Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

April 15, 2007

Made a trip to Bangalore

Filed under: My Life,Travel/Trips — Suramya @ 5:12 PM

Went for a trip to Bangalore for the past few days for work. Left here on Thursday morning via Jet Airways and arrived in Bangalore in the afternoon. The flight was nice and I liked the service. Vinit’s mom picked me up from the airport and dropped me off at the office where I met the guys/girl for the first time. It was an interesting experience.

Spent a lot of the day installing Visual Studio 2005 on my system along with other assorted junk. VS took up almost 2.5 GB of my disk space no idea how much SQL server has taken up. Will be doing a lot of .NET programming now and I have already started missing Unix/Linux programming. However thankfully I will also be working on PHP and MySQL so thats a saving grace for me. 😉

There were a lot of power cuts during the day and the UPS kept us running for a while but then even it gave up and we had to sit and wait for the power to come back for almost an hour. At night it we had a thunderstorm and it was the first time I saw so much lightning at a time (Probably because usually I spend thunderstorms inside). This time I spent some time talking with Aunty while enjoying the cool breeze and the lightning.

Friday and Sat were also pretty much the same; spent some time programming, waiting for power and more programming.

Flew back on Sat night with Indigo Airlines and it was an OK flight. The service was good but for some reason they don’t serve any food during the flight. The only stuff they sell are cookies and cashews plus juice and softdrinks. My flight was Via pune so only got to Delhi at 11:35 pm. Then had to drive back to Noida so got home almost at 1 am.

Overall it was a fun trip. Met some interesting people.

Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

– Suramya

April 9, 2007

Archie in Hindi, Veronica wearing a sari

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 4:22 PM

You have got to be kidding me. Wasn’t Spider-Man India enough? If I recall correctly it was a major flop. Now we have this horrible idea:

Imagine the popular American youth comic idol Archie conversing in Hindi, chasing Veronica, who’s draped in a sari while Jughead’s burger gets replaced by an idli and Moose dumps baseball for cricket. Flights of fancy? Not anymore.

The US-based owner of the famous comic brand Archie Entertainment is planning a large scale expansion in India, for which it is even looking at localising the content to suit the market requirements.

Part of the charm of these comics (Archies, Spiderman etc) is the US settings and this will ruin it. I don’t have a problem with a hindi translation of the comic, thats a good thing and will probably increase their sales but “Indianizing” it is just wrong. If I want to read a comic with an Indian setting I will read one of the many Indian comics: Nagraj, Chacha Chaudhri, Super Commando Dhruv etc.

What kind of weirdo’s come up with these idea’s?

Source: When Archie speaks Hindi, Veronica will come wearing a sari- Hindustan Times

– Suramya

April 7, 2007

Saying Grace

Filed under: Humor — Suramya @ 6:16 PM

Found this funny:

2007-03-21.gif

Source: www.sinfest.net/

– Suramya

Setup my new speakers

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 6:07 PM

Finally setup my new home theater system that I had bought about two weeks ago. I got an altec lansing 5.1 speaker set and they sound awesome. I like the new system but have the following issues with it:

1. They didn’t give any means to hang the speakers on the wall. (More on this later)
2. The speaker with the volume control is the front right speaker. It should have been the center speaker as that would usually sit on the TV/Music system.

As they didn’t give me any hooks/tape/screws to put up the speakers I had to figure out a way to have the speakers up on the wall. Initially I wanted to use sticky tape but dad vetoed that idea as the tape tends to come off in time and he didn’t want the speakers to keep dropping off. Then we thought that we could create a platform for each of the speaker but that idea was dropped because it was too much work. Finally dad convinced me to drill holes in my brand new speakers so that we could put nails through them and hang them. I guess my warranty is no longer valid. But on the bright side the speakers stayed up.

The part that took the longest was running the cables as it had to be neat. Took me almost 3 hours to get all the cables neatly put up. Now I can enjoy my new surround sound system.

Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

– Suramya

April 5, 2007

How I fixed my Vonage phone issues

Filed under: Tech Related — Suramya @ 2:24 PM

Today I finally fixed a problem that I have been having with my Vonage phone. Basically what was happening was that everytime the power went out and the inverter (Sort of a UPS for the entire house) kicked in the phone would stop working. All I would get was a lot of static on the line and no incoming calls would come though. If I switched the UPS powering the router off so that it was running on internal power the line would clear up. Couldn’t figure out why this was happening so I moved the UPS to a outlet that wasn’t connected to the inverter so when the power went out it would kick to battery backup, but this wasn’t a good solution as the beeping would get on my nerves.

Today I found that the phone was having the same issue even when the inverter wasn’t running so I thought that the issue might be the power supply for the router. I tired plugging it directly to the wall but the issue persisted so I tried running it off the UPS with the main turned off and it worked fine. Then I dug out the extra power supply I have for the router and then the problem was magically fixed.

The weird part is that I still can’t figure out why the thing worked when the UPS was running off battery power but didn’t work when the UPS was running off the mains power.

Oh well. Atleast the stupid thing is working again.

– Suramya

April 4, 2007

Visiting relatives

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 11:05 PM

Went for a visit to my relatives on Monday morning and it was a lot of fun. We (Me and mom) left home at 6 am and drove to Basera. The problem was that we just had an engine overall done on our car so we weren’t supposed to drive at more than 50 kph. Believe me, driving at that speed was annoying. We got there at almost 1 pm. (This included a 20 min halt for breakfast). Once we got there we picked up my nephew (Shaurya) from school as it was on the way.

Once we got home we had lunch and talked for a while after which mom showed everyone Surabhi’s wedding photos while I played with Shaurya and Lakshya. Once the sun went down me and Ashok bhaiya went for a drive where I saw the damage that was caused by the recent hailstorm. This was the worst hailstorm in living memory (as per my grandfather). Hail whose size ranged from golf balls to baseballs completely destroyed crops. There was a 100% destruction of crops in most villages. The hail killed a lot of animals and I heard unconfirmed reports that 4 men died because of it.

The evening/late night was spent talking. On the next day Shaurya woke me up pretty early and that was annoying but once I was up it wasn’t that bad. We spent the day playing catch and tagging along with Ashok Bhaiya as he went along with his work.

On the way back we stopped at Goon for a couple of hours and I had a great time over there also with Shipra, Chavi and Badal. We looked at the photos again (I am getting tired of looking at them…) and talked. Actually Rajkumar mama and mom talked while I listened. We left from there and stopped for a glass of Fresh lime soda which was awesome. I love that shop, I have been their customer ever since I can remember and hardly any visits to Basera go by without me stopping at their place.

Over all it was a fun trip and I came back very relaxed even though my back hurts from Shaurya and Lakshya jumping all over me.

This is all for now. Will post more later.

– Suramya

April 1, 2007

Installing Debian without burning CD’s

Do you want to install Debian on a system thats running Windows but doesn’t have a working CD-ROM (Like my current laptop)? Earlier you had to try to install it using floppies and other methods that didn’t always work but now there’s an easier method:

You can now download a “Debian-Installer Loader” from their project site which is basically an exe file which you can run as a regular exe file. Once you run it, it will work for a few moments and then it’ll ask to reboot your PC, at which point you’ll be given the option to run Windows or Debian. Choose Debian and you will end up in a regular Debian installer interface.

Here are some Screenshots of how the installer looks like.

I haven’t tried it yet so I can’t personally verify how well it works but so far I have heard only good things about it. If you try it out let me know how it works out.

Thanks,
Suramya

What I did over the weekend

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 3:24 PM

This weekend me and Richa visited Rakhi Didi again. Richa came over in the morning and we both drove over to Rakhi didi’s place. We had lunch and then didi told us that her car had a flat tire so we all went down to the car and I showed them how to change a car’s tire. Once we changed the tire we went to a shop to get the flat repaired. Over there we found a 1 inch nail embedded in the tire which had destroyed the tube so we had to get a new one.

Then we drove to Ria’s school in Greater Noida where we picked up her books for the new academic year. By the time we got home it was 5 pm and the swimming pool had opened so all of us went to the pool where I tried to teach Ria how to swim. I say tried because Ria is scared of the water and clung to me like a limpet most of time. Though after a while she actually started swimming and did it pretty well.

While I was teaching her a couple of ladies came up to me and asked me if I was the new coach. Had to disappoint them by saying no. During the lessons one of the girls who was watching us said “Uncle, take her to the middle of the pool and let her come back on her own” It took a few seconds for me to process that the uncle she was calling was me. It was a bit of a surprise but I guess we are getting old.

Then we went back home and talked till almost 1 am. Then we went to sleep and got up at 7 am so that we could be at home to receive Padmini Buaji and kids who were in town for a day. We spent the entire day looking at Surabhi’s wedding photos, watching the wedding video and talking. It was a lot of fun.

In the evening we had to attend a dinner and she had to catch a train at 10:30pm so I dropped them off at the station. The rest of the night was uneventful. The weather is starting to get warmer. Now I have to keep the fan on because otherwise my room gets super hot.

Well this is all for now. Will write more later.

– Suramya

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