Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

October 24, 2009

Found a good online bookstore for India

Filed under: Books Related / Reviews,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 11:41 PM

Recently I ordered my first set of books (after almost 2 1/2 – 3 years) online from Flipkart.com. I used to order a lot of books online but then stopped because shipping to India is very expensive on most Online book stores. e.g. Amazon charges about $5 per book and it doesn’t seem to matter how many books you order you still have to pay $5 per book. Though a friend told me that if you order about 10-15 books then the price of shipping does go down. *shrug*

FlipKart is a Bangalore based company that allows you to order international editions of books at a reasonable price and ships it to anywhere in India. So I ordered my first set of 4 books. The ordering was painless and pretty quick, though the site search engine does leave a lot to be desired. It seems like it can only do an OR search so its hard to locate books with common words in the title. Other than that the site is pretty easy to use.

Today at 11 am I got an email that 3 out of the 4 books I ordered have been shipped to me and the 4th one was being processed. At 1:10 pm I had the books in hand. I was amazed. Plus the books are in great condition and arrived safely.

The books ordered internationally (i.e. books that are not available for sale in India) take about 14-21 days to ship, but mine arrived 18 days. Once I get the last book I will be ordering my next set of books. 🙂

I am pretty happy that I found this store, though my bank balance is not going to be that happy with me. 😉

If you want to buy books that are not available for sale in India, check out their site.

– Suramya

October 10, 2009

What is friendship about?

Filed under: My Life,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 12:49 AM

What is friendship about?

  • Friendship is not about “I m sorry “ its about “abbe teri galti hai ”
  • Friendship is not about “I m there for u” or “I missed u “ it’s about “kahan marr gaya saale”
  • Friendship is not about “I understand “ its about “sab teri wajah se hua manhus”
  • Friendship is not about “I care for u “ its about “kamino tumhe chhod ke kahan jaunga”
  • Friendship is not about “I m happy for ur success “its about “chal party de saale”
  • Friendship is not about “I love that girl“ its about “saalo izzat se dekho tumhari bhabhi hain”
  • Friendship is not about “R u coming for outing tomorrow “ its about “ nautanki nahi, hum kal bahar ja rahe hai”
  • Friendship is not about “Get well soon “ its about “ Itna piyega toh yehi hoga”
  • Friendship is not about “All the best for ur career“ its about “ bahut hua, abhi toh switch mar saale“

    • Got this from a friend and Guess what? Its all true.

    – Suramya

    PS: Normally I translate all Hindi expressions to English on the blog, but these don’t really translate that well so I have left it out for now.

    October 9, 2009

    Ordering books online

    Filed under: Books Related / Reviews,My Life — Suramya @ 3:49 PM

    2 days ago I ordered 4 books online for the first time in three years. I stopped buying books online when I got back to India. Even before then I would rarely buy books online as I could ask the book shops to order any book they didn’t have and would just pick it up the next time I was in the area.

    This is a Bangalore based company and so far I have heard good things about them. Lets see how the books look when they get here. It will take 14-21 days for me to get the books because all the books I ordered are not available in India and have to be shipped from outside.

    Can’t wait. If the service is good then I will certainly be ordering more from them. Lets see.

    – Suramya

    October 5, 2009

    Weird MSN Password reset logic

    Filed under: Computer Related,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 11:45 PM

    Yesterday I was organizing my system and found log files from an old MSN account I had which I used mainly for chatting with friends. I decided to enable the account in Pidgin and see if the account still worked. When I tried logging in to the account it didn’t let me because I guess the account had gotten locked down due to inactivity.

    So I went to the MSN site and tried to login to the account. At first it didn’t let me, so I tried resetting the password for the account. But that didn’t work as I couldn’t remember what information I had initially filled when creating the account so I asked the system to email me the password reset instructions.

    Now came the funny part. The system was going to email me the password reset instructions to the same account that I was requesting the password reset for. Below is a screenshot I took of the process.


    Weird MSN Password reset logic

    How I am supposed to access the account to get the reset instructions is something that they didn’t quite explain. The funny part is that the system finally let me login with the same password I had tried with originally. *shrug* Atleast it worked, though I am surprised that the account wasn’t deleted considering I hadn’t logged in for over 2 years.

    – Suramya

    October 4, 2009

    Quote from Surabhi

    Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 2:50 AM

    Me, Vinit and Surabhi were talking about Samsung phones. During this conversation Vinit said that “They have a kernel developer for the phone available” and Surabhi responded “We should ask the ‘Kernel’ to talk to Sam”.

    By this time me and Vinit had already started cracking up. For those of you who are not computer science majors (which Surabhi is BTW) the kernel is the core base of the system on top of which everything else is built upon. So when programmers/comp sci people talk about the kernel they are talking about the core software not a ‘Colonel’ in the army.

    – Suramya

    October 3, 2009

    Upgraded my desktop and OS

    Filed under: Linux/Unix Related,My Life — Suramya @ 5:14 PM

    As some of you know I have been complaining about my old desktop for a while now. It was a good system for its time but it had its issues. For example, if I hooked up more than 3 harddrives to the system it would refuse to boot, if I left my USB drive connected during boot it wouldn’t start up. Too much data transfer over USB would cause the entire USB subsystem to shut down. Finally it got to the point that I couldn’t leave my Bluetooth adapter connected to USB if I wanted the system to boot. So I decided to upgrade.

    Now I am the proud owner of an AMD Phenom X4 9650 Quad core processor with 2 GB of RAM. It works great. Initially I had some issues with it but now its all sorted out and the computer is super fast. The problem I faced initially was that my old hard-drives were too slow for the new motherboard and when I installed the OS on any of the old drives the system was spending anywhere from 20% to 55% of its time waiting for data from the HDD.

    Now I also have a 1 TB (Terabyte) SATA drive which is very fast so I had to create a partition on it for Linux which involved moving 500GB of data to different partitions which took me almost 3 days, thanks to interruptions and slow computer speeds etc. But now that I am running off the SATA the system is superfast and responsive.

    In addition to upgrading the system I have also moved to Ubuntu (from pure Debian) and am running KDE 4.x now instead of KDE 3.5. Its a bit irritating trying to figure out how to do stuff again but I am slowly getting used to the new look/feel. What I find most annoying is that it feels like they have removed features from KDE3.5 and have come to KDE4. For example in KDE3.5 I could set my konsole to be translucent and it would show my desktop but in KDE4 it shows the windows behind it. Also I can’t seem to be able to set the size of the window (80×25 lines etc) in the config.

    In all there are minor irritations but over all its working the way I want it to. Mostly.

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

    – Suramya

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