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.

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.

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. It wasn’t very surprising, since getting a message in morning isn’t something out of the ordinary. Opened the message only to see it was a blank SMS from an unknown number. Ignored it at first, but then the buzzing went on continuously. In a matter of few minutes my inbox looked like this:

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.

Let me start from scratch.

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.  As usual, after doing some last minute mail checking, I went to sleep at around 01:45. Barely half hour later, we had a power failure. No fans, 40 degree temperature, >90% humidity, sweat pouring down your head and neck, I was certainly NOT in the best of my mood. And then, bam! Some stupid prick prick starts playing music from his (presumably Walkman series, going by the loudness)phone AT FULL VOLUME,  at 02:30. I mean WTF? I gave him a bit of time, waited for couple of songs to get over, thinking he would stop playing.

BSNL Chennai’s website may claim that EVDO connections are avaible, but the reality is that they’re offering connections only in outer peripheral areas. Sad as it may be but the news is true. I’d paid a visit to the Greames Road exchange in Chennai to apply for a EVDO connection. Initially I was thrilled to see the EVDO device infront of me, all my excitement died when I was informed that there’s no CDMA tower in Triplicane, nor there is one in city. I was told that at the moment, BSNL is focussing on EVDO connections(in Chennai, atleast) only in areas where standard wired connectivity is not possible - areas like Perungudy, OMR, Velachery etc.

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.