Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

July 3, 2009

Chinese airline wants to use ‘barstool-style’ seating instead of regular seats

Filed under: Funny News — Suramya @ 9:27 PM

Don’t know if its true or not but its been getting a lot of press. Apparently Spring Airline in China doesn’t have enough planes to support all the customers they are getting inspite of them ordering new planes. So they have found a unique solution to their problem; in some portion of their planes they will replace the seats with ‘barstools’. This will allow them to fit upto 40% more passengers.

However if any of you have ever sat on a bar stool, you will realize that its not the world’s most comfortable seating option and I just can’t imagine people sitting on them for long periods of time. Although if the bar-stools were next to a bar, I am sure they will get a lot of takers.

The second problem I see is the safety issue. I can’t think of any safe way they can attach a seatbelt on a bar-stool. If this was possible then I am sure it would have already been implemented in bars around the world to keep their drunken clients safely seated… 😉

I am sure that this is just a what-if exercise that was leaked to the press and not something serious. Although, if it was serious it might be a good way for them to carry more passengers on short flights.

Source: DVICE.com
Thanks to : The Raw Feed for the original link.

– Suramya

July 2, 2009

My Article just got Published in LinuxGazette #164

Filed under: Linux/Unix Related — Suramya @ 7:46 PM

My Latest article on ‘Sending and Receiving SMS from your Linux Computer just got published in the Linux Gazette #164 🙂

Check it out if you get the time.

– Suramya

July 1, 2009

Doctor Who Quotes

Filed under: Humor,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 2:54 PM

I love watching Doctor Who and reading Dr Who books. While surfing the web I found this site that talked about the most famous Dr Who quotes. So I did a little search and found some more. Here are some that I really liked:

“I just put 1.795372 and 2.204628 together.”
“And what does that mean?”
“Four!”

– The Doctor and Romana, in “The Pirate Planet”

“There’s a corpse by the wood.”
“What sort of corpse?”
“A dead one what other sort is there?”

From “Image of the Fendahl”

“You look very nice in that dress, Victoria.”
“Thank you. You don’t think it’s a bit, uh –”
“A bit short? Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that. Look at Jamie’s.”

The Doctor and Victoria, in “Tomb of the Cybermen”

(Jamie is a Highlander and wears a kilt)

More quotes are available on the following sites:

http://www.amk.ca/quotations/doctor-who/
http://forums.scifi.com/index.php?showtopic=2258680
http://forums.scifi.com/index.php?showtopic=2333552

– Suramya

June 29, 2009

My day today: I officially hate the heat

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 10:02 PM

Went to Nehru Place today to get Surabhi’s laptop fixed. The fan on the laptop wasn’t working so the system wasn’t booting up. Its an IBM Lenova. All I can say for that is my Sony Vaio was on for 24 hours a day for almost 2 years and only then the fan started making noise so I decided to get it changed, while this laptop is little over a year old and the fan already died… Same thing with my HP Compaq laptop. That one was on 24 hours a day for about 2 year + with no issues so far.

Anyways, so I drove to Nehru Place in the boiling heat, on the way there I got stuck in traffic and spent about 1 1/2 hour for a drive that is a max of 1/2 hour usually. Once I got there I saw a IBM showroom almost immediately so I asked them if they would fix this system and they gave me the address of their service center that was over on the other side of the complex. So I walked all the way over to the other side climbed 3 stories of stairs and found the following sign on the service center’s door “Due to the powercut the service center is closed for the day”. *Gah!* One would assume that IBM would have enough money to put a backup power-supply for their service center.

So I called the IBM guys again and they directed me to another center. That was also closed for the same reason. Then I decided to take the laptop to a shop I knew did good work and get it fixed. It took them a little more than a hour and a half to get the laptop fixed and I was good to go.

During all of this I also bought a 500GB portable HDD as a gift and a battery charger for me (I got sick of buying new batteries for my wireless mouse) Finally got home and just about crashed.

Right now I am sitting in a AC room and not planning on leaving it for a while. 🙂 Although tomorrow I might have to go and get my chair fixed. One of the legs broke (Its one of the revolving chairs with 5 feet at equdistance in a circle) and I have to balance on the remaining four legs when I want to work on the computer. Its sitting in the car right now but lets see if I have the courage to go out again tomorrow in the heat.

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

– Suramya

June 27, 2009

Virtuality: Could be a decent show if given the chance

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 11:13 PM

Watched the pilot episode of Virtuality today. Its a new show where Earth’s first starship is on a ten-year journey to explore the Epsilon Eridani star system. To keep the crew sane VR (Virtual Reality) modules are installed on the ship and the crew uses them to decompress.

The pilot was decent, I mean it wasn’t awesome great but watchable. If it was going to be produced as a full show I would probably watch it. It has a lot of room for interesting developments. Plus I liked the ending of the pilot.

Basically the main idea behind it is that there is something wrong with the modules and it looks like someone hacked the system, but since the spaceship is beyond pluto, only someone on the ship could reprogram the modules. At times it took a few seconds to figure out if a scene was a VR scenario or the actual show. Another thing that got irritating was the frequent views of the ship from the outside from one of the exterior camera’s. They were interesting at first when they followed the captain through the ship but later they added no content/anything to the story and just took screen time for no reason.

The show is a pretty cool take on how future astronauts could spend long periods of time in space without going nuts.

Catch the pilot if you are interested in these kinds of shows. You just might like it.

– Suramya

June 26, 2009

AC’s and stabilizers and me

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 10:59 PM

Today I decided to replace the stabilizer being used in my room with another model that supported AC’s upto 2 tons (The current one supports upto 1.5 tons) This was because we are having a 1 ton AC put in and it makes more sense to put the 1.5 ton stabilizer over there instead of the 2 ton.

So I spend 15 mins to disconnect the old stabilizer and then left it as is to go out. Once I got back I started to connect the new one in… Now the thing is that the AC plug is behind my desk and the desk is really hard to move. Its one of those L shaped desks and its fitted really tight over there so first I had to pull the desk out before I could get to the plug. Then I had to remove the plug from the input cable so that the wire could get through the little hole in the desk to where the stabilizer is supposed to sit. This was the easy part.

The hard part was to put the plug back on the wire when there was a distance of about 6 inches between the wall and the desk to work in… Finally got everything connected and when I switched the thing on it didn’t work… The power came on but no output. Seems like the cutoff was kicking in.

Called dad, he looked at it. We disconnected everything and then reassembled it but no joy. So after about an hour we give up and reconnect the old one back. Once the AC is back up and running we decide to check the stabilizer again in another room. There it worked perfectly… So we brought it back and reconnected it. It still didn’t work. 🙁

Finally we gave up. I am using the old stabilizer again and all I got for my time and energy was a sore back (you try standing bent over for an hour). My desk is still not in the correct spot as dad wants to try again tomorrow. (I think I will be out visiting friends tomorrow all day 🙂 )

Atleast my AC is working and my computer is connected to the web.

– Suramya

June 23, 2009

Firefox 3.5 RC2 and my experience with it

Filed under: Computer Software,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 11:21 PM

I have been using the latest version of Firefox(FF) 3.5 for the past few days and I am pretty happy with it so far. I first started using FF when it was version 0.5 (or was it 0.6). Since then I have used every alpha and beta version that Mozilla released for any of its new versions.

This is the first release for which I never tried out the alpha/beta versions. The first time I downloaded it was the pre-RC version Beta 99 that was released just before RC1.

Some of the things have changes. One major change that I have noticed is that it is using a lot less memory than any of the previous versions. Previously it would routinely take up 200-300 MB of RAM, currently it is using 100MB after about a day of surfing.

The privacy mode is also nice but I haven’t really tried it out yet. I haven’t really noticed a lot of speed difference while surfing yet but it does start up faster.

I am eagerly waiting for the final version to come out so that I can play with it.

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

– Suramya

June 22, 2009

Nice Chair…

Filed under: Humor — Suramya @ 5:00 AM

This is a chair that is built out of cactus plants. Why someone would make something like this I have no idea. But it looks cool. Though I would not want to try it out.

Cactus chair
Cactus Chair

If I had this chair I would cover it with a cloth cover and wait for unsuspecting folks to try and sit on it. 🙂

Source: My[confined]Space

– Suramya

June 21, 2009

Finished my first atricle in 3 years today

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 11:51 PM

Finally got off my lazy backside and wrote my first article in 3 years today morning. 🙂 The last article I wrote was back in 2006.

I have sent it to the Linux Gazette and it has been accepted for publication. I think it might be published either next month or the month after. Once its published I will post a link here.

Yay, I am so proud of myself. Now off to write more articles.

– Suramya

June 18, 2009

Angels and Demons: Book vs the Movie

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 9:58 PM

As I mentioned before I recently saw the Angels and Demons movie and when I watched it I didn’t remember a lot of the book so I wanted to read it again to a)see how the book was different b) the plot was interesting.

Yesterday I finished reading the book and I am happy that I didn’t remember the plot/ exact details while watching the movie as some of the changes they made in the movie would have irritated me while watching it. A lot of things were changed in the movie to make it simpler and more straight forward. I think the movie was toned down a lot in comparison to the book to reduce the opposition from the Church and religious community. But the good part is that they managed to do it well enough that the movie came out well and was not a complete disaster like the Da Vinci Code.

In all most changes were minor but a few stood out.

1. In the movie there is very little involvement of the CERN, and none at all of its director. In the book he is the one who tapes the branding of the chamberlain while in the movie its recorded by the security camera’s installed in the office.

2. The movie completely glosses over the whole debate of proving genesis using the anti-matter which is covered in great detail in the book.

3. In the movie the last preferiti survives and is confirmed (?) as the pope but in the book he also dies.

4. In the book the final brand used is the Illuminati Diamond (see image below) which is an ambigram of the four elements arranged in the shape of a diamond while in the movie they use the Vatican’s symbol as the final brand. This point irritated me the most and what point was served by changing this is something beyond me. If one of the readers can explain this to me I will appreciate it.

Illuminati Diamond
The Illuminati Diamond

While writing this post I found out that some parts of the movie were censored in India (Source: The Hindu) so now I want to watch the uncensored version to see what was different. For that I will have to wait for the DVD to come out, which hopefully will not take that long.

The final verdict? The movie was good but the book was better. 🙂

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

– Suramya

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress