Those guys with country-road bags and sun-glasses

We all know how much of a public nuisance these guys have become. Initially, it was just one desi guy spotted in the city rail on the western line. Slowly their numbers have increased from single digits to a lot more. We have been praying to god that someone will bring them to justice. Finally, yes and finally, our prayers have been answered. Yes, I am talking about the same people whom you were thinking about. The desis carrying those Country Road branded bags and wearing those sun glasses and travelling on city rail. Because of whose overkill of using them, something that used to be a sign of coolness, has become an irritation.

News is coming in that city rail introduced special squads to patrol the trains for them. Any one carrying country-road bags and wearing sun glasses and travelling on city rail will be fined as a first offence. Repeat offenders will be fined heavily and under certain circumstances, their bags and glasses can be confiscated.

I whole heartedly welcome this move by cityrail. I hope these steps reduce the overkill and make the travel on cityrail a breeze once again. This also helps cityrail to clear the flak it has been receiving due to the frequent delays.

Udaya vs Woolworths

People living in western sydney needs no introduction of Udaya indian supermarket. This supermarket has grown out of bounds to restrict itself to just a part of sydney. It wants to go national like woolworths.I have a suggestion for the tagline something in the lines of woolworths.

Woolworths : Thanks for shopping with Australia's fresh food people.

Udaya : Thanks for shopping with Australia's expired food kept on discount but won't refund your money when you find it out people.

Hope you liked it. My suggestion gives the would be customers of new branches an idea of what to expect ;)

This and That

Going to India has always been a distant wish that would come true surely some time but not visible anywhere near. But, now it is atleast visible at the end of the tunnel. Nothing much exciting is happening on my personal front. I went on a trip to Port Stephens and Nelson Bay a short drive from Sydney. I bunched up with one of my company-training-mate-cum-room-mate-cum-colleague friend during my Kolkata days and his colleagues. We hired a Toyota Aurien and had a blast in the trip. I got a chance to try out paragliding and jet-skiing (for the uninitiated, if you haven’t tried this already, it’s a must do and if possible, unlike me, to do with your soul mate/partner/etc hope you got it). If you did not get irritated by my ‘I am Mac’ post, it means you did not read it. I bought a stunningly beautiful Macbook White. Though I would love to spend some time getting a feel of it, I am not finding much time to even switch-it-on. The thing is my project is in full swing now and my role requires me to stay in office right into the wee hours of the night. I think I am actually enjoying it. Getting up very late in the morning, having a quick shower and snack (mostly Arabica coffee with chocolate muffin at a small café in St Leonards or a Cappuccino with raspberry toast at a café in Artarmon, these two have become my favourite these days), working into the late hours of the night, having dinner of the food ordered by my company from some Indian restaurant and coming home by cab. I am finding it cool, atleast for sometime. I am not even touching my IPod now. I get a sickening feeling listening to the music collection I have. Music of Telugu Movie Oye by Yuvan Shankar Raja is out and it is absolutely rocking. Oye Oye, Seheri and Saradaga are running non stop on my laptop. The lyrics especially in Oye and Saradaga perfectly matched the haunting music. I read in movie sites that Sidharth acted as producer of the music (whatever it is) for this movie. It seems the combination of them both really worked out well. I also listened to music of Mallanna. Man, what happened to Devisri Prasad? Though there is not much to find fault with his music, it has just turned monotonous. It seems he has few templates about creating music and just sticks to them not trying to do anything new. But that’s the thing with him. He comes back again with a bang when we think his hour is over.

I am Mac

I am Mac. Finally. I have been wishing of owning one ever since I had the first glimpse of it at the newly opened Apple showroom in Kolkata way back in 2006. At that time, I can only dream of owning one, but cannot even think of buying it. When I came to Australia, I almost bought it when I was shopping for my first laptop. Again, the exorbitant price and the okay kind of configuration I am getting at the price I am going to pay made me step back. I zeroed in on a fourteen inch windows notebook which I used for around a year. It performed marginally well, the key board and RAM eating vista operating system giving me night mares. One fine day, the monitor went blank never waking up again. A little research revealed that the mother board got burnt. Giving it to repair, I started search for my second laptop. This time, I want it to be Mac though I was weighing one or two other options. The final shortlist was Macbook White and Dell Studio 15. Dell Studio 15 is the king of the 15 inch laptops where for an economical price you can get everything you can dream of in your laptop, if you do not mind carrying a 15.4 (designer laptop) or 15.6 (regular) inch notebook PC with you. However Apple made a mouth watering offer by deciding to reduce the price of its white macbook range. What more? It made the configuration almost same as its new range of Mac-books at a moderately economical price. With a 13.3 inch screen, 2 GB RAM, 9600GS NVIDIA graphics card, 120GB hard disk, Leopard Operating System, iLife 2009 and the Apple brand name, it is the best value for money laptop in its range right now.

Though I had some experience of working on two Power Mac G5s in the test lab of my company, the experience of switching on the macbook the first time is an experience I will never forget. The thought process that went into the design of mac can be seen in the packaging as well. And the Leopard operating system which apple calls the world’s most advanced operating system comes along with iLife 2009. iLife and other Leopard software will almost take care of all the users needs with iMail, iChat, iPhoto, iDVD, iMovie, Garage Band and some more. These are not just another software but are thoughtfully designed products keeping the customer’s needs in mind and honed over the years of development and maintenance. For instance, take iPhoto. Take a photo, select a face in the photo and give it a name. iPhoto will try to search, identify the face in other photos and sort them. Not just these, Leopard is littered with such small thoughtful tweaks that would delight you. It reads documents, newspapers and webpages for you in a choice of voices. It tells you time if you ask it. You are listening to music on iTunes and someone called you on iChat. Once you pick the call, iTunes will pause the song and continues once you are done with it. If you plug in an iPod to your macbook, it shows the icon of the iPod on the desktop exactly same model and color. This was later introduced into iTunes version 8 as well. You can learn guitar and piano on garage band. One more delightful feature I found very useful is spotlight. A universal search utility on the mac found on the top right cornet using which you can search for file, meaning of a word, calculations, etc.

Coming from the windows world, it might take some time to get used to mac navigation. Especially the right click. Mac too has a right click, but is replaced by control and a tap on the trackpad. The multi-touch trackpad makes browsing very easy. Put both the fingers on the trackpad and move your fingers in the direction you want to scroll. A double tap is equivalent to double click. However pressing the ‘Enter’ would edit the name of the file instead of opening it. Most of the keyboard operations are paired by command button with an alphabet key. If you want to explore more into the mac world go for iWork, Logic (the music library which most of our music directors from Rahman to Devisri Prasad uses) and more. Built on strong unix background mac is almost devoid of any viruses. And if you have windows only software which you want to use, install either XP or Vista using boot camp. Believe me, windows work so well on mac that some times surpasses the built for windows machines.

Now the drawbacks. On any scale, the price of a mac can be said to be exorbitant. Any mac accessory you want to buy will make your jaw drop seeing the price tag. If your machine is not covered under the Apple protection plan, you are gone for a toss. Lovers of softwares like winamp, gom player, etc are going to miss them as there is no mac equivalent released. Voice and Video chats with friends is very limited as all popular messengers which provide free voice and video calls in windows world do not provide the same in mac. Only recently did yahoo introduce voice chat in its mac messenger. iChat, Apple’s chat software supports only AIM for video chats. This can be more or less compensated by web version of google talk. Mozilla Firefox has a very limited add-ons compared to its windows counterpart. I also observed that firefox 3 crashes a lot on mac. I had some problem reading telugu sites on the safari browser. Later searching the internet I found the pothana font which almost solved my problem.

For all its drawbacks, if you do not mind to spend a penny extra, the machine will almost delight you. It almost never crashes, though there are some exceptions.  

Japan like Connectivity!

The other day I was reading the book World is Flat by Thomas Friedman. Though I already read it once when I was in India, I thought of opening it up again to understand how the US credit crisis turned into a global phenomena. It is a really good book to understand confusing things like why real estate prices in your home place went down when Lehman Brothers filed bankruptcy and why Satyam Computer Services is worried when Goldman Sachs is bought by Bank of America.

In one of the chapters in it, describing about the tenth flattener I think Thomas Friedman is impressed by the wireless connectivity present in Japan. He is worried that when he can have seamless connectivity anywhere in Japan, his mobile phone goes out of range when he travels between two suburbs back home in Washington DC, United States.

As I was reading this it suddenly struck to me, that though I have all the necessary things to enjoy the wireless connectivity, I am not using it to the full potential. I have a wireless enabled notebook and a USB powered wireless connection. However I use it only at home. I never used it anywhere else when it is actually designed to be used for travel. The next day I took my personal notebook with me to browse the internet while I travel to office in the City Rail. It takes around forty minutes for me to reach office and I thought of using it to the most. Once I got into the train, I switched on my notebook and plugged in the USB Internet Connection. The switching on and the connectivity ate up around ten minutes. I logged into orkut and found that a friend whom I am dying to meet and sent a friend request did not yet approve my request. Just as I logged out of orkut and opened my yahoo, the train passed the Harbour Bridge and entered the tunnel to Wynyard. The moment it entered the tunnel the connection is gone. As the train passed Wynyard, Town Hall and came out of the tunnel to reach Central, the connection is up again. But, I cannot enjoy browsing here as I have to change here for a train to Domestic Airport (that’s where my office is). However I found that the connectivity is quite good between Central and the airport. Later I came to know that it is because it is a privately managed line and customers are made to pay extra for this excellent connectivity. Moral of the post is, it takes some time for rest of the world to have the same kind of connectivity Japan enjoys today. For the time being, I stopped opening up my laptop in the train and started using my already worn-out IPod again.

What I am listening and reading?

What I am listening to?

Though it is two years that the album Adavari Matalaku Ardhalu Verule (AMAV) released, I could not stop listening to the song Naa Manasuki Pranam Posi. Karthik breathed life into this beautiful composition of Yuan Sankar Raja. Ever since I listened to the song, I was waiting to see how it would be presented on the screen. I have to say that the pict urisation did not match at all to the beauty of the composition. The other songs I am listening to

Telugu
“Oh My Friend” (Mickey J Meyer), Happy Days
“Dost Hey Dost” (Vinu Thomas), Ankit Pallavi and Friends
“Alagake Allari Vayasa” (Vinu Thomas), Ankit Pallavi and Friends
“Tidathara Kodara” (Kalyani Malik), Ashta Chemma
“Adinchindi Ashta Chemma” (Kalyani Malik), Ashta Chemma
“Jennifer Lopez” (Devisri Prasad), Jalsa
“I go crazy” (Mani Sharma), Kantri
“Sudu Sudu Lachmi” (Sandeep Chowta), Bujjigadu
“Get Ready” (Devi Sri Prasad), Ready
“Tu Tu Tu” (Devi Sri Prasad), Ready

Tamil

“Kangal Irandal”, Subrahmanyapuram
“Pudhu Pudhu” (Harris Jayaraj), Dham Dhoom
“Anbe En Anbe” (Harris Jayaraj), Dham Dhoom
“Cinema Cinema” (G V Prakash), Kuselan

English

Black Eyed Peas

What I am reading?

“The hunt for Atlantis”, Andy McDermott

An adventure thriller of Nina Wilde, Kari Frost and ex SAS body guard Eddie Chase hunting for the lost civilisation of Atlantis in a frantic race across the world, but a secret society does not mind even killing them as their quest can lead to a secret that destroy the world.

Ipod and its habitat

I still remember that day. I was window shopping at City Center, which is present in the suburb of Salt Lake in the antique city of Kolkata. City Center is a swanky new shopping mall that has come up, and people like me who has nothing to do during the weekends would bunch up together and end up here. Most of the time we would be window shopping, buying a T Shirt or Jeans that is absolutely unnecessary from the shoppers stop at the exorbitant prices kept as discount. The already out of limit Credit Card would be used for this. The remaining time we would be roaming around giving ratings (I will write comprehensively about this in another post) finally having a pizza in the Meal for two for Rs150/- offer at pizza hut. On one such trip I visited this newly opened Apple showroom. Till then I have never seen an Ipod except on the internet and in magazines. May be because of hearing a lot about it, the moment I saw the gadget, I was in love. In a whim, I decided to be a proud owner of it. In a week, I bought a shining black Ipod. The first song I heard using the iconic white earphones is “Ramachakkani Seethaki” from the movie Godavari. Hearing that beautiful song on them, a rich noise free sound produced at proper bass giving life to the music is a great experience.

To my heart break the earphones were broken in a week when they mistakenly fell under the tyres of my friend's motor bike. At that moment I was introduced to the world of Ipod accessories which a popular technology blogger called Ipod habitat. I entered it in search of earphones to replace my broken ones. The Apple's earphones were extremely costly forcing me to look for other options. Some of the earphones that match the quality of Apple's earphones or surpasses them are bose, sennheiser,bang and olufsen and some more which are much much more costlier than the Apple ones. Finally I bought the apple earphones again. But you cannot spend all the time plugging the earphones in your ears. The ears start itching after an hour or two of wearing them. I needed a speaker system where I can hear to the songs on my Ipod. There are atleast 150 or more models of speakers available to compliment the Ipod. Most of them have the facility of charging the Ipod when it is plugged in. Some have a digital clock with an alarm and you can specify the song with which you want to start your day. The ones that are very popular are Bose Ipod speaker system, Apple's own Ipod speaker system, Jamo and some others that are not at all in the range of owning them. A better idea is to buy computer speakers with woofers of popular brands like creative and charging the Ipod from an external power source. This is what I did. I bought creative 2.1 speakers and an additional charger for the Ipod. It produced fairly good output at a very good economical cost compared to the highly priced ones. I later upgraded to Bose Companion 2 series after I came to Australia.

Move on from earphones and speakers, you get lots of accessories for the Ipod from skins, socks, fm transmitters, car speaker connectors, travel chargers, Digital photo storage to special edition cars that have the capability to play the Ipod, pedometers and lots more. There are lots of softwares too that can be added to your Ipod from games, dictionaries, city maps, books, audio books, pod casts and so on.

Whatz more? There is also a linux distribution available specially designed for Ipod, Podzilla if you got bored with the current apple's operating system for the Ipod. Download it from ipodlinux.org
and try it out.