Tittle-Tattle

Landmarks...

2011-09-25T13:14:00.000-05:00

The other day I was talking to a friend of mine. Our office canteen has this great Biriyani counter. I told my friend that this guy has one of his outlets somewhere near RV Dental College in JP Nagar.

My friend said, you mean the one opposite to HDFC bank.

I said, no HDFC Bank should be opposite to this RV Dental College. (Actually, neither is correct, but that isn't the point of this post).

We laughed over this, but this reminded me of the way landmarks keep changing and its repercussions.

I sometimes take a bus to travel back home from my office. BMTC conductors are familiar with the way the bus stops were named earlier. But that was then, and there are several new landmarks in Bangalore now, including on the Bannerghatta road. There is this Bannerghatta road and Outer ring road junction and BMTC knows it as JD Mara junction. On the same junction, there's a Maruti showroom called Mandovi Motors. Similarly there is Jayadeva Flyover junction which was called BTM checkpost and there's this Shopper's Stop very close to that.

So I get onto this bus, take ticket for self and then there will be some new recruits boarding the bus with their workplace tags hanging around their necks. Some will say Shopper's Stop and some will say Mandovi Motors junction and I have seen the conductors staring back at them blank faced. There will be some more words exchanged but still the two parties remain at their own stratospheres. Then some learned gentleman will speak out loud - Checkpost... Checkpost... or JD Mara. That settles it and folks move ahead with their own businesses.

Kids...

2011-02-19T09:46:00.001-06:00

We recently underwent the domestic change management exercise of sending our young daughter to a play school. Although we have been thru this once (our son), but still the anxiety was no less. It is very difficult to break a young kid's heart. Hand her over to a teacher unknown to her while she is still crying... And this actually happened when she exchanged laps between me and her teacher although against her will.

In the first two weeks, it was all cries, sobs and such for -

स्कूल नहीं जाना! ( I don't want to go to school)...

Two weeks later, again cries, sobs and such for -

स्कूल जाना है! (I want to go to school!)

That was a quick transition, we thought. It was heartening to see her performing in the school annual day function as well, doing a butterfly dance -

When I left my home for the first time to join my job, I wrote a letter to my parents. The content more or less said that I am that kid-bird which has grown up and has left its nest. It was written in an attempt to assure my parents that I am fine. But soon I realized that those must have been really "strong" words for my parents. Now the same words come boomeranging on me somewhere in my mind, when I "happily" watch my kids grow and build a world of their own.

Kids...

2010-11-09T10:42:00.000-06:00

Young kids always come with some interesting observations from the way they understand the world. In their playfulness they bring out their interesting interpretation of things. My kids are no different and I used to quote my son a lot when I was regular in this blog earlier.

Now my daughter does that quite often. Like she gets really excited when our car undergoes some underpass. She starts shouting with joy the moment she realizes we are going to go thru a tunnel like underpass. My son always wants us to go atop a flyover. I try to avoid them as it could be a detour, as well as many of the Bangalore flyover land you right into a Jam point! Anyways...

Recently, when we were standing on a red signal, my daughter started singing the rhyme "London bridge is falling down", all of a sudden and with great enthu and all. And when we paid attention we noticed that she was also trying to point to something. It was this site -

Needless to say, we couldn't stop laughing...

My Nokia 5800 Xpressmusic phone

2010-07-04T05:36:00.004-05:00

I recently bought this Nokia 5800 XpressMusic mobile phone. Recently as in, a few months back! I have been exploring it a lot and with time I have come to like it a lot. This guy is a full screen touch mobile phone from Nokia with GPS, 3G and wifi capabilities. It has got dual camera, so the front camera helps in making video calls. For full specifications you can always refer to the Nokia website. I have also taken a BSNL 3G connection on this phone so I have got a fast access internet connection in my hand all the time (well, almost all the time).

This mobile phone has become very famous so much so that many of the meetings I have gone to, almost half the attendees san this phone. Its almost two-thirds the size of any of the world famous smartphones (read iPhones and Androids), but I have behaved like any of the price conscious Indian consumer and gone for this smartphone which comes for half the price.

Nokia has poured in many of the goodies with this set, when I bought it, I got a free Sennheiser headset, 100 free songs from Nokia music store (people buying the set now get unlimited free songs) and free OVI maps with GPS capabilities. One also gets access to the OVI store with loads of free apps to install. I would talk about some of those which I have installed on my set.

Snaptu - This guy is a great aggregation of some of the typical online activites I perform on a daily basis, vis-a-vis news reading (general, tech news, sports), social networking (facebook, twitter, flickr) etc. It gives one single interface to aggregate all of those and neat uncluttered UI to use them. This is the most frequently used app on my phone now. Most of my tweets now show up from Snaptu on twitter.
Fring - This is another aggregation of various online chatting tools. I had kind of stopped using them but now with Fring I am back in the chatting world again. Most of my online chats or VOIP calls now happen thru Fring on my mobile. I have got aol, msn, yahoo, gtalk and skype configured thru this. I can see all of my friends online at one single place "on my mobile". With msn, yahoo, aol folks I can do a hand-typed chat and with gtalk and skype I can have a VOIP call. Interestingly, Fring offers video calling using skype whereas skype's own Symbian S60 app for my mobile won't allow video calling. One intresting story I am almost always telling my friends is that I went to a shop to do some gift shopping. But I went alone and was confused on what to pick. So I asked my wife to come online on skype and then using Fring and 3G internet, we had a video call from the shop and I showed her various options and "we" finally picked something.
Audible - Twit got me into Audible listening and I have a membership now. This is not too old a flirtation but I have already enjoyed a great book thru this app. I was recently going for a training to one of my office which is a good 1 and half hour drive away from my place. Within 3 days I finished listening to almost 10 hours of read. So I don't mind going to far off offices now :P (just kidding).
Podcasts - The default music application comes with podcasts section also. So I have revived my interests in podcasts and have already splurged on Twit, then there's Twig and Buzz out Loud as well. These are my companion on my daily one side half an hour trip to office. Yup, I have gone a bit of green now and let the Vajra bus drivers negotiate with the crazy traffic while I listen/watch the podcasts.
Tunewiki - This is an interesting app with capabilities to fetch lyrics when a song is playing. It can read thru my library for songs, search in youtube if I want to watch the song video, connect to shoutcast and play online radio and other typical capabilities of any mobile based music player. I like but I am not an avid listener of English music (yup I call all of them English music) and with this lyrics fetch capabilities I can at least understand what Mr Adams is singing while I used to enjoy only his rock music whatever he sang. Not all the hindi songs I listen to have their lyrics with tunewiki and its a surprise if I find any. But then, I don't need their lyrics anyway.
Shazam - Another problem I had with English music was the inability to find which album that song belonged to. Heh! If you don't understand the lyrics how would you find the album. So I found Shazam, this guy literally "listens" to the music currently being played and tags them or rather finds the album to which the song belonged to. Nice, another good tool to handle that peer pressure ;)
Google Maps - Yes, I am on latitude, people know where I am if they are on my friend list. Google maps is really good in Bangalore. I have even used it usefully in Chennai.
OVI Maps - Unlike Google maps, this nokia app also helps as a speaking navigator. Uses GPS well and finds my exact location on this earth. The maps are not really as updated as Google and search capabilities are questionable. But the speaking navigator gets some brownie points. Apart from English, I have also installed Hindi and Urdu language support. Its fun to hear the Urdu speaking lady telling you - "आपकी मंजिल आ गयी है" - Meaning "You have reached your destination". Using GPS navigator is also fun when you know the one ways and how to go thru the roads with less traffic. It picks up the shortest distance path mostly, it tells me turn left and I turn right and then poor guy recalculates the route again.

There are many other nice apps that I have installed on this phone but I mostly use the above. Other mentionable apps are skype, cricinfo, communities, qik, youtube, dictionary, sudoku etc. Cricinfo is anyway seasonal app; I have used qik to upload a few videos; if you find a tweet of mine from Nokia, that means I am using the Communities app, it also connects to facebook for me. Communities also finds my location and attaches that to my tweet. But its in effect a bit.ly url to the OVI maps site taking one to my current location which doesn't look very nice, guess twitter is not able to separate that url from my tweet at show it as my location.

Another thing that has happened is that my father has stopped using the computer. With a 3G mobile connection at both ends, we can now make video calls to each other instead of the traditional skype/google video calls. His technology needs are getting fulfilled with another 3G nokia mobile.

That is it for now. This has become a long post after a very long time. And long posts get boring in these days of micro-blogging. Thanks for reading till this point of the blog.

~mks

Passive smoking...

2009-12-27T11:41:00.003-06:00

How would you handle this?

So far my 6 year old used to say I will become this, I will become that when I grow up. Today he said - "मैं बड़ा होके smoking करूँगा!" (Means: I will do smoking when I grow up!!!!)

Out goes our reply with a long listing of our entire family tree trying to make a point that no one smokes because its not good (for health)... Added with some lecture on smoking hazards...

Comes another statement - "But friend's grandpa smokes..."

Discussion closed - No, its not a good thing to do... Think about doing something else... so many better (cooler) things to do...

I am sure so many people would have thought about this for themselves when they were kids, but its always like "reinventing the wheel" when you become a parent and see your own kid going thru the same cycle; and trying to save them from what's not good and encourage them to take up what's good...

PS: Cigarette smoking is injurious for one's health... Actually not only for smoker's health but its injurious for passive smokers and the potential smokers as well...

BIAL...

2009-12-21T20:52:00.002-06:00

Today's Hindu features a house panel report on the shoddy workmanship exhibited by the builders of the Bangalore International Airport. There are two news articles in the print edition today and I tried looking at the elaborations of shoddy workmanship in those articles, but I couldn't find any. Its a 124 page report it seems, but all that the news media has picked up is following -

1. Profit making by one of the promoters by trading BIAL shares

2. The facade of the exterior of the airport not showing the culture of Karnataka or India for that matter

3. Hold Narayanamurthy, Rajiv Chandrashekhar et al responsible for such lapses

I have looked at the google news results for BIAL also, but seriously I don't find anything else in the news reports, and I am especially interested in looking at the elaborations of the poor workmanship. I would also like to the see if the house committee looked at the delay in building the approach road(s) to the airport (Why am I asking about road(s), there has to be A world class road first!). The approach road which is available now is certainly not world class so to say. There were some discussions on building a Airport Express Metro also, did the house committee look into that?

If we take the experience of a traveler starting from the time he or she gets out of his/her home and reaches the final destination, the experience is certainly not world class while he or she is in Bangalore (except for the Vajras). I hope the house committee would have looked into it, in that entirety.

Talking about BIAL only, if we had set our expectation of getting a Heathrow in our city, then BIAL has certainly not met that expectation. If I have to compare it with HAL, then BIAL is certainly bigger, wider, better managed. The cleanliness quotient is higher; the check-ins or the baggage claims are quicker. For peak hour traffic, one would get pissed off by the time it takes to clear the queues, but then even the Delhi Airport on a Sunday evening resembles a railway station (a better managed one of course) just by the sheer number of people inside the airport premises. I still find the queues moving faster in BIAL and I doubt if our VIPs would have ever experienced those queues.

Btw, this also reminds me of the delays in the commissioning of the airport where people, bureaucracy and politics played a huge role. I am sure people have forgotten those days and the issues, so they need not feature in the house committee report as well...

Shopping on the Web...

2009-10-24T23:32:00.015-05:00

Today, I was reading an article on Windows 7 on indiatimes. An ad showed up on the website indicating (Nikon) Digi Cams are available starting Rs 5800/-. Sounds interesting, so I clicked on it...

The click took me to the camera section of the seller website but the first page showed lots of Kodak and Canon cameras.

Where is that Nikon of the Ad? So I checked on the checkbox on the left to see Nikon only section and here's what I got -

Lesson Learnt (Again) -

WYSIWYG rarely works in the Adv+shopping world.
Indiatimes needs to catch up on Google Chrome.

My suggestion to Indiatimes - You may want to put a "* conditions apply" tag on those ads.

Go Green!

2009-05-30T06:00:00.004-05:00

I see many "Go Green" campaigns running around me these days, be it the ads on TV and Radio or initiatives at work. I have consciously done a few things to abide by the advices given in these campaigns -

Cut down on the number of print outs

While I was on a small time assignment in the US, I did not configure printer at all. This led me to request a friend of mine to take the printout of my return tickets for me! Recently, at work, they change the print server configuration and I have survived so far without configuring it.

Switch off the car at signals

My inner self reminds me to switch off the car at the signals but I fail to do so many times when it is hot outside and the car AC is on and all the other vehicles which are not switched off, puff out smoke clouds into my car.

Take public transport for commuting

Recently the municipal body started monsoon preparations in my locality and they have blocked and dug one side of a very busy road near our house to complete a drainage construction work which is on for over an year now. Interestingly, during the recent elections, when people raised this issue with the campaigning politicians, the politician asked them to talk about the problems of the nation (and forget about these tiny winy problems which will take their own course to disappear).

Anyways, the road block prompted me to think about taking public transport instead of driving to the office. This is a very recent initiative and I hope I manage to continue this for some time. Car pooling is another nice idea but I find it very difficult to match my work timings with those of others. I will have to learn it probably because taking public transport is not a very encouraging experience so far. We will see!

Taking stairs instead of Elevators

I do this sometime but not always. Laziness prevails mostly! But I seriously dislike those set of elevators which do not have a software to schedule them together. I have got such sets at my apartment. Most of the residents when they want to use the elevator, they will happily push the switches for both of them and wait for both to come to their floor while they are definitely going to use only one. Big time energy waste!

Hope this little post of mine encourages a few other folks to do better than me...

For now GO GREEN!

In US...

2009-02-13T00:38:00.013-06:00

This is my first visit to the US and past 6 weeks have been a nice experience. I have these many things to write about, not sure if my schedule here will allow me to write on them -

The Journey to the US
Driving in US
Snowfall
Sight Seeing

One good thing about the place where I am staying here is that I wake up every morning with this view outside the window -

It doesn't snow every morning here. And sleep with this view outside my window -

The Gateway Arch has been my prime subject in photographs so far. And I guess I would be uploading various photos of it if I manage to post all my blogs I mentioned above.

When I was starting from India, my friend told me about this and it still struck me when I landed here in the downtown of St Louis. You feel like there is some curfew imposed in the city. There are very less people on the street. All you see is cars (if at all). It can also be due to the cold weather. In this city, I guess this phenomena is especially true with the downtown because we could see decent population moving around when we went to the Malls in midtown or further away.

That's it for now.

Formula 1 Drama!

2008-11-02T13:54:00.004-06:00

Luck!

Drama!

Nail biting finish!

Climax - Anti-Climax!

Fantastic!

Unbelievable!

I have been trying to think about words which can describe today's F1-2008 finale@Interlagos. I started watching Tennis when Boris Becker's won the 1985 Wimbledon at the age of 17. I started following Formula1 keenly when I noticed blogs@my office and newspapers mentioning a young rookie doing podium finishes race after race in 2007 season. I actually became a fan of Hamilton right from the moment I saw him (a rookie!) holding Kimi all thru the race right from the beginning which Alonso won with McLaren 1-2. Prior to that my interests in Tennis or Formula1 was limited to newspaper sports columns.

Today I think I am sold to formula1. I uttered a thousand swear words to Kubica when I saw him doing those maneuvers between Vettel and Hamilton. I also for a moment believed like the Ferrari team that my favourite Racer has lost the title again till I heard Karun Chandhok shouting at the top of his voice that Timo Glock slowed down and Lewis Hamilton is fifth. The lady-luck turned her back on Hamilton last year while she has smiled on him this year. Scores are level! He has won this year's championship when it "sounded" like the whole world was against him. He can make a fresh start next season and please please please make less mistakes. But for the mistakes he would have been a champion by leaps and bounds in both 2007 and 2008 seasons, but a "no-mistakes-life" is impossible for mere mortals. Championship goes to the guy who makes least number of unforced errors.

Stories will come in pouring about those 30sec when it all happened but those 30sec were the most dramatic ones which people will remember for some time to come. If I say "long time to come" then it will undermine the fun that this game brings into the life of spectators and the players. Looking forward to the next season right away!

Fedora...

2008-10-29T10:04:00.004-05:00

I used to use Fedora till I fell for Ubuntu sometimes back. I have never been loyal to any particular Linux distro till I started using Ubuntu a year or two back. That instinct of "switching distros" was probably on a high yesterday and I thought I should check how is Fedora doing these days. I checked Fedora website, currently Fedora 9 is available. Let's download the DVD so I went for the torrent way. I noticed that some 700 seeds were available and some 250+ users were downloading Fedora 9 with me. I was amazed and I thought probably Fedora 9 was released recently. So I checked the schedule. Some more amazement for me, Fedora 9 was released on May 13 this year. And Fedora 10 is just a month away. Hmmm, I am totally out of touch and it seems Fedora is quite popular. But I cancelled the download and will wait for Fedora 10 to get released. The Ubuntu upgrade is just a day away anyway!

I am really very interested now in checking the torrent data on Fedora 10 release day!

~Mks

BIAL Visit...

2008-09-06T23:47:00.008-05:00

Last Saturday, we went to the Bangalore International Airport. I have uploaded some of the photographs from that visit at my flickr site. While we were there waiting for our guest to come, we noticed a huge group of school kids visiting the airport that day. All their teachers did is to divide them in two different groups. One group stood near the departure terminal and the second group near the arrival terminal. We were sitting close to the arrival terminal.

These kids were having fun. And they have their unique ways of having fun. Whenever some foreigner (especially white skin) was coming out of the Arrival terminal, all the kids would in chorus say a Big "Hi" to them. I am sure those guests would not have expected such huge welcome when they land India. Not sure what all their teachers showed to them that day, soon our guest arrived and we left the airport. There is one good area though to watch the happenings on the runway etc next to the departure terminal.

One can climb on top of those small sand deposits which are thrown carelessly in that area and watch the inside of the airport for free.

Rumours...

2008-08-01T09:29:00.005-05:00

During the recent Bangalore Bomb blasts last Friday, I was tracking the happenings at various places on the web. One such update caught my eyes, I was a little late in doing the print screen but still I managed to get a fading view of what I want to show here (inside red enclosure below) -

The text is - "Guys hate to break this, but info from sources well placed whom I cannot reveal : 5 more blasts to happen in Bangalore".

A very serious rumour, I gathered this at around 7pm in the evening while all the Bangalore blasts happened in the afternoon. I still remember we were getting news of two more blasts that day which didn't happen - one in Iskon temple and another somewhere near Hebbal on the new Airport road.

Major fire near my apartment...

2008-07-20T11:46:00.006-05:00

There was one major fire near my apartment on Bannerghatta road...

In the background is the Mantri Elegance apartment. It must be somewhere close to Mandovi Motors junction.

Phishing...

2008-06-15T07:23:00.008-05:00

Today, I checked the junk folder for one of my personal mail box and noticed a mail like this -

I never open any mail like this leave aside opening the links given in this kind of mails. But today I got curious and thought of just checking out exactly what these websites look like. And was I amazed -

Exactly same as how ICICI bank's website looks and these smart people are asking for your whole world there. Normally the ICICI bank's infinity website prompts for User id and password only. Check it out yourself -

Awesome work! Note the "Important Security Notice" in the original website also.

~mks

Ubuntu 8.4 LTS

2008-05-17T13:40:00.005-05:00

Today I upgraded my home PC to Ubuntu 8.4 LTS. Almost a month after it was first released. And I am pleasantly surprised to see that they have packaged it with FF3b5.

I like change and this change indeed impressed me. I have been using FF3b5 for some time but never expected it to be packaged with a stable desktop operating system. Actually before upgrading from Ubuntu 7 I was wondering which FF version they will provide in 8.4 LTS as FF3 is almost getting finalized.

I am yet to get the feel of this new version but from the first impressions I find it a bit sharper than the previous version. The desktop effects are smoother given that I was facing GUI freeze problems just before the upgrade. I see the search feature pre-configured on the top panel, somehow I fail to recall if it was there earlier. I never used it even if it was there. I will have to reconfigure Automatix as the current one says it works only with Ubuntu 7. Lets see, more updates as I use it more...

My Windows XP installation will have to seriously work on startup time to get me back there... I am anyway in Love with Ubuntu already!

My Pics in Google Image Search...

2008-04-22T13:27:00.003-05:00

Whenever I look at my flickr statistics, I notice that I have frequent visitors for my Infosys Mysore photos. I wondered why and today when I did a google search for "Infosys Mysore", I understood why.

When we do a google search on "Infosys Mysore", my photos are there on the top of the page (as of today). If you do a google image search for "Infosys Mysore", again they are on the first row. And it is not just the flickr photos, I get traffic to Tittle Tattle is due to these results.

Nice, I like it!

~mks

PS - This is my 100th blog post! Century during the IPL season.

IPL Telecoverage

2008-04-20T12:10:00.004-05:00

This IPL's television coverage is all screwed up. What a sentence to start a blog! But really, they are messing it up a lot. The host commentators are all amateur including Ajay Jadeja. May be I am so used to Harsha Bhogle. But surely, Max thinks that putting pretty faces can do it for them. They started with one face earlier (Yeah, Ms. Bedi) and now there are plenty. And they all slip and flip on their words, switch overs and match each other in asking silly questions. I wonder why I have not seen Sunil Gavaskar in the studios.

Coming back to the point, there is no sync between there various departments, including the audio and video department. Once we could see Symonds and the commentator talking but couldn't hear them and on another occasion the video showed players warming up while the audio was from the toss. And then it seemed that the host commentators heard and saw everything correctly, no apology for the mixup. The camera men frequently lose track of the ball especially in the Mumbai-Bangalore match today.

Another thing, I am not sure why MAX is using only one channel to show the matches. The schedule is so packed up, the half hour gap between two matches gets eaten up and then they eat up the post match ceremony of the first match. If these guys are going to cover the world cup matches then we sure are up to some pathetic coverage.

No Comments...

2008-03-14T07:37:00.002-05:00

10 year boy burnt alive in Delhi

70-80 strong mob molests 2 women in Mumbai

We the barbarians!

Coorg Trip

2008-02-21T21:48:00.014-06:00

We recently went for a Trip to Coorg on the Jan 26 weekend. It was an interesting trip because it happened in a very unplanned manner. We have been thinking for sometime to go out, go on a long drive, go somewhere sorts. So we thought, we will go for a day long trip on Jan 26 weekend, starting on Saturday morning and coming back on the same day. And we finalized on Hogenekkal for this day long trip.

Saturday morning came and we started for Hogenekkal, we heard that there was no good place to eat around Hogenekkal so we packed lots of food as well. When we reached the Silk Board Flyover (Bangalore), a discussion started and this idea to drive to Coorg instead was thrown in and everyone agreed. We had no stuff to change to for the overnight halt, no hotel bookings and no places decided, I had just browsed thru a traveler's guide the last night, noted a few places (in mind) in Coorg and then I forgot picking that book up in the morning haste.

By the time we decided to go to Coorg instead, we had crossed Bomannahalli, so I decided I will take the NICE road near Electronic City which will take me to Mysore Road. The NICE road is really cool and there was one "Great ELCIA Run" organized that day. 26th Jan is an ideal day to organize such events.

The NICE road is a great road to drive but the apathy of authorities has made it unusable at several stretches. The Run was organized to raise a voice against that apathy it seems. We had a first hand experience of the problem, when we tried to get back on the NICE road from the Bannerughatta Road. Politics can stop things from happening, but it cannot stop people from progressing. Somehow, there is continuous flow of trucks and cars on this extremely bad patch despite a pathetic severely potholed mud path connecting the two. Because people know that after this bad patch there is a world class road all the way till Mysore Road (at least, since I have not used the road beyond that!).

One complain to the NICE people though, there is ridiculously steep slope after the flyover over Kanakpura Road. I am not sure how difficult it was to carry forward that flyover till the other cliff, but right now you feel like climbing down a wall. But we reached the Mysore Road pretty soon and continued our journey towards Coorg, the tentative destination being Madikeri because I could recall that the book mentioned - if at all we need a hotel at run time in Coorg, Madikeri is the place. Continuing on Mysore Road, we reached Kamat Lokaruchi but it was so awfully crowded that we decided against having the breakfast there. So we continued and finally stopped at a restaurant which is behind the Cafe Coffee Day. And here we had to be content with Paper Dosa only because the restaurant guys ran out of their raw material, they did not anticipate such a rush on a weekend it seems. Interestingly, whatever we were asking that day, he was going in and then coming back saying "wover". And finally, whatever he could get, he just dumped that on us.

Anyway, we reached Srirangapatnam. The book mentioned that after Srirangapatnam, take right turn to Ranganthitthu bird sanctuary to get on a short cut to Hunsur Road. I got confused and decided against that and finally we took a right turn just outside Mysore on its outer ring road. After that due to lack of appropriate signage at various unassuming forks, we wandered around but finally managed to get on the Madikeri road. I was expecting not a very good road but this was indeed a good one, not as good as Bangalore-Mysore road but still driving was a pleasure. Again, we kept looking for signboards to Madikeri at each and every forks. The good road finally ended and we came across an extremely bad town road in Piriyapatna. It was ok again till Kushalnagar. That's where we started looking for accommodation. Kushalnagar seemed to be full and that helpful Hotel person tried to call Madikeri hotels as well and they were all full as well. We finished our home made food in Kushalnagar. Kushalnagar looked like a good locality with lots of shops etc. We proceeded to Madikeri from here on the hilly road. The road is quite wide but full of potholes.

On the way to Madikeri, we noticed a left turn to Dubare Elephant Camp where they give bath to the elephants every morning. I noted that it was something I needed to take my son to, the next morning. Another fork indicated that the Abby falls will be on the right side of the road. We finally reached Madikeri in late afternoon and decided that the first thing we need to do is to get accommodation. By the time, we had discussed a lot about home stays and the consensus was to get that somehow. Going thru the Madikeri town, we came across a tourist information center and we approached them immediately. They connected us to a family which gives out a portion of their house for home stay. We finalized that, it was in some colony on way to Club Mahindra Resorts. Looked good, they charged us Rs. 1250/- per night per room. After that it was too late to go to Abby falls because they close that by 6pm and we would miss the sunset at Raja seat had we gone there. So we went to Raja Seat immediately and I was amazed to see how it opened the Coorg Valley in front of us.

It was difficult to imagine about such a valley when we were going thru it while on way to Madikeri.

We spent some good time there, watching sunset and taking photographs. That's the only time my Camera worked and was used during the trip.

After the sunset, we went to the town market for some shopping. Then a restaurant, then good night sleep. We decided that we would wake up early next day and go to Abby falls first and then proceed to Dubare where the elephant bathing starts from 8:30am. And to our surprise, we were all up early by 5:30am next day. We checked out, but by the time we started it was close to 7:30am. When we reached the Abby falls there was no crowd and it was all open for our eyes only.

Nice place, but I liked the snake like hilly road more thru which we drove to the falls and back. Then we took the same bad road towards Kushalnagar and took a right turn to Dubare from where it was a very nice road all the way to the Elephant Camp. The queue made us wait for a while on one end of the River Kaveri while we watched Elephants given bath at the other end of the river. And by the time we reached the other end, the bath was over. Little disappointed, we went ahead to watch the Elephant feeding session. They prepare some big balls of ragi and jaggery and put it inside the Elephant's mouth. It was fun to see the kid elephants hurrying to pull some stuff out of their mother's mouth. Sunny enjoyed it a lot and I guess he enjoyed more when we let him get into the river and have some fun with water and pebbles.

From Dubare, we came back to Kushalnagar road and went to the Kaveri Nisargadhama park. Their the fun thing was the Elephant ride and a stroll in a good park with lots of animals around. That was our last outing sorts in Coorg trip. After that we had lunch in Kushalnagar and then back to Bangalore via Mysore. On return, we did stop at Kamat Lokaruchi which has lesser crowd and then I didn't take the NICE road to reach back home.

It was a fun trip, and it ended with a longing to visit that place again and enjoy it more.

And I thought...

2008-01-30T08:40:00.000-06:00

And I thought why my system is running so slow!!!

Search Travel in India - 90DI.com

2007-09-15T15:57:00.000-05:00

A few friends and ex-colleagues of mine have come up with an interesting idea about travel search. First a little background - The Indian Railways operates around 8700 passenger train trips but still these many trips are not sufficient to give you point to point connectivity to around 6,856 railway stations. So we have this practice of connecting trains.

To go from point A to B, you first go from A to C then from C to B. You can have various options depending on your fare, time and location preferences. And you may want to check about the availability on these routes, the pricing, time taken etc. To this, if you want to add the options provided by the fast growing air travel industry of India, you will have even more options to compare for.

So what my friends have done is that they have come up with a website called http://www.90di.com, which lists all the connection options from point A to point B in India. One can select modes like Train, Flight and Train+Flight and it fetches information from related websites and gives you a consolidated result which includes all the route options, duration of travel, number of hops, fare etc. One can also check the map for the listed routes.

I was very amused and amazed when I first came across this website. A really nice idea and makes life very simple for frequent long distance travelers. This website will be especially useful for those who need to travel during festival times and the direct route reservations are full on the very first day they open.

For those who have seen Yahoo!'s farechase website, they will find this one similar but with an added convenience of search in Indian Railways. Farechase caters to search in Air Travel only (when I last checked). And I am sure, search in Indian railways is a big feature because doing the same thing on the IR website takes a looong time!

~mks

Disclaimer - I don't have any financial affiliation with 90di.com! Naqvi and gang were in my previous company and we are good friends.

Route to E-City in Bangalore...

2007-09-15T15:05:00.000-05:00

This blog is for people in Bangalore, who happen to travel on Hosur Road every weekday or more to reach their offices in Electronic City. I have tried to create a tour in Google Earth of an alternate route from Wipro Office in Electronic City to Bilekahalli-Bannerughatta Road junction. The latter junction is a few hundred meters away from the Bannerughatta Road and Outer Ring Road junction. This route will be a wee bit longer than the regular BTM-Hosur road route but the time one would take on this route is always close to 30mins (in almost all weather conditions!) unlike that on regular route which varies from 20 min to 4 hours.

To check this route, you will have to install Google Earth and open the .kmz file using that. The route starts from the Wipro Office gate in Electronic City and takes you thru some villages although the road thru them is mostly wide and tarred and in very new condition and rarely used. This even avoids the NICE road whose exit to Bannerughatta road is always choked.

Please find the route file here (to be opened using Google Earth). Hope the file opens as easily as it did in my computer and the route therein was easy to follow! Once thru this route in Google Earth, you may also want to have a dekko on the same route in wikimapia.

~Mks

Long time no see...

2007-09-08T11:11:00.000-05:00

Its been a long time, lots of things to post but never posted.

Workplace changed, blogs labeled Infosys will decrease and those labeled Accenture will increase! Apparent changes in web presence - AOL becomes primary IM. MSN is also there to some extent. And came to know about this nice thing called trillian. Sleek one, useful if you use many instant messengers and you actually chat using all of them. Supports AIM, MSN, Yahoo and ICQ.

My home PC recovered from a near crash situation. Its working fine right now, touch wood! Reason being, switching it off from the UPS directly instead of normal shutdown (There's a four year old in house!). Ubuntu is totally unusable now, is not booting up at all and I saw it going from bad to worse while trying to recover. Windows looks normal now after a system restore and multiple chkdsks.

Had to buy additional USB harddisk for backup. You get a 160GB Seagate hard-disk, vendor assembled in a Tech-Com casing for Rs 3328/- (tax included) in Bangalore. That's when you don't do any bargaining and are assured of a 5 years warranty. Taking backup in an unstable system is an arduous task. Took two nights for me to backup some 100GBs. For once I had to run chkdsk on new USB drive as well.

That's all for now. Hope to see my system up tomorrow!

~Mks

Call from Google search...

2007-07-24T11:56:00.001-05:00

I was trying to search for some Movers and Packers in Bangalore today when I noticed this call thing in the sponsored links. So I dialed out the first result and it actually connected me to the movers and packers listed there. Its another thing that I was trying to call at 10pm in the night and this movers and packers guy didn't want to talk and disconnected immediately. The feature as such was a pleasant surprise. I will test this out tomorrow during working hours.

~mks