For some (probably conceited :) ) reason, I felt that my blog was getting overrun (or about to really get overrun) with non-technical babble arising from my frustration about where this country is headed. So before I turn off those three of you who read my blog, I have decided to split my blog on a very fuzzy boundary of technical/non-technical lines. My non-technical rants will now be posted at the appropriately named http://rants.
Takes me an hour to travel just this 2 km stretch every morning and every night.
(Pai layout on the left. RMZ Infinity in the background)
Very embarrassingly, after a spate of reinstalls, crashes, backup of wrong copies and my policy of destroying old backups in the house, I discovered that I have lost the secret keys of my GPG keypair(I had not used them for a while). The revocation certificate, printed on a scrap of paper, was lost during my relocation to Bangalore.I was always procrastinating its re-generation, and I seem to have paid for this now.
My first brush with the stock market, and you can see how well I am doing.
Shit! š¬
On Jan 9th, 2006, I joined Yahoo Bangalore. Am living out of a suitcase in a guesthouse right now. Will be moving in lock, stock and car next month after I find an acco. All those who live here and can help, I am looking for a place in the Koramangala vicinity.
After my terrible experience with Sify broadband early this year, I decided to stick to dialup - Reliance rconnect over FWP actually. But the idea of keeping a phone busy all day doesn’t appeal to me much even if the plan I have (Platinum) doesn’t have download caps or per minute call charges.
So today I decided to bite the “broadband” bullet once again, and registered for a Tata Broadband connection.
I bought my first wireless equipment a couple of days back - A Linksys Wireless-G router model WRT54G. I had selected this model after spending a number of days poring through online reviews of various routers.
The Linksys WRT54G Wireless-G router The box cost me Rs. 3550 (with bill) in Nehru Place. I immediately started working on how to place it in my network. Finally an hour back, I could figure out the right way to configure it.
For quite some years now, I have been having an odd problem. I seem to get charged up with static electricity very frequently. As many of my friends and relatives would testify, they have suffered many painful and shocking handshakes with me.
Then there are time periods when this problem becomes especially acute, and touching anything from door curtains to basin knobs to car doors gives me shocks. Sometimes I can even see a blue streak of electricity zapping across my hand to a door handle I am about to touch.
Here is the letter I sent to Sify contact points in Delhi yesterday. It chronicles my Sify broadband experience here in Delhi.
From: Sandip Bhattacharya To: Sanjay Bhandari , Puneet Sharma , anamika Cc: India Gii Subject: Official complaint - My sify experience and a request for refund Date: Fri, 04 Mar 2005 14:21:23 +0530 Mailer: Evolution 2.0.2 (2.0.2-3) I had applied for a sify connection exactly a week ago, and paid a cheque on the same day.
Inspite of my contempt for their loathsome Internet fleecing plans, I had to reluctantly sign up for a Sify cable internet plan today. Cost me a neat pile for installation and pre-payment for one month. The most painful part of this transition is going back to a NAT-ted private IP. This means no more gnomemeeting, no more yahoo voice/video chat, no more Bittorrent, no more gnutella/fasttrack/openft and other P2P networks, no more logging into my home machine when stranded outside my home office to retrieve a document I left at home.