She told me that my fiancee’s family wanted to break the engagement and drop the wedding proposal. The news had me shook so bad, I was frozen at my seat for a good half hour thinking, what? Is this real? Am I imagining things? What did I do wrong? Did I insult them somehow?

I had a little bit of hope of trying to talk and fix this thing, and waited anxiously and patiently till beyond office times so that I can call her up and get things sorted.

The call happened, but things remained at status quo. Apparently the family ‘feared’ about my leg pain(I get bouts of leg pain, especially when I walk /stand for more than 15-20 minutes, my thigh muscles hurt and I tend to limp a bit). This condition of mine feared my future in-laws and they said that they didn’t want to give their daughter to someone who ‘has a problem’ and of the pain is like this now, they don’t know what it’d be in the future and don’t want to give their daughter to ‘someone like that’.

Yes, This lameass excuse is the reason for the break. I’ve also been told that they have been told that flat foot(which I have) is linked to kidney failure. I have no idea how this conclusion was reached at, neither am I aware of what other things have been put to their mind.

Whatever it is, it’s final that they don’t want this to go ahead and with the way this was brought up and done, with me treated like an unwanted piece of trash, I’m not going to go forward with this even if they want to patch up.

My birthday was last week, and the last thing I expected was for our engagement to be broken up like so.

Goes without saying it was a pretty emotional day for me, and with none of my family members around, my sister was deeply worried about me.

I’m very glad and grateful that Sharath made me stay at his place that day, with Daaku coming by for support. Talking through the day’s events with them made the transition a bit easier, and Sharath convinced me to head home for the weekend tl be with my family asap(I was originally scheduled to go a week later).

Also thanks to all those who have written, called, Emailed, dm’d, sms, whatsapp’d, fb messaged and got in touch with me offering support. It means a lot to me. Thank you.

And now it’s time to close the chapter and move on.

Related posts:

1. Some of The Most Embarrassing Moments

And the very next day after my talk, Evernote gets compromised & has issued a password reset. You still believe in bad password practices? Wake up, smell the coffee. Improve your passwords. Use Lastpass(disclaimer: referral link; if you signup using this, both you & me get a month of free LastPass premium. If you rather not want to use the referral link – head straight to their site).

Update: To download the slides – click on the Settings gear & select the format of your choice. If you’re having problems, here’s the link to the presentation. Open it, then click on File menu → Download as and select the format of your choice.

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1. Creating and Editing Parameterized Queries in Excel 2007
2. Cisco VPN Client for Windows Vista / Windows 7 64-bit
3. Win Free Passes For The Def Leppard Concert in Bangalore And Mumbai

• Welcomed the New Year in a coffee estate/homestay in Chikmagalur with Ashwin, Daaku & Prasad.
• Made a quick trip to Mumbai & Vasai with Ashwin and finally met some awesome twitter folks – b50, Anaggh, Nakul, Jayesh, slacker, Preshit, Failgunner and lots more. Malcolm welcomed us to Vasai with an epic awesomesauce lunch and a trip around Vasai. Aalaap gets drunk and results in skipping the Pune/Doolally visit that we had planned
• Ditched the iPhone again, went back to Android and bought a Samsung Galaxy S2
• Became a Guinness World Record holder, albeit with my email leaking out to whole lot of people.
• Diablo III finally gets released, after a 12-year wait. And I played it. A lot.
• Made a trip back to Chikmagalur to the coffee estate/homestay that we had gone to during New Years’ – this time during the start of monsoon season. The weather was out of this world.
• Got a chance to be an interviewer which was pretty cool.
• Became part of Barcamp Bangalore organizing team – though I was more or less handling the word-of-mouth marketing part, it was hell loads of fun. Tweeted the hell out of it. Gave a small talk on automated data backup too
• Kunti, Bibhas, Rishabh come down to Bangalore. Had great fun meeting up and hanging out with them. Some pics from Kunti, Bibhas & Rishabh.
• As if to take revenge for me dumping the iPhone 3GS, its battery expanded and exploded wildly.
• Plan a trip to Pune for NH7 weekender. Ditch Weekender plans and meetup with slacker & Mikhail at Hyatt. Get serenaded. Twice.

Gadgets /Software bought/acquired/reviewed

• Nokia N9(though I admit, I never got to write the review, such a shame. Great device, great OS – just DOA)
• Sennheiser CX680i sports in-ear earphones (review)
• Llama (review)
• System Mechanic 10.8 (review)
• Norton 360 (review)
• Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook (review)
• Alienware X51 (review)
• Sharkoon X-tatic 5.1 headphones (won)
• Logitech Optical Mouse G400 (purchased)
• Klipsch S4a (bought)
• Samsung Galaxy S2 (bought)
• Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 1TB hard disk (bought)

So, that’s about it for 2012, I guess. Happy New Year all & here’s wishing the upcoming year is as awesome as it was last year.

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• Check out AT&T’s Direct Access Dialing Code for India(at the time of writing this, it’s 000117)
• You’ll reach an Operator. Tell him/her the number you want to Dial. This should be 602.597.2395 for Bank of America. Will be different for others.
• You’ll be prompted to Enter Calling Card number. Skip entering anything
• You’ll be asked if you want to initiate a Collect Call. Say yes.
• Done.

This should work with any organization which uses AT&T and accepts Collect Call, but I haven’t tried with others. I’m writing here because I want to document this for my future use.

This will come in real handy especially in situations where BoA detects Irregular/Fraudulent card activity and wants you to verify the transaction by dialling in – but you have no way of reaching out to an International number. Have your card number & other details ready

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1. Of Dead Hard Drives, Stolen Phones & ICICI Bank Dumbassery

Till couple of days ago – I wanted to try out of iOS 6 and some iOS apps to review. I had removed the abomination that is iTunes long ago and had no intention to install it again to do the iOS 5 -> 6 upgrade. Since Apple now offers an OTA upgrade, I went by that, taking well over 12 hours to complete the OTA download (the first OTA download failed after God knows when, second attempt was successful).

With iOS 6 on, I tried out some of the “improvements” that is iOS 6 maps.

Launched Maps on my 3GS.Tried to find directions for half a dozen or so locations previous navigated. Couldn’t find directions. #JaiiOS6Maps

— Sathya (@SathyaBhat) October 6, 2012

I decided to carry out my iOS 6 experiments later on. That’s when the initial set of problems seemed to appear. In the evening, I noticed that the battery had completely drained out. That was quite surprising, since

1. It was running only on WiFi, there was no SIM card in the phone
2. From my previous experience, I’ve known the 3GS to last at least 2 days on standby on WiFi, if not more.

I connected the 3GS to the USB cable connected to my laptop, and then observed that the device was stuck on the Apple logo screen.

iPhone 3GS is stuck here. Neither switching off, nor switching on. What’s next? twitter.com/SathyaBhat/sta…

— Sathya (@SathyaBhat) October 6, 2012

This morning, I got a whole bunch of responses on twitter, telling me what next to do, and following them I go the familiar “Connect to iTunes” logo. Since I didn’t have iTunes installed, I was pretty much SOL. As much as I didn’t want to install iTunes, I had no option and decided to download iTunes anyway. While iTunes download was under progress, I noticed that the battery had died out again. *Sigh*Proceeded to connect the iPhone to the USB cable and I waited for iTunes download to complete.

About 10 minutes later, the download was completed and I was about to start the install when I heard a loud bang very close to me. Moments later, I realize that the bang came from my iPhone – the battery had swelled to such an extent that the iPhone’s LCD had popped out of it’s casing.

My immediate reaction was to disconnect the iPhone from the USB cable, to prevent further charging / damage to the battery. Having done so, the expansion and the accompanying bangs continued to happen

By now, an hour had passed by since the initial big bang(!) and I decided to go have some breakfast. I moved the iPhone away from my computer, to my hall and kept it in the corner and went for breakfast. Fast forward about half hour later, I see that the battery’s swelled to such an extent that the LCD’s at nearly a 30-35 degree angle to the iPhone base. And the mini bangs were still continuing.

Couple of hours later, the situation had stabilized and this is how the phone ended up looking like

Taking a cursory look at the iPhone, I see that the metallic backplate holding the PCB is bent pretty badly. Not quite sure what to do with this – the phone’s about 2 years old and I doubt Apple India will acknowledge this.

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1. Upgrading to iPhone 3G to iPhone OS 3.1.2, with keeping the baseband at 04.26
2. Get your iPhone in India for $99 ( ~ Rs 4500 ) Only!
3. The case of the Neverending SMS Series

Anyway, after Ashwin’s feedback(“my santa didn’t send anything. I was reassigned. second santa also nothing. #foreveralone”) I didn’t expect anything. A month or so later, however, my secret santa confirmed shipment of the gift. And I received it couple of days later.

This is what my /r/secretsanta sent me (at Borg Cube) [pic] — path.com/p/2oFaso

— Sathya (@SathyaBhat) December 26, 2011

Sweet! What I didn’t realize, till couple of weeks ago, was that the folks at /r/secretsanta were trying set a Guinness World Record for “the largest online secret santa game” and were successful at that! So that made me a Guinness World Record holder too! Woohoo!

Soon enough, I put forward an order for my Guinness World Record certificate and things were all set. Or so I thought. Couple of days ago, I received an email from Guinness stating that due to high volume of orders, the shipment would be delayed by another couple of weeks. That was fine, but then the person who sent the email did the biggest goof up ever.

The person put the email address of about 1,072 people in the “To” field. Not even the cc, the frigging “To” field.

Image courtesy http://www.comicvine.com/

Here’s how it looked like

Naturally, I wasn’t too pleased

The morons at Guinness World Records just sent an email to all reddit secret santa participants with email address in To field. WTF?

— Sathya (@SathyaBhat) September 4, 2012

and neither were the reddit folks. Kicker was the contents of the email, with a disclaimer stating:

The contents of this e-mail from Guinness World Records Limited are confidential and intended for the addressee only.

If you are not the intended recipient you must not copy or further distribute this e-mail, and delete this message from your computer system.

Riiight.

Marco Frugatti, SVP Records, however did send an email apologizing the data breach

I am writing to you from the Guinness World Records Management Team regarding our company’s recent breach in relation to email data for a group of our record-holders for Largest online secret Santa game.

I can confirm that this breach was a human error by one of our own staff. Naturally, we take this matter extremely seriously and are conducting a formal investigation to ensure an event like this never happens again. I would like to offer you our unreserved apologies for this situation and any inconvenience it has caused.

However, I fear that this breach will have even more serious repercussions, given how lax people are with passwords. Good thing is that Guinness owned up to the mistake and have confirmed that they have initiated refunds for the payment of certificates. Time will tell who’ll be hit more – Guinness or the individuals in the email. My bet is on the latter.

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Last week, I got a call from the HR team asking if I’d be available and willing to come to office on Saturday. The reason? We had a weekend hiring drive and they wanted me(among others) to be an interviewer. My first reaction was – “mm okaaay but I’ve never done this before”(though never is not true, I did take up an interview, but that was for my team & was more of accompany-the-project-leads-and-ask-a-few-questions). This case, however, was different. It’d be a face-to-face interview. With people willing to join the organization. I decided to say Ok. Hey, it’d be a different experience.

Some time later, I realized that I needed to prepare – you don’t want an Interviewer who goes blank in front of a candidate!  Now deciding what to prepare, how to prepare was a challenge. The candidates I was to interview would be having a work experience of about 1-2yrs – and at that stage most candidates would barely know anything.  After speaking to few colleagues and friends I decided to prepare a “set list” of topics to talk about.

Come Saturday, I started for office, reaching at 10:00, even though I’d been asked to come only at 10:30. At first sight, there were a lot of people – I’d say about 100-or so. Some time later, most of the other Interviewers came in. I met the other Oracle interviewers. The candidates had to undergo a written test first, followed by a communication round.

The candidates who cleared both were sent into the lion’s pit – to us. For most candidates – I started off by asking them to tell me about themselves – the intention is to figure out how well they can speak. After this, I asked about what they did in their earlier workplace – the intention being to try to understand what work they’ve done so far. Most candidates spun tall tales about doing x,y, z and so on. Finally, I asked them how much they would rate themselves in their skill sets. Once again, most candidates rated themselves as 4/5 in most.

Once I started interviewing them, however, I ended up sighing and face palming so many times, I lost count. I had a candidate who’d mugged up their entire project source code & when I asked for a simple query, much like writing an exam, come out the vomit of their mugged up program – including front end validation which I’d never asked for – neither would work when run on the database! There was another candidate, who claimed to have almost 2 years of experience, but didn’t know a bit of database triggers, or transactions/commits/rollbacks. Probing a little deeper indicated what I had inferred when interviewing them – all paper experience with nil real world application. Most of the other panelists had the same experience.

In the end, I interviewed 4 candidates, taking an average of about 40 minutes per candidate & ended up rejecting 2. Overall it was an interesting experience. Would definitely take up the opportunity again.

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Guess who I am & win!

When you use something for 16x7x365 (I won’t say 24×7, since the lenses are off when I’m sleeping), you tend to know it inside out. And especially when it’s something like contact lenses, which sit on your eyeballs, every little change will result in instantaneous result. For instance, if you put on your lenses with an every-so-tiny speck of dirt that it’s bloody invisible, trust me, you will know about it & you eyes will water like there’s a big pump pushing out all the tears.

Anyways, all these years I’ve been using Bausch & Lomb’s SofLens monthly disposable lenses. They’re great. Actually, scratch the great part. They’re fantastic. Fits perfectly, no shifting, no dryness nothing. If coloured lenses are your fancy, they come in various colours, but I’ve been on the stock ones, which have a light-blue visibility tint which is awesome if you ever do the scary part of dropping your lenses on the ground or in the kitchen sink.

I’ve tried some other lenses, mainly B&L’s “permanent” ones(in reality, they’re supposed to be changed every year or so), but these didn’t suit my eyes & would go bad in less than 3-4 months. Also tried Johnson & Johnson’s contact lenses, they were fine, but not as comfortable as SofLens.

Over the past few years, we’ve had HD shoved down our throats – everywhere from video to audio. Heck even FM stations started touting “HD quality radio” crap. And joining this “we have HD” queue is… *drumroll* B&L.  Yes. Bausch & Lomb claim their lenses have “HD” optics.

Whatever the heck that means. And on their webpage they have pretty, pretty pictures(albeit served as Flash, so if you’re on a laptop, move it away from your thighs else you’ll have a Seekh Kebab down there) showing what happens when you wear their “HD” lenses. Apparently “blurred” images become crispy, squeaky clean & sharp. No more halos. Excuse me you brilliant folks at B&L PR and marketing, all those (blurred images, halos) are signs of a person wearing lenses NOT suited to them.

Curious to see how they actually work – I took the bait & bought them. For a pretty steep price. Lenskart took about 10 days to deliver them. They forgot to ship the free lens solution & case which was to be included as part of the offer, but after a support ticket, they sent them to me via courier.

Been wearing these for about 2 months now. And as expected, the HD’s just marketing gimmick. Everything looks the same. And to answer those who asked me on twitter, wearing “HD” lens and viewing a “HD” movie on “HD” monitor doesn’t give you a 2160p display. Har, Har.

It’s not just the ludicrous steep price that bothers me. These lenses don’t have any visibility tints. Trying to find where the lenses are in the case itself is like fishing in the deep sea with your eyes blindfolded. Don’t bother searching if you’ve dropped them. While there has been no “shifting”, the lens tends to get dry a wee bit faster. And not to forget, the lens is a dirt magnet. Picks up dirt way faster than anything else that I’ve tried.

So to sum up: Don’t buy ‘em. HD or no HD, you won’t find any difference. And you’ll save some cash to buy another pair of lenses. Or for some shopping. Or beer. Whatever you prefer.

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Didn’t hurt that they had a very nice, clutter free UI. Off late, they have been sending these long-weekend emails.

We usually write to you about happy things in life – upcoming holidays – and here we are once again, informing you about some festivals and long vacations in March.

Holidays in March

Holi	March 8 (Thursday)	Book now
Ugadi / Gudi Padwa	March 23 (Friday)	Book now

Tip for hard-working employees (employers, please ignore): Take an off on March 9 (Friday) and get a 4-days long week-end. After all, playing Holi can get stressful.

Perfect to remind you well-in-advance and get those tickets booked ahead of the rush! Another thing to notice: the cheeky sense of humour contained in the emails.

Well done, redbus! Thank you very much for the lovely service that you guys are providing!

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• Sold off my iPhone 3G and purchased a Nexus S
• Supposed long term US stay gets cut short.
• 3+ years of work on project gone down the drain. On the upside, learnt quite a lot.
• Met Manaa in person, after being a very close friend for 6+ years
• Was elected as Community Moderator for one of the Stack Exchange sites, Super User
• Wrote my first Chrome Extension to get around WebNonsense crap
• Bad security practice from the past comes to haunt me.
• Quit 3i and joined Logica at the middle of the year – after almost having joined TCS, rejected in final round of interview at Oracle & a bungled interview at Société Générale.
• Did a short term stint in Bangalore for training at Logica
• My beloved Nexus S got stolen, purchased a iPhone 3GS from Shivaranjan as it’s replacement
• Went on a road trip to Goa with Appy, AshwinSid and SwaroopH during the middle of the rainy season.
• Test drove the Swift & Figo. Waited for the new Swift to arrive in market and then went and booked the Ford Figo. Swift’s price put it out of my budget & couldn’t wait 6+ months for the Swift
• Met Harshad Sharma & Malcolm after having known them for *years* on twitter.
• Gatecrashed Ravi’s wedding.
• Ran all over Chennai in trying to get the paperwork & formalities done for the car loan
• Car loan got disbursed, did the payment, only to be told, couple days before taking delivery that I will be relocated to Bangalore
• Cancelled car booking, return loan since re-registration of TN car in KA === heavy losses. Total damages: 2.3k(loan processing fees) + 4k (first month interest)
• Got a permanent transfer to Bangalore! (woohoo!) Ashwinsid & 9_6 welcome me in style.
• Moved to a 1BHK house on rent. Much thanks to Dkris for allowing me to stay at his house and give expert tips on house hunting.
• Watched Poets of the Fall perform with front row, centre stage view at The Great Indian Octoberfest
• Got clicked for #TAD365, thanks Roycin!
• Met GeekGod & Waste-u Photographer, Waste-u Photographer’s bitch and Frequent Flyer Manish
• Finally, welcomed the New Year at a far-away coffee estate in Chikmagalur.

Gadgets bought/acquired/reviewed

• Kingston V100 SSDNow 128GB SSD
• Belkin Gold 8-socket Surge Protector
• Mugen Extended Battery for the Nexus S
• iPhone 3GS
• Razer Goliathus Omega Control Gaming Pad
• DLink DSL-2520 ADSL Router
• Dell UltraSharp U2312HM 23” IPS Screen
• Lava S12 Android phone

Overall, a fab year. Happy New Year – and best wishes for the year ahead.

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