This site saw the last post almost 3 months back and since then many have been checking with me on my well-being.

Few services even banned this site for having no activity in the last 3 months.

I just took a long break from blogging and hope to be back as soon as possible !

It was time at my workplace which initially (and is still) held me from being “online”. Later I just felt better being “away”.

I also got hooked onto reading fiction novels! Currently I have these many books waiting to be finished

On the top of these 9 books, I have an additional 7 books in the queue including a few non-fiction books by Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock

When I am not reading books, I am busy exploring the new 13″ macbook. Like with the Apple iPhone, even Macbook ownership is temporary and is finally ending up with my brother.

The new Macbook is way too cool, compared to my existing Acer Laptop (or compared to any of the notebooks out there in the market)

Currently I am stuck with a Windows based notebook and a Windows based mobile while my sibling is “all Mac”. Something I wish to change to in the coming few years !

I am liking everything about the Mac except for the fact that you have to pay for almost all the good software.

Meanwhile if you didn’t care as to where the hell was I, you probably should definitely care to see where the hell Matt was this year round

The new Bangalore International airport started operating from today and seems to have already handled around 341 flights.

I tried to check on the official website to know more about the launch day only to find the website down ! I tried accessing the site contents via Google cache; even that seemed to lead to pages with errors.

Update – Bialairport.com is now redirecting to http://www.bengaluruairport.com. The site is half baked and is hosted on Bharti in Karnataka, India.

The site was well designed and optimized for search engine queries. However looks like the IT team overlooked the bandwidth requirements and visitors seeking information have to end up seeing the above screen !

The web server seems to be in Texas and hosted by Theplanet.com Internet Services Inc.

The site should hopefully be online soon and till then, check my earlier post on BIA.

Instead of putting more data in that post, I linked to the official BIA site and I kind of regret that decision now

The Bangalore/Bengaluru International Airport (BIA) is finally commencing operations from 23 May 2008.

The switch to the new airport will take place at midnight on May 23. As per the statement from BIAL (BIA Limited) all flights landing and departing after midnight will operate from the new airport.

Update: BIA opened on May 24 (Saturday) and handled 341 flights on Day One

Also flights arriving before midnight (on May 22) can also choose to land on the new airport.

Air India’s flight from Bangalore to Singapore will supposedly be the first flight to take off from the new international airport in the city, when it becomes operational on May 23.

Even though I am not traveling out of Bangalore in the near time, I decided to checkout on the connectivity and the various transport options available to and from the new international airport.

Official Website

The BIA official web site does have a lot of information on the new airport. The site is indexed pretty well in Google and also has managed to get the Sitelinks.

http://www.bialairport.com

http://www.bengaluruairport.com

Contact Details

Bangalore International Airport Limited
   118, Gayathri Lakefront
   Outer Ring Road
   Hebbal
   Bangalore - 560 024
   Tel: +91 80 2354 0000
   Fax: +91 80 2333 3400
   Email: cont...@bialairport.com

Flight Schedule Details

BIAL has also come up with a Flight Schedule List which is effective from 24 May 2008 to October 25 2008.

• Domestic Departure Details – Download here
• International Departure Details – Download here

Note that these schedule are subject to change and for more accurate information you should/could always call up 1800 425 4425

BIAL website also has added a new feature via which you can view the live flight arrival and departure information.

Transportation Facilities

Following is the list of current transport options available. You can either travel by bus, use the Airport Taxi Service or drive by yourselves.

Airport Shuttle Service

There are around 40 Volvo AC buses which will shuttle between the city and the airport. The following table has more information on the pick-up/drop-off points. The following areas are covered as of now

• Hebbal
• MCTC
• Jeevan Bhima Nagar
• HAL (Old Airport)
• JP Nagar 6th Phase
• Koramangala
• Kempegowda Bus Stand
• Whitefield(ITPL)
• Electronic City

Note: Once you know the route taken by these buses, you can catch the bus at any place on the route.

The following transport map seems to show 2 more locations not mentioned in the above table.

For more information on the areas covered, you can always call up these numbers.

BMTC Control Room: Telephone No: 22952522/22952422
BMTC, Kempegowda Bus Stand: Telephone No: 22952311/22952314
BMTC, Shivajinagar Bus Stand: Telephone No: 22952321/22952324

For those who are familiar with Bangalore, the following image might help in choosing the shortest road to the airport

Airport Taxi Service

Meru and Easy Cabs are the official taxi operators at the airport. The cars supposedly have a GPS and are also air conditioned. They are also are equipped with a credit card machine and at a charge of 15 INR/km this is definitely required

You can also book these taxis over phone; the facility however is available only if you are going towards the airport.

Easy Cabs - 43434343
Meru Cabs - 44224422

Limo and Car Rental

You can also rent premium cars from Hertz or Akbar Travels. Apart from the regular chauffeured cars, passengers can also avail self-driven cars at the airport.

There will be three ranges of self drive cars- the compact category (Suzuki Swift), the intermediate range – (Ford Fiesta), the standard category- (Toyota corolla), Multi Utility Vehicles (Toyota Innova) and Sports Utility Vehicles (Ford Endeavour)

AirLift

AirLift is another car rental service which is currently charging 300 INR for a pickup/drop from any place in Bangalore. I checked on the official Website of Airlift and it looks like they are covering only south and east Bangalore as of now.

However at 300 INR, a drive in Toyota Innvoa with personal entertainment is a steal. I haven’t had the opportunity to use AirLift and hence can’t give a feedback on their service, if anyone has used Airlift, please feel free to give your feedback on the same.

If you intend to use Airlift, note that they are available at P-3 parking at BIA’s arriving terminal.

You can contact Airlift using the following details:

AIRLIFT
#106, Sherwood Suites,17/2 Varthur Main Road,
Marathahalli,Bangalore 560 037
Call : 97313 96331
Email : supp...@airliftonline.com 

RedBus

RedBus, the online bus ticket booking service has introduced BMTC Bus booking for Bangalore International Airport.

You can book using RedBus irrespective of whether you are traveling to or from the International Airport.

RedBus allows you to book the Volvo buses on all the routes mentioned above and they even let you pick your seats.

(Note: The available seats have a checkbox which when checked appears in the “Chose Seats” text field)

Parking Facilities

The Airport’s car park can accommodate 2000 cars. The system used for the parking management is fully automated, efficient and transparent and is provided by SKIDATA™

Car parking fees have been priced at Rs.40/- for two hours and Rs.20/- for every additional hour in the general parking area. For overnight parking, Rs. 300 will be charged for the first 24 hours and Rs. 200 for every additional day.

BIA Photos

For up-to-date information, bookmark the official BIA Website !

Update – BIA has now come up with an Easy Guide which has lot of useful information.

Download BIA Easy Guide.pdf

There has been another round of pagerank  update and I see that many sites have got a higher pagerank and few of them have even managed to get a PR of 4 within few months !

This site had a PR of 4 from quite some time and even during the last update where few sites were penalized for selling Text Link Ads the PR of this site remained at 4

At that time, I thought that I wasn’t penalized since I was not selling Text Link Ads from my home page (which had PR4) and was only having post level ads (Around 5 post level ads were active).

However this round of pagerank update has taken the PR from 4 to 2, reminding me of QOT’s PR downgrade from 6 to 3 !

I am not sure if dividing existing PR by 2 is the way of Google penalizing sites selling text link ads. I immediately stopped Text Link Ads and in a way it was even easy since a new month just began !

I have also raised a reconsideration request with Google !

But again I am not completely sure if TLA is the core reason behind this downgrade ! I moved my hosting from Dreamhost to MT some time back and one of the biggest mistakes I made was not to check on the XML sitemap.

After the hosting change, the XML sitemaps generator plugin for some odd reason started putting the XML file on venukb.com/blog while Google was searching for it on venukb.com. I had manually set to venukb.com and during the move, the option changed to “Automatic” and happened to select the subdomain.

And I realized this only after 3 weeks ! Duh !

The crawl stats also confirmed that the sitemaps were not accessible from quite some time !

I fixed the issue and even then I see that 0 pages from sitemaps are included in the search index.

Has the PR downgrade affected traffic ?

This site for one gets almost 80% of the traffic from search engines (mainly Google) and I have noticed that some of the high traffic pages are no longer in the Top 10 !

I do see a dip in the number of unique visitors, but after including the landing page, the pageview count hasn’t changed much.

I am hoping the reconsideration request to fix the PR And if any of you are running Text Link Ads and also get a huge amount of traffic from Google, you should consider switching the text ads off !

And yes be careful about XML sitemaps when you are moving to a new hosting ! (Though not sure if this is also the reason for downgrade !)

Talking of PR, do share your experience as well ! Has it improved ? Do you see change in traffic with the improved PR ?

My 8Mbps broadband plan is sucking out money from the past 2 months; somehow I am managing to exceed the 4GB download limit.

With the intent of checking on some new plans, I tried to access the Airtel website http://www.airtel.in

I ended up with this:

The URL was being re-directed to http://www.airtel.in/srilanka/srilanka….. Looks like the site was hacked by somebody !

Talking of Airtel web portal, Airtel seems to be changing its domain every other month; Few months back, it was airtelworld.com (It was something else before this) and now its Airtel.in !

And with every domain change, they seem to be changing the URL for some of their important offering e.g. Airtel Data card.

Check an example URL for Airtel Data card:

http://airtel.in/level2_t7.aspx?path=1/106

And its not just this URL; every URL in the site seems to have a awkward “level2″ and path parameter. Also the path parameter seems to get a new value with every domain change and makes linking to their site a pain !

Update: Airtel portal is back in action; not sure who hacked it or whether it was some upgrade issue. The countless number of “srilanka” in the URL in a way conveys that it was probably not a server upgrade issue !

Online Banking has really caught up in India and you rarely see a bank not providing online access to your bank account. However the quality of user experience varies across banks and the same can be said about the security.

ING Vysya Bank, the Indian arm of ING is one example of a crappy online banking portal. Checkout this exception while trying to access the portal:

StringIndexOutOfBoundsException ! hmm .. My complaint is not much on the stack trace print, but on not encapsulating this message in a meaningful string.

I for one like the way Citibank handles exceptions, you just get a message saying “We are unable to service your request”etc etc.

Which bank in India in your opinion provides the best online user experience and features ? Here is how it stacks up for me

1.  Citibank
2. ICICI Bank
3. HDFC Bank

Recently Raj found out that he was color blind and requested his readers to take the color blindness test on Flixter. When I first scrolled through the quiz questions, I thought it was some kind of fun since I wasn’t able to find numbers in those circles.

After spending considerable amount of time, I finally came up with 6 correct answers out of the 10 questions. The 4 failed ones had single numbers and even if someone showed me where the number was I couldn’t see it!

I still thought that the quiz was some kind of fun and that very few people would have scored 10 out of 10. But I was disappointed to see the average score of 97%!

The next day I sent the quiz to my colleagues and friends; almost all of them scored 100% with a few exceptions. The frustrating thing was that other than scoring 100%, they were competing for setting the fastest time!

More interesting was the way they handled the quiz; they could see the numbers clearly and were searching for the option which had that number. Me on the other hand was checking on the options first and later was trying to find the number in the circle! So this in a way confirmed that I am partially color blind; partial because of the fact that I could answer 6 out of the 10 questions J

Now I am wondering if I was color blind from start or was it caused by the countless hours I spent in front of the PC! Meanwhile you guys go ahead and take the quiz to find out if you are color blind!

If you are on Facebook, you can take the quiz here, otherwise use this public link.

The new year has bought in a new look to my weblog. Here is a snapshot of the site opened in Safari.

The last update was done in July 2007. After checking lot of themes, I finally settled on the Freicurv theme. I still have to work on the ad placements and some of the page templates (archives etc). Meanwhile check out the new look and let me know your thoughts on the same.

I have been planning to write about my visit to Staples from quite some time and now I have finally found some time

Staples is one of the worlds largest office supply retail store chain and they entered India via a joint venture with Kishore Biyani’s Pantaloon Retail Limited. The biggest store in Bangalore is located on the Sarjapur Outer Ring Road (Next to Reliance Fresh/Opposite Innovative Multiplex).

Update – Staples has now opened a new store in Koramangala (near Forum Mall)

A store like Staples is tailor made for a gadget freak like me. When it comes to electronic goods/computer accessories, I am not constrained by my bank balance, I’m only restricted by the limit on my credit card

However I was more than disappointed with the store and I believe Staples would be more disappointed with the amount that I spent. More details on my shopping experience below:

1. First of all I had no trouble in getting the parking space. Other than the space available in front of the store, part of the service road is “officially” used for Staples parking. In fact, even the main outer ring road itself is misused for parking.
2. As soon as you enter the store, you are greeted with LCD monitors on the left. I have been thinking of buying one from a long time and was excited to see this rack first; however it was only short lived since Staples has only stacked 17″ – 20″ monitors. Also the vendors were restricted to Acer and HP ! What about Dell ? Well I had read that Staples will start selling Dell Monitors, but I guess its probably not applicable in India yet.
3. Going ahead you will find the left part completely filled with software and game CD’s/DVD’s. I checked on the price of Vista Ultimate and it was mentioned as 24K INR. I asked for more clarification on the price only to find that the staples workforce was not that educated ! (Indiatimes is selling the same for 15K INR)
   In fact one common problem I noticed was that the entire sales force was not educated/trained to sell the items stocked up in Staples. I guess they were expected to learn over the period of time. Every time you ask something, you find them running towards some other sales guy for more clarification. And when none of them are clear about what the customer is asking, they finally flock towards the manager of the store !
4. There is a small section for laptop’s, digital cameras and camcorders which I conveniently skipped.
5. I have been wanting to buy an external hard drive from quite some time and when I asked about Western Digital Passport drive, the sales guy gave me a “what is that” look !
6. I got the same kind of look for the following items
   • Duplex Accessory for my HP C6180 Printer
   • Compressed Air (which I thought I could use to clean my laptop keyboard)
   • Logitech diNovo Edge keyboard
   • HP Photo Printing Paper – Staples which has received 100 million USD from HP to sell only their ink cartridges hasn’t received the same kind of payment for photo paper I believe. After being recently sued over the printer ink prices, I am not sure HP and Staples will again pair up for exclusively selling the HP photo paper.
7. What you do get is :
   • A good enough collection of web cameras
   • Writable CD’s /DVD’s
   • Small collection of Printers
   • Shredders
   • Label Makers
   • Ink Cartridges (HP/Epson/Brother)
   • Wireless Routers – Again restricted to only Netgear and Linksys
8. The second floor of staples has :
   • Print Center
   • Apple “Corner” – The small corner with Apple products is probably enough for marketing Staples as the official Apple distributor in India, but might not be enough for a Mac Fan.
   • Lots and lots of office supplies – Paper/Envelopes/Labels/Whiteboards/Pens/Staples/Clips etc etc
   • Nilkamal Computer Tables – Totally sucks
   • Unbranded Chairs – Some of them were good looking and they were unfortunately attached with a big price tag.

To summarize, I would say that it was definitely refreshing to see Staples in India; However me personally didn’t find many of the items that I wanted to buy. It might not be the same for everyone, so go checkout Staples and have fun

If you already visited Staples and had fun, please do share you experience in the comments section.

I keep a regular check on the IMDB Top 250 to see if any new movies have made it to the elite list. Today I noticed that both Godfather and Shawshank Redemption have got the same weighted rating of 9.1

(I am not sure it was the same few months back, I guess Shawshank had a mean rating of 9 I believe)

Even though Shawshank has more number of votes (296,165 vs 250,516) compared to Godfather, its still placed at No 2.

I had a look at the formula used by IMDB

I am not sure if 9.1 is the weighted rating or the average rating (R). Irrespective of that, with the 50k vote difference and the above formula, I thought that Shawshank should have been placed at No 1 ?

I have no complaints on Godfather being No 1, I am just wondering as to what is preventing IMDB from placing Shawshank at the top ?

Either I am not doing the math right or IMDB feels that Shawshank is not in the same class as Godfather What do you guys think ?

I have been a BIG fan of Lost TV Series. I saw the first 2 seasons on DVD and managed to see almost all the episodes of Season 3 on Star Movies. I am not sure what hooks me to this program; its probably got to do with the direction and a little with the unique style in which each characters story is told.

Wikipedia does in better job in describing the unique episode format of Lost

Episodes have a distinct structure: following a recap of events relevant to the upcoming narrative, each show begins with a cold open. Often a close up of a character’s eye will follow. At a dramatic juncture, the screen cuts to black and the title graphic, slightly out-of-focus, glides towards the viewer accompanied by an ominous, discordant sound. The opening credits generally appear alphabetically by last name over the scenes that immediately follow. While there is a continuous story arc, each episode relates events concurrently with off-island flashbacks and later, flashforwards, centered on a particular character. The majority of episodes end with a suspenseful twist or cliffhanger, revealed just seconds before a smash cut to black and the title graphic. Others, following a plot resolution, will finish with a reflective closing scene that precedes a simple fade to black, and in particularly tragic or heart-felt closing scenes, the booming noise that accompanies the title graphic will be silenced, amplifying the impact of the event.

Have a look at the Season 4 Trailer !

How many of you have watched Lost ? What do you like/dislike about this series ? What other alternative series would you recommend ? Few were suggesting me to watch 24 !

Its been almost 3 weeks since I have put up any post on my weblog and this 20 day silence also has eclipsed my previous record of 10 days . And hopefully I wouldn’t be setting new records of this kind in the future.

Most of my time in the last 20 days was spent at my workplace (including few weekends) and whatever spare time I had on the day was used for sleeping. I had barely any time to read my feeds or write any useful content

The same work also took me to Beijing for a week. Beijing has changed a lot since I visited last in 2005 and this was expected as the city is hosting the 2008 Olympics.

Building of these types are common across the city.

Even the Taxi Drivers have gone the extra mile to understand and talk a little bit of English. Also Hyundai Accent/Elantra/Sonata’s  have replaced the old VW Passat taxi’s.

More Beijing Trip photos shared here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/venukb/sets/72157602256140070/

Even though more routes have been added to the Beijing subway, the traffic reminded me of Bangalore. And the reason for the pathetic traffic condition was attributed to the explosion of private cars in the city which again is due the massive growth of Chinese economy.

Being a coffee addict and I was excited to find Starbucks in the vicinity of my hotel. However I was totally disappointed by the quality of the coffee. Beijing Starbucks is not “Starbucks” ! I am not sure of the type of coffee beans that they use here, but I had to add an extra shot of espresso for every cappucino and even then it didn’t taste like “Coffee”.

I am not planning to write a detailed travelogue of Beijing. If any of you guys are traveling/planning to travel to Beijing/China you can always ping me using the Contact page for more information

Orkut’s new look is active on my profile. The Google logo is highlighted in the footer and there is also the link to the official Orkut blog.

Even though there is no major change in terms of features, the new look definitely looks fresh and is a welcome change. What is your opinion on the new look of Orkut ? Meanwhile how many of you are still active on Orkut ? Do share your Orkut experience  

I haven’t written a post in the past 10 days and many of my friends including some readers started pinging me to check on my status

I am very much alive, only that I was caught up with a little work and also decided to take some time off

FeedDemon, the RSS reader that I use, was filled up with so many new posts !! I was forced to use the “Mark Folder Read” option for most of RSS folders. However I did a quick check on India Technology Bloggers feed and got myself updated with the latest happenings in the tech world. (Thanks to QOT for staring this network, its really useful)

Orkut seems to have got a face-lift; It looks only like a CSS update (with rounded corners/use of “blue” color/new icons). Not sure, if Orkut team read one of my earlier post, but they do seem to have finally started an official blog on June 25.

Other than this:

• Apurv seems to be having a fun filled time in Austin. His first tryst with Square dancing even won him a Philips DVD player
• Vasu takes some time off to explain the significance of his name. His blog archives are just amazing. Most of his posts are worth reading over and over again
• Chris does throw up an interesting proposal on Twitter Groups
• Kyle reminds to update the Text Link Ads Referral Links.
• Shankar, as usual is glued to his PC after school and has a lot of interesting posts.
• Nirmal suggests 7 Plugins to improve the comment section of your WordPress powered weblog. I really need to integrate some of those plug-ins to improve the “commenting” experience on this site.
• Mayank talks about the new Bloglines Beta RSS reader.
• Shivaranjan talks of the built-in Screen capturing utility of Vista. I am still on Windows XP and I am really keen to know as to how many of you have upgraded to vista and how many of you would recommend an upgrade.
• Vijay points to an interesting Web Page Technology profiler – Builtwith
• If you are a game freak, do checkout the Microsoft Sidewinder mouse suggested by Madhur. I am not into gaming much these days and I’m quite happy with my Logitech V500 mouse
• I was about to check on the 3 WordPress Plug-ins that won the WordPress Plug-in Competition when Aprit warned me of the security flaws in each of these plug-ins.

Yesterday I received a cheque from Text Link Ads and I was surprised to see 25$ printed on it. I never realized that somebody has signed up via my TLA referral link.

Generally I direct all payments to my PayPal account, however by mistake I had set the payment option to Cheque on TLA and also the minimum amount was set to 25$.

I am sure if I drop on to my savings accounts, its going to take at least a month. Also I am not sure about the bank charges for USD Cheque’s.

I checked with TLA if they could cancel this cheque and send the same to my PayPal; However they replied back saying that the cheque cancellation charge will cost 30$ !!!

Anyone know how to en-cash this cheque with the least penalty ?

I’ve been tagged by Shankar to write 8 Random facts about me. Here it goes:

1. On my character front, I find it little difficult to handle praises showered on me . I keep smiling, even for things which I shouldn’t. I’m analytical and rarely emotional. I easily get angry and I am/probably finding/will find ways to control it. Over the years many people have labeled me as a “complex character”. I’ve also been appreciated for my character analysis skill as well !
2. I’m a complete vegetarian. ! I love chocolates and it helped me survive in China ! I love fried food and its high time I did a check on my cholesterol levels !
3. I love watching movies ! Yes I’m a movie freak. IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes are my “online” movie hangout places.
4. I sleep a lot ! I can manage to be awake till any time during the night, but waking me up in morning is a tough task. People in my house have even tried extreme methods like pouring water on my face to wake me up on weekends. Off late even those techniques are not working and hence the folks have given up
5. I bought my first PC during my engineering days to write/test C programs. I constantly upgraded it for the next 4 years, not for running complex huge C/C+ programs but to run memory and CPU hungry PC games . Diablo, Caesar, Rise of Nations, Formula1 are some of my favorite games.
6. I love owning Gadgets and computer accessories ! Who doesn’t The only thing holding me buying all those fancy gadgets is my limited bank balance !
7. November is my Birthday
8. Damn only 8, I still wanted to write so many things about me. Ah I will probably use the “About” page for that.

Ok, now time to tag my other buddies: Vasuki, Apurv, Harish and Anand to share 8 random facts about themselves.

I have been finding my laptop’s 15.4″ display too small to work on and hence was thinking of buying a Flat Panel LCD monitor. From the past 2 days I have been researching on products from different vendors and I finally ended up in a confused state.

At my workplace they have 19 inch Dell monitors (recently widescreen versions also arrived) and these monitors are a treat to work with. So first I went to check on Dell monitors available in India.

Paul’s review of Dell’s 30 inch LCD display was also one of the factors for checking out Dell first .

17″ and 19″ inch monitors were ruled out and so was the 30″ monitor !. Dell India currently has about 5 monitors in the 20-24″ range and are not selling the 30″ LCD monitors.

After reading reviews on each of them, I finally shortlisted Dell 2007WFP 20″ UltraSharp Wide Screen Flat Panel LCD Monitor and Dell UltraSharp 2407WFP- HC 24″ Wide Screen Flat Panel LCD Monitor.

Now for the surprise: Dell 2007 WFP 20″ costs around 25000 INR (625USD) while the same costs only 339$ in Dell US store. Dell UltraSharp 2407WFP costs around 40000 INR (1000USD) while the same costs 670$ in US.

There is a huge price difference and I guess its just not worth buying a Dell in India. I guess Dell hasn’t factored in the strong India Rupee while fixing the price.

ViewSonic also had a couple of good monitors as part of their X Series. ViewSonic VX2245wm (22″) did seem like a nice choice; It also had an integrated iPod Dock. However the reviews of this model weren’t too great and the price was also high at around 30000INR (750$).

The other monitor I checked was the Samsung SyncMaster 244T (24″). TrustedReviews had a pretty detailed review of this display and they even put this monitor ahead of Dell 24″ display. PC World, in one of its old reviews quoted a price of 80000 INR. Again shocked

Looks like I checked on a wrong segment of LCD monitors.None of them were within my budget of 20000 .

How many of you are using a LCD monitor ? What size of monitor are you using ? Share more details on your experience; Hopefully it will help me to decide on one

Check this picture !

 

Now read this story

Some guy went to China and bought it for very cheap. It is supposed be able to store for several GB of memory. But as much as he tried, it didn’t work so he decided to to open it up and that’s what he saw. So please if you go to China or planning to try stuff you buy even though it is very cheap. But anyway I think it’s hard to return stuff there. This is like the extension cord for the USB cut and put inside, how did they even think of doing this?

China was the first place where I saw a 70 floor electronic market (known as Seg Plaza). It was a huge building and you could find any electronic item you want. In fact you could even assemble a Nokia mobile phone of your choice!!

Me and my friends have shopped extensively in this market and we rarely have been duped.  

Anyway I would still recommend anyone buying a DVD player to buy it in China.

I for one own a BBK DVD player and it plays any damn scratched CD/DVD with no issues.

I have another Philips DVD player which sometimes is not even able to recognize a partially scratched DVD, let alone playing it.

What is your view on Chinese Electronic Items ?

Anyone who has visited or stayed in Bangalore would have definitely experienced the horrible traffic while commuting within the city.

Bangalore Traffic Police in association with Mapunity and Airtel have come up with a comprehensive urban traffic information system for Bangalore city know as Bangalore Transport Information System (BTIS)

Mapunity Information Services is a Bangalore-based developer of geographic information systems primarily for government departments, civil society organizations, and development initiatives of commercial ventures.

With BTIS:

• You can get real time information about the traffic conditions within the city.

  There are 2 ways of getting the traffic information. If you are connected to Internet, you can access http://btis.in/live.htm to view live traffic

  
  Alternatively if you are an Airtel Subscriber, you can send an SMS to 54321 (As of now the service is free)

• Get Directions around Bangalore – http://btis.in/directions.htm (Interestingly you also get a rough estimate of the Auto charges for the selected route)
  You can even SMS the driving directions !

  

• Shortly Carpool service will also be launched which will let you quickly check with your pool partners using your cell phone, and plan your trips each time you hit the road.

  

This live traffic information system is the first of its kind in India. This service definitely looks useful for people living in Bangalore or visiting Bangalore

Checkout BTIS

More on bLaugh

Few months back I had written a post of describing the features of Airtel Data Card. It turned out to be a hugely popular post(with 143 comments); everyday the site gets a lot of unique visitors to this post.

Most of the visitors are referred either by Google or Yahoo Search (The former almost bringing in 90% of the visitors). I was wondering why Live Search was not referring to this post.

A search for “Airtel Data Card” on Live Search took me to this post on TechTime

http://techtime.co.in/thetech/data-card-from-airtel.html

Compare the contents of the above post with the one I wrote. The author has done a copy of my post (including the formatting of the text) and published as his own content. The only thing he has spared are the images embedded in the post.

I wrote a comment requesting the author of the TechTime blog to delete the post. My comment was conveniently deleted.

I had a look at the other posts in the site site and it looks like the TechTime blog is filled with Plagiarized posts. The blog which describes itself as “Just another Indian Tech weblog” should be renamed to “Just another Shit log” !!

How do you deal with this kind of content theft ?

What other things can one do other than politely asking the author to delete/remove the copied content?

Update

Whois.sc just gave me some more personal information about this TechTime Guy

Registrant Email:
Admin ID:PA1468_178
Admin Name:imran baig
Admin Organization:imran baig
Admin Street1:456 5th cross 2nd main
Admin Street2:kalyan nagar
Admin City:bangalore
Admin State/Province:Karnataka
Admin Postal Code:560046
Admin Country:IN
Admin Phone:+91.91988606808
Admin FAX:+91.91988606808

Guess I have to call him on his mobile

“Doodles of a Crazy Man” is the title of the blog maintained by my highly talented friend Vasuki.

Wondering why I am writing about this blog? Not because he is my friend or that his link is on my Blogroll; its out of total appreciation to the blog’s content and his writing talent.

Of all the different blogs/RSS feeds that I read daily, this blog stands out primarily because of quality content.  

Vasu has a unique style of story telling/putting his view and if you read a couple of posts in his blog you will definitely be tempted to dig through the blogs archives.

Most of the posts are guaranteed to bring a smile on your face. Irrespective of whether it makes you smile or not, each and every post in his blog is an interesting read unlike my blog. (Yes I am envious )

Checkout Doodles of the Crazy Man - You’ll love it

Subscribe to his RSS feed as well; Its one of those feeds where you wait for a new post to arrive.

P.S. I sometimes wonder why Desipundit doesn’t link to some of his amazing posts.  

If you want to know more about me and this weblog, click on the following link

http://www.venukb.com/blog/about/

I have been thinking of updating the info on this page from quite some time;Thanks to Garry for pushing me on this.

The blog now has a new look and feel ! There is no major change and only the header layout is re-designed.

I always wanted to move the “Page” links on the sidebar and now it has a new place at the bottom of the header.

However I almost spent hours together for the right color combination of Header and menu containers. Even now the combination is kind of weird and I would request a creative mind to suggest a good color combination for the header.

Feel free to comment on the things you like and dislike about the blog layout.

Note: If you are reading this post from your favorite RSS reader, for a change you have to open the link in your favorite browser to check and suggest on the layout changes

This is one picture doing rounds in the E-mail forwards. Worth putting it down here.

As seen from the above photo, the skirmish in the skies is now turning into a war of words. Kingfisher and Jet Airways are now fighting each other on the streets, in an advertising battle.

GoAir, one of the new entrant into Indian skies and also one of the fastest growing airline in India has a punch at both Kingfisher and Jet airways in this advertising campaign.

Kawaiikuma at DoshDosh has been running a interactive experiment from some time called as “Ultimate Technorati Favorites Exchange“. (Thanks to Garry for pointing me to this programme)

After I left a comment in DoshDosh’s post 100 people have add this blog as their favorite. (Before I “enrolled” for the programme, the count stood at 7).

Increase in the favorite count will have a effect on the Technorati ranking of the site and hence might improve the traffic to the site over the period of time.

In sprit of this experiment I am also extending the Technorati Favorite Exchange.

Participating in this programme/experiment is very easy

1. Click on the link below to favorite my blog to your Technorati Favorites.

   

2. Leave a comment mentioning the link to add your blog to my Technorati favorites.

Link Format http://www.technorati.com/faves/?add=YOUR_BLOG_LINK

Note

Akismet might misbehave and log the comment as spam. I will keep a check on the spam page, however if I miss any of your comments, please contact me through the contacts page.

Guess how this cat is stuck to that wall !

2 more pictures

In spite of hearing all the negative feedback on Windows Vista I am still very keen on upgrading my Acer laptop from XP to Vista. I had tried the Beta version of Vista on the laptop and worked pretty well.

I got my Acer 1690 laptop in the first quarter of 2006 and wasn’t aware that Acer was running a upgrade program for vista.

Acer’s Express Upgrade to Windows Vistaâ„¢ offer lets you enjoy all the benefits of Windows Vistaâ„¢ on your Acer computer. Any Acer Windows Vistaâ„¢ Capable or Windows Vistaâ„¢ Premium Ready PC bought between October 26, 2006 and March 15, 2007 includes an Express Upgrade to Windows Vistaâ„¢ option that presents you with the great innovations of Windows Vistaâ„¢.

Acer is providing the upgrade at a pretty reasonable price. A upgrade from Windows XP home to Windows Vista home costs 66$ and an upgrade to Windows Vista Premium will cost 96$. Acer is providing its customers with a vista upgrade DVD(along with drivers for the supported models) but it looks like its applicable to users who have bought PC after Oct 26 2006.

Why are the other customers left out ?

Acer India doesn’t seem to provide any information on the upgrade except to linking to the global acer site for vista related queries !!

Does anybody know how to upgrade Acer laptop to vista ? I have shot this query to the Acer support;meanwhile if anybody has inputs on this please let me know.

During my stay in China, I had trouble getting good food. Being a vegetarian finding “edible” food became much more difficult. However unlike China I had no trouble in finding veggie food in Boston.

Here is the list of restaurants I visited over the past one week and the “veggie delights” I had over there . The choice of dish was limited to one or two in most of the American/Mexican/Thai restaurants.

(Restaurant Name – Veggie Dish – Rating )

1. Viet Thai – Veg Fried Rice – Very good
2. Udupi Bhavan – Veg Biryani – Totally Hopeless
3. Applebees – Cheese Pizza – Good
4. Bamboo – Spinach Fried Rice – Totally Good
5. Garlic Bistro – Veg Fried Rice – Totally Hopeless.
6. iHOP – Veg Sandwich – Normal
7. India Palace – Buffet – Very good
8. On The Border – Nachos/Veg Fajita/Tortilla – Very Good
9. Burger King – BK Veggie Burger – Hopeless.

If you are a veggie and coming down to US, the above list might be of some help

I’m in Boston and will be here for another two weeks. Some of the highlights of my 19 hour journey from Bangalore to Boston

• The Lufthansa plane was at 3AM due to which I spent only 10 min in the cab from my home to the airport which otherwise would normally take 40 minutes.
• The check-in queue for the Lufthansa flight reminded me of the queue at BTS Bus stand !
• The plane took off at 3 and landed on time; no wonder Lufthansa is known as an”efficient plane”
• The economy class seats in the Lufthansa flight was very congested and it looked like they converted the normal 2 seater to a 3 seater !
• On my flight from Frankfurt to Boston, I happened to sit next to guy whom I thought should have bought 2 tickets !!
• I slept for most of the 19 hour journey; probably one of the reasons I am not experiencing the so called “jet lag”
• Boston experienced the highest temperature on the day I landed. I was literally sweating in the hotel room. Today it rained the whole day and for the coming 2 days there is a snow fall prediction !
• As soon as I landed, I plugged in my laptop and was amazed to see a 6Mbps connection at work. At my workplace it gets much better (10mbps) and my ever so slow site does open up very fast over here

On March 1st I requested Airtel to switch my current 256kbps unlimited plant to 2Mbmps limited (3GB) plan. (For more details on Airtel new plans, check this post)

After making multiple calls to Airtel customer service, the plan switch is finally done today.

Nice to see downloads happening at 1.5-1.8Mb/second and nice to watch YouTube videos without any “buffering”

However access to my blog is still hopeless !! I guess I should switch to a better hosting !!

By the way anybody knows about a good bandwidth tracking tool ? With my previous unlimited bandwidth plan, I didn’t have to worry about usage, but with the current 3GB limitation I have to think before downloading something !

Hoping for a unlimited plan from Airtel soon

Airtel broadband service, one of the 3 SBU (Strategic Bussiness Unit) of Bharti Enterprises has now started offering 2Mbps bandwidth plans.

The official site is still not updated with the latest tariff plans. The service is available only in select areas (as told by the customer service).

Sushubh has more info about the new packages.

Special Double Speed Offer

My 256kbps unlimited plan seems to have been automatically upgraded to 512kbps !!

2Mbps Packages

Now this is interesting ! The President of India Dr. A P J Abdul Kalam asks a question on Yahoo Answers as a part of Ask the Planet !

7863 people seem to have answered till now !

Also don’t forget to checkout the interesting comment thread going on at Digg !

Via bLaugh

I switched from K2 theme to Freshy some time back and though the theme looked nice, there were quite a few problems with the Freshy Theme.

1. Too many images in the theme (including bullets etc) made the page load very slow. A part of it is also because of the hosting speed (GoDaddy)
2. The theme was breaking up in IE6. Though IE7 seems to have fixed a lot of CSS issues, my analytics suggest that still many people are using IE6

Paul and Niel Patel of Pronet Advertising had come up a theme called 281 some time back and I was very impressed by that theme.

As Paul puts it, the intent was to have a strong WordPress theme that combined slick minimalist aesthetics, speed and search engine optimization.

I have to agree that it does look slick, does load faster and regarding SEO I have to wait a bit longer to see if there any improvements.

I would love to hear your comments too ! Does it look good ? Are the pages loading faster ? Also don’t forget to check out the new Archives template

You can download the 281 theme here. Also Eli Foner has adapted 281 with 3 columns.

Wishing you all a prosperous, fun filled, happy new year

More on the history of New year here

bLaugh is the (un)Official comic of the Blogosphere and as its writer Chris puts it; bLaugh is colorful, satirical and comical !

Brad Fitzpatrick is bLaugh�s artist and as you can make out from the site it is exclusively sponsored by GoDaddy.

Here are some of the recent cartoons posted on bLaugh

I am sure you would want to subscribe to their RSS feed and so here is the link You can also download the latest comic to your desktop with Comicazzi. And if you are a geek you may want to check the bLaugh API.

I find a lot of nice articles and its difficult to blog/comment about every other article. Sharing these links directly makes more sense and the best way to do is to deliver it as part of your RSS feed.

Feedburner is a widely used feed publishing service and even the feeds of Online Diary are delivered via Feedburner. The service has a link splicing feature via which you can share your collected links as a part of your RSS feed.

FeedBurner supports the following Link Services: Digg, del.icio.us, Furl, Bloglines, My Web 2.0 and Magnolia

As of now del.icio.us is my favorite bookmarking service and you can find my shared bookmarks here:

http://del.icio.us/venukb

You might already have observed these del.icio.us links in the RSS feed and I guess Feedburner has delivered the links for past 10 days by default. However from now on you should be getting only 1 feed from del.icio.us per day.

I guess for few readers this feature might be annoying since they would be seeing the same links again and again in various other feeds I would definitely like to know your views on this !

Also do share your del.icio.us links if you have one

This post by Amit some time back had made me think on partial feeds . And after lot of thinking I have decided to switch from partial to full RSS feeds and I am sure many of the readers will be happy with this switch

And if you are searching for a good RSS Reader,this post might help you a little bit.

Check out the trailer of The Last Legion starring Aishwarya Rai !

I never knew till now that she was starring in a Hollywood movie. If you saw the trailer completely one thing that you will notice immediately is the dialogue delivery by Aishwarya Rai ! Sounds pathetic !  Doesn’t it ?

This is the comment left on IMDB by a viewer who saw an early preview of this movie:

I saw an early screening of this movie. I went because I think Ben Kinglsey is a great actor so I thought it would b a great movie. I was dead wrong. My 2 friends as well as my brother and sister laughed throughout this whole movie because it was very poorly done. It might be one of the worst movies I have ever seen. Honestly, it is hard to ruin a movie that takes place during the Roman empire and the director somehow found a way to do it. The plot establishment is poor, you are left confused about many issues that never become readdressed and visually it looks too much like LOTR. I left this movie very disappointed but laughing due to how bad it was. My friend and I still laugh when we think about some of the horrible lines that were written into this movie. By the way, I was asked to stay in the focus group at the end because I put the movie was fair at best but I was sent home because too many people put fair and they didn’t need me to explain why also. All in all, do not see this movie, save yourself the time and the money.

My hands are aching as I type this post ! All credit for the pain goes to this game called QWERTY Warriors !

The game is pathetically addictive and is supposed to improve your typing speed !

When I took the “Typing Test” some time back I was impressed by my own abilities. However I have not been able to find the same kind of success with this “warrior” game. This was the best I could get after trying 7 times !! Almost in all the tries I ended with a score near 55-60K !

Yesterday I was in the top 50 list, as of today you need at least 1 Lakh to be in the top 50 !! I am not going to pursue further unless one of you guys (readers) make more than 67 K && leave a comment challenging me to break it