Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

Went to watch “The Clash of the Titans” today in 3d. It was an ok movie. The glasses I had were pretty blurry and I was sitting all the way in the back which made the movie quite difficult to watch through the glasses so I ended up watching most of the movie without the glasses. I don’t think I missed that much. Compared to Avatar the 3d effects weren’t that great. The story was ok, nothing to write home about.

Now I am waiting for the new Dr Who series to start, I just have to wait for another day.

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

– Suramya

I just got back from the hospital after visiting the latest addition in our family. My cousin sister Rakhi gave birth to a healthy girl at 3:19pm yesterday (29th March). The new kid hasn’t been named yet so we spent the time on the way back figuring out good names for her. The only condition I have is that the name should be easy to pronounce (I think the reason for that should be obvious)

Here’s a couple of pics I took at the hospital:

My Niece

My Niece holding Ria’s finger

Both my Nieces (Ria and the nameless one) together.

Man I feel old. But pretty physicked. This is the first time I have seen a kid of the next generation so soon after being born, usually I wasn’t around so only got to see them face to face after a couple of months. This time I got to see her when she was a little more than a day old (~25 hours old)

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

– Suramya

I have started using the AC in my room as the temperature in Delhi has hit 41 Deg C. (Today is 35 Deg C or 95 Deg F). Then I heard sound that suggested that something was stuck in the vent, I thought that it must be a leaf or something so ignored it. After a min or so the noise stopped.

About 15 mins after that the AC started ejecting Ice chips at me instead of cold air. I know I like the cold but I think I prefer cold air to frozen water esp in my room. I shut down the AC and after a couple of hours it seems to be working ok now. Thankfully an AC servicing is scheduled for Tuesday so they can check the AC and figure out why its acting like an Ice machine instead of an AC.

– Suramya

After 3 years of wait and constant nagging from my part mom’s new car has finally arrived. This car was supposed to be bought the same time as the Honda City three years ago. Basically the Honda was my gift to Dad and this my gift to Mom. Anyways after all the delays we have finally purchased a Chevrolet Beat LT and I drove it home from the showroom a few mins ago.

I had just about given up that this car would ever be purchased because everytime we would start deciding on a model a new model was announced and we just kept postponing the buy waiting for the next one. We Went from Zen Estillo to Spark to Honda Jazz to a couple of others.

Here are some pics to give you an idea of what the car looks like:

Our new Chevrolet Beat parked in our Driveway

Dad, Mom and Me with the car

View of the car’s Dashboard.

One thing I can say after driving the car… Its a smooth drive, the steering is very sensitive and the engine is quite powerful so the car will be fun to drive once I get used to the controls. 🙂

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

– Suramya

BTW, in case you are wondering why all these posts from me are showing up on Facebook all of a sudden, its because I have linked the two together and any posts I make on the blog automatically get published on my Facebook feed.

Just thought I should let you know.

If you don’t want to see the blog postings then I should be able to block the application (wordbook) and you won’t get any feed updates from it. In any case the blog posting are usually only once a day so I hope that people don’t find it too annoying.

Let me know if you have any comments/questions.

– Suramya

The 19th International Book fair has been going on at the Pragati Maidan in Delhi for the past week and will be ending tomorrow and since I love books there was no way I was going to miss it.

So I left for the Fair today at around 12 and got there at 12:30. The fair was in ~10 halls (not sure of the exact no) and I walked through 8 of them completely. It took almost 6 hours to do the entire trek and I ended up buying 9 books. The selections were good but for some reason there were not as many second-hand books as last year. So I only bought 4 books second hand the rest were new but at a discount.

Now all I have to do is figure out which one to read first. All sound very interesting (duh.. that’s why I bought them). In any case if you are in Delhi and are free tomorrow check the fair out. It’s open from 8am to 8pm.

– Suramya

A lot of you (or atleast some of you) must have heard people complaint about the Delhi Fog and how much trouble it causes for flights, trains and cars and atleast some percentage of you must be thinking: “Whats such a big deal about a little fog?”

I went to pickup Vinit from the Metro station today, which is about 2 min drive from my place. It took me about 10 mins to get there and this was how the roads looked when I left home.

Road to the Metro

BTW, this is not as bad as yesterday, so yeah the visibility gets even worse sometimes. This is why people from Delhi complain about the fog.

– Suramya

I read a lot and I buy a lot of books. Today I placed an order for limited edition copy of ‘VENGEANCE OF RAVANA’ which is Book #7 and ‘SONS OF SITA’ which is Book #8 in The Ramayana Series by Ashok Banker. Both of which won’t be out in market before the end of the year. Actually Book #8 is supposed to be published in 2011! 🙂 Yay Me!

I ordered the books directly from the author’s site and the process was painless. I just had to give my address, email & name and the books will be shipped to me directly. The best part was that the payment wasn’t made by credit-card during the purchase.

I got a separate email from the author with the payment instructions. The author prefers that the money be sent directly to his bank account and this can be done online or from a cash counter at his bank. The reason I like it is because this way all the money I am giving for the book is actually going to the author as the only cost to them is the cost of shipping and there are no payments to be made to the bank for maintaining a payment portal (Which can be expensive, depending on traffic etc).

BTW, Copies of Book #7 are still available as of the time of this writing so if you are interested check it out and international buyers can purchase the book using a credit card as usual.

In other news a lot of nice books are releasing soon and I can’t wait for them to come out. Here are a few along with their publication dates:

– Suramya

The past few days have been interesting, as they were spent rewiring the house so that the new UPS that we installed for the house would work and not have too much load on it. In addition we redistributed the load so that each of the three phases coming into the house from the electricity board have an equal amount of load on them. This involved cutting a lot of wires, some drilling and a lot of splicing and adding of new fuses etc.

We finally got the delivery for the new UPS 3 days ago but the batteries that were supposed to be delivered at the same time were only delivered yesterday as they took longer than expected to charge (That’s what the dealer told us). When the UPS arrived we had to remove the old Inverter ’cause of the deal we had made with the company (we got a discount if we gave them our old inverter) so we didn’t have any power backup for the house till yesterday night when all the work was finally done.

Thanks to all of this, my desktop was off for most of the past three days. I didn’t want to chance the power going off and my UPS (for the computer) running out of juice before it came back.

Once everything was installed and tested I booted up my system and got a Grub Rescue prompt instead of my normal boot screen. Normally the solution to this is booting up with a live CD and reinstalling Grub. But first I had to figure out what happened and why I was getting this error. I still don’t know what happened but I ‘think’ that the drive developed a bad sector/block and that sort of destroyed the bootloader.

The problem I faced then was that my DVD drive seemed to be having a lot of trouble reading any of the Live CD’s I have lying around. I first tried the Debian Testing Installation cd, followed by RHEL 5.1, Slackware, Kanotix, Kanoppix. None of them would work. Finally managed to boot using the Debian Test and convinced it to read from the CD. Once that was done told it to restore the Bootloader and was good to go.

But since I didn’t know what caused the crash I wanted to make sure that my Main drive was working ok (Its a 1 TB Segate) so I booted into single user and told the system to scan the 1st 500GB partition for badblocks and mark them as such. This scan took about 14 hours. Now I have another 500GB partition plus a 200GB drive and another 15 GB drive. Which by my guess will take the most of the next few days to scan. The 20 GB shouldn’t be an issue as I can scan it while booted in the GUI (Its a backup drive) but the rest have data on them that is used when I boot into Linux so I will have to do it from a single user mode.

I think I will copy most of my work/entertainment files to a thumb drive and work off that till this is done.

Well this is all for now. I am off to copy data to my thumb drive and then will start the scan on the other partitions. Will post more later.

– Suramya