2011 was a roller coaster year. Here’s the year in review, in bullet points 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.

Happy New Year! While I’m working on year-2011-in-review post, here’s a spam that I have being receiving quite a lot. MARUTI SUZUKI INDIA LTD (MSIL) Head Office Maruti Suzuki, India Limited Nelson Mandela Road, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi-110070. Board no.46781000. Fax: 46150275 and 46150276 OFFICE NUMBER : +917838133834 “MARUTI SUZUKI” DIRECT RECRUITMENTS OFFER. This Company selected 62 candidates list for Senior Engineer, IT, Administration, Production, marketing and general service Departments, It

It’s been a bad, bad week for couple of my gadgets. First, my 500GB internal laptop drive, which I had swapped out for a Kingston 128GB SSD and converted into an external drive, crashed. It is my fault, tbh – I had disconnected it before sleeping the previous night and next day morning, after waking up, breakfast et al decided to listen to some music & plugged in the drive to the USB port.

Been a while since last wrote a review so I’m a bit rusty 🙂 Previously, I depended a lot on the crappy Airtel data card. In course of time things happened, ( which is not relevant to the review 😉 ) and I shifted to a new place. This place had a pre-existing Reliance WiMax connection, so I really cannot comment on the installation charges and support. So I’m going to focus more on the way it works, speed and support.

Most of the Ruby gang are very well aware of the “Stupid SMS series”. For the uninitiated, it was Nitin’s way of…. umm… timepass ? by sending SMS to all of the Ruby gang which made absolutely no sense whatsoever ( I hate to admit it, but it’s true, Nitin is a version of “The Amit"). Anyways back to the post, couple of days ago, as I was spending time in morning, my iPhone started to buzz away.

I’ve been in couple of flights before but this would be my first International, Intercontinental flight. As in my previous post, the flight was scheduled to depart at 23:40 from Mumbai on Nov 20 and arrive in Newark, New Jersey at 05:25 AM. And then the connecting flight from Newark, NJ to Austin, Texas was scheduled to leave at 07:15 and arrive in Austin, Texas at 10:25. Like most other things, (surprise, surprise) this too didn’t as per plan.

Statuatory Warning: LOT of curse words ahead. If you cant stand curse words, well then fuck you. My stay in Chennai is turning out to be one big lesson as to what kinda pricks and dumb fucks exist in this planet. First it was the Chennai Cops. Then it was the stupid mansion owner. Recently it was a stupid hotel cashier. Chalk up yet another dumb prick to that list courtesy yesterday night’s sequence of events.

Generally I always carry a fair amount of cash with me, coz I’m a bit paranoid as to what might happen if I’m stranded without cash. The set of incidents which happened just now will now ensure that I will always carry cash with me. I’d been to Hotel Balaji Woodlands for dinner - I don’t go there often, but have been there enough number of times to know that they *do* accept Debit cards.

Well it’s been a while since I updated my blog, so here goes. It’s been an event packed(and not-so-packed) past few weeks. Let start with what happened 2 weeks ago: The first half of the week was more or less the same. Just the same things that I’d mentioned in the previous post. It’s the latter half of the week where it got interesting. We(as in me and my team mates) received a mail from our onsite implementer stating that he needs all our support for the project as the project was supposed to go live on Feb 14th,and there would be testing at their end(their end meaning US).

Ever since my guest house owner denied me permission to draw a 2MM cable for TATA Indicom broadband, I’ve been searching for alternatives, so that I can get atleast a decent net connection. For the past month or so, I’ve been trying out AirTel’s EDGE USB modem option, but this net connection sucks harder than the blackhole. Another good alternative is BSNL’s EVDO service, but then the service was launched recently, and BSNL staff are ignorant about the service.