I have been getting onto 6 AM flights to Delhi for week long work trips for some time now. The mornings are crazy and I end up roaming around like a zombie all day, surviving all day on loads of caffeine and whatever else I can find.
This Monday, I set up my alarm was set for the usual 3.45 AM, but I ended up hitting the sack only at around 12 AM - thanks to all the crazy TV shows my sister watches and all the fun one derives from the most meaningless of discussions amongs siblings and cousins. Needless to say, I woke up when my alarm rang with a crazy headache and the highest level of despise for this trip.
I probably snoozed the alarm at least 4 times before I woke up and surprisingly, saw my cousin sitting by my bedside who seemed to be amused with all the snoozing around. Looked like he was up all night, not uncommon for for him at all, but he had my office blackberry in his hand and he announced that a text message from Kingfisher had just notified that my flight was cancelled and I was put on another flight at 1 in the afternoon. I was as pleased as I was on winning a $250 hand of blackjack in Vegas and couldn't thank my admin more for booking me on India's most unreliable airline (based on my personal experience, of course).
I gladly slept for a few more hours and woke up sometime after the sun was up, and my cousin was still by my bedside, probably watching more movies on his laptop. Again he was holding up my blackberry and announced my manager sent me an email asking me to confirm my presence in the office today morning for an important meeting, as he heard my morning flight was cancelled. I decided to dial in for it and just as I took over my blackberry, I noticed that the clock on my phone suggested it was 8.15 in the morning. How did my manager know so early that my flight was cancelled and has been rescheduled to afternoon? While I was pondering over this in a half awake state, there was a loud throbbing sound that drove me nuts, all of a sudden.
It was my phone ringing - the driver of the cab assigned to drop me to the airport was calling. The phone ring gave me the kick I needed to rise from my dream, realizing it's only 4.15 AM and I had at most 15 min to get ready and head over if I had to make it to my flight, which was unfortunately on schedule.
I did make it in time and the day was uneventful from there on, but I was amused by the games our mind plays. So much so to get a few hours worth of extra sleep - a part of my brain fabricated an entire story line that the other part almost accepted - some creativity, huh?
Thursday, 21 July 2011
Tuesday, 12 July 2011
Never again, I promise!
Emptiness! I had never really felt it until today. I am not the kind of guy who can stay without thoughts racing in the mind incessantly, yet here I was - feeling nothing, thinking nothing. It was as if I was floating with darkness all around me.
Except for that one tiny dot of light far away. Probably the Sun. It seemed as if it were growing in size. Too fast. Wait, something was wrong, the light was becoming stronger and wider. I looked harder. It was growing. As my eyelids flickered more, it grew. I turned away as if I could run away from it just by looking elsewhere.
Something was moving over my head, swishing past in slow motion. As if it wanted to threaten me, but it seemed far away. Once, twice, thrice, the swishing was never ending and it seemed to slow down when I stared at it. I tried to look away again.
I was cold, shivering a bit. I tried to look around to pull something over me, but I could not find anything. There was darkness all around. Where was I? I closed my eyes, shut them tight so I could think straight. What is the last thing I remember? Where am I? And slowly, it started coming back to me. I could feel the smooth tiles under my body. I remembered leaving office late on Friday night, heading over to a party hosted by a friend of a friend, someone I didn't even know. I could feel the breeze striking against my body now. All the drinking, the smoke, the laughter and the music - started coming back. F***!
I forced my eyes open and now it all cleared up, the electric light, the fan blades on the ceiling, the cold floor underneath me. It must have been hours since I passed out - shouldn't have taken those shots, especially the last few.
Never again! I promise again...
Sunday, 10 July 2011
Creating a website is easier than I thought
On a late Saturday night, I decided to explore setting up my own website. Felt like I was doing something that went out of fashion years ago but what the heck, better late than never. I was not 100% sure on what I wanted to do with it but I had some ideas so I began; surprisingly things turned out to be a lot more simpler than I thought.
First I visited goDaddy.com and looked for domain names, found a few interesting ones for ~$10 a year and added them to my cart after registering on the website. Wanting to look around a bit more for better deals, I postponed the decision to pay for the domains and let it go for a couple days until I had some spare time. Within 2 days, I got an email from goDaddy offering me a flat 25% discount on my purchases and I cashed in on the offer. I now owned a few domains - all .coms and each costing about $7.5 a year.
Next weekend, I decided to host one of the domains and explore adding a few things there. A few online searches and after going through a bunch of review comments, I picked webhostingpad.com as my hosting provider and got a $2/month solution with unlimited space, email accounts, and visits (more details here - http://www.webhostingpad.com/hosting-features.html) on a 3 year bundle. I had to shell out ~$75 in one go but I am all set for the next 3 years. I would have picked bluehost.com if I had multiple domains though. To complete the hosting process, I had to update the DNS entries for my domain which was easily done from the goDaddy.com control panel.
Next, it was time to design my website. webhostingpad.com offered a free web designing tool but I didn't like any of the designs. Some more Googling led me to weebly.com and one look at their homepage (http://www.weebly.com/) told me they had some good stuff. Off I went, picked a template and designed a few web pages by conveniently adding widgets to the pages. The design experience is similar to blogspot.com but the available widgets are a more simplistic on weebly.com compared to blogspot.com. I also added a blog page and was pleasantly surprised to see a that buttons to Like/Tweet the post were automatically added. Hooking up Google Adsense and adding Google Analytics to the page was done pretty quickly and I was all set to publish the page.
Publishing the page encountered an error and weebly.com shot up a message box that had diagnosed the error to be the domain's A records and presented the exact text I should send over to them, including things like 'I want to continue with you as my host but want to publish the site designed on weebly', etc. Neat! I pasted the text as is in a support ticket and within a couple of hours the issue was fixed. I later realized that weebly.com takes up 50% of any Google Adsense revenues you earn on websites designed and published via their service, which sucks, but should be okay to get started.
So in a few hours spent over a couple of days, I had my website up and running - it's all blank pages now but what the heck - I managed to seamlessly work with 3 different providers to get my site ready for ~$20 a year, not too bad, eh?
The silent revolution
It's an incredible time to be a part of the largest democracy in the world. There is an opportunity to witness a silent revolution in progress that can change the country as we know it today.
Corruption has been the name of the game in almost every administrative office run by the Indian government from the very beginning. As the great Indian 'jugaad' ensued to help those who could bend the system their way, corruption became socially acceptable - even glorified at times. This is how I remember my childhood and most part of teenage life. But now the times have changed, the new and young India identifies corruption as a social evil, at least publicly if not personally.
It is not surprising then to see that the biggest complaint against the incumbent government today is corruption. As of this date, Members of Parliament like Kanimozhi, A Raja, and Suresh Kalmadi are behind bars for their alleged role in corruption cases and many others seem to be on their way. The 2G corruption scandal alone has brought a powerful political party in the state of Tamil Nadu, DMK, to it's knees in spite of it being a part of the coalition government at the center. And the civil society has become as active as it could be demanding transparency and action against corruption via their leaders and babas, albeit using non-democratic means.
All of this seemed unimaginable to someone like me until recently and knowing what I knew of the society, I would have bet generously on the all powerful 'netas' never letting either of the above happen, ever! I now believe these seemingly independent developments I see all around represent a silent social revolution underway to eradicate the single most important disease that has infected our government and society - corruption.
More than anything else, this revolution offers hope; hope that one day the largest democracy in the world will rise up and give that equal opportunity to all it's people as it promised. The pessimist in me laughs at me, but the Indian in me still believes the gears are in motion, turning ever so slowly but turning at least.
Corruption has been the name of the game in almost every administrative office run by the Indian government from the very beginning. As the great Indian 'jugaad' ensued to help those who could bend the system their way, corruption became socially acceptable - even glorified at times. This is how I remember my childhood and most part of teenage life. But now the times have changed, the new and young India identifies corruption as a social evil, at least publicly if not personally.
It is not surprising then to see that the biggest complaint against the incumbent government today is corruption. As of this date, Members of Parliament like Kanimozhi, A Raja, and Suresh Kalmadi are behind bars for their alleged role in corruption cases and many others seem to be on their way. The 2G corruption scandal alone has brought a powerful political party in the state of Tamil Nadu, DMK, to it's knees in spite of it being a part of the coalition government at the center. And the civil society has become as active as it could be demanding transparency and action against corruption via their leaders and babas, albeit using non-democratic means.
All of this seemed unimaginable to someone like me until recently and knowing what I knew of the society, I would have bet generously on the all powerful 'netas' never letting either of the above happen, ever! I now believe these seemingly independent developments I see all around represent a silent social revolution underway to eradicate the single most important disease that has infected our government and society - corruption.
More than anything else, this revolution offers hope; hope that one day the largest democracy in the world will rise up and give that equal opportunity to all it's people as it promised. The pessimist in me laughs at me, but the Indian in me still believes the gears are in motion, turning ever so slowly but turning at least.
+1 Google!
Back to blogging after a loooong time, feels great! Thanks Google Plus :)
Nailing it in circles!
Having checked out Google Plus over the past couple days, I couldn't help but smile every time I saw an update on circles - I end up adding a few people everyday, simply deciding whether or not I want to share my stuff with them, that too selectively. That's all I get to decide!
Whether I get to see their stuff or not is entirely their prerogative and an independent decision they can take, that too each time they share stuff. This is much in contradiction with Facebook Friends concept where you mutually agree or disagree to share stuff or as they say, be 'Friends'.
So much better!
Something borrowed?
It's interesting to note that G+ isn't an entirely innovative product though, which is why it doesn't feel as fresh as you'd expect the latest kid on the social networking block to be. It's more like all the social networking best practices applied together and boy have they applied it well! The Circles concept is borrowed from the Follow of Twitter, albeit with more privacy controls; the +1 concept is obviously borrowed from the Facebook Like; the hangout is borrowed from Skype; not to mention the host of other design items borrowed from Facebook like the 3 column layout, the notifications, and the news feeds.
In spite of all the +1s and -1s I'd give to G+, seamless integration with Google applications (which I subscribe to by the dozen) and the concept of circles has won me over, at least for the next few weeks. (I seriously think they should do something about the bland look and feel though.)
+1 Google!
Nailing it in circles!
Having checked out Google Plus over the past couple days, I couldn't help but smile every time I saw an update on circles - I end up adding a few people everyday, simply deciding whether or not I want to share my stuff with them, that too selectively. That's all I get to decide!
Whether I get to see their stuff or not is entirely their prerogative and an independent decision they can take, that too each time they share stuff. This is much in contradiction with Facebook Friends concept where you mutually agree or disagree to share stuff or as they say, be 'Friends'.
So much better!
Something borrowed?
It's interesting to note that G+ isn't an entirely innovative product though, which is why it doesn't feel as fresh as you'd expect the latest kid on the social networking block to be. It's more like all the social networking best practices applied together and boy have they applied it well! The Circles concept is borrowed from the Follow of Twitter, albeit with more privacy controls; the +1 concept is obviously borrowed from the Facebook Like; the hangout is borrowed from Skype; not to mention the host of other design items borrowed from Facebook like the 3 column layout, the notifications, and the news feeds.
In spite of all the +1s and -1s I'd give to G+, seamless integration with Google applications (which I subscribe to by the dozen) and the concept of circles has won me over, at least for the next few weeks. (I seriously think they should do something about the bland look and feel though.)
+1 Google!
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