having got used to USB/Bluetooth on my current setup, it is like going 2 years into the past. Still the sound quality is good

- Glove box space felt a little small, but I’ll know only after sustained use

- No dead pedal

Totally dissatisfied with

- Indicators, why they are on the left in a made-for-India car is beyond me

- Chrome side view mirrors (ugh)

I booked the car on Oct 12, expecting to get delivery in 2 weeks time. It was a tough choice on the colour, the white (taxi), silver (already had a silver Santro), platinum (the most common colour), morello (purplish tinge)today, red (too bright) and black (tough to maintain) were eliminated and I went for the sea grey having never seen a car in the colour. The delivery took a little longer than expected and when it finally arrived, I wasn't all that thrilled with the colour, somehow it seemed a little lighter than I expected. But I wasn't prepared to wait for another month and gave the go-ahead to register it.

We picked it up on Saturday evening, did a small pooja at the Anjaneyar kovil near our house and brought it back. Unfortunately, it was raining throughout and the car got a little messy, so I couldn't take the photos that I had planned on Sunday. That will have to wait for the cleanup this week.

Missing App Store on iphone

2009-11-08T07:42:00.000-08:00

I recently encountered a problem on my ipod touch where the App Store was completely missing from the device. In addition, when I plugged in the touch to my computer, the Application tab was rendered read-only. This meant that I was not able to add any new applications or rearrange the icons through iTunes. A google search did not offer much advice except to restore the device to factory settings. But that would mean that all data would be lost and have to be retransferred, which could take a long time on my 32 Gig touch.

I set out to explore a little more and I found a suggestion on the Apple support forums that it could be related to Restrictions. So, I set out to explore that under Settings->General->Restrictions and voila, I found that the setting for Installing Applications was Off. A quick change to On and the App Store icon came right back on.

Back to Bangalore...at last

2009-11-06T05:38:00.000-08:00

I made my first trip to Chennai for the Satyam transition project on 1-Sep. Between then and today, I have travelled back and forth 6 times spending almost 60% of the time there. In hindsight, a lot of our preparation was overkill as the cutover went through extremely well. But as I am discovering, that is how my new boss operates, he wants to sure all the i's are dotted and t's are crossed well in advance and goes over it twice to make sure!!!

I was expecting to work out of our Mount Road office, but it was not to be. To ensure proximity to the Satyam office, we had taken an office on Old Mahabalipuram Road (aka Rajiv Gandhi Salai : why do we insist on naming everything after that blasted family) near Thoraipakkam. Despite the development that has taken place over the last 5 years, there is a big difference between that and the rest of the city especially when it comes to decent hotels and restaurants. Since we were in office till 10pm almost every day, it wasn't so bad. But once the cutover was complete, we were done at 6pm and that's when I felt isolated on OMR road.

At home, Mukund has been growing a lot and progressing enormously in his development. He now smiles all the time, especially when he is around his Nisha-akka. He has outgrown the batchtub we had bought for him, so we had to go and buy a replacement one today. Nisha is doing well in school, she and the 1-5 standard kids are putting up a grand show next week. She has not revealed much as it is meant to be a "surprise" for the parents.

My new Ford Fiesta is coming tomorrow. I went for a grey colour one, as none of the other colours appealed much to me. I wasn't very impressed with the grey, but since I had booked it, and a change would have taken another month, I had to go ahead. I've still not decided what to do with the Santro. I could sell it or employ a driver and use it for Vidya to go to the office. I'll decide in a month or so.

The other thing that I am really looking forward to is cycling and jogging, which have suffered greatly over the past 2 months. A lack of exercise and unhealthy diet have sent my weight soaring over the big eighty, have to work hard to bring it down to 77-78 before the month end!!!

Thoughts on Diwali

2009-10-17T00:13:00.000-07:00

Ah, Diwali, the time when the PC class gangs up to complain about child labour, pollution etc. I am getting tired to hearing the same bull repeated year after year. Consider the arguments against the festival

Child labour in Sivakasi: I am no expert and don't know the current situation. This has been highlighted a lot over the years and I have seen reports of action being taken against the culprits. Child labour, if it still exists, is a symptom, not the cause. The children work because their parents are too poor to continue to send them to school. The solution is to lift the families out of poverty AND educate them about the importance of keeping their kids in school. Accomplish that and watch the problem go away, if not the people will just send their children to work elsewhere.

Noise/atmospheric pollution: This argument has more merit as the increase in the SPM count and other gases cause problems to those having respiratory issues. The other constituent that suffers the most are the animals that are mortally scared of the loud noise. Some steps have been taken in this direction by banning really loud crackers. I've also seen a gradual shift towards the visual aspect of fireworks over the years.

There are quite a few positive aspects of Diwali

Awareness of tradition: Diwali is one of the fun ways to get children to understand about Indian culture and tradition

Boost to the economy: The spending that happens during Diwali may seem vulgar to the PC masses. But, it is this kind of spending that stimulates the economy and creates jobs for the poorer classes.

Let's put this bullcrap aside and celebrate Diwali in the traditional way. Happy Diwali everyone.

Goodbye Kimi?

2009-10-01T18:28:00.000-07:00

After months of speculation, the news is finally out. Fernando Alonso is moving to Ferrari for on a 3 year contract. I am excited as I see Alonso cast in the same mould as Schumacher. Maybe, he is not as complete or as fast as Schumi, but he will get the maximum out of the car every single weekend. Kimi, on the other hand, has never been as consistent, there are days where it seems like he is on a different planet and days where he never shows up on the track.

There is a lot of speculation that he is going to Mclaren. I hope that is true, for losing him would be a big loss to F1.

I don't know what makes me support a particular driver. There are examples like Prost, Schumacher, Kimi, Heidfeld who I liked from day 1 and have looked to support them through their career. I think it is a combination of their performance with reports in the media that make me form an opinion about an individual. There have been only two cases where I changed my opinion, the first was Senna, who I hated initially but became a big fan of later on. The other is Alonso, who has really won over me over the past two years.

Evolution of PC

2009-09-14T07:47:00.000-07:00

I was reading yet another article on the relative merits of Mac vs PC. There were many comments that made the point that Macs lost a lot longer than PCs. That got me thinking of whether that was really the case. How long had my PC’s lasted? I realized that I didn’t really know and set out on a trip down memory lane to catalogue the various computers that me and my family have owned.

Siva PC: This was bought by my father in the 80s as an office computer. It cost almost 60,000 rupees (in 80’s money). I think it had a 8086 processor, 640KB of RAM, a 20 MB hard disk and a green screen monitor. Needless to say, it only ran DOS and software like Lotus 1-2-3, Wordstar etc. I don’t think we got too much of usage out of it while my father’s factory was operational, except for some financial accounting. After we closed the factory, we brought the computer home and I remember playing around with it for a few years before it died a natural death.

- Assembled PC #1: The next computer I bought was an assembled PC in 1996. I boasted a 100 Mhz Pentium processor, a massive 4 MB of RAM, a 1 GB hard disk, CD-ROM and a colour monitor. It cost me almost 40,000 rupees back then. I used it till around 2000 when I upgraded to Assembled PC #2. I don’t remember what I did with it, most likely we just gave it away.

- Computer in US : When I went onsite for the second time in late 1996, I bought a computer at Fry’s electronics. It was a slightly more powerful version of the one I had at home with a 133 Mhz processor. I sold it to my roommate when I returned for good. That was also the trip where I bought a 16 MB RAM stick for my PC in India for an unworldly price of 350 dollars.

As Built PC #1: In 2000, it was finally time to upgrade my PC and Vidya and I decided to build a PC together. I had bought a CPU and hard disk from the US and we went to SP Road to buy the remaining parts. We ended up with a Celeron 667, 128 MB of SDRAM (which I later upgraded to 384 MB), a 4.3 GB hard drive and a CDROM (later upgraded to a CD-writer). We retained the 15 inch monitor from the PC which we later upgraded to a second hand 17 inch in 2003. We used this PC till the end of 2004, but when we came back to Bangalore, we stopped using it. I used some of the parts (memory, hard drive) on PC#3, and to my surprise, managed to sell the remaining parts in 2006 for around 1000 rupees.

- Australia PC: When we went to Australia in 2002, we initially picked up a cheap second hand computer, a Pentium 2 model. A few months later, when it seemed like Vidya’s work from home plan would fructify, we invested in a proper model, a Pentium 3 – 700 Mhz monster with 512 MB of RAM, 20 GB hard disk, 17 inch monitor etc for 700 australian dollars. When we returned back to India in 2003, we sold it to my friend Venky.

- PC Build #2: After returning back to India in 2003, we moved to Mangalore. In Bangalore, my mother was left without a PC. In 2004, I built the third computer. Unlike the previous computer where I salvaged a lot of parts, this was a complete unit, with a Athlon XP 2000+, 512 MB of RAM, 40 GB hard disk, DVD drive and a 17 inch Samsung monitor. This computer survives till this day, though in a very different form. The guts of the machine (MB+CPU, RAM, HDD) are now in my father-in-law’s machine at Chennai.I’ve upgraded those to a 2.66 GHz Core2Duo E6700 with 2 GB of RAM and 570 GB of hard disk space. The monitor has been exchanged for a 19 inch Viewsonic LCD. The case, keyboard, mouse, speakers and UPS remain functional a full 5 years later. The OS has also evolved, I initially used a copy of Windows 2000, switched to a legal OEM copy of Windows XP in 2006 and when I upgraded the CPU in late 2007, bought a full version of Windows Vista Home Premium.

- Laptop #1: I’ve never been a fan of laptops, despite using a laptop as my primary work machine since 2002. In my view, they were slow and expensive. I finally bit the bullet in 2007 and bought a HP dv6516 tx as a birthday present for Vidya. It cost almost 60000 rupees and had a 1.5 GHz Core2Duo processor, 2 GB of RAM, 160 GB hard drive, 15.4 inch screen and a DVD drive. It came with Windows Vista Home Premium. Except for some reliability with wireless networking, it has performed flawlessly over the past 2 years. I upgraded the machine to the RC version of Windows 7 and intend to upgrade to the full version in October. At the same time, I'll probably upgrade the hard drive to a 500 GB one.

- The Future: Both of my computers are fast enough for anything that I throw at them, whether it is browsing or playing games or encoding movies (OK, the laptop is not, but I would not ever transcode a movie on a laptop when a desktop is available as an option). Another big change is the rise of portable computing through devices like the iphone and Nokia internet tablet. As they evolve, they make the case for a full sized desktop or laptop that much less compelling. So, I don’t see myself upgrading my current setup anytime soon, unless something breaks.

Looking back, I see that pretty much every computer has lasted me atleast 3-4 years, so much for PC’s being unreliable. I’ve also had a lot of good luck with components, very few of them have failed on me. Just listing them down has shown how much progress the PC industry has made in terms of speed and specifications. I remember encoding mp3 in 1997, it used to run at 1/3 speed (i.e. over 15 minutes for a 5 minute song). My current computer can transcode video at 5x speed (120 fps for H.264 compression).

YSR Chopper crash

2009-09-03T05:48:00.000-07:00

There is such a big fuss being made about the reason behind the chopper crash that killed the Andhra CM, YS Rajashekar Reddy with calls to book all those who have not done their job properly. Is it really news that our government servants are incompetent and least interested in their jobs? Every single day, there are umpteen deaths of common people caused by some babu who decided to take it easy on the job. Like the RTO inspector who takes bribes and allows people without basic driving skills to become killing machines on the road. Or the PWD engineer who screws up our pipelines that mix sewage with our water supply. Why is there no outrage at that? Why are there no demands to chop their heads off?

It isn’t nice to speak ill of the dead, but the reality is that YSR has reaped the fruits of what he has sown. It is he and others of his ilk that have tolerated (and even encouraged) incompetence and substandard delivery of services to the public. Why should we be surprised that he has paid the ultimate price for that?

Another post on ethics in Indian IT

2009-09-02T22:05:00.000-07:00

We’re currently transitioning some work from a subcontractor back into our company. Through the transition, it is disturbing to see some of the lack of ethics that are being displayed by people at various levels in the subcontracting company. Some specific examples are

- People accepting our offers in writing and use that as a negotiating tool with a third company. Once they get a job, they turn down the offer throwing our entire planning out of gear

- - People in the higher management of the subcontracting company trying to convince people who have accepted our offers to reject them by offering onsite opportunities and other perks. While this is not a violation of the contract, it clearly goes against the spirit of the contract

The first case is not very surprising because the Indian IT professional’s lack of ethics and pursuit of Mammon is well known. But, it is very frustrating to see Indian IT companies trip each other in this manner. It also causes a project that has been planned over many months to suddenly shift into a constant fire-fighting mode.

A fallout of the situation is that I have to shuttle between Bangalore and Chennai to take control of the transition. I will be getting very familiar with Indian railways over the next few weeks.

Rebooting blogging

2009-08-23T03:52:00.000-07:00

It has been a while since I updated the blog. I would blame it on Twitter and Facebook, which encourage a quick blast of words at the cost of a longer post that needs to be thought through. I've resolved to be a little more regular from now on.

To start off, a few snippets from the last couple of weeks. Of course, it was a huge moment in our lives with the arrival of a baby boy on August 13th. It happened on Gokulashtami day, so we have decided to name him Mukund, one of the names of Lord Krishna. I believe it also means One who bestows/gives Moksha/Nirvana.

Nisha was hugely excited by the event. Though she had been wanting a baby sister, it all changed once she saw her brother. Her happiness has been tinged by disappointment, she had made grand plans to call all her friends and show off her baby brother, but we have tried to avoid too much of contact in light of the swine flu scare. She'll get over it, kids have a way of dealing with these disappointments and focussing on positives.

We were a little disappointed with Divakar hospital. Firstly, we got a room facing the main road that had traffic through the day and night. Our bad luck, the hospital was full, so we could not even get a change of room. They also had no catering facilities. Typically, hospitals provide nutritious, dietician approved meals for the patient, but here, we were forced to bring everything from home. There was also the issue of differing charges, we got a bill for 40K, but my friend Krishna got a bill for 85K for similar treatment. The main thing was the medical staff and attention was good.

We came home on 17th Aug and since then it has been an endless cycle of nappy changing and disturbed sleep. But it is all worthwhile when you see Mukund reacting to his environment.

What real estate slump?

2009-06-16T02:08:00.000-07:00

I have been calling various real estate developers and private sellers over the past few days to get an idea of the real estate market. Here are some of the quotations that I got

Mantri Espana : A super-duper-ultra-luxurious-out-of-this-world-exclusive apartment complex off the ORR with 5 swimming pools, 9 hole mini golf and flats ranging from 2600 to 100000 sq ft. The prices start at 1.2 crores. I said thank you very much and left.

Mantri Flora: At the junction of ORR and Sarjapur Road, 3 bhk apartments for second sale at around 75 lakhs for 1700 sq ft. This works out to over 4000 per sq ft

Sobha : They had an ad for a 3 bhk @ 50 lakhs. This is for their project on Kanakpura Road. For their projects in this part of town, they have a super luxury project starting at over 1.2 cr. Their luxury projects are “only” 77 lakhs for a 3 BHK

Ozone Evergreens@Haralur Road: Touted as the first “affordable” housing complex in Bangalore, this has a 900 sq ft 2 BHK for 28 lakhs all inclusive. This works out to around 3000 per sq ft. Unbelievably, as the sales woman told me, these don’t feature a balcony as they are “affordable housing”.

SJR Eastwood@Haralur Road: A person was selling a 40x80 plot @2800 per sq feet.

Ferns Habitat@ORR: A 2800 sqft plot quoting at 3300 per sq feet

Lakedew Residency@Haralur Road: A 1500 sqft plot quoting at 2600 per sq ft

I didn't pursue any of these opportunities. If these are the prices post the real estate slump, I am stunned.

Is Indian IT too insecure

2009-05-05T21:54:00.000-07:00

Every time we hear Obama's political rhetoric, there is an outcry against the so-called "protectionism" by Nasscom. Frankly, this is making them seem like crybaby's.

Obama is a politician. Whether in India or US, a politician's primary focus is his constituents and his comments are geared towards them. Right now, the US is hurting with massive job losses, and as their elected leader, it is his duty to address that.

Indian companies too have their own set of favourable circumstances vis a vis American firms, they pay almost no tax on their profits due to the STPI scheme. They have a huge wage advantage, as most of their employees are in India. If these are not sufficicient for them to compete and thrive, then they deserve to fail. after all this is the Capitalism that they so praise in action.

As for Nasscom, what happens to their grand pronouncements on the strength of Indian IT (1 million + employees, 60 Billion revenues)? Surely, an industry of this size should be able to innovate to handle any bouncers of this nature? Or deep within their hearts, do they know that Indian IT is nothing but a bunch of low skilled code coolies whose only advantage is the cost and the minute you take that away, the entire thing will unravel?

Taking Internet video to the TV

2009-04-15T04:07:00.000-07:00

Internet video has really hit the mainstream in the last couple of years. Whether it is the regular “legal” avenues like Youtube (www.youtube.com) or P2P networks like bittorrent, there is a vast plethora of content to be found. The challenge has always been on how to bring it into the living room, as most people are not that comfortable watching long form video on their computers. They would much rather sit on their sofas or lie on their beds to watch the latest blockbuster.

Over the years, a lot of effort has gone in to solve this “last-metre” problem. A few notable attempts at solving this are

Apple TV : is a small book sized device that connects to your TV. It can also connect to your network and download movies from your Itunes library on your computer. It provides the ability to purchase movies and TV shows from the Itunes store. As with all Apple products, the process works flawlessly. The catch as always is in the lack of flexibility. It can only play the type of content that Apple allows, which limits its utility. The vast majority of Internet video is encoded in the AVI/XVID format which the Apple TV cannot play. In addition, since the Apple TV lacks a DVD drive, you will need a separate DVD player. The Apple TV is also expensive at over 200 dollars, and is not available in India.

Game Consoles (PS3/XBOX 360) : In addition to being awesome game consoles, both the PS3 and XBOX 360 can also serve as media players. They can play quite a range of video files including most of the common formats found on the Internet. In addition, they have their own video stores where you can pay and download movies and TV shows. If you’re a gamer and already have these consoles, this is the way to go, especially as you get the ability to play games and watch DVD’s on the same device (in the case of PS3, you also get a Blueray drive). However, they are limited in their ability to browse sites like youtube.

Media center extenders: A number of companies (Linksys, D-Link) have launched media center extender products. These connect to your home network (wired or wireless) and can play the video files stored on your computer. Typically this requires some software to be installed on your computer, though Vista has the media sharing feature built in. These have received mixed reviews, the most common complaint is the slow response time.

WD TV: This is a product that was launched in late 2008 and has got very positive reviews. It works like a media center extender without the network capability. You copy the video files to a USB device (pen drive or hard disk) and plug it into the device. The device will scan and play back the file. This approach removes the weakest link of the media center extenders which is the network. The other reason why this has been very successful is the support for virtually every kind of video file (except the copy-protected ones). The downside is that you need to buy an additional USB device and have to spend the effort to copy the files that you want to watch to the device. So, it is not that great for impulse viewing. The lack of any kind of network access is also a negative, as you cannot watch video from any of the online sites like youtube.

Despite all these choices, the best option still remains the Personal Computer. It provides the widest compatibility and support, playing back virtually every form of media. The challenge is to bring the personal computer to the TV and remove the parts that don’t fit in the living room space. Microsoft has done a lot of work on their Media Center software, to the point where the computer can be controlled using just the remote, but until now the hardware has lagged. The average desktop PC is too clunky and noisy to fit in the living room. However, many companies are introducing Home Theater PC’s (HTPC), which are very sleek and do not look out of place in the living room.

The human interface challenge still remains. Though the Media Centre functions can be controlled with a remote, there will still be occasions where you will need to go back to a keyboard and mouse. Having a regular keyboard + mouse in the living room is a no-no for most people. Logitech has the excellent diNovo, but it is an extremely expensive solution. A more elegant solution may be a software based, running on a smartphone that connects to the PC using Bluetooth.

The company that can package all of this together into an integrated solution can make a lot of money. I’ve seen some movement towards this by companies like Acer (Acer Revo) and Asus (EEE Box)

This has been an area of much interest for me, mainly because my TV viewing mostly consists of downloaded TV shows (though these are available on some channels, they are aired much later and not in a widescreen ratio). I’ve hesitated in adopting any of the solutions because the area is very immature and the products are not available in India. I do employ a variant of the PC solution, sometimes connecting my laptop to the TV via HDMI. I also use a program called BlueMaemo on my N800 to control the laptop remotely. It’s not the most elegant solution but works for now.

Why I will vote for the BJP

2009-03-16T22:06:00.000-07:00

Here are 3 reasons why I will vote for the BJP in this coming election

1. Security: It is amazing how the media has pushed the 26/11 attacks to the background. But, let that not distract you, the past 5 years have seen a huge number of terrorist attacks on the population of India. Mumbai was the grand finale, but we had Delhi, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Bangalore, the list goes on. By taking a soft stand on the security issue, the UPA government has failed in its duty to protect the common man. It is a matter of chance whether you will be a victim of the next attack. Everyone knows the root of the issue, but the BJP seems to be the only party willing to tackle it head on. Is that not reason enough?

2. Economic reforms: There is no debate required on whether reforms are good or not, the evidence of the past 20 years is clear enough. The UPA government lucked out by being in power during a period of unprecedented boom, but did very little to contribute to it. On the contrary, it did all it could to derail the momentum that had been built up during the NDA’s term, the Golden quadrilateral, PSU disinvestment, FRBM, each was chucked by the wayside in their quest to ruin the country.

3. Quality of leadership: In most parties in India, you need the right DNA to get to the top. What that essentially means is that unless you are the son of an important party leader, there is no chance you will be anything more than an ordinary party worker. The only parties where this is not the case are the Left parties and the BJP. Which other party can throw up leaders of the integrity and caliber of Vajpayee, Advani, Modi, Jaitley etc?

I have no doubt that the BJP is not everyone’s cup of tea, and a few things about them may turn off some people from the party. Even to them, I will say that the reality is that no party in India is anywhere close to perfect and we need to make compromises. I feel that for all its faults, the BJP is a lesser evil than a Congress led UPA government or a rag-tag bunch of parties calling themselves the Third Front. Look at what each of them offers and then make your decision on who is the best suited to lead India forward for the next 5 years.

World Yatra by KG-2A

2009-02-28T07:46:00.000-08:00

Nisha's class put up a great show. Here are some clips

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Why I hated the Slumdog Oscar tamasha

2009-02-24T01:07:00.000-08:00

I am happy for Rahman and Boyle and the other cast of Slumdog Millionaire for the glory they got at the Oscars. They understood the way the Oscar game is played and did a perfect job there. But the general euphoria about it over the past couple of days has left me angry. Very angry. Why? Here are a few reasons

- Firstly, the film. I haven’t seen the movie but have spoken to people who have and also read reviews. A common feeling is that it portrays Indian society in an extremely derogatory way. Why would I go and support a film jo mere pe thoonkta hai?

- Secondly, the media would like us to believe that this is the arrival of Indian cinema on the world stage and there is no stopping us now. That is Grade A bullshit. The fact is that the movie was a Hollywood production and that’s what got it the awards. I am willing to bet that if it was made by an Indian crew, it would not even have been nominated.

- Thirdly, why do we as a people have such low self-esteem that we need to be praised by the West to have really arrived? I’d really like to see a day where we see the Oscars for what it is, an American award that is given by an American industry association, not some great honour that has been bestowed on us.

 I'm definitely very happy for Rahman, he is one of the masters of our generation and deserves to be recognized. It's just sad that he had to get the award for a work which is nowhere near his best.

A missed opportunity

2009-01-29T01:14:00.000-08:00

The government has swung into election mode by announcing a substantial decrease in the price of petroleum products. It is good for the consumer, but is it good for India overall? Granted, we have had a crash in oil prices and a period of relative stability over the past 2-3 months. But, who knows what the situation may be in 6 months. If the price of oil skyrockets, will we again go into a cycle of under-recovery and a mounting subsidy bill?

The prudent thing for the government would have been to take advantage of the low prices to bring about a degree of deregulation. They could have revised prices on a monthly basis or even rationalized the taxes and duties on petroleum products. But that would have been too much to expect from the worst government in Indian history.

Satyam

2009-01-07T07:05:00.000-08:00

India's Enron...No truth at Satyam... the headlines are flying thick and fast. I'd predicted its downfall when the scandal initially broke, but I never suspected that a fraud of this magnitude was possible.

Beyond the uncertain future of the company and its employees, it raises quite a few questions

- How will it affect the image of Indian IT? All along, we'd held them up as ethical role models in a generally corrupt and immoral corporate system. How many more Satyam's are waiting to be discovered?

- How will it affect the Indian stockmarket? Will FII's pull out or will India's growth potential override this? There was some kind of recovery happening over the last couple of months, will this spell an end to that?

- Coming to Satyam's employees, I think with almost no cash on their books, they are going to have to do a mass layoff of all the non-billable resources. With the Indian IT job market already looking bleak, what will happen when thousands of people are added to the list of job-seekers?

- Will Satyam's customers jump ship? If they do, will it be to other Indian IT companies or will the MNC's benefit?

On a side note, I'd picked up Satyam shares in December at 115. Yesterday, I exited at 180, making it one of the best investment decisions I ever made. But somehow, I am not feeling that thrilled about it.

Karwar Trip

2009-01-03T08:45:00.000-08:00

Here are some photos from our trip to Karwar over the New year

Karwar Trip

Trip to Devbagh Island

2008-12-31T22:55:00.000-08:00

We had been promising Nisha a trip to the beach for a long time. So, when her Christmas vacation started, it was time to start planning. Unfortunately, we left it too late and most of the places I checked were pretty much booked solid. I had almost given up hope and started planning for a trip to Chennai when the agent called to say that a cottage at Devbagh beach resort was available for 2 nights. It also helped us check one more thing on our to-do list, which was to make a trip to Karwar, where Vidya had grown up.

We had got the booking for Sunday and Monday nights. We decided to start driving on Saturday itself to make full use of the weekend. Our cook packed us a great lunch of puliyogere and thayirsadam, just like the old days when we would pack food and eat on the wayside. Our target destination on the first day was Hubli, where we hoped to find a decent hotel to stay at. Rather than risk the regular jams on Tumkur Road, we decided to take a slightly longer route via Dodbal

lapur and Dabbaspete. It was a good decision, as the traffic was very light and we reached Tumkur around 2 hours after we left. The main downside was the many speedbreakers along the way, it was almost as if each house in evey village had constructed one to slow the cars down.

We had a quick bite at the Kamat Upachar and set out towards Chitradurga. The highway between Tumkur and Chitradurga was awesome, as most completed section

s of the GQ are. On the way to Chitradurga, we saw an amazing vista of over a hundred windmills. Apparently, this is a windfarm run by Suzlon and has

generated a lot of controversy for environment damage.

Once past Chitradurga, the road deteriorates rapidly, with lots of unfinished sections. Unfortunately, our present buffoons in the UPA government view the highway project as a low priority and all work on the uncompleted portions seems to have come to a standstill.

It was now almost 2:00pm and we were looking for a place to stop and have lunch. That's when we realized the other main casualty of the four-laning project, the tree cover. There is absolutely no shade anywhere to be found. After driving for almost 20 km, we found some shade and stopped for lunch.

We progressed slowly, past Harihar, Davangere, Rannebennur. Finally, after we crossed Haveri, the conditions improved and we were able to make faster progress, finally reaching Hubli at 6:30, a full 9 hours after we started. I'd managed to get the name of a decent hotel (Hotel Hans) from one of my friends, but there was no number. Luckily, we found that they had some rooms available and were abl

e to check in. The hotel was average, but the food (both dinner and breakfast the next morning) was really good.

The next morning, we had a short stop at Lake Unkal. This is a fairly large lake in Hubli and looked quite clean, unlike some of the lakes in Bangalore. There is a statue of Swami Vivekananda in the middle (a la Lord Buddha at the Hussain Sagar Lake in Hyderabad)

, but we couldn't really make out from the distance.

The highway from Hubli to Ankola was once described as the "worst road in the country" due to the hundreds

of iron-ore laden trucks from Bellary that had destroyed the road. However, with the collapse of iron-ore exports, the road had significantly improved. The road still bears the scars, everything has a reddish hue, the leaves on the trees are coloured red and the overloaded trucks have sunk the ground by a few inches, making it an unpleasant ride for a car that has a narrower track.

We reached Karwar at lunchtime and checked into the hotel office in the city. The resort we had booked in, Devbagh Beach Resort, is run by Jungle Lodges. As the only access to the resort is via boat, it is relatively uncrowded and clean. The beach is clean and shallow enough that you can venture a few hundred feet and still have the water only reach up to waist level. The waves are also relatively small, so it is a great beach for children to play in. There are varied levels of accommodation ranging from tents to log huts. We had booked a fisherman’s log hut, but due to overbooking, we were upgraded to a higher category of loghut with air-conditioning. Being a enterprise that promotes eco-tourism, there are not that many frills in the resort, no TV, telephone or restaurant. Instead, there is a common dining area with set times for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Nisha was eager to hit the beach right away, but we convinced her to wait until 4 o’clock when the heat subsides a little bit. She had a great time playing in the water till around 6:00 pm, when we decided to head back to the room and get ready for the campfire. It turned out to be a disappointment, as there was no activity planned as such, it was just people getting into their groups around the fire. But, it was a great night for stargazing, the lack of city lights meant that we saw a lot more stars that we ever could in Bangalore.

We were woken up at 5:30 am the next morning for the nature walk. Vidya and Nisha were in no mood to get up, so I went alone. It was quite windy and chilly, but the people who braved it were treated to a fantastic sunrise over the mountains.

The nature walk was quite entertaining, with the guide Anil rattling off quite a few jokes in hindi and Kannada. The highlight was when he dug up some river

crabs and put them on people’s hands for a special photo-op. These were fairly docile and the non-biting variety.

Later on, he dug up a proper ocean crab (chamadi nikalne wala) from the beach. This was a real mean one, when he held up a small stick, it immediately grabbed it and held on with a surprisingly firm grip. He took it back with him, probably a lunch feast.

Soon after breakfast, we went back to Karwar to visit the colony where Vidya grew up. On the way, we stopped at one of her father’s colleague, Mr Saxena’s house. Though they were Biharis, they had grown so much in love with the place, that they had settled down in Karwar itself. It was a beautiful place, with a large garden and lots of trees. The fact that it would cost less money to buy than an average 2 bedroom apartment in Bangalore, left me wondering whether we have our priorities right. The factory and colony were around 5 km away in a place called Biniga. We were taken on a tour of the place by one of the older employees. It was a nice place, clean and well maintained, but as the person explained, it was no longer like the olden days. The plant was being operated with a lot fewer employees and there was a lot of movement of people, so the community had been built around the factory in the 70s and 80s was no longer present. In addition, the beach near the colony had been acquired by the Navy, who had built a 10 foot wall along the road. As a result, Vidya was quite disappointed and was wishing that she had not come to see the place in its current state.

From there, it was back to the resort for lunch and more beach activity. This time, we walked further along the beach and found a small pool of water where Nisha enjoyed herself tremendously. We had to check out the next morning. Before we left, we took the boat ride into the sea that was included as part of the package. If we were fortunate, we would be able to see some dolphins. But, it was not our lucky day. Not only did we see no dolphins, on the way back, the boat broke down. The boatman dropped the anchor and we waited there for almost half an hour for the other boat to come and pick us up. As a result, we could only leave Karwar only by 12:00 pm. Our plan was to visit the famous Mahabaleshwar temple, but due to the late departure, we decided to leave Gokarna for another time and instead visit Yana.

Before the trip, I had researched and found that it was advisable to get to Sirsi and then go to Yana rather than take the direct route from Kumta. So, we went on NH17 towards Kumta and took the smaller state highway towards Sirsi. A few km before Sirsi, we found a turnoff towards Yana. We enquired with a local shop on the condition of the road and got the reply “Channagidde sir, hoga baudu”. As we discovered later, the perception of a good road is very different in Sirsi. The road was average to begin with and progressively got worse. To make things even more exciting, we saw a huge black snake cross the road just before our car. That made me even more cautious, as we didn’t want a puncture or breakdown in that place. Along the way, we considered turning back many times, but the thing that kept us going was the chance that maybe we had taken the bad road and there was a better road to Sirsi. Finally, we reached Yana taking almost 1.5 hours to travel the 30 km. There we were told that the actual rock was a 1.5 hour trek. More disappointing was the news that the only way back to Sirsi was along the same road that we had come. We were so dis-spirited that we decided to skip the trek and head back to Sirsi. The first 15 km were hell, when we came up to a fork in the road. We decided to skip the path we had come on and take the other one to Sirsi. It was a couple of km of the same bad roads and then miraculously, the road improved and we had a fantastic 20 km till we reached Sirsi. We had a quick bite and moved towards Haveri to join the national highway.

The road from Sirsi to Haveri was only marginally better, hardly more than single lane in many places, a broken surface and almost no traffic. We made slow progress and covered the 90 km distance in around 2 hours. A quick stop in Haveri for some fuel and tea followed. By now, it was almost 8 pm and reaching Bangalore was out of question. We decided to stop for the night at Davengere. Luckily, I remembered my friend Shashi, who is from Davangere, and got the names of a few hotels from him. A quick call to Just Dial got us their contact details and we had a confirmed room booking. We finally reached Davangere at 10:30 pm, just in time to get a quick bite before the hotel kitchen closed.

After the adventures of the previous day, the drive back to Bangalore was boring. We reached Neelamangala at 2:00 pm and took over 2 hours to get to HSR Layout. For the third year in a row, I arrived home just in time for new years eve. This time, we were just too tired to stay up, so we did the traditional new year cake cutting at 9 pm before going to sleep!!!

Discovering Uttara Kannada

2008-12-17T16:29:00.000-08:00

We are going on a road trip after a long time. The last trip that we took by road was to Coorg in April. This time, we are planning to visit Yana, Gokarna before landing at Devbagh island at Karwar for a couple of days of relaxation. We will come back via Hubli, partly fulfilling my long standing dream of driving from Bangalore to Pune.

More bailouts

2008-12-17T16:04:00.000-08:00

So, now the Indian government is going into baliout mode. I wonder what it is, China envy, if you can come up with a 500 million dollar bailout, so can we.

There are a couple of problems here
- The Chinese government is rolling in cash with huge surpluses. The Indian government is broke and the true magnitude of how broke is hidden because they keep items like fertilizer/oil subsidy out of the budget statement
- They are targetting the wrong segments. I completely agree with help for the auto and textile segments. But realty? Come on.
- They're trying to make it cheaper to get loans for homes/cars etc. But what they don't realize is that we Indians are among the most risk averse people in the world. When the future is so hazy, why would people go out and take a loan even if it 2-3% cheaper than a couple of months ago?

Talking about realty again, no amount of stimulus is going to turn the situation around till prices come down to reasonable levels. Charging 80 lakhs for an apartment that falls apart in a couple of years is just not sustainable. Even if you give it a fancy name and come up with great looking brochures and websites. Has anyone considered the average income level of people in this country before taking prices to such absurd levels?

It's the same with automobiles. We're seeing a war of words between the auto companies and banks. The auto companies are saying that banks are not bringing down the interest rates fast enough while the banks are saying that no one is actually approaching them for auto loans. The auto companies were blinded by the boom years and thought that the cycle of people upgrading their cars every 2, 3 or 4 years will continue forever. They didn't realize that when people are uncertain about their jobs, cars are one of the easiest purchases to defer.

Overall, I am extemely uncomfortable with the whole bailout idea. My reasoning is simple, we had many excesses during the last few years primarily caused by a huge oversupply of money. At some point the bubble has to burst before things get back to normal. But, by throwing more money at the problem, aren't governments just postponing the inevitable and setting us up for an even greater bust?

Satyam's downfall

2008-12-16T21:39:00.000-08:00

In the past decade where we have seen scandals like Enron, sub-prime crisis etc, really surprises anymore. In India, we have had our fair share of crooks. Even then, I was astonished with the brazenness and audacity of what the promoters of Satyam tried to do yesterday. They announced the acquisition of Maytas Infra and Maytas Properties, which are promoted by the same family and friends of the family. All this for a royal sum of 8000 crores. I immediately sensed this as the biggest diversion (robbery?) of public money since the Reliance Power IPO earlier this year.

The response was immediate with analysts and institutions blasting the move. Ramalinga Raju came on CNBC and bumbled his way through a tough Q&A session. The ADR tumbled by over 55%. All this reaction led to a withdrawal of the acquisition.

I’ve always thought of Satyam (and by association, Raju) as a follower rather than a leader, someone who had no original idea or vision and was always aping the big three of Indian IT (TCS, Infosys, Wipro). His commitment to IT was always suspect. Even if you take away the moral and ethical concerns, the fact that he wanted to diversify into real estate essentially shows where his true interests lie.

I think this is the beginning of the end for Satyam. With its reputation effectively in the toilet with respect to corporate governance, any sane investor or institution is going to dump the stock. This coupled with the tough economic situation is going to lead to very tough future for Satyam. I wouldn’t be surprised to see that it is a shadow of its former self in 2 years time.

Mumbai terror attacks

2008-11-27T00:16:00.000-08:00

I don’t know how or why, but this morning I got up at 4:30 am and couldn’t go back to sleep. So, I made myself some coffee and proceeded to check my email and Google news reader. One of the feeds that I read mentioned about the usage of Twitter, blogs, flickr etc in reporting the Mumbai blasts. I clearly remember thinking why it is a story today when the blasts happened quite a while ago. I attributed it to a reposting and went on. Around 6:00 am, I went to Rediff to check on the cricket score when the enormity of the terrorist attack hit. I switched on the TV and watched for a while, but after a while I just couldn’t take the tamasha that these people were turning it into.

I was angry, really angry. The anger prompted me to write an open letter to our country’s leadership.

Dr Manmohan Singh

Prime Minister

Republic of India

Dear Dr Singh,

By now, you would be well aware of the attacks in Mumbai. Though I live in Bangalore, I feel that these were an attack on me. It was just a chance that it took place in a different location to where I was, each of the persons killed could well have been me. They were just individuals who were going out for dinner or returning home from work or brave officers who jumped in knowing very well that they may not return alive. We have seen many attacks in the past and the response from you and your members of Cabinet have never been more than empty words. I am afraid for the future of our country, because I feel that the people of India have reached a tipping point and unless you act decisively, the outcome will be an end of the India that we know and love.

Here are a few things that I would like you to do

- You keep saying that terrorism has no religion. Yet, we have seen an amazing game of double standards being played out in the media. An elaborate case has been concocted against Pragya and Lt Col Purohit and the media has gone to town heralding the rise of “Hindu terrorism”. Can we have the same sense of purpose in all terrorism cases? Do not let vote bank politics play a role in the investigation

- Do not negotiate with the terrorists. They may kill a few hostages, yes that is damaging for the people and their families, but the damage to the country that is caused by your capitulation is far worse.

- If reports are true and Pakistan is behind these attacks, we need to take decisive action against them, even if it means large causalities on our side. Otherwise we will forever be known as a weak state that will keep facing attacks like this one.

Going by the past record of your government, I have 0% confidence that any of my wishes will come through. But I live in hope, because the alternative is to live in fear. That would mean giving in to the terrorists.

Sincerely

An Indian Citizen

Futures trading

2008-11-20T07:23:00.000-08:00

I had been looking at futures trading for a while, but always maintained a healthy distance from it. My friend Shashi was constantly pushing me to give it a try, my relationship manager at ICICI kept calling me every day with updates on the market and trading strategies, but I had resisted.

The thing that changed my mind was the falls that we saw in October. I could only watch as every single investment that I had made (stocks, mutual funds, PMS schemes) went down in value by 25, 35 and even 50% in some cases. It seemed that the least risky way to make money was going short. Given that we follow a same day settlement, short selling in the cash market meant day trading. In my view, that is just gambling and it has never worked for me in the past.

So, I have made my first tentative steps trading in futures, a month ago. I set a few ground rules for myself before I started
- Set aside a small amount of money and do not take positions beyond this. Ensure there is adequate margins available so that the broker does not close out the position
- No day trading, I don't have access to a trading screen or my broker's website most of the time. So, most orders would be placed at the start of the day
- Very conservative stop losses. This was the most difficult decision for me. My reasoning is that most people put very conservative stop loss, which in a volatile environment gets triggered very easily. While this may limit thier losses, it would also rule out opportunities for gain in the longer term
- Restrict the trading to the NIFTY and a few stocks that I had been following for a long time. At this time, I've picked 5 of them (Bharti, SAIL, Reliance, TCS and Infosys). All of these are fairly volatile and extremely liquid

I did have a few stomach churning sessions towards the end of last month when I had a buy on NIFTY at 3300. Over the next few days, it dipped to 2300, and I was down by almost a lakh of rupees. I wasn't prepared for such a big loss right at the start, so I broke my rule #1 and paid up the additional margin. Thankfully, the market retraced to 3200 and I was able to exit with a much smaller loss.

Other than that single transaction, it has been a really good month. I've been lucky in making the right calls both on the short and long sides. I know this won't last forever, there will be the inevitable bad call, but as long as I keep my head and not get carried away, I'm hopeful that it will give me some good profits.

Of course, this will never make up for the losses elsewhere, but in a general gloomy outlook, every bit of good news helps.

A new champion is crowned

2008-11-03T02:28:00.001-08:00

So, finally one of the most exciting F1 championships ended with Lewis Hamilton being crowned at the very last corner. It was a completely disheartening time for Massa, who initially believed he had won only to lose it at the very last corner as Timo Glock's decision to stay on dry tires backfired.

Though Lewis is a great driver, I feel that Massa deserved it more. He had two sure wins in Hungary and Singapore taken away by other people's mistakes. Lewis by comparision did not have a single retirement. If things had worked out, Massa would have won quite comfortably.

On the whole, bar the occasional race, I found that the F1 races were becoming extremely boring and for the first time in many years, I did not watch a couple of races. The farce of the safety car lottery also made it worse, I'd rather that the cars start overtaking each other on track. Hopefully with the massive change in rules for 2009, we will have a better spectacle.

My picks for the best drivers and races
Races: Canada, Britain, Belgium, Singapore, Brazil. Three of these were rain affected and two were influenced by the safety car. Anyone see a problem here?
Best drivers: Kubica, Vettel, Alonso, Massa, Hamilton
Most underperforming drivers: Kovy, Raikonnen, Bourdais, Button, Fisichella

Nandi Hills ride

2008-11-03T01:18:00.001-08:00

I had cycled twice before to Nandi hills, but never done the complete ride from Bangalore and back. The first time, ,I'd started from the Nandi cross on NH-7. The second time, we had started from Bangalore, but could not complete the ride back due to severe headwinds and a puncture. I was determined to complete it fully and finally did it yesterday.

Eight of us started off from Hebbal at 6:30. People kept dropping off and finally when we reached the base of Nandi, there were only 4 of us left. I had two goals on the climb, one to do it nonstop and secondly to avoid using the lowest gear. I achieved the first one, but the second one was too hard especially on the later stages. On the way back, we took the route via Doddballapur to avoid the hot sun and headwinds that are always present on NH-7. We reached Hebbal at 3:30, it was a ride to cherish.

Stats
Total distance: 106 km
Time from Hebbal to Nandi base : 1 hr 50 min
Time to climb to top: 50 min
Time to descend : 12 min 42 sec
Ave speed on descent: 37.5 kmph
Max speed on descent : 67.5 kmph
Time from Nandi base to Hebbal : 2 hr 5 min
Overall ave speed: 21.2 kmph
Ave speed excluding Nandi: 23 kmph

Layoffs, Airlines etc

2008-10-17T04:13:00.000-07:00

Having seen the drama created by the massive layoffs at Jet Airways and the subsequent reinstatement of the staff, I now understand why the IT companies in India behave the way they do when it comes to retrenchment. They never admit to layoffs, it is always described as “performance related separation”. Initially, I had thought that it is related to their stock price, but now I realize it is to avoid getting the politicians involved.

As for Jet, I fear that it may not be around in its present form for much longer. Though the immediate crisis has been averted, the conditions continue to be as difficult as before and they will continue to hemorrhage money. They have also cut down their schedule drastically for the coming months, so I wonder what all these people are going to do?

Speaking of airline schedules, I had to fly to Chennai earlier this week at very short notice. To my surprise, the agent just came up with a couple of options for flights in the morning. It did seem like the airlines have drastically cut down on the short haul flights. The rates were astronomical as well, Kingfisher was quoting over 10K, they finally got me on a Jet flight at 5K. The days when all 3 of us flew round trip from Bangalore to Goa for 10K, seem like a very distant memory.

The other observation I had was the security check at Bangalore airport. The queue was atleast 50 people and according to a Jet employee, this was an everyday occurrence due to the huge number of flights that take off in a very short time period. If that was the case, I wonder why they do not double the number of security personnel for that time period to make life easier for the passengers?

Mumbai Pune photos

2008-10-09T08:28:00.000-07:00

We had gone away for a week to Mumbai and Pune for Nisha's vacations. Here are some photos from the trip

Google Android

2008-09-24T03:56:00.000-07:00

I watched the live stream of the T-mobile G1 launch, the first Android phone yesterday. The event was almost amateurish, a simple stage, photographers bunching around like they were at an Indian politician rally and there appeared to have been no preparation for possible questions, quite often the various gentlemen were looking around clueless while they figured out a response. You'd definitely never see this happening at an Apple event.

I never had any great expectations from the phone itself. In any case, it is not going to be launched in India anytime soon, but what I am excited about is the platform and the promise it holds. It is only a matter of time before the other partners start bringing their products into the market, and this is going to bring smartphones prices way down.

The real potential of the platform is the software and the apps. Apple seemed to have that momentum and mindshare but given the restrictions on their SDK and the god-like power they hold over which apps get sold, that could be waning pretty fast. Though WinMo and Symbian have a huge developer community and lots of apps, I predict that Android will eclipse them quite easily.

Capgemini offsite meet

2008-09-02T19:34:00.001-07:00

We went away to Kumarakom for 3 days of serious fun (er work). Here are some photos from the trip

Scariest flight yet

2008-08-27T05:23:00.000-07:00

We had our group's annual strategy meeting at Kumarakom earlier this week (I will write about that and the Poovar visit soon). We returned last night and it was one of the scariest flights I had ever been on. When we took off, it wasn't too bad. But once they served dinner, it started moving around a bit, enough that they had to suspend the service. Then we hit a giant air pocket and the plane fell what seemed like a few hundred feet. Everyone was thrown up, only the seatbelts kept them on their seats. The dinner wasn't as lucky and plates and spoons and food was all over the cabin. The rest of the flight was bad, but luckily we didn't hit any more air pockets. Everyone was counting the minutes till we landed. As the pilot announced the landing, we began to relax and from the window, i could see the airport surroundings as we descended. But, there was no sound of the landing gear deploying and sure enough, we started to gain height again and were in full take off mode. There was no word on why this happened for around 10 minutes and this only heightened our fear that there was something wrong with the plane. After some time, the pilot came on and said that the conditions were too bad for landing and put on some music to calm the passengers. We stayed in the air for around 30 minutes more. All this time, it was raining heavily and the plane was getting thrown all over the place. People were very tense, many of them closing their eyes and praying for a safe landing. Finally, at 10:50, almost 90 minutes after we took off, the plane came in for the final landing. This time, the landing gear deployed properly and we made it safely to the ground.

Trip to Poovar

2008-08-22T04:44:00.000-07:00

We signed up for a Club Mahindra membership last year, this gives us a week’s stay at any of the Club Mahindra resorts every year for the next 25 years. As part of the joining incentive, we got a 5 day free stay at a Club Mahindra resort and a 2 week free stay at any international resort. We used the Club Mahindra offer for a week’s stay at their resort at Poovar Kerala, which is near Trivandrum. The plan was to leave Bangalore on the 14th and return on the 21st of August and in the process celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary there. It didn’t exactly go to plan…

We’d decided to travel by train for a couple of reasons. Firstly, Nisha has never really experienced train travel and we wanted her to go on a longer train trip. Also, the train ticket cost me around 6K, whereas the cheapest flight tickets were almost 30K. As the train timings were extremely convenient, we decided that we can put the extra money to better use, like buying a new smartphoneJ

We set out on 14th evening, armed with umbrellas and raincoats, as we expected heavy rain in Kerala. As it turned out, the only rain that we saw was in Bangalore as we were waiting to board the train. For dinner, we finished off the delicious aloo paranthas that I’d ordered from our neighbourhood Punjabi dhaba. We reached Trivandrum right on time, around 12:00 pm and took a taxi to the resort, which was around 30 km away.

The resort is located on a river island right at the place where the river meets the Arabian sea, which meant that we had to take a boat to get to the resort. As we reached the resort, we passed the estuary where the river meets the sea. We also saw a few local boys swimming in the river, though none were doing so around the estuary, which we learnt was quite dangerous.

We had reservations for a floating cottage, which are built on a hollow concrete base and tethered to the shoreline. However, as these cottages were shutdown in the weeks prior to our arrival due to high tides and wind, they were not ready for occupation when we arrived. They put us up in a regular room, with a hammock in the balcony for a couple of days before we shifted to the floating cottage. In hindsight, that was a good break, as I was not very impressed with the cottage, which had quite a shabby feel to it. In contrast, the rooms were extremely impressive, spacious and neat.

We visited Kovalam beach on Sunday. It was a big letdown, the erosion was so bad that there was barely 20 feet of beach left and in many places, it was even less. The water was also quite rough and the lifeguards prevented anyone from venturing more than 10-15 feet into the water. We were hoping to have some bhelpuri or chaat items, but all the establishments at Kovalam seem to cater to the foreign tourist, all we could get was sandwiches. I am sure it is a much better place to visit during the season, but based on what I saw, I don’t see why it should deserve the fame that it has as one of the best beaches in India.

Other than the trip to Kovalam, we did not move out of the resort during our entire stay. Our usual routine was

- get up and have coffee
- have a heavy buffet breakfast
- relax for a couple of hours on the hammock
- Nisha an I would then hit the swimming pool for a couple of hours, while Vidya spent time reading
- Eat a heavy lunch
- Sleep for 2-3 hours
- Laze around till dinner
- Dinner was a light affair, we would typically order some phulkas and dal in the room
- Watch TV

With food and rest being the mainstay, it was no wonder that I found all my trousers getting much tighter when I returned back to Bangalore. The food was the typical resort food, a huge spread with many salads, curries and desserts. It would have been a dream 20 years back when I had an unlimited appetite, but times have changed and we tired of it in a couple of days. On the last day, it was a relief when we found that there was no buffet due to low occupancy.

The one major disappointment was the activity centre. On our previous stay at Coorg, the activity centre was bussing through the day with lot of things for children to do. Here, it was the exact opposite; it was a small dingy place where you were left to yourself. Luckily, the weather was glorious throughout and we could use the pool, or else Nisha would have been bored to death. In total, we spent almost 10 hours in the pool. She became great friends with a 8 year old girl Trisha from Mumbai, who took it upon herself to teach her to swim. Some progress was made, but there is still a long way to go.

By Monday, we had completely unwound and were really beginning to enjoy ourselves. However, it was not destined to last. There was a strike called by the left parties on the 20th, which was the day when we had to leave for Bangalore. The resort informed us that there would be no taxi service after 6 am on that day. So, we had a choice of waking up at 3:00 am and getting dropped to the station by 5:00 am or moving to Trivandrum the previous day and checking into a hotel near the station. The thought of waiting 7 hours in a station during a bandh was not very appealing, so we went for the latter option. We checked into the Comfort Inn Grand, which was around 2 km from the railway station, right on MG Road on the 19th. We left most of the luggage in the cloak room, the plan was that even if we don’t get transport to the station, we could always walk if we don’t have much stuff to carry.

The next morning, we woke up to the news trains were being stopped all over the state. We were in a quandary, do we check out, go to the station and find that our train was stopped, thus having a lengthy wait. Or do we wait it out at the hotel, thus running the risk of missing the train in case they started running again? We decided that I would go alone to the station at 10:00 to get a real assessment and depending on the situation, we would take a call. In the worst case, we’d just stay put for another day and take a flight to Bangalore on the 21st. On the way, I found that MG Road, which was choc-a-block with traffic the previous evening was completely free. At the station, the person at the information desk informed me that our train was running on schedule and was slated to leave on time. I hurried back to the hotel, hoping that they would be able to organize a private vehicle for us to get to the station. Unfortunately, they had no vehicles available or did not want to take a chance. So, now our only option was to walk. If I had not gone earlier, I would have just not taken the chance, but having seen that the police were out in force throughout our route to the station gave us the confidence to go ahead. We reached the station without incident after a 20 minute walk. By this time, the trains were running normally and our train departed on schedule at 12:55. We reached Bangalore right on schedule on 21st morning and got ready for the regular grind.

Joke of the year : iphone India launch

2008-08-21T02:29:00.000-07:00

As expected, greedy Apple and even greedier mobile operators Airtel and Vodafone have totally screwed up on the pricing of the iphone in India. At 31000 for the 8 GB version and 36100 for the 16 GB one, I doubt they will be selling more than a handful. Personally, I never intended to buy the iphone, but was hoping for competitive pricing that would force Nokia to cut prices on its other smartphones (like the N82). At this price, I doubt they would even bother.

Only in India

2008-08-07T01:47:00.001-07:00

We have this automated bill payment machine from Vodafone in our office. It works fairly well, you enter your number, it connects over the GSM network to the server and retrieves your bill details. You then have the option of paying by cash/cheque or swiping your credit card. All of this works pretty well. The craziness, however, starts after you have paid the bill. Vodafone has employed a person to record the details of your payment on a sheet of paper. He even has columns for recording the number of notes that you insert (10, 20, 50, 100, 500, wonder what he would do if you paid with a 1000 rupee note).

I wonder what prompted such a system, a distrust of technology or the abundance of cheap labour?

Bangalore MTB Race : August 3rd

2008-08-06T00:01:00.000-07:00

The Bangalore Bikers Club is a community of cycling enthusiasts in Bangalore. It hosts a wide range of discussions from choice of cycling equipment to weekend ride plans. A few weeks back, a group of cyclists upped the ante and decided to hold competitive events to test the speed and ability of the group members. The first of these events was a ride from Hebbal to Nandi Hills. Due to the extreme nature of the event, the participation was very poor with 5-6 people showing up and only 4 people finishing. The group therefore decided to make the next event more accessible to a larger audience and that is how the idea of the first Bangalore MTB race was born.

The event was held on Sunday, the 3^rd of August. An offroad trail of 13 km off Sarjapur Road was recced and marked for the race. The trail was fairly challenging, the terrain ranged from short stretches of smooth tarmac to typical unpaved roads and trails found everywhere in India. The recent rains had converted some sections to slush, some of it so deep that a truck got stuck during the race. It passed through fields, a garbage dumpyard as well as some manmade forests.

The response was extremely good, around 30 cyclists showed up and 25 participated in the race. Though the race was scheduled to start at 8:00 am, there was a delay as the organizing team took longer than expected to mark the trails. It finally started around 8:45.

A few of the riders just took off at the start, I decided to pace myself as I didn’t want to run out of steam in the latter part of the race. I followed a cyclist for almost the entire first lap, but then found that he was going quite slow and once I got past, I left him quite a way behind. I completed the first lap in around 45 minutes and was 11^th out of 25 riders. The second lap was almost solitary without much company and I was able to maintain my pace and recorded an almost similar time. On the third lap, I caught up with another rider, Dinakar midway and we rode together till the end of the lap. Though we did not overtake many people, we found ourselves in 4^th and 5^th places, as many of the riders who had ridden away had dropped out. The timekeeper encouraged us by mentioning that we were just a minute behind the 3^rd placed rider. Dinakar took off in pursuit, but I decided to rest for a few seconds before starting off. I used the time to eat a couple of bananas, this was to prove invaluable later. I caught up with Dinakar a couple of kilometers later and as we entered the offroad section, we could see the other rider upfront. I encouraged Dinakar to come with me and we caught up with him quite easily. By then we had come to the slushy part and we found that a truck had got stuck completely blocking the way. Since, we were still racing, all of us dismounted and carried our bikes over the slush. At this time, I was really pumped up and wanted to ride really hard for the next section to put some distance between me and the other two. However, those two guys were really spent and fell quite a bit back, so I relaxed a little bit and concentrated on getting a good rhythm going.

Towards the end of the lap, I spotted another rider (I thought he was the second placed rider, but he was a lap behind) and set about catching him. Though I was able to catch up with him, I decided to wait until the final straight to overtake, it was a long uphill slope and I figured that if I really pushed and got past, he would find it difficult to respond. It worked exactly as I planned, as he saw me coming, he started to pedal faster, but after I shifted to a higher gear and kicked hard, he was unable to respond and gave up. I finally finished almost 50 meters ahead of him. My lungs were literally bursting from the final effort but the feeling of achievement made up for it.

My total time for the 4 laps was 2:55, the lap timings were really consistent, between 43 and 45 minutes for each of the laps. I was quite a way behind the first and second riders, who finished in 2:22 and 2:26 respectively. There were 7 people who finished behind me, the last rider finished in 3:30. In all, 17 out of 25 people completed atleast half the race.

Podcasting : An Introduction

2008-07-31T02:40:00.000-07:00

Over the last couple of years, I’ve listened to over 1000 hours of audio on my ipod, but fewer than 10% of it has been spent on listening to music. The bulk of it has gone into listening to various podcasts. Podcasts are essentially audio files that are delivered to the listener through RSS feeds. They can be on any topic, ranging from movies to technology to news. There is nothing very technical about podcasting, the actual audio file, it is a plain mp3 file that can be played almost anywhere. However, you need a “podcatcher” program that can parse the RSS feed, make sense of the content and download the audio file for your listening pleasure. The best podcatcher software by far is iTunes. In my view, there are three different elements of podcasting that Apple has really nailed

Subscribing to content: The itunes store is the most comprehensive repository for finding podcasts. It is neatly categorized and subscribing to a podcast is a single click process. In the rare event that you have a podcast that is not present in the itunes directory, Apple allows you to enter the URL of the RSS feed

Tracking episodes: Most podcatchers offer this, but none work as elegantly as iTunes. You can set it to automatically download all new episodes, it keeps track of episodes that have been played and can clean up older episodes automatically. If you are like me and want to control the entire process, you can set everything to manual mode and take care of it yourself.

Integration with portable devices: This is the area where itunes+ipod pulls ahead and leaves everything far behind. You can control how many episodes are downloaded to your ipod, once you hear something on the ipod, it automatically shows up as played content on itunes. If you have heard part of an episode on the ipod, once you sync back to itunes, it even resumes playback at the same place!!!

There is a veritable treasure trove of content out there and most of it is free. Some of the podcast feeds that I listen to are

CNN-IBN : This is the feed from CNN-IBN. They mainly feature programs like Devil’s Advocate with Karan Thapar (I hate his interview style, but I still listen to him) and some interviews with prominent personalities from the film and arts world. They like to throw in their news bulletins, which is one of the main reasons why I resort to manual control of downloads.

TWIT: twit.tv is a podcasting network started by Leo Laporte, a prominent tech journalist for many years. He produces over 20 shows a week and I listen to a few of them like This week in tech, Windows Weekly and Macbreak Weekly

Buzz out loud: My favourite source for tech news is cnet.com, this is their daily podcast that presents tech news in a light hearted manner. They are up to episode 780 now, I’ve been listening since episode 380, which means that I’ve devoted almost 300 hours of my life listening to BOL.

NPR Science Friday: I believe this is a very popular science program in the US, the podcast is just another distribution medium for them. I have learnt more things about more subjects in the two years that I have been listening to this podcast than in the previous 15 years since I left college.

The one caveat to keep in mind with podcasting is the bandwidth. Each episode is usually around 10 MB, so you could easily use up over 1 Gig a month just keeping up with your favourite shows. That’s one of the reasons why I always prefer an unlimited slower connection over a faster metered one.

Sadly, there is very little quality Indian content, I wish other networks like NDTV, Times now etc start putting some of their content on the Net soon.

Video podcasting is an offshoot of podcasting with video files (usually MPEG4) instead of mp3s. They haven’t taken off because they are extremely bandwidth intensive (a typical episode is > 100 MB) and unlike audio files which you can listen to while doing your other tasks, you need to be actively watching the video. I’ve usually given up on most video podcasts after a couple of episodes and switched to the audio version.

Bangalore bomb attack

2008-07-26T01:08:00.000-07:00

9 bombs went off in Bangalore yesterday. They were of really low intensity, in fact looking at the TV pictures, you could mistake it for a firecracker that went off. Due to the limited damage, people have written it off a little too easily and it has almost become a joke. But, that's not the point, we should not forget that the terrorists could have easily used a more powerful explosive and the damage could have been a lot worse. We got off easy this time, but will we be as lucky the next time?

Vista hate - Part 1

2008-07-23T00:31:00.000-07:00

Contrary to the major negative press that Vista gets, my experience with the OS has been generally positive. I have used Vista on two machines, a HP laptop and my custom built desktop. I have faced some issues with wireless networking on the HP laptop where it would lose the network settings and force me to manually connect every single time. However, that problem went away after some driver updates and it is working great. On the desktop, my experience has been fantastic, so far. The thing that people don’t realize is Vista is extremely resource intensive and needs a fast processor and lots of memory. Most people who face problems are trying to run it on older slower hardware.

Atleast that’s what I thought, because yesterday I had my first hair-tearing experience with Vista. I had got a couple of 8 GB SDHC cards and wanted to transfer some videos to them. I hooked them up through my card reader and began the transfer process. It was a simple file copy procedure, open the folder on my local hard drive in one window, select the files and drag it to the window where the memory card’s drive was mapped. That’s when Vista’s problems reared its ugly head. Initially, I got the file copy dialog, where it just got stuck at the message “Discovered 0 items”. I then tried doing it one file at a time, it worked for files smaller than 100 MB, but just wouldn’t start for larger files. I googled for “Vista slow file copy” and discovered a setting for “Remote Differential Compression”, which is meant to optimize bandwidth but ends up killing file copy speeds. My experience improved after turning it off, but it was still a hit and miss affair.

Disgusted, I gave up and tried to do the same with a 2 GB standard SD card. This time, the files copied without problem. Thinking that it may be a problem with the 8 GB card, I tried using it with my laptop and this time, the file copy went through without problem regardless of the size. So, now I have got two versions of Vista that behave in totally different ways with the same hardware. No wonder, so many people feel that Vista sucks.

N800 vs ipod touch

2008-07-14T22:51:00.000-07:00

I’ve now had an ipod touch for a couple of weeks. Here is my comparision of the ipod touch with the N800. Rather than compare the two feature for feature, I have attempted to compare their capabilities for some common usage patterns.

Music Player: The ipod touch is so far ahead that there is no comparision here. The ability to organize music on a PC through itunes and sync automatically has no parallel on the N800, where you need to manually manage your music. Most of my listening involved podcasts and there is no better solution than the ipod for podcast management. Period. Verdict: ipod touch

Video Player: Viewing video on a portable player is a much more involved exercise due to the plethora of formats and limited horsepower of these devices. The first thing is to get videos onto the device. The ipod has more capable hardware and can handle higher resolution/bitrate/framerate videos than the N800. However, its support for video codecs is limited with only H.264 and mp4 support. This means that most videos need to be transcoded, just like on the N800. The N800 has an extremely slick free transcoding solution provided by Nokia (Internet tablet video converter), I’ve found that to be a better solution than the various third party solutions for the touch (I use a program called Videora). Once the files are on the device, I find the experience to be comparable with the N800 having a slight edge due to the larger screen and built in speaker. I also like the fact that it has a stand, this makes for a more pleasurable experience. Verdict: Nokia N800

Browsing: The ipod touch has a Safari browser while the N800 has a Firefox based browser. Both are full fledged browsers and can display web pages just like on a desktop rather than the modified mobile phone version. In terms of performance, the touch Safari browser feels snappier and more responsive than the Firefox browser on the N800. However, I’ve not found a huge difference in the overall time taken to render the pages. The N800 can play flash content which the touch lacks. On the other hand, a lot of websites have iphone/touch optimized versions which makes the overall experience better for those sites. On the whole, I think the experience is comparable and I’d rate both devices equal for browsing. Verdict: tie

Youtube: The ipod touch has a dedicated youtube player, while the N800 can play youtube videos through the web interface. Youtube videos on the N800 were jerky and took much longer to load. I found the performance of the touch youtube player to be far superior and the experience to be much better. It is without doubt, an ideal youtube player. Verdict: ipod touch

Email: The ipod touch client offers support for Gmail, Yahoo and a number of other email services. In addition, with the 2.0 firmware, it offers support for Exchange. The N800 on the other hand, has a plain IMAP/POP3 email client. I’ve never bothered to use this, but I’m hooked to email on the ipod touch. Verdict: ipod touch

Applications: The App Store is one of the most important developments for the iphone/ipod touch family of devices. The store opened just 3 days back and the number of apps already greatly outnumbers the N800. With the number of iphones sold approaching 10 million and probably an equally large number of ipod touches, the gap is only going to get wider. Nokia has a good platform and an extremely competent device, but it has never moved beyond niche status, hence the apps available for it will continue to be limited. On the other hand, due to the open nature of the device, there are applications available on the N800 that will never make it to the touch (e.g. VOIP, GPS apps like Maemo mapper). Still, this doesn't affect the healthy lead that the touch has Verdict: ipod touch.

So, ipod touch wins the comparision 4.5 to 1.5. The margin is unfair to the N800, which is a very comptetent device in its own right. If I had to make a decision on which of the two to buy today, the choice would be clear, it is the ipod touch. But, since I already own both these devices, I will continue to be a happy user of both the platforms.

ipod touch 2.0 software

2008-07-14T21:06:00.000-07:00

I was really looking forward to the iphone 3G launch last Friday, mainly for the added functionality it would bring to the ipod touch. Like the millions of Mac faithful, I started checking sites on Friday morning for pointers to when the software would be released. I soon discovered that Apple had launched the itunes store in India and was able to create an Itunes account by entering my credit card details. But, there was still no sign of the new ipod touch software. It finally became available on Friday evening, coinciding with the launch of the iphone 3G in the US. However, the update experience was anything but smooth. Over the next few hours, I encountered a variety of errors, ranging from “Itunes store is unavailable” to “Your version of ipod software (1.1.4) is the latest”. Disappointed, I gave up and decided to try again the next day.

The experience was completely different on Saturday morning when I tried again. This time, I got the notification about the update and quickly got through the payment formalities and started the download. The update was 223 MB in size and downloaded in just over 20 minutes at an average speed of almost 1.5 Mb/s. The entire process of updation was completely automated with no interaction required from my side. The longest part was the backup and restore, which seemed to take forever. I guess transferring over 20 gigs over a slow USB connection to a flash based device will always be slow.

The biggest change and the most expected feature of the 2.0 software was the App Store. Frankly, I was a bit disappointed with the app store, as most of the good apps were paid ones. I wanted to wait for a few days before purchasing any software as I am not sure how it will work for India (exchange rate etc). There are quite a few free apps but very few of them are any good. Though I installed quite a few, I don’t see myself using them on a sustained basis. So, for me atleast, the biggest feature of the update was a bit of a letdown.

The other feature that I was really looking forward to was the Exchange support. I had a few issues setting this up, mainly because I did not have the required information to set up the VPN to my company’s network. But once I got that, it was extremely straightforward. Checking my official email has now become a quick and simple exercise. The mail client is not very full featured and this is mainly useful for monitoring email and sending out quick replies rather than lengthy emails.

Other than these two features, I didn’t see anything else of note. There’s the Mobileme, but I’m not going to pay 4000 rupees a year for that functionality. There are still quite a few features that I didn’t find. Here is my top 3 wishlist

- Itunes store: I stopped buying CD’s a while ago because I found it to be a complete waste of resources, as I was just using them once, to rip them to my computer. I would love to have the ability to download legal mp3 at Rs 10 per song. I can do it today through Soundbuzz or mobile companies stores, but they are completely locked down with DRM. I understand our music companies reasoning that it will lead to widespread piracy. However, I don’t think they should worry about piracy, as pirated mp3’s of their songs are available everywhere on the Internet and on every street corner. If they only opened up their closed thinking, they will find this to be a very good revenue stream

- Ability to download podcasts over the air. As the touch has a wifi connection, I should be able to manage my podcasts from the device rather than from my computer

- Enhanced video file support (esp .avi files and the xvid codec): I was initially very thrilled about the video viewing experience on the touch, but I’ve cooled down a bit. The first problem is the restriction on the video format and codec support. This means that I have to transcode most of my videos before I can watch them. The second issue is my Nokia N800. Quite frankly, I find the video viewing experience to be better there as it has a bigger screen and a comfortable stand to seat the device. The one advantage that the touch had over the n800 was the higher capacity, but I’m getting a couple of 8 GB SD cards, which should make it a non issue. For now, I think the N800 is going to be my primary video device.

ipod touch

2008-06-30T02:39:00.000-07:00

I lost my beloved ipod nano last Monday during my trip to Delhi. In some
ways, it was a fortuitous as I got to replace it with an ipod touch 32
GB. I purchased it from JJ Mehta, a Mumbai based camera store, for 21500
rupees on the Internet. I can't remember the last time I bought
something other than travel tickets on the Net. It was an imported gray
market item as the MSRP for the ipod touch in India is 24700+tax. I was
apprehensive initially, especially with respect to the warranty, but
this store has got a lot of good reviews, so I decided to go ahead with
the purchase.

One of the main reasons that I went for the Touch rather than a
replacement Nano was for the video capabilities. A couple of years ago
when I got my first video capable phone, I was wondering how anyone
could watch video on such a small screen. But, having experienced it
over the past few months, I am hooked and find it difficult to watch it
on a PC or laptop anymore. I think the combination of portability and
comfort is hard to beat and when you're watching from 8 inches away, the
screen size and resolution does not matter that much.

Once I started using the Touch, I was floored by the interface, not only
was it gorgeous to look at, the way you interact with it is something to
be experienced. It makes other touch screen devices look pre-historic in
comparison. I spent 3 hours downloading album art for all my CDs from
the internet just so that I could browse them through the Coverflow
interface.

I was expecting to be disappointed with the Safari browser given the low
screen resolution, but the zoom capabilities make it surprisingly
usable. Also, given the popularity of the iphone, a lot of websites have
tailored their design to the screen making for a very usable experience.

The one standout app for me is the Youtube viewer. Searching for youtube
videos has never been this easy and I have never seen their videos look
as good as they do on the touch. I can easily see this becoming the no 1
use case for me.

My #1 reason for buying this was for viewing videos. Frankly, I was a
bit under whelmed, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I already have a
N800, which is as good when it comes to picture quality and portability
and has the advantage of a slightly bigger screen/resolution. Secondly,
the range of codecs and file formats that are supported in the touch is
limited, so I need to transcode most of the videos before I can watch
them, like in the N800. Given these factors, the experience of watching
video on the touch is just a little ahead of the N800, but not the light
years that I was expecting. So, I think I'll end up using the N800 for
watching movies at home and take the ipod on the road, giving me the
best of both worlds.

I have to end by comparing the touch with the N800. Somewhere, I'd read
about the ipod and the N800 being competitors for the other pocket, i.e.
not your phone. I'm finding it difficult to really compare the two, as
they are two different devices. The N800 is really a miniature computer,
extremely open with a wide variety of apps, but a mediocre media player.
The touch is a fantastic media player with quite sophisticated general
computing capabilities. I wouldn't give any of them up for the other.

But, I hear Apple is launching the 2.0 firmware in a couple of weeks. If
that delivers on the promise and makes the touch a truly extensible
platform, I can see the N800 gathering a lot of dust...

Long day yesterday

2008-06-24T05:27:00.000-07:00

I flew to Delhi for a day trip yesterday for a meeting with a prospective client. For that, I woke up at 4:00 am. I'd planned to take the bus from Hebbal but once I reached there, decided to ride all the way to the airport. Just as I reached the airport, the Activa started giving some problems. I hoped that it was just overheating and would sort itself out later and boarded the flight. Incidentally, I had no complaints about the flying experience from the airport.

The meeting in Delhi went really well. I was done by 2:00 pm and had 5 hours to kill. The meeting was at Pitampura right next to the Metro station. I had heard a lot about it and decided to check it out. I went to Palika Bazaar, which was very impressive in its day, but has now become a seedy place full of shops peddling pirated DVDs and smuggled electronics. Rather than take a taxi from CP, I took the Blue line to Dwarka and took an auto to the airport. Overall, I was very impressed by the Metro, it is clean, cheap, fast and comfortable. If our Namma Metro is anything like it, it will revolutionize Bangalore like nothing else.

Our plane was late and landed close to 11:00 pm. As I had feared the scooter's problems were bad. The clutch was slipping and the engine was cutting off as soon as I went past 50 kmph. As a result, the trip back home took a long time and I finally reached home at 12:30 am, making for a very long day.

Iphone 2.0 impressions

2008-06-09T21:03:00.001-07:00

It was inevitable. Such was the hype that the reality was always going to be anti-climactic. I don’t see anything hugely different from the original iphone, the main talking point is the 3G radio which is useless in India. The GPS is nice, but it will be a battery killer and I find that the triangulation offered by Google Maps good enough for most purposes (it was able to locate my position in places like Dharmapuri and Kaveriatnam).

There are still quite a few big items that give me reason to pause, the lack of a keyboard, no video recording, no removable battery being the chief irritants. On the positive side, it is a wonderful media device, especially for video. Plus with the opening of the app store, it will become one of the pre-eminent app development platforms, with a number of fantastic applications. We've already seen a preview with the jailbreaked apps and the licensed apps will be even better.

I hear that Apple is going to offer it for the equivalent of 199 dollars around the world. At this price, it is obviously subsidized, I wonder what the price in India is going to be, I don't think the subsidy model is going to work here. I expect it to retail at around 16K for the 8GB and 20K for the 16 GB models. At that price, the likes of Nokia and Sony are going to be hit really hard.

The next few months are going to be really good, there are a lot of really interesting phones coming out, like the Nokia tube, Sony Xperia and the many variations of Google Android. With the iphone unlikely to come to India till later in the year, it will give me enough opportunity to evaluate these before making my choice.

Petrol price hike

2008-06-01T09:49:00.000-07:00

With oil prices headed to 150 $ and beyond per barrel, the need of the hour is for our petrol and diesel prices to reflect that, so that people will adjust their consumption and when demand falls, prices will fall too. That's how the market works.

Instead of taking the decision, our politicians, including our so-called economist prime minister keep procrastinating, thus ensuring that we pay a much higher price for the indecision in the future.

Flew to Mumbai

2008-05-29T00:59:00.000-07:00

I flew to Mumbai for a day yesterday for a training program. This gave me my first experience flying from the new Bangalore airport. It was not pleasant, got up at 3:30, called a cab at 4:30 and reached the airport at 5:45. All this for a 6:50 am flight.

The return flight was almost 45 minutes late and finally took off at 9:30 pm. We landed at Bangalore around 11:00 pm only to be greeted with a comical situation when the plane reached the aerobridge. Apparently the airport staff was unable to find the keys to attach the aerobridge. This caused a 10 minute delay and we finally set off at 11:15. By the time I reached home, after dropping my colleague off, it was 12:45 am.

The real shock will be the taxi fare. They charge 15 Rs/km and 50% more if it is between 9 pm and 6 am. The total bill for both journeys was around 2400 rupees!!! This is going to drive people flying on their own expense crazy.

Cycling to work

2008-05-20T04:07:00.000-07:00

One of my (unstated) objectives when I started cycling was to cycle to work on a regular basis. Though it has been close to 3 months since I started cycling, I was still sticking to my motorcycle for going to work. It was a number of small issues that were preventing me from starting off

- My laptop and all accessories weigh a lot
- We don't have a proper cycle parking facility in the office
- No shower or cleaning facilities in the office

I finally decided that none of these were particularly big issues and began cycling to work last week. As for the issues, the solution wasn't too difficult

- I lock the laptop in my drawer and only take it home on the weekends
- I still don't have a solution for security, but I atleast substituted my heavy metal chain for a metal rope solution that I picked up from KR Market last weekend

I did it on 3 days last week and 2 days this week. I hope to continue on for atleast a couple of days each week, atleast till the rains start or I get proper fenders.

Bus travel, IPL etc

2008-04-21T21:51:00.000-07:00

I don't enjoy bus travel and tend to go for it only as a last option. I took a ride after a gap of almost 3 years when I went to Chennai to drop Nisha at her grandparent's place. Even though we took the KPN Volvo service, which is supposed to be much better than the regular service (it is) and the roads were extremely smooth, I found it to be cramped and uncomfortable and just could not get a sound sleep. What made it doubly worse was that I returned back the same night and had two nights of bad sleep in a row. Nothing beats our Indian Railways for comfortable and affordable travel. Now, if only they could get rid of the smell...

If you're anywhere in India, you could not have missed the start of the IPL tournament. It's had the kind of opening that Lalit Modi and co could have only dreamt of. I won't deny that I had wanted the IPL experiment to fail badly, just to teach the idiots at BCCI a lesson. But, I have changed my view now. With a format that generates non-stop thrills and some of the best players in the world, it has all the makings of a blockbuster. We've had 5 matches and three of them have been thrillers and have produced unbelievable batting performances,
especially from McCullum and Hussey. Yesterday, one of my favourite players, Jayasuriya looked set to match them before he was cruelly run out. So far, it seems like the foreign players and the relatively unknown Indian players have done much better than the superstars, who really have to pull up their socks to show that their mind-boggling valuations are justified.

One thing that every expert under the sun seems to be talking about is the impact this is going to have on the traditional forms of the game. Contrary to what people think, I feel that one dayers are going to be more affected than the test matches. Let's face it, Test cricket is already dead commercially, no one actually watches it. But, it is a holy cow that will be protected by the establishment even if there are only five people watching it. However, one day cricket will not be as lucky. When you can pack the same amount of excitement in a 3 hour game, why waste an entire day on it? It's also going to be a lot easier on the players, as the wear and tear on their bodies is going to be a lot less
in 20 overs than in 50.

I'm betting on Kolkota and Chennai to be the top two teams, followed by Hyderabad, Delhi and Mohali. I have Bangalore, Mumbai and Jaipur as the bottom three, and despite Jaipur beating Mohali yesterday, I don't see reason to change that.

Diesel engines

2008-04-03T22:13:00.000-07:00

I've never been a fan of diesel engines. Having traveled quite a bit in my friend's Tata Indica, I found the noise and vibration to be terrible, especially compared with the new generation of petrol engines, which are so silent that you have to really strain to hear them. Plus, it was slow as hell and used to take forever to accelerate.

Over the past few days, however, I've changed my view especially when it comes to performance. My friends and I have test driven three diesel cars over the past few days, the Ford Fiesta, Hyundai Verna and the Maruti Dzire. The Fiesta was refined, had fantastic handling and was responsive, but was way too overpriced at close to 8.5 lakhs. The Hyundai was an explosion of power. It was exhilarating to ride the torque curve, I was constantly letting the revs drop to below 1000 and
then flooring the accelerator. Initially nothing happens, but when it crosses 2000 rpm and the turbo kicks in, the power comes on in a violent manner and the car surges forward. Very soon, you're doing some serious speed indeed. Still, it was way too overpriced at almost 9.5 lakhs OTR and it doesn't even have airbags!!!

Yesterday, I test drove the Maruti Suzuki Dzire. I didn't like the looks and it was a bit cramped, especially compared to the Verna, but the engine was a revelation. Sitting inside, we couldn't believe that it was a diesel, it was so silent and free of vibrations. The power does not come on like the Verna as it is just 75 bhp instead of the 110 bhp, but it is still fairly fun to drive. The top end model is 7.65 lakhs OTR and its surely going to be a huge success.

It's still not all advantage diesel. The fact is that modern petrol engines are even more refined and silent, and they still have the edge when it comes to all out performance. The clincher is the fact that they're priced significantly lower than the diesel version (blame the Indian obsession with fuel costs and greedy manufacturers). So, if at all, I decide to buy another car, I still think I'll go with petrol.

BIAL

2008-03-30T22:54:00.000-07:00

I went on a long motorcycle ride last Saturday morning to visit the new Bengaluru International airport to check out the progress of the project and also the connectivity and travel time.

I had last been on this side of the city almost a year ago. At that time, to call it chaotic would be an understatement, it took us almost 1 hour and 45 minutes to get to the Hebbal flyover and the airport was a further 25 kilometers beyond. This time, I started off at 5:55, so I expected it to be a lot faster. I also had a chance to look at the first two "magic box" projects. The Cauvery underpass is a joke, which could only have been conceived in Bangalore, the city of "signal on a flyover". To have a busy arterial road wind through a U-turn is sheer madness and I bet that the net traffic flow will be slower than before. Plus the underpass is so narrow, that unless you were specifically told, you'd think it was a pedestrian pathway. Heaven help Bangalore, as they are planning to have 46 more of these all over the city. Anyway, back to BIAL, the ride through the city was fantastic, the overnight rain had cleaned up the roads and the traffic was non-existent, so I reached the Hebbal flyover in 25 minutes.

Bellary Road was being widened into a 6 lane highway and the project is almost complete. Luckily for motorists, they have not built too many signals or speed bumps, so I was able to maintain a constant 70-80 kmph speed right till the turnoff to the airport.I could have gone much faster in my car.

The trumpet flyover taking you from the highway to the airport was a source of much amusement a few months ago, when they realised that it would not be ready in time. This would mean that the entire airport traffic would need to take a U-turn to get off the highway. Imagine the chaos at peak time. Luckily for Bangalore, L&T took over the contract and completed it in double quick time. The interchange was completed this week, though some final asphalting was going on and I was forced to go through the mud road on the side to get to the airport road.

The airport is around 5 km from the highway and BIAL has got a nice 4 lane road leading to it. I couldn't help think, though that it would have been better if they had made it a 6 lane road to avoid any congestion. They do have space to expand, if required. I couldn't get too close to the main terminal building as it is still not open to the public and I didn't want any panga with the security guards. It's definitely larger than the HAL airport, but still looks much small that I expected. I was also quite disappointed to see the car park, they claim a capacity of 1500 cars, but it doesn't seem much bigger than the old airport car park.

Overall, everything had a not-yet-completely-finished look to it. I'm sure the airport guys will claim that they were ready on time, but secretly must have been quite happy to have been given the extra month to get things 100% complete.

The biggest talking point so far has been the travel time to the airport. I started at 5:55 and reached an hour later. On the return journey, I took the longer route via the Outer Ring Road and still reached in an hour and 15 minutes. My feeling is that the journey from Hebbal onwards is unlikely to be more than 30-45 minutes even in peak hour, so the bulk of the time is going to be getting to Hebbal. I feel that the IT crowd and others that protest are extremely hypocritical and their statements and are only looking at their own selfish interests and not the overall best interests of Bangalore. So, when people in Electronics City complain about the 2 hour journey, I don't think they even consider that when the airport was in HAL, it would take people in Hebbal and Rajajinagar atleast 2 hours to get there. The fact is that any new airport could only have been constructed far away from the city and in a sprawling city like Bangalore, that will always mean that the distance and travel times vary significantly.

GPS is so cool

2008-03-17T03:26:00.000-07:00

In India, GPS receivers are still very rare and proper maps are rarer still. Even when available, the receivers are too expensive, so unless you really have a compelling need, you're unlikely to invest in one. So, though I've been reading about GPS for over 10 years now, I've never ever seen it in action. Until now.

Last week, during the Savandurga ride, I saw Rohan checking out his GPS receiver periodically. At the end of the trip, he had produced a map layered over a Google Earth image of exactly where we had been during the ride. I was suitably impressed and wanted to try it out for myself.

By sheer coincidence, my friend Shashi had bought a GPS receiver from China. It was a simple Bluetooth receiver that hooked up to any external device like a mobile phone or PDA. He's also just invested in an unlocked iPhone, but because its so badly locked down, he just couldn't get it to work with the receiver. So, he had resigned himself to just watching his stationary position on his laptop and was getting very frustrated about not being able to use it to the fullest potential.

In the past, I'd considered getting a GPS receiver for my Nokia N800. In many ways, it is an ideal navigation tool, with a large screen and adequate storage capacity. Maps were always going to be a problem, as the few solutions for India obviously didn't support the N800. At that time, I had thought that if someone could write a program that would use publicly available maps like Google maps or Yahoo maps, it would be very useful. I had not researched further, as I didn't have a GPS device to play with. However, now that Shashi had one available, I asked him lend his GPS receiver, and started googling for N800 GPS solutions. Very quickly, I came up with a program called Maemo-mapper.

Maemo-mapper is a mapper application that can interact with a GPS and plot the current position on a map. A lot of other applications can do this, however, the beauty is that it can access many publicly available maps like Google Maps, Google Satellite view, Yahoo maps etc. Amazingly, this was just what I had wished for a few months ago!!!

It is fairly simple in that it can only display your current position and route on a map. It cannot create driving directions automatically, this needs to happen in an external program and can be imported into this. It does, however, have the ability to export your location data as gpx files, which can be imported by any mapping program or a number of Google maps mashups and shared with others. This is a much more likely usage in the Indian context as driving directions are unlikely to ever
be reliable given the ever changing urban landscape.

I borrowed the GPS receiver for the weekend and took it with me everywhere. It was a lot of fun sitting in a car and watching it move on the map.

Report - Ride to Savandurga

2008-03-13T02:05:00.001-07:00

A group of riders in the Bangalore riders e-group had made plans to ride to Savandurga and back on Sunday. The plan was to leave from Kanakpura Road-ORR junction at 6:00 am, ride down beyond NICE road and take some backroads till Mysore Road, cut across to the Big Banyan tree and ride on beyond to Savandurga. They promised a “not easy” ride. I signed up right away.

The practice in these rides is to meet at the starting point and leave at the pre-announced time. If you’re late, too bad, you miss the ride. I did not want that to happen, so I set the alarm for 4:30 am on Sunday morning and was out of the house at 5:00 am. I had estimated that it would take me 45 minutes to ride to the starting point, but the traffic was non existent and I was able to make it in 30 minutes. I was the first one to reach had a fairly long wait (time really goes slowly early in the morning) till the others got there. This being the first time I was going on such a long ride, I was a bit apprehensive about whether I would be able to keep up with the others. As I saw the others come in, my fear grew. These guys looked like real pros with proper cycling shorts, gloves, high tech drinking bottles etc. However, they were all really nice and I began to feel at ease. Then one of them hit me with a bombshell. I hadn’t had anything to eat other than a cup of coffee, which was a big mistake, as I’d start feeling really tired a couple of hours into the ride. There wasn’t much I could do at that point, though. I had a small piece of cake which I had and hoped for the best.

We set off a little behind schedule at 6:15 am, 10 of us in all, Rohan, Nikhil, Balu, Shamim, Pramod, Tilak, Shiv, Rushi, his wife Celine and me. The first part of the ride was really good. Kanakpura Road is one of the least trafficked highways in Bangalore and is mostly downhill on the way out, so we made very quick time right till the NICE road interchange. Rushi and Shiv had road bikes, so they decided to take the NICE road to Mysore Road. The rest of us took a smaller village road parallel to the NICE road. The road was freshly laid, so the first couple of kilometers were really good. Then we hit the stretch that was still being laid. It was full of small stones, on many occasions, we had to ride right on the edge of the road to stay in control. By the time we reached Mysore Road, my hands were totally numb from the pounding and vibrations. We stopped at Mysore Road for one of the group to catch up. He was on a Hero Octane and despite his best efforts could not keep up with the various Treks and Firefoxes in the group. As for me, I was encouraged by the fact that I was able to keep up with the group without too many problems.

We turned off Mysore Road at the Big Banyan intersection, we rode past many small villages and some facility of ISRO with a few huge satellite dishes. To start with, the road was fairly smooth, but went downhill rapidly and most of the time was little better than a dirt road. Towards the end it got a lot better. The highlight for me was the approach to Manchinbele dam. There was a fairly long uphill section and as I approached it, I was in one of the higher gears. Rather than shift to a lower gear, I decided to continue in the same gear and increase the pace of my pedaling. I just made it to the top right as I was totally out of breath. If it was any longer, I just could not have continued. Suddenly, the road leveled out and turned slightly to the right and I was rewarded with an awesome sight. I had no idea that we had such a beautiful sight so close to Bangalore.

The long downhill right after that was thrilling, but my joy was tempered by the fact that we would have to climb that long slope on the way back. We stopped around 5 km before Savandurga for some elaniru and finally made it to Savandurga at around 10:00 am. We stopped there only for 10-15 minutes, just enough time to get some fuel for the long ride back. On the return, a group of 4 riders took off first. I was planning to ride along with the remaining people, but then I learnt that the folks staying back were on the road bikes and wanted to try an alternate route with better roads. So, I set off on my own hoping to catch up with the group that had left.

I caught up with Pramod just before the Manchinbele dam. He had pulled a muscle and was trying to stop a tractor to take him up the hill. Instead of helping him, the driver started abusing him for blocking the road!!! Finally, he decided that there was no other way but to pedal up and we started going up. I had to use the granny gear (F1R1) and even with that, it was tough going. I finally gave up just 50m before the top, got down and walked/pushed the rest of the way.

At the top, Pramod held on to the back of a Tatamobile that was heading in the same direction and went far ahead. I continued cycling and caught up with Balu after a while. He was really pacing himself well, riding at a constant pace. We continued together and caught up with Rohan just before the ISRO facility. The leading rider, Shamim was waiting for us at the next village and we all stopped for chai. I later found out that Shamim was a professional cyclist and this ride was like a warmup for him, as he was planning a Bangalore-Mysore-Bangalore trip the next day and a 1200 km ride from the 16th of March!!!

At this point, I thought we had covered most of the distance and the rest would be easy. Balu had some bad news for me. He said that we had another 25 km to go just to reach Mysore Road and the NICE road was going to be even tougher as it was mainly uphill. My spirits fell a bit, but then I realized it was no use getting disheartened at that point, so I just got up and started pedaling away.

It must have been the boost provided by the Limca or the fact that the road condition improved tremendously after the Big Banyan tree, I found the remaining distance to Mysore Road to be fairly easy. We had a short ride on Mysore Road and then crossed over to the NICE road. Just as we were getting onto the road, I finished all the water that I had carried. As I was to learn later, that was a very big mistake.

The NICE road is beautiful, straight, wide and smooth, an ideal road to speed in an automobile. It’s a good road for cycling, as it has wide shoulders and you can stay out of the way of the bigger vehicles. If there’s a downside, it’s the elevation change. Kanakpura Road is at a much higher level than Mysore Road and there are 3 or 4 long uphill climbs, definitely not what we were looking forward to. To make things worse, it was extremely hot with no shade and a nasty headwind. We made slow progress, but Rohan soon fell far behind. Midway through the strech, I felt very thirsty, but there was no water to drink and I had to keep going. Luckily for me, Shamim had stopped for us a little further ahead and I took a few sips from his bottle. By now, it was clear to me that I was quite dehydrated and hitting the wall. Even on the downhill sections, I wasn’t able to go on the top gears and was just letting gravity do its work. When I finally saw the big green board for the Kanakpura Road turnoff, my spirits lifted again and I started pedaling with renewed vigour. Balu who was just a little in front of me was waiting at the turnoff.

We waited a few minutes for Shamim and Rohan but there was no sign of them. Later I found that Rohan had stopped and Shamim had gone back to help him. We then decided to start off as there was another 10 km to go on Kanakpura Road. The stretch which had been so enjoyable on the way out was now a nightmare, lot of traffic, mostly uphill and hot. We made slow progress and when we came upon a ganna juice stand, we decided to stop and refresh ourselves.

While the guy was crushing the juice, I suddenly felt very weak and could not stand on my own. I went and sat down hoping it would get better. It didn’t and I felt like throwing up, but when I tried, there was nothing to throw up. Balu realized that there was no way I could continue and asked me to take an auto. I got the auto driver to bring me a bottle of water and once I had it, I felt much better. I finally reached home at 2:00 pm.

It was not the best end to what was a very memorable ride. Just before we stopped, Balu told me that we had covered 105 km from our starting point. We rode for almost 6 hours, at an average of 17.5 km/h. The bad roads and the steep climbs really brought down the average significantly.

I was thrilled about being able to keep up with such a group of experienced riders, who’d done many 100+ km rides. I’m not planning to do another 100km ride for a while, though, will do a few shorter 50-60km rides before attempting something like this again.

TOTAL Supermarket

2008-03-04T22:10:00.000-08:00

TOTAL is a big supermarket that has opened its doors in Bangalore a while ago. I've gone past their store in Madivala but being in such an inconvenient location, I never thought it worthwhile to stop and take a look inside. They have recently opened their third store in Sarjapur Road and have bombarding the radio waves advertising the same. I had also heard a lot of good things about the selection in their meat section from friends, not that I was ever going to buy anything from there. So, we decided to check it out on Saturday.

The first impression was very positive. As they had been advertising, they had parking space for 500 cars. We didn't have a problem finding a spot. I wonder if it will be the same after the rest of Bangalore discovers the place.

The shopping area is fairly spacious, by Indian standards. The ground floor of the mall was full of fancy shops offering a variety of items ranging from clothing to kids furniture. All with very appealing
displays, and I am sure, price-tags to match. Value-conscious person that I am, we never bothered to enter any of them.

The hypermarket was on the second and third floors. The second floor was mainly clothing with some additional sections for toys and electronic items. We were mainly looking to buy a few shirts and some gifts, so that's where we spent most of the time. Their range of men's clothing
was decent. They weren't very well known brands, but in quality and texture, they felt as good as a Vivaldi or Excalibur atleast, if not the higher end brands. Their range started at 299, but those were not that appealing. The ones at 499 were much better, decent quality cotton and really nice designs. I am not so sure of their longevity, but at that price, it seemed like a good deal and I picked up a few.

The toys section was disappointing, mainly Chinese made junk with a limited selection. I think in their desire to cram in as many categories of goods as possible, they compromised on the space allocated to each section and this greatly limits their variety.

The third floor had furnishing and the food section. The groceries section was fairly well stocked with a huge number of rice varieties occupying centre stage. The vegetable section was good, but what really upset me was the indiscriminate usage of plastic. The process is that you pick up the vegetable, place it in a plastic bag, weigh it and print out a barcode which is scanned at the checkout counter. Novel for India, the advantage is that checkout is really fast, but this means that you have a separate plastic bag for each type of vegetable. I think its high time, we have
rules that discourage such wanton use of plastics.

The thing that impressed me the most was the number of checkout counters. They had around 20 of them, with a lot of space to push the trolley through. Most of the counters had less than 2-3 people waiting in line. They also put a stamp on the parking ticket to waive the parking fees.

Regarding whether these types of supermarkets and hypermarkets are good for India, I am in the middle. I definitely support them when it comes to categories like clothes, furniture etc. For too long, we have been taken for a ride by greedy showrooms and these can definitely bring down
the price of goods. I am not so sure about grocery and vegetables. I don't care what the experts say, they are going to affect the kirana stores and the vegetable vendors with their money power and economies of scale. While that is good for me as a consumer, I don't think it is good
for the people overall. That is the reason I avoid outlets like Reliance Fresh, Food Bazaar, Fabmall etc even if it increases our monthly grocery bill.

Cycling Adventures - Week 1

2008-02-24T05:51:00.000-08:00

Buying the cycle is the best decision that I ever made. I find that I'm able to sustain my activity for much longer than running. I burn as many calories as before don't end up with the kneepain that was causing me so much of trouble earlier.

I've been going out in the early mornings, so the traffic has not been an issue. Early mornings are probably the only time when you get to breathe some fresh air in Bangalore, so that's been an added bonus. I've stuck to two routes, going on the Outer Ring Road till Marathahalli (20 km) or on the Inner Ring Road till the Domlur flyover (16 km) and then looping back.

As I'd mentioned before, there are a lot of passionate cyclists in Bangalore. On Saturday, I joined a bunch of these people for a weekend ride . It was quite a varied bunch of people, a 50 year lady, a guy who has cycled from Arunachal Pradesh to Ahmedabad, a college student who lost 25 kg cycling and has done a trip from Mysore to Kanyakumari, a PhD who works for Yahoo and his French girlfriend. The ride was fairly sedate, we went on Sarjapur road and cut across to Varthur and then went on a side road for around 10 km. The side road was the interesting part, we experienced a variety of terrain ranging from good (smooth tarmac) to horrible (loose stones). We covered 40 km in total. The highlight was towards the end when a bunch of us decided to test how fast we can go and touched 52 kmph!!! I was thrilled that even after riding 40 km, I was to keep up with these guys.

F1 2008 coming soon

2008-02-22T08:15:00.000-08:00

The 2008 F1 season starts in less than 3 weeks. From the winter testing, it seems like it will be another Ferrari-Mclaren battle. In my view, Ferrari have the edge and when they feel the need to push, they are able to comfortably pull ahead of the rest.

Of the rest, Williams and Redbull have been impressive, whereas BMW have not really made the step up from last year. It should be interesting to see what Fernando can do in the Renault, though it seems out of the running for podiums.

There's not much to be said about Toyota or Honda, they're going to be hardpressed to get into the Top 10. Force India will be eagerly watched in India at least, but I'm not expecting any miracles from them. As for Super Aguri, it is still debatable whether they will actually last the season, as they are facing a severe financial crunch.

I'd briefly considered going to Singapore for the first ever night race. But I doubt it will happen, firstly with the race tickets costing 15K and add in airfare etc, there's no way I can justify spending 30-35K on this. Secondly, it's too close to the big vacation we're planning from Oct 2. So, I guess it's the TV for me and I'll wait for the Delhi grand prix in 2010!

The Trek has landed

2008-02-17T21:44:00.001-08:00

I took delivery of my bike yesterday. Here’s a photo of me taking delivery of the bike.

I rode it back from Jayanagar and covered the distance of around 10.5 km in around 30 minutes. I had to go cycling this morning and went for a ride on the IRR, rode till the Airport road flyover and back, which is a distance of around 16 km. I covered that in around 53 minutes. So, an average speed of around 20 kmph, I’m quite happy with that, considering that I didn’t really stretch myself too much. I plan to maintain a moderate level of exercise for the first couple of weeks and get my body used to cycling, before I think about anything more extreme. Definitely, rides like this one are out of the question for now.

The one thing that I realized very soon is just how vulnerable a cyclist is on Bangalore roads. Some of the rules that I follow on my motorcycle that I intend to follow while riding my cycle as well

- Stick to the left of the road.
- While changing lanes, look back and ensure that there is no vehicle charging at you. Resist the temptation to squeeze through a gap, especially when there’s a bus or lorry involved
- If you’re stuck behind a stationary vehicle, just take a deep breath and relax. Don’t join the mad rush of vehicles that try to overtake and block the other lanes
- If ever you get into a confrontational situation with a four wheeler, back off. You’ve got much more to lose.
- In a traffic jam, disregard all of the above. As a two-wheeled rider, you are kingJ

Kanua : Goan restaurant

2008-02-14T05:51:00.000-08:00

Lunch has been a very low-key affair of late, I either come home or go to the canteen with friends. O of my friends suggested that we go out for a change. We've got a few restaurants that we usually go to, Bhagini for Andhra food, Roomali or the Village for North Indian, but today everyone was in the mood for something different. Shashi came up with a Goan restaurant near the Wipro corporate office called Kanua.

After I've seen the fish that they catch at Agara lake, I've avoided eating fish in Bangalore. This being a Goan place, fish was the speciality. The waiter swore that the fish does not come from the Bangalore lakes, so we decided to take a chance. It was a meal fit for the gods. Amazing anjal-fish fry. Fish curry with rice-water dosas. The best biryani that I'd eaten in a while. It was fairly cheap too, just over 1000 for the four of us.

This is definitely a place I recommend and intend visiting again and again.

Bad times for Indian IT

2008-02-12T16:11:00.000-08:00

Typically, companies in the US outsource their routine maintenance and low end project work to India and keep the really important projects inhouse or work with local vendors here. Most large companies that have offshoring programs have already offshored most of these functions to India. For the remaining companies, if they have not offshored yet in 2007, it is likely for a good reason and I doubt it will happen anytime soon. Even if it does, I feel that the potential increase in business will still not be able to make up for the loss from projects that have shut down due to budget cuts. You will never hear anything like this from the companies or the analysts, who continue to portray a rosy picture and feel that a slowdown will only benefit Indian IT. But, I hear enough news to the contrary and think that companies are preparing themselves for tougher times ahead.

Look at the evidence
IBM fires 700 people.
500 people "voluntarily resigned" from TCS.

I'm sure that there are similar stories being played out elsewhere. I see enough evidence in my own firm. All the managers were called for a meeting last week and informed that the overall utilization was low and a major drive has been launched to fill up the open positions from the bench pool. And yesterday, we learnt that the notice period has been slashed to 1 month. Add to this the fact that promotions, bonus, salary hikes which are typically completed by early January have yet to be announced and it does seem clear that job cuts are on the horizon.

The Indian economic growth story depends a lot more on the IT sector that many people realize. It's the promise of huge salary increases and large disposable income that keeps IT folks spending on a lot of goods and services and leads to a boom in those sectors. So, a slow IT sector is not only bad news for itself, but for many other sectors as well.

Cycling updated

2008-02-10T07:38:00.000-08:00

I moved closer towards my quest to start cycling. Initially, my thought was to buy a cheap second hand cycle and buy a better one later if I really get into it. So, I found a guy selling a second hand Hero Octane. I met him on Saturday and rode the bike a fair bit. I didn't feel very comfortable, I couldn't exactly place what it was, and thought that I should ride a few more bikes before I make a decision.

I'd contacted the folks at Bums on the Saddle and fixed up an appointment. They are a bunch of bike enthusiasts who were very disappointed with the service of Firefox bikes in Bangalore. When they complained to the company, they were invited to do something about it by setting up their own shop. Which they did.

I'd zeroed in on a couple of bikes, the Firefox Target and the Trek 3700 and test rode both of them. Both were lightyears ahead of the Hero bike that I rode on Saturday. I found it difficult to choose between the two purely on the merits of the bike. The Trek did feel better put together, the seat was more comfortable and the bike felt a little more stable than the Firefox, but for someone of my riding ability, it was difficult to really make out a difference. In some way, this is reflected in the pricing, the Firefox is 10.3K and the Trek is 13.9K. Going by reviews, it does seem like the Trek has better components and will last better. One thing that I've learnt over the years is to go with the wisdom of the crowds, especially when it comes to an area you know little about. So, I've decided to go for the Trek. I'll place my order today and will hopefully get it in a week's time.

Amazing video of a camera shooting at 2000 fps

2008-02-08T17:50:00.000-08:00

Cycling

2008-02-06T17:53:00.000-08:00

I've decided to buy a cycle. I got the inspiration from my friend and colleague, Sriram, who has a cycle and uses it for all local commutes in his area. I don't really plan to commute anywhere with it, just use it as a low impact substitute for my morning run, which has given me severe knee pain over the past few weeks.

Just when I start thinking about it, I find out two additional people who are thinking along the same lines. My friend, Rajesh, who runs his own company is moving his office to JP Nagar from Electronics CIty and is planning to use his cycle to go to work. Likewise, my former boss, KR, who works with Rajesh and claims to be a "cyclist all his life" is also planning the same. Some co-incidence.

I also found that there is a small but dedicated community of cyclists in Bangalore and they all meet here

Most addictive game ever

2008-01-30T06:08:00.000-08:00

4 months, 3 phones, countless hours, I finally did it. I completed Level 100 of the most addictive game ever, Frozen Bubbles. It's beauty lies in its simplicity as well as the fact that it is ideally suited for the limited mobile phone controls.

It's available for S60 Symbian phones here

If you've got a non-Nokia phone, you can get the Java port here.

If you do download, watch out for levels 70 and 80. They're tough to get through, but once you do that, it'll be smooth sailing till level 99. 99 and 100 require a lot of patience and luck!!!

Video: A Malayalee girl

2008-01-28T04:56:00.000-08:00

Video from the program on national integration held at Stepping Stones on January 26

School Admission

2008-01-28T04:18:00.000-08:00

School admissions are one of the biggest challenges for any parent in India. The rush to get your child into one of the "good" schools starts when the child reaches 3 years when they become eligible to join Pre-nursery. The general wisdom is that it is your best chance of getting the child into one of the school as vacancies in the later classes is extremely limited.

The entire admission process serves as a good revenue generator for these schools, they issue 5000+ forms at around 500 rupees each and rake in a cool 25 lakhs. The selection criteria and procedures are always a secret, as it allows the school to use its discretion to accommodate the "influential" members of society. If you don't have influence, they you need money and lots of it, schools routinely charge 30-40K as building fund or something similar, and all of it is taken in cash and unaccounted. It's a money spinning business raking in crores which is why so many politicians and bureaucrats have set up schools in the last few years. The fact that you get control of large pieces of land at throwaway prices is just the icing on the cake.

One of the schools that is a refreshing change from this racket are the National Public schools. However, I see a few things that are different about them
- They do not take donations. They are upfront about their fees and provide a receipt for the entire amount
- They do charge a higher fees than most schools, but are open about it and seem to pay their teacher's well above the market wage
- Like other schools, their admission process is opaque. Based on evidence, I could see that they overwhelmingly go for children of professionals and give preference to children of alumni and teachers. A few of my friends with significant influence were unable to get a seat there, so it does seem like who you know seems to matter less than in other schools.

I may seem a little biased towards them and with good reason. Between me and my brothers, we spent almost 30 years at NPS Indiranagar. Nisha is set to join the NPS ranks next year, having got an admission to UKG at their newest school in HSR Layout.

IPL rights

2008-01-24T07:59:00.000-08:00

A couple of things really bug me about the IPL rights

- This is India and our currency is the Rupee. What the hell are they doing announcing the winning bid in dollars?
- What exactly will this do to ticket prices? If these jokers have paid upwards of 300 crore for the rights, will the tickets be affordable? I've already lost hope for the TV coverage, with the dough that Sony has coughed up, we'll be lucky to see more than 3 balls an over.

Mother of all crashes

2008-01-22T01:07:00.001-08:00

It’s been a couple of days to remember (or forget) for the stock markets. It takes me back almost 10 years to 1998, when the Asian financial crisis unfolded. I clearly remember that I was in Chennai at that time and was watching the live quotes of the Indonesian Rupaiah on CNBC and watching the freefall of the currencies and the stock indices. The feeling was similar yesterday and today. There was no other topic of conversation throughout the day in the office.

Luckily for me and my group of friends, we never did venture into the market when it was playing at the 20K+ levels, our investments were made at much lower levels. Of course, we've seen our profits vanish, but it's nothing compared to the thousands who were seduced by the media to begin investing, misled into thinking that the market could only go up and up and are now left without the shirt on their backs. It's happened before in 92, 95, 2000 and will happen again in the future.

One silver lining is that many stocks are so far off their highs that they make very sensible investment decisions. Take IT for instance, you've now got Infosys and TCS available for 15-16x FY08 earnings and 12-13 times FY09 earnings. These are extremely profitable companies generating 1000s of crores of cash each year and yet the market is totally ignoring them. I think it is a very smart decision to buy into them right now. I would, if only I hadn't fallen for the hype and put so much money into the Reliance Power IPO:-(

Best pictures of 2007

2008-01-08T17:39:00.001-08:00

I've come across quite a few best pictures lists, from National Geographic, various newsmagazines etc. Here is one more, which spans a number of subjects

What Indian cricket must do

2008-01-06T20:37:00.001-08:00

All this talk of boycott and calling back the Indian team is bull. Even if it were the right thing to do, one doubts if BCCI has the capacity or the guts to take such a hard stand. It would also not be right, as it would cause irreparable damage to Indian cricket and we would forever be tagged as whingeing losers who could not take the heat. The right thing to do is for the country to get behind our players as one and support them through the rest of the series. This includes the fan, media, TV and BCCI. Let's not forget that the team really fought well in Sydney and with a bit of luck could have held off for a draw.

We should also show the Australians where they get off. Write to the newspaper editors and TV channels to stop taking any comments or articles from the members of the Australian team. Boycott any products endorsed by any of their team members and ensure that they drop them.
Revoke any contracts signed by the Aussie players with the IPL. Hit them where it hurts and I'm sure that they will change their rotten ways.

Long trip home

2007-12-31T21:43:00.001-08:00

We went on a long trip to Delhi, Agra, Jaipur, Udaipur and Ahmedabad. 10 days, 2 flights, 4 train journeys, countless rickshaw and traffic rides. I ended up 2 kg heavier but 25K rupees lighter. That's not including the train + airfare. Whoever said India is a cheap place to travel.

Despite the large number of great places we visited, I have to say that the main highlight of the trip was the food. We had the best samosas that I had ever eaten at Gopaldas Pethe wale near the Jama Masjid in Agra. And the best jalebis ever, cooked in pure desi ghee at Dilli Haat. This was followed by a traditional Rajasthani feast at Lakshmi Mishthan Bhandhar in Jaipur and an amazing Gujrati thali at Pakwan in Ahmedabad. When I think back, I count myself lucky to have got away with just a 2 kg increase.

I was also really impressed with the cities that I visited, especially Jaipur and Ahmedabad. They both have seen a lot of development, but it seems to be a lot more planned than Bangalore. Ahmedabad, in particular really impressed with its wide and good roads, lush greenery and the general prosperity that I saw there.

It was a good end to 2007 and I feel happy that I am starting 2008 on a happy note.

Computer Woes etc

2007-12-16T02:35:00.001-08:00

It has been rough over the past few days. I came down with cold and fever on Thursday, which continues till today. Though it was mild, it totally wrecked my plans to take part in the half marathon this year.

To top it off, the new computer that I built had been behaving very badly since Wednesday. It would start up fine, but if I left it running for more than a couple of hours or did anything memory intensive, it would almost always end in a Blue Screen of Death. I tried a number of things likr refixing the RAM, removing the video card and uninstalling software that could have caused the error, but it was all in vain. Finally, as all indications were pointing to memory errors, I decided to run a memory test on the RAM modules, and voila, came up with almost 2 million errors!!! I then did a check on each module individually and identified the culprit, a bad RAM stick. I removed it and have been running Vista with 1 GB since this morning and no lockups. Funnily enough, despite all the stories I've read about Vista being a dog on 1GB, it isn't all that unusable.

Upgraded PC

2007-12-10T15:59:00.000-08:00

My old pc, an AMD Athlon 2000XP was getting on in years, it was the slowest processor available in 2004 and though I had no problems with mundane stuff like browsing etc, it was struggling to run anything more processor intensive. I'd considered upgrading for many months, but somehow it was always the lowest priority and I never did. Finally, I got to it last weekend and took the plunge.

I went for the high end this time. For the CPU, I was torn between Intel and AMD. I've been an AMD fan for many years and have been rooting for them to come back strong over the last year or so, ever since Intel came out with the Core2Duo. The prices are that much better on the AMD as well, but the performance difference is significant. I finally decided to go for the Core2Duo E6750, which is the fastest non-Extreme dual core processor available today. To it, I added 2 GB RAM and a mid-range graphics card (Nvidia 8600GT based) and I got one hell of a beast.

Last year, I had made a resolution not to run any pirated software on my pc. I'd gone out and bought an original WindowsXP license and wanted to transfer it to this PC from the old one.
That's when I realised a) I'd bought an OEM version which was non-transferable and b) I'd kept the certificate of authenticity in such a safe place that I couldn't find it at all!! I decided to go with Windows Vista, as I felt that it would be more future proof, despite all the negative press and my previous bad experience with it.

The OS installation went off very smoothly and I was done in a little over an hour. I was amazed by how sweet Vista runs on this machine as compared to my laptop, which is also a dual core with 2 GB of RAM. Must be the faster processor, RAM and hard disk. I'm really excited because now I'll finally be able to play the Orange Box games that I bought recently:-)

Connectivity to Bangalore Airport

2007-12-01T18:00:00.000-08:00

The new airport in Bangalore is almost complete, but the connectivity to the city is a total mess. The proposed expressway is mired in litigation. There is no rail link to the airport. The existing highway (Bellary Road) is already a mess and will only get worse when the airport opens.

BMTC is planning to launch a Volvo service from various points in the city. They plan 40 buses in total, which I think will be inadequate. Here's my reasoning. The buses will only run at hourly intervals. I think they will find it difficult to live up to, considering that they only have 5 buses from each location and the round trip to the airport may easily exceed that during peak hours, but . Assuming a 4 hour round trip, each bus carrying out 6 trips per day and a capacity of 50 passengers per bus, this just works out to 24000 people who will be able to use the service (40 buses x 6 trips x 50 passengers x 2) at peak capacity. With a projected 50000 passengers per day expected to use the airport daily, that's just half the number. The problem gets worse when you consider that the traffic will not be uniform, the peak hours traffic (6-9 am and 5-9pm) could easily double.

BMTC has also taken a stupid decision to have multiple stops for each service. I don't know what they were smoking when they came up with this brainwave. Not only will the stops increase the travel time tremendously (remember we are talking about passengers with a lot of luggage here), but very likely the buses are going to be full at the starting point itself, making the stops meaningless.

Despite these issues, I still think this is the best solution, both for the short and long term. Let's hope they fine tune this, increase the number of buses to 100 and price it competitively (around 250 per passenger).

A wonderful weekend

2007-12-01T17:38:00.000-08:00

So far, it has been a weekend to remember. It all started on Friday. Nisha's school has a competition (sort of), where the kid with the highest number of stars gets to take home a toy monkey (named George). She's come close many times, but last weekend was the first time that she brought it home. The joy on her face as she announced it to us will remain forever in our memory.

On Saturday, I woke up to read that the Bangalore marathon has been scheduled for the 16th of December. This was one of my resolutions earlier in the year, to run the half-marathon. I started the training with a 10K run, which I managed in around 72 minutes. I was half-dead at the end of it. At this point, I'm sure I will not be able to "run" the full distance, but I feel confident that I will be able to run-walk the complete distance. I'm aiming for a time of 3 hours.

Later, we went to an old friend/colleague's kid's first birthday. I got to meet all my old friends from Infosys. In the evening, we went to Capgemini's annual event, Jashn 2007. They definitely know how to throw a party, it was held at Bangalore Palace, with amazing food and drinks. There was a dance show by the employees, which was so well done that we actually thought they were professional dancers. We had a couple of professional performers as well, one good (Mahalakshmi Iyer) and one bad (Neha Bhasin from Viva, someone needs to ban North Indians singing in Tamil).

All in all, a weekend to remember.

Investing in stocks

2007-11-19T00:47:00.001-08:00

The Indian stock markets are becoming a gambler’s den. Knowing when to buy, and more importantly, when to sell is more a game of chance than science. I’m increasingly coming to the view that this is something best left to professionals. For the retail investor, sifting through the volume of information (and dis-information) that is available and arriving at a right investment strategy is virtually impossible. To boot, many of us don’t have the nerve to hold on and sell too early in a rising market, or in a falling market, we don’t know when to sell and continue to hold on to stocks way past their sell by date.

A case in point is my investment in the three oil marketing companies, BPCL, HPCL and IOL. I had made good profits in these stocks in the 2003-04 period. Sometime last year, when the market tanked, I thought that I would take a contrarian bet on these stocks, after all, the demand is ever increasing, they were well off 52 week highs and the market was totally ignoring them. To my misfortune, the market conditions became extremely negative for these companies, crude oil prices spiked, the government did not allow them to hike prices and their losses mounted. Though they were compensated for their losses, the markets took an extremely dim view of their prospects and the stocks lost almost 35-40% from the prices that I bought them. I had completely stopped looked at their prices as it seemed like I had no hope of ever making any money on them till 2025.

And then suddenly last week, the stock price of these companies went up by almost 25-30% each. There was absolutely no trigger for this, crude oil prices were rising to all time highs, there was no sign of the government allowing them to increase fuel prices, nothing to indicate that their prospects were getting better. To me, it looks like the other stocks had got so expensive that the punters were looking for something cheap to buy. Whatever the reason was, I didn’t care. For the first time in almost 2 years, they hit my purchase price. I sold and exited with no profit or loss.

It’s not just these stocks. In the mid 90s, I’d invested in a company called VBC Industries at Rs 20/share. After the IPO scam, the company disappeared and I got so frustrated that in 2001, I tore up the certificates and burnt them. Recently, I found that their shares were trading at Rs 35.

These are just a few of the companies that I know about. I wonder how many more are out there and when investors are going to get burnt. I'm not waiting around to find out.

Fancy dress video

2007-11-14T18:59:00.000-08:00

Fancy dress competition at Nisha's school

Satisfaction

2007-11-12T20:40:00.000-08:00

You're stuck in yet another horrible big Bangalore traffic jam on the
Outer Ring Road. You decide to play by the rules and sweat it out behind
countless vehicles on the main road. All around you, you see people
trying to beat the jam by getting on to the service road. Suddenly, the
jam magically clears on the Ring Road. The service road is now horribly
jammed. What satisfaction!!!

Stupid stupid BBMP

2007-10-31T21:48:00.000-07:00

The rain that we received over the past few days have made a total mess of the roads in Bangalore. In HSR Layout, where many of the roads were laid just a few months ago, the rain has exposed the shoddy workmanship. What takes the cake is how the authorities deal with the problem. There is a stretch near my house which is particularly pothole ridden. Some genius thought that the best way to deal with it is to dump a lorry load of mud on to the road.

An ode to America

2007-10-27T18:56:00.000-07:00

Enjoy

Kimi - World Champion 2007

2007-10-22T01:35:00.001-07:00

Wow, what a way to finish off the most closely fought championship in recent memory. Before Shanghai, only the most optimistic (and foolish) Kimi supporter would have given him a chance of being world champion. At Brazil, the odds shortened but it was still a very long shot. How it all came together is something that we will be wondering for a very long time.

With this win, Ferrari also move away from the Schumacher era into the Kimi era. Massa was very brave in the press conference hoping that his time will come, but I think that it is very unlikely. Kimi is now comfortable with the car, is the fastest driver out there still and as world champion, there will be a definite tilt towards his side of the garage. Massa should resign himself to playing the second driver role and collect a few wins, poles, fastest laps and a few million dollars along the way like Rubens and Eddie Irvine did.

With the championship over, all talk is going to be about Alonso and Mclaren. Everyone says that he will be leaving Mclaren to Renault. Renault are not even announcing their driver lineup until this plays out. It should be an interesting few weeks, keeping fans interested through the winter break.

I really enjoyed the world championship fight, but cannot say the same for the races. The only ones that will stay on were Canada, Nurburgring, Fuji, Shanghai and Brazil. Three out of those five were rain races, that speaks a lot about how boring F1 is nowadays.

My picks for the drivers this year were

A+	Hamilton	came up way beyond expectations
A	Rosberg, Kovalainen, Heidfeld, Raikonnen, Alonso, Massa	All of them had flashes of brilliance but their fair share of mistakes
B	Webber, Vettel, Sutil	Each of them could have done far better if their car had been better
C	Kubica, Button, Coulthard, Liuzzi, Speed, Sato, Davidson, Trulli	All of them were disappointing, did nothing of note
D	Fisichella, Wurz, Barrichello, Schumacher	career ending performances for this bunch

Infosys

2007-10-16T17:12:00.000-07:00

After the somewhat disappointing (??) quarterly results from Infosys, one of the irritating TV anchors on CNBC asked an equally obnoxious analyst, "Is this the end of Infosys as a bellwether stock?". I wanted to strangle both of them and tell them to cut out the rhetoric, but thinking about it now, it is a good thing.

For too long, the importance of Infosys has been wildly exaggerated and many other companies that were doing equally well (TCS comes to mind) never got their fair share of recognition. I also think that the Infosys management plays too much to the markets, which is not a good thing for the longer term. So, if the markets write it off completely and start focusing their attention elsewhere, it will give the management the freedom to take decisions that will help them in the long term.

In other news, the market touched 19000, just 4 days after it touched 18,000. People are now talking about 20000 and 25000 levels by the end of the year. I wonder if any of them recall the famous words "Irrational exuberance".

Zuma

2007-10-16T17:05:00.000-07:00

I was checking out Zapak for some new games the other day and discovered Zuma. It has since become an addiction, I find that I've devoted many hours to this over the past few days. Check it out at your own risk:-)

Airtel broadband

2007-10-10T21:52:00.000-07:00

Airtel has announced a 8 Mbps broadband offering. That's good news, but as I expected, they are announcing a puny 7-8 GB download limit. Essentially, this means that if you use your connection to full capacity, your monthly quota is over in a little over 2 hours. You have to wonder at the special breed of dimwits that we have in allthe Indian telecom providers.

It'll be interesting to see the kind of pricing that they will have for this speed and whether it will translate into lower pricing for the lower speed plans. I'd also like to see them change their download policy, rather than charging extra for the excess downloads, they can throttle the connection to a lower speed of 512 kbps or 1 Mbps. If that happens, I would definitely consider moving to the higher speed plans. Until then, I'm sticking to my pathetic low speed unlimited plan.

Sensex at 18000

2007-10-09T06:45:00.000-07:00

Just when I thought that the market was ripe for a massive fall, it rises by almost a 1000 points in a single day to blow past 18000. Truly unbelievable. I think it is all part of a grand conspiracy to ensure that Mukesh Ambani becomes the richest individual in the world, even if it is only temporarily.

Thrilling climax to 2007 F1 season

2007-10-07T22:35:00.001-07:00

The final two races of the 2006 season promised to be a thrilling end to
a hard fought season, but that evaporated in smoke along with Michael
Schumacher's engine. When the circus moved to Brazil, Alonso's title was
a formality. That did not stop Michael Schumacher from producing one of
his virtuoso performances for which he is well known for.

This year, there was no such expectation. Lewis Hamilton came into the
Chinese grand prix with a 10/17 point lead over Alonso/Kimi, expecting
to wrap things up over the weekend. He did his chances no harm by
bagging pole (albeit, as we found out later, with a much lighter car)
and built up a 9 second lead in the first stint. At that time, I thought
it was just a formality, as even if Kimi caught him, he was well ahead
of the rest of the pack and would finish 4th at worst. It all started to
go wrong after the first pit stop as the advertised rain never came down
hard enough and the track started drying up. The front runners who did
not change their tyres after the first stop started going slower and
slower and lost upto 12 seconds a lap to those who took the gamble of
going on to dry tyres. Lewis was the worst hit as he had pushed a lot in
the opening stages and his tyres were in bad shape. Kimi caught and
overtook him easily (I think, as the power went off just when this
happened) and Fernando started catching him at 6-7 seconds a lap.
Instead of bringing him in, Mclaren asked him to stay out for another
lap and by the time they came to the long back straight, Fernando was
right on his rear. Lewis kept him off and headed into the pits but went
in too fast and instead of making the right turn onto the pit lane, got
stuck in the gravel trap and that was the end of his race.

Kimi won and Fernando came 2nd and in doing so, cut Lewis's lead down to
7 and 4 points. This leaves us with a mouthwatering possibility of any
of the three being crowned champions.

Kimi needs to win and hope Fernando finishes 3rd or lower and Lewis
finishes 6th or lower to become champion. If not, he needs to finish
second and hope that Lewis finishes 8th or lower AND Fernando is 4th or
lower. IMO, this is a very slim chance as even if Ferrari are
comfortably faster and Massa covers his rear, Mclaren should be ahead of
the rest

Fernando needs to score 4 points more than Lewis. If he wins, Lewis must
be lower than 4th, if he's second, Lewis must finish 5th or lower. If
he's third, Lewis must finish 7th or lower and if he's 4th, Lewis must
finish 8th or lower for him to be champion. If he finishes 5th or lower,
he is out of the championship.

Lewis is in the best position as he doesn't need to go all out for the
win. However, one could turn that on its head and say that he has the
most pressure as it is all his to lose. In fact, Kimi and Fernando
started their mind games right at the post race press conference by
setting the expectations very low for themselves and putting all the
pressure on Lewis.

It promises to be very exciting weekend in Brazil. I wish the next two
weeks goes off very very quickly.

Commute to office

2007-10-03T23:53:00.000-07:00

For long, I've been advising everyone who would listen that there is no
better solution to beat the traffic stress than to drop our cars and
start using public transport. I have been guilty of not following my own
advice, always justifying it with the "my office is so close, I don't
think I am contributing to the mess" argument.

I finally decided to do something about it. I decided that I will start
taking the ~~Volvo~~ bus to work at least once a week. I have been doing it for
the last two weeks. It's a lot more expensive than driving, very crowded
and inconvenient (with a wait time of upto 30 minutes), but I have the
satisfaction of contributing to the greater good.

And who knows, if more people start doing this, the traffic in Bangalore
may start getting better.

Fuji Grand Prix

2007-10-01T00:12:00.000-07:00

It was an amazing race yesterday, after 2-3 processional races. Every time there is a rain race, we seem to have such drama and I wonder if Formula One should have artificial flooding of the track every weekend to make things interesting!!! Lewis won, Alonso crashed and the Ferrari drivers came from the back of the grid to finish 3rd and 6th.

Finally, it looks like Lewis Hamilton is pulling clear in the race to the World drivers championship. Kimi is in with a mathematical chance, but to gain 17 points in 2 races is virtually impossible unless Hamilton retires in both. Alonso is 5 points closer, but it's still a tough ask. Hamilton can easily play it cool, settle for 4th and still win the championship. With the kind of advantage that Ferrari and Mclaren have over the other teams, that wouldn't be too hard.

Cash awards for Indian team

2007-09-26T21:29:00.000-07:00

I am appalled to hear about the cash awards announced by politicians of
various states to our cricketers. Cricket is a self sustaining sport
with large amount of sponsorship. The players have contracts that
guarantee them big bucks. Where is the need to spend public money on
them?

If the politicians wanted to get their name in the papers and go one-up
on each other, couldn't they just restrict it to a felicitation
ceremony? With people like this ruling, we are condemned to forever be a
second rate nation.

A moment of madness

2007-09-25T08:15:00.000-07:00

Misbah-ul-Haq lost the Twenty20 world cup for Pakistan in a single moment of thoughtlessness.

Today, on my way to work, I saw a ghastly accident just outside my office gate. A motorcyclist was lying on the road, dead, his skull smashed. He had skidded and lost control. Unfortunately for him, a truck was coming at that very moment and it ran over him. If only, he reached that place a few seconds later.

Almost everyone in my office saw this on the way to work. The euphoria of the World Cup victory was gone.

All that work...

2007-09-25T08:09:00.000-07:00

...and still no real results to show for it. I started keeping tab of my exercise details since Feb 18, 2007 through the website Traineo. Since, then, I've exercised 153 days out of 217 burning a total of 71814 calories!!! Sadly, my weight which was 78-79 kg at the start of the year is still at the same level. I think its time for me to seriously start looking at my diet:-)

An inspiring story

2007-09-20T17:05:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, you come across an inspiring story just when you least expect it. I had gone to an engineering college for campus interviews. Given that we are late going to campuses this year and the colleges that we are going are not in the top echelon, I wasn't expecting too much.

Then, I came across a candidate who simply blew me away. It was not because he was brilliant. It was because of his background and what he had achieved. His father was a daily wage worker, who delivers bricks on a bullock cart. He has realized that education is the only way out and borrowed through his nose to get his son through college. We found that this guy was easily the best of the lot and offered him a job.

This reinforced to me the point that India has so much of talent, which goes unnoticed due to a lack of opportunity. Instead of opening up and providing everyone equal access to opportunities to improve the life, our politicians seem intent on shutting them out further.

An Indian win

2007-09-16T17:25:00.001-07:00

It did not happen in the Twenty 20 world cup, our overhyped bunch yet again proved unequal to the task. But an Indian won yesterday in the GP2 championship. I was lucky to catch the last part of the race while channel surfing and it felt amazing to hear the Indian national anthem at a major motorsports event. I'm hoping this happens a few more times, with Narain Karthikeyan taking a full place in the A1GP championship.

Apple's new ipod range

2007-09-14T09:42:00.001-07:00

Apple has formally launched its ipod range in India. The prices and the corresponding prices in the US

Model	Price in INR	Price in USD	Converted Price in INR	Premium
ipod Nano 4GB	8800	149	6000	2800 (45%)
Nano 8GB	11400	199	800	3400 (42%)
Classic 80GB	14500	249	10000	4500 (45%)
Classic 160GB	20400	349	14000	6400 (45%)
ipod Touch 8GB	17700	299	12000	5700 (47%)
ipod Touch 16GB	23600	399	16000	7600 (47%)

I wonder what the justification is for such a premium on what is already a premium line of products. Where is the incentive for anyone to buy it in India, they will just pick it up on their next trip to the US or Singapore.

T20 world cup

2007-09-14T08:03:00.001-07:00

Watching the Twenty-twenty world cup, I can't help but feel that the days of one day cricket are numbered. The same excitement and thrills but in half the time, how can it fail? I'm surprised that it has not taken off in India yet, maybe we have a lot of people without much work to do and need sometime to keep us occupied the entire day:-)

Bangalore drowning

2007-09-14T06:51:00.001-07:00

It's been raining heavily for the past two days and Bangalore has descended into chaos. Flooding, traffic jams, the same story repeats itself. There was a silver lining for me this morning. The traffic situation at Jakkasandra and Silk Board was so bad that most of the vehicles coming on to the Ring Road got stuck there. I left for work expecting an hour long commute, but reached office in 12 minutes flat!!!

Here are some shots of the storm water drain at the intersection of HSR 14th main and ring road.

Only wish there was a way to get all that water into Agara kere and fill it up

The race ...

2007-08-16T17:08:00.001-07:00

for the first to complete 20000 km was on between my car and bike. For a while, it did seem that I would reach 20K on my Pulsar first, but the trip to Chennai in July meant that my Santro reached it earlier. Yesterday, my Pulsar also completed the milestone. The date:16-aug-2007. Location: Sarjapur Outer Ring Road