Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

Yes I am talking about actual birds. The feathered ones… Sheesh..
Used to be an avid Bird watcher. Remember one summer when I was in 8th where I got up every day at ~5 am to go take photos of nests. Unfortunately the roll of film I was using was messed up so none of the pics I took got developed but the experience was fun. Me, Surabhi, Aditya and Soumya would spend hours trying to find nests and then taking pics. Infact I have pics of a peacock’s nest that we found when I was in 9th. Its a great shot. Will share it if I get the time to scan it and if I feel others are interested in it.

A couple of days ago I had mentioned that I have a nest in my bathroom window and I promised that I would take some pics. I did take the pics and I must say that the eggs look a lot prettier than the chicks. This one looks like a roasted chicken. I guess he/she is not more than 4-5 days old, a week tops. If you look closely at the pic you will see the two unhatched eggs in the front.

Nest in my Window

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

– Suramya

PS: Let me know if you want me to share more pics.

This post has some random thoughts that I have been thinking about so is a bit less organized than my usual posts.

Well… This past week wasn’t a lot of fun, spent the last three days coding/debugging for more than 18 hrs a day. Not fun. The worse part was that my cousin was over for all three days and I couldn’t spend time with him because I was working. But the feeling that I got once I got the stupid thing fixed was unbelievable. Made it worth the time spent. Then I spent most of Sat and Sunday sleeping to recover from the work.

It was bad enough that I find another Suramya posting comments on my friends blog (Meghna’s), She had to turn out to be a girl. Now everyone is confused so as to which Suramya said what. Though it would be interesting to get to meet her, just to be able to say “Hi, Suramya, I am Suramya”.

Then I was reading Surabhi’s blog and there I read a comment where another friend of Surabhi decided to start calling her ‘Sur’. Thats even more annoying. Had to spend a month in college where both of us were being called Sur by friends. I finally managed to convince everyone that I had been known as Sur for a longer time than her (Since 1996) so she couldn’t start poaching on my nick name. Now I dread that I have to do the same again. Ah well.. It would have been worse if I had met the friend but since I haven’t I guess I can ignore it(I think).

Yeah Yeah. I know. Its childish. But its 3 am. I am tired. That annoyed me. So there.

Oh I have a bird nest in my bathroom’s window. There were three eggs in it and one of them hatched. The other two should be hatching shortly. Will take pics tomorrow.

Been doing Yoga at 5 am for the past week. Its pretty relaxing. But I know I would never get up at that time so I go do Yoga and then comeback and goto sleep. Started running also, but that part is not so much fun. My legs hurt but I think I am getting better.

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

– Suramya

On Saturday I went to Yash’s Birthday party and it was a lot of fun. Got to meet people I hadn’t met in ages. Met Yash and Nora for the first time after their wedding. It was nice, they weren’t looking/acting any different. Some of Yash’s MBA classmates were also there and we spent the night talking/enjoying. I got there at 8:40 pm and was the first one to get there (Yash had asked me to be there by 8:30 – 9:00) and everyone else joined us by 9:30 pm and the second set came it at almost 11:30 pm. We cut the cake at almost 1 am and started dinner at 1:30 am. We were there all night before we realized that it was almost 5 am and while Yash and Nora were too polite to ask us to buzz off we should leave so we left.

Before that Gaurang was in town for a week and he crashed at our place for a day/night which was a lot of fun, Was meeting him after almost a year. So it we had a lot to catch up on.

That reminded me what the important things in life are: Family and Friends. All the material wealth in the world won’t do you any good if you don’t have a friend or a family member to share it with. Meeting friends, reliving memories and catching up with each others life is a good way to de-stress and it rejuvenates you.

I have been a bit bad about keeping in touch with friends recently and now have decided that that has to change. I will be calling and emailing a lot of people in the coming days so that I can get in touch with old friends. Who knows maybe we will get to meet also.

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

– Suramya

Over the past few weeks I have noticed some issues with my UPS when the power goes out and our Inverter kicks in. Earlier then the mains power came back when the UPS was on inverter it would loose power for about 1/2 a second which is enough to restart any computer connected to the UPS. So I took it for servicing and the guys over there increased the sensitivity of the UPS and it looked like it worked for a while…

Two days later I noticed that when the system was running off the inverter power it was having trouble, basically it looked like the UPS was cutting to battery and then back to mains ~ two times a second. Spoke to the UPS people and they said that it might be a problem with the inverter voltage/frequency and asked me to reduce the sensitivity or connect it to a socket without the inverter. So I bypassed the inverter and connected it directly to the mains.

Now the problem is that there is one hour loadshedding in the morning and if I am running the computer the UPS drains out in 20 mins and shuts down. Which was a pain. So I installed the UPS control software on my desktop and reset the sensitivity back to medium. Then I was just playing with the various options and I saw that the incoming voltage was 280 Volts (Normal voltage in India is 220 Volts) when the inverter was running.

I thought that it might be a bug in the software and it was probably showing the wrong voltage so I took my digital multimeter out and used that to measure the voltage. Sure enough it was 280 volts. Immediately disconnected the UPS from the inverter line and connected it directly to the mains line.

Spoke to the inverter people today (actually dad spoke to them) and they tried to tell me that the inverter was giving a cosine wave instead of a sine wave so thats why the voltmeter was reading the voltage incorrectly and that its supposed to give 280 volts and if we put more load on it then the voltage would go down to the correct value. Told them to stop BSing and send someone over to look at it. So a tech is coming tomorrow.(Hopefully).

Till then all my equipment is off the inverter line. Hopefully this will get fixed soon.

– Suramya

PS: Incase you are wondering; an inverter is sort of like a UPS but for the whole house. The one we are using is 1400 KVA. You also get ones with larger capacities that can support AC loads etc.

Got my laptop back and its working great so far. 🙂
You have no idea how annoying it is to not have your computer working. I was using other computers but since I had my laptop customized to my needs it got annoying when I tried to do something on the new system and it didn’t work because I hadn’t installed that program or customized that install.

But everything’s working again. Now to reinstall Windows on Dad’s laptop…

– Suramya

The fan on my laptop failed so I decided to get it repaired before it caused trouble due to overheating. I already had a slight accident with the heating while I was in Bangalore. One of the rubber legs under the laptop melted due to the heat.

Anyways so I took the laptop to Nehru place and showed it to one of the shops over there. They replaced the fan and it looked like everything was working. Unfortunately when I got back home I found that I am unable to keep the laptop running for more than 5 mins at a time, it just shuts down. Looks like some sort of trouble with the CPU/heating/power-supply. Will take it back there tomorrow.

Currently using my dad’s laptop to remotely connect to my desktop. Using the desktop because the laptop has some issues with the windows version on it and I don’t want to sit on the desktop as the AC is not installed in the study room yet.

Lets see… Hopefully I can get the stupid laptop fixed.

– Suramya

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