Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

Was woken up at 7am today by a very active puppy (Sherlock) trying to eat my hair and lick my face. It was quite a rude awakening.

Thanks a ton Surabhi… She let him into my room at 7am because Sherlock was sitting outside my door crying and trying to get in. As soon as he got in he jumped on me and starting trying to eat my hair. When he was stopped from that he decided that licking my face was much more fun. Gah..

Try being woken up from a sound sleep by something jumping on you and then eating your hair. Not fun. Had to kick both of them out from the room so that I could go back to sleep.

What added insult to the injury was the fact that Surabhi just sat there and kept watching this entire scene without helping and had the gall to laugh throughout.

Ah well, tonight I am going to make sure that the door is locked before I go to sleep 😉

– Suramya

Last weekend I flew down to Chennai from Bangalore for some work. The flight from Bangalore to Chennai is about 1 hour long and the plane is one of those propeller planes (I forget the name at this time). So I boarded the bus totake us from the terminal to the plane and once e got there we had to wait for a few minutes in the bus to let them finish cleaning up the plane.

During this time I noticed a person in Kingfisher security uniform frisking a person who had just gotten out from the plane. I thought it was pretty strange but whatever… then another guy got out from the plane carrying a garbage bag and he too was frisked and the garbage bag checked. Once they were checked they walked away from the plane with the trash.

Now can someone please explain to me what the purpose of frisking a person who is leaving the plane is? I can understand them frisking a person entering the plane but why would you need to frisk a person leaving the plane. Its not like there is a lot of expensive stuff on the plane which can be stolen. The only item that they could steal really easily would be the food and I don’t think that would want to steal it.

Although, if the cleaners had access to the luggage hold then it makes a bit more sense. But then again most checked in luggage is large enough to make sneaking it off the plane difficult.

Watching this I thought that this must be some quirk at the Bangalore airport so when I saw it again at the Chennai airport during my flight back I was even more surprised.

Anyways, I thought it was interesting and funny so decided to share.

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

– Suramya

I have been meaning to post this for a while now but kept postponing. Anyways finally remembered about this when I had computer access. so 🙂

Arti from friendsofbooks.com who is also the editor of the Chicken Soup book series contacted me recently and asked if I was interested in contributing to the Chicken Soup for Indian College Soul book which will be coming out soon. Basically this is a series of books that focus on heartwarming and inspiring aspects of everyday life.

At this time I can’t really think of any story about college that fits into the above criteria so I am going to pass on it this time, but if you have a college story that you think people would like then please contact Arti and let her know. Below are more details about the series/invitation:

———————————–
If you have a college story that you would like to share , please read the guidelines below and send your stories to: arti@friendsofbooks.com in the subject line please write ” CS for College Soul”

Publisher: Westland/Tranquebar
Last Date for submissions: July 22nd 2010 ( or earlier, if 101 stories are selected before that)

The write-up will carry the contributor’s name. Westland pays Rs 1000 per story and two copies of the book. A 3-4 line profile on all contributing authors is also carried in the book. We accept blogged and published work too provided the authors get the reprint permissions. The copyright of the story stays with the author.

Recipe for a Chicken Soup for the Indian College Soul

A Chicken Soup for the Soul® story is an inspirational, true story about ordinary people doing extraordinary things. They are personal and often
filled with emotion and drama.

Chicken Soup stories have a beginning, middle and an ending that often closes with a punch, creating emotion rather than simply talking about it. A story that causes tears, laughter, goosebumps or any combination of these. A good story covers the range of human emotions. The most powerful stories are about people extending themselves, or performing an act of love, service or courage for another person.

Guidelines

1. Tell an exciting, sad or funny story about something that has happened to you or someone you know. Make sure that you introduce the character(s).

2. Tell your story in a way that will make the reader cry, laugh or get goose bumps (the good kind!) Don’t leave anything out — how did you feel?

3. The story should start with action; it should include a problem, issue or situation. It should include dialogue and the character should express their feelings though the conflict or situation. It should end in a result, such as a lesson learned, a positive change or pay-off.

4. Above all, let it come from your HEART! Your story is important!

Story Specifications

Stories should be non-fiction, ranging in length between 300-1200 words.
——–

More details on how to submit/additional information is available in this blog post: Inviting stories for Chicken Soup for the Indian College Soul.

Please contact Arti if you have questions about this. All the information I have about the invite has been posted here.

This is all for now. Will post more later.

– Suramya

So yesterday was an interesting start of the weekend for us. Me, Vinit, Surabhi, Anil and Manisha walked to UB City to get dinner at Tuscano’s (I think that’s how you spell it) with Dev and Chandani. While we were waiting to be seated I suddenly smelled smoke. At first I thought that someone was doing a barbecue and had burned the food a bit but then we could see the smoke coming out of the vent in the building.

Initially there was only a little amount of smoke but later it got quite heavy. So we waited for a few mins to see what would happen and then left for another restaurant nearby. I did take pics but they didn’t come out well. All you can see is the building and a blur.

The funny part is how the fire was portayed in the media. The Times Of India headline reads “Fire at UB City scares diners” and here’s a blurb from the article:

BANGALORE: Panic ripped through the food court at UB City on Friday evening when the kitchen smoke started billowing across the the restaurant area. It was 9.50 pm. Customers having dinner mistook it for a fire and there was chaos at the venue.

This is complete BS. I was there. There was no panic or chaos atleast till the time we left which was about 10-15 mins after the fire started. People were still at their tables calmly finishing their dinners and there were some who were still waiting to be seated. Lots of people were taking photos (including me) and calling friends/family telling them about it. Only when they were told that the restaurant(s) were closed they started leaving.

Which in a way is quite bad. There should have been a fire alarm or something that went off and the security team from UB City should have evacuated the tower/food court. Luckily it seems like there was no major damage and no one was hurt.

Tonight going out with another group of friends and am hoping there will be no such excitement over there as well. 🙂

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

– Suramya

Hey Everyone,

The past week has been quite hectic for me so didn’t get a chance to post anything before this. I have now officially moved to Bangalore last week (the 12th) and have joined Goldman Sachs in the Tech department. For now I am staying with Surabhi & Vinit but will be getting an apartment sometime soon (Before they are tempted to kick me out :p )

Things are going great and so far I like Bangalore and my job a lot. For obvious reasons I won’t be talking/posting about my work here (Not that I posted work related stuff earlier but still…) The only thing I have issues with is not having my desktop here. That desktop has been customized with all my settings and preferences and using a different system is really annoying. At present I am borrowing Surabhi’s old laptop and have installed a version of Ubuntu on it.

I want to install Debian Testing on it, but since I don’t want to burn a CD and I didn’t bring my CD case with me to Bangalore (Weight considerations) the process has been an interesting experience. For some reason even though the bios lists USB as one of the boot options the laptop refuses to boot from my thumb drive. When I managed to get the system to boot into the installer then the stupid installer wouldn’t read the install files from the hard drive and insists on searching for a CD. I know I can fix it and get it installed but for now I have just installed the Backtrack Live CD (Based on Ubuntu) to the disk. This way I have a system that I can start customizing and that doesn’t get reset everytime I reboot the system, which is what would happen when I was using the laptop with the live CD.

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

– Suramya

For some reason my N95 started acting really strangely last week, after I copied some ebooks to the phone it became really really slow. On an average it started taking upto 8 seconds to perform any operation on the phone. So if I got an SMS and wanted to read it it would take about 8 – 16 seconds for the SMS to open. If I restarted the phone it would work ok for about 30 seconds or so and then become really slow again. Plus the battery life also got quite bad. I was getting about 2-3 hours on a full charge without any use, plus the phone was heating up a lot.

Since the last thing I did on the phone was copy some text/html files to it I tried deleting them and other files from the phone but that didn’t fix anything. So I decided to do a hard reset on the phone.

But before I could do that I had to backup the data on the phone. The files on the internal file system and the Mass storage device were quite easy to backup. The problem was backing up the Contact list and the SMS’s. I did a little research and found that the Contact list can be backed up to the Mass Storage by following these steps:

1. Open Contacts
2. Options -> Mark/Unmark -> Mark All

That will mark all the contacts in your address book. Once you do that Go to

3. Options -> Copy -> To Mass Memory.

This creates a directory called Contacts on the Mass Memory under the folder Others and stores all the contacts as .vcf files. Which you can copy to your computer using the USB cable. To restore all you have to do is open Contacts and then Options -> Copy -> From Mass Memory.

Backing up the SMS’s was a bit more involved. To do that you need to have Python for the Nokia phones installed. I used a Python script to loop through my Inbox and write the contents of the SMS into a text file that I then backed up.

The code incase you need it is listed below:

from time import ctime
 
import codecs
import inbox, appuifw
 
box = inbox.Inbox()
msg = box.sms_messages()
 
f = codecs.open('E:/Others/listSMS.txt', 'w', 'utf8') # open file in UTF8
for i in msg:
	f.write(box.address(i))
	f.write('\n')
	f.write(ctime(box.time(i))) # convert seconds in a string
	f.write('\n')
	f.write(box.content(i))
	f.write('\n----------')
f.close()
 
appuifw.note(u'All SMS are backed up!', "info")
 
f = codecs.open('E:/Others/listSMS.txt', 'r', 'utf8')
print f.read()
f.close()

Once I backed up all the data, I did a hard reset on the phone. The Built in function to Restore Factory defaults didn’t seem to accomplish anything so I had to resort to a search on Google again.

Use the following codes to do a Hard Reset on a Nokia N95 8GB. (Warning: This removes all data from the phone except the data stored on the Mass Memory)

Reset code: *#7370# or *#7780#

The page I got this information from listed *#7780# as the hard reset code but it didn’t do anything on my phone while *#7370# did the job.

Once I reset the device it started functioning properly again which was good. So I had to restore all the applications on it. About 1/2 way through I installed ‘FlipSilent-RDA-v2.00’ which allows you to silence your phone by flipping it. As soon as I tried installing it the phone went nuts again. Which sucks because I really love this app 🙁 I think the version I downloaded was infected. I don’t have the original .sis file that I used to install it the first time and now I really don’t feel like experimenting again by installing various versions to my phone to get a working version. I guess I could try contacting the author directly. Lets see.

But still, I have a working phone once again and all is well.

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

– Suramya

It was quite a long day today. Actually, it wasn’t so much as long as it was tiring. All my stuff from the US has finally arrived in India and I had to go finish all the paperwork so that I can collect the shipment from the container depo.

To get the release documents I had to make the final payments by DD (Demand Drafts) so the first job of the day was to go to the bank and get the DD’s made and I also needed to have some documents attested because the shipping company needed copies. The DD’s were no problem as the staff at the Oriental bank is quite helpful and fast.

Normally unless its specified that a document has to be attested by a gazetted officer a bank manager has the authority to attest a document. So I went to the manager of the local branch and asked him to attest the document copies for me. BTW, I know the manager because a couple of weeks ago I had a long talk with him and he had attested other documents for me. He told me that he is not a gazetted officer so can’t attest the docs, so I told him that it wasn’t an issue because the shipping company hadn’t specified that a gazetted officer had to attest the document.

He flat out refused to attest the document, telling me that unless I showed him written proof that a manager’s attestation was valid he wouldn’t attest it. So I told him not to worry about it because convincing the shipping company was my hassle and if he went ahead and attested the document his part was done and I would deal with the company if there were any further issues. Still he refused. In fact he was actually quite rude and told me to stop wasting his time and leave. I then asked if I called the shipping company and have them confirm over the phone that it was ok for him to attest the document would he do it. He still refused and told me it had to be a written email/letter/document.

It would make sense to follow this rule if he had to log this proof somewhere or maintain a log. He just wanted to see the email/letter before attesting the documents and the email/letter would then be returned to me (I have done this before but that time I had a brochure that said that it was ok. He had looked at it and then given it back).

This is what I call petty bureaucracy because he has this ‘power’ to attest and is following some rule that has no bases in reality and you can’t question him because if he doesn’t do that then how can he show others how important his position (he) is. He has done this in plenty of other items but that’s a story for another day. For now I just have to deal with him but seriously… I can’t wait for him to transfer out.

Once the bank stuff was done (I spoke to the shipper and they told me I could self attest the document as long as I showed them the originals) I took the metro to Dwarka which is on the other side of Delhi. If I had driven there I would have had to deal with all the traffic so it was easier and less stressful to take the metro, especially since the shipper’s office was near the station.

Once I got to Dwarka which took I called them up and asked for directions to their office. I was told to take a rickshaw and go to Ramphal Chowk and their office was located there. I took the rickshaw and got all the way to Ramphal chowk (In Sector 7, and I had started from Sec 11) but when I got there no one knew the building they were supposed to be in so I called them again and asked for directions to the building from Ramphal Chowk, that’s when they told me that they were not located at Ramphal Chowk but were at another Chowk (I forget its name now) which was back in Sector 11 about 10 mins from where I had started. So I had to go all the way back.

In all because of this screwup it took about 1 hour 45 mins to get to the office instead of the 10-15 mins it should have. Plus I got to enjoy Delhi’s 40 Dec C heat at noon.

Once I got there the paperwork didn’t take much time and I got out quite fast. Now I had to take the documents these guy’s gave me to another office in Nehru place. So I went back to the metro station and took the metro to Rajeev Chowk (Connaught Place) because the metro doesn’t service Nehru place yet. Once I got there I took an auto to Nehru place which took almost an hour to get there thanks to the traffic and the fact that the top speed of the auto was probably about 40 kmph.

That office took processed my paperwork and gave me another set of docs that I need to take to the shipping depo tomorrow to get the actual stuff released. Once all this was done I took a bus back to Noida. Thankfully I got a seat in the bus ’cause it was jam packed. Think all sardines from two cans stuffed in one can.

I literally didn’t have space to even move one step forward to get out of the bus. But it was a quick journey. Thankfully.

So, now I am back at home after having spent almost 9 hours bouncing around Delhi/Dwarka/Noida and tomorrow I get to do another marathon session to pick up the stuff and get it back home.

I need sleep. (I was up till 5 am working on a project and slept for about 4 hours before leaving home in the morning).

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

– Suramya