Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

The internet connection at our place had been down since Saturday morning. So I called up Comcast and made a complaint on Sat, they said that they would have someone come over on Tuesday to check the connection as everything seemed ok on their end and the problem was on my side. So I was like fine, I guess I can survive without the net for a couple of days.

Today the guy was supposed to come between 3 and 6 but I came home I noticed that the cable modem was still blinking and it didn’t look like anyone had come (We had told the super of the building to let the repair guy in) so I called up comcast to find out what happened. The lady I spoke to told me that the repair person had called it a night and since he had been running late he didn’t come to our place… How stupid is that? If I had stayed home from work by taking time off I would have wasted half of my day. The least they could have done was call me so I wouldn’t waste time waiting for him…

NEways, then she goes on to tell me that they can only have someone come over on Thursday. Thats when I blew my top and told her that it was their fault that the guy didn’t show up and I wanted someone here tomorrow to fix my connection. She said that she didn’t have the authority to change the schedule but that she would put in a request for me and I should call them up again tomorrow and talk to dispatch and have them send some one over. She was pretty nice and was feeling pretty sorry about this, so I was like fine… I will talk to them tomorrow.

While I was talking to her I was also playing around with the modem, I had remembered that the modem had a status page that I could get at so I starting looking at the values and it looked like we weren’t getting any signal from the comcast server. While playing with the status page, for some reason I had this feeling that someone might have disconnected our cable in the basement or something, because the net connection was working fine on Sat morning and it stopped working in the afternoon with no changes made.

So I went down to the basement and checked out the cable connections. I saw a couple of wires were disconnected but only one didn’t have any label on it (The others had apartment numbers on them) and I didn’t see a cable with our apartment number on it. I could see an open socket where I could plug the cable in, so just as a test I plugged it in and came back up and rebooted the modem, sure enough when it came back up I had connectivity. 🙂

If I find out who the idiot is that unplugged us, I would have a nice long chat with him/her…

Thankfully I was able to get connectivity back but it still doesn’t excuse Comcast’s handling of the situation. If I hadn’t figured it out myself I would have had to spend another 2 days without net access, which sucked. Now I have to call them and tell them that the issue is fixed. Don’t think I will tell them how I fixed it…

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

– Suramya

Yesterday was Diwali [1] and I celebrated it by visiting friends for dinner and a party. It was one of the most fun Diwali’s I have had in a while. We all drove to Edison to Aarti’s place and we got there at about 7pm. Once we got there we spent some time talking and meeting everyone. (I had Bhelpuri which tasted great) then we got together for puja. We did the whole 9 yards with the puja and the prayers and the lighting of the diya’s.

Once the Puja was done the actual party started and it was a blast. We danced for over 4 hours and it was a lot of fun (Though my body is aching a but today) A lot of people showed up and none of them were of the weird kind and they all just had fun (Including me). Yes I took a lot of pictures and they are on Aarti’s camera and I will post them when I get a copy. A couple of other people were also taking pics so we should have a good collection to choose from. I also took a couple of videos so will also post them if they came out good.

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

– Suramya

[1] Diwali is an Indian festival. Its also known as the festival of lights. It is dedicated to the Goddess Lakshmi, the Goddess of Wealth, in most parts of India. Check out Diwali on Wikipedia for more info on it.

Last night I went out to dinner with friends to the Burmese place in New York called Village Mingala It was a lot of fun and the food was great.

The restaurant was recommended by Meghna and she was worried that she would be blamed if no one liked the food but she need not have worried as the food was good. Vinit, Surabhi, Meghna, Madhur, Aarti, Vivek, Pranav, Sandeep, Gaurav and myself all dug into the food and we all ate a lot The best part was that the place was pretty cheap too.

The only down side of this place is that they don’t have any good deserts… They only had three dishes for deserts so we went to another place to get desert. We got kheer and Gulab Jamun’s and took them home to enjoy them while watching this hindi movie called Don (No its not the new one, This one was the original one…) We watched it on our projector so for a while our living room looked like a cinema. (Actually it still does, ’cause we found the arrangement to be more efficient so we left it as such)

In case you are wondering about all the restaurants I am writing about then its just that we are on this quest to try every kind of cuisine in the world, and so far we have tried: Indian (Duh..), Chinese, Burmese, Thai, Italian, Cuban, French, American, Egyptian and Turkish. I have probably missed some others we have tried but… I will post about my experiences with each kind as and when I try them…

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

– Suramya

PS: If you know any good places to try any particular cuisine let me know so I can try it out.

Signs to know when you are getting old:

1. Most of your batchmates are either married or about to be married/engaged.
2. Some of your batchmates have already had kids or are expecting
3. You don’t find it strange when you see an invitation to an event that includes the line “Also bring your significant other”
4. You start to get pressure from everyone that its about time you married/engaged
5. You actually answer when someone calls you mama or chacha

– Suramya

Went out for dinner in New York yesterday with Surabhi, Vinit, Vivek, Meghna, Aarti and Madhur at this great restaurant called Cafe Habana located in Soho. Its a small place and If you go by the looks alone you will most likely walk away to eat at some of the better looking places around it, but that would be a big mistake as the food here is awesome and the service is really good. Too many times I have eaten at a place where the food is great but the waiters looked and acted like they were in a funeral. In contrast the waitress over here were friendly, cheerful and helpful.

The place is really busy so expect a wait when you show up. On weekdays its not that bad, though on weekends however the wait is a lot longer. One thing to keep in mind is that the larger your group is the longer your wait is, so don’t show up with a group of 15. The max I would take to this place would by 8 -9 people, any more than that would be a bit difficult so fit in quickly.

The corn over here is to die for and the rest of the food is also very good and filling. They play some really nice upbeat music so the atmosphere is very lively. The best part is that the place is not that expensive either.

If you are ever in the area check it out. You won’t regret it.

– Suramya

Today I bought the Second Season of I dream of Jeannie on DVD. I love the show and have been looking for it for a long time. Unfortunately they don’t seem to have released the rest of the seasons yet (Season 3 onwards). They should. Its a great show, a bit silly at times and still good for laughs.

I first watched this show in India where it had been translated in hindi. Surprisingly the translation was pretty good and the voice over wasn’t bad, unlike bewitched or some of the other shows where the voice overs were horrible. But I think I like the english version better as some of the jokes didn’t translate that well.

Well I am off to enjoy I Dream of Jeannie now… Will post more later.

– Suramya

Well, its 1st Oct again and its been 2 years that I have been maintaining this blog. Over the past two years I have realized the following things:

* Blogs are a good way for people who you don’t regularly interact with a way to keep up with whats going on in your life. You have no idea how many people told me that they regularly visit my blog to keep up with my life..

* Blogs allow you to present your thoughts to the public and have a good discussion on topics that you feel strongly about.

* Blogs are like a online archive of your life, a few years down the line you can come back and revisit old memories.

* Good Blogs are hard to maintain. 🙂 Yup its true, so many times I think about posting something but then decide that its not good enough or I don’t have enough time to make a good post. People who post regularly on their blogs have a great amount of dedication.

If you have been following the blog from the beginning you will probably have noticed that in the beginning I had a post almost every day then it sort of tapered down and recently I haven’t been posting at all. Its all to do with inspiration and time/desire/energy to post. I think I got tired of maintaining a blog, but now I think I will resume again. Lets see…

And if you actually read all that then thanks for being a dedicated reader and for visiting my site.

– Suramya

As promised here’s a brief writeup on my flight to the US and what I saw during it…

This time I flew in Business class on Aeroflot because due to the late date tickets in Business class in Aeroflot were cheaper that tickets in Economy class on other airlines. So mom and dad dropped me at the airport at ~ 1 am, and I walked up to the check-in desk where this one guy asked me if I was a business class passenger and when I told him yes, he told me to follow him and really speeded up my checking by letting me bypass the queue. Then I got the pass for the first class lounge in Delhi which was nice. They have complementary food and drinks over there so I had a couple of sandwiches and then after waiting for a while went through security and waited for the flight to board. They changed the departure gate a couple of times but then they finally let us board.

The flight was ok, as they didn’t have any in flight entertainment for some reason. So I listened to music and read my book. The best part of that flight was the meals. While in the economy class they give you a weird looking/tasting meal, in the Business class they literally give you a Five course meal and the service was awesome. Basically as soon as I sat down I was offered champagne with unlimited refills. I had a glass and then switched to orange juice and I drank a lot of it. Basically anytime during the meal if my glass was empty they would refill it without my asking.

Landed in Moscow and had a 5 hour halt over there.. Moscow airport has this weird rule that they only give you access to the Business class lounge two hours before the flight so since I had about 5 hours to kill I spent 3 hours roaming around the airport and reading a book and when I finally got access to the lounge I was hungry again so had sandwiches and juice. They had a cyber cafe also but the internet connection was down for some reason.

Then I boarded on the flight to NY on time and we departed pretty much on time. The service again was awesome and this time they even had in-flight entertainment. The thing was that they didn’t have the standard LCD displays mounted on the back of the seat, they gave out these portable players which had the movies/stuff stored on it so you could lie down and still watch the movies. I saw V for Vendetta. The seats recline to ~20-30 degrees from the floor and are flat so it was easy to sleep. They even had power sockets where I could plug in my laptop and work on it.

I arrived on time in NY and since I was in business class I missed most of the rush at the immigration and customs. Surprisingly even my bags arrived on time and without getting lost. In total it took me less than 35 mins from the time I got off the plane to the time I was out of the airport.

It was an interesting trip, and if the tickets didn’t cost so much I would fly business class again. But prob not Aeroflot.

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

– Suramya