...Bienvenue 5300

A few days before my Nokia 3120 gave up, I'd been looking into phones because my family had been pestering me to get a 'better' phone, considering the condition the 3120 was in. So when it did die, I wasn't completely unprepared to buy.

I didn't want to spend too much on a device I'd primarily use to make calls. But if I was going to spend and get a phone, I'd want at least some features. The principal features I was looking for were connectivity via Bluetooth and USB and a music player. Secondary were camera, radio and connectivity via IR and whatever else would come as part of the package. And I didn't need any of these to be top of the line. I was happy with a 1 megapixel camera rather than shell out for a 3 megapixel one that I wouldn't really use.

Now, I'm partial to Nokia phones. I think they've the best, most intuitive interfaces around. And most of them are very well built and the standard features are well thought out. Plus, I've been using Nokia PC Suite for years now and I think it has all basic features I'd need or want to put stuff on my phone. It's bulky but it works. Also, I wanted to be able to access my SMSs and contacts on the phone and save them on my computer. As far as I know, most other phones don't let you into the phone memory even if you can connect them to your machine.

So I finally settled on the Nokia 5300. It's price was short of the upper limit on my budget and it had a music player, FM radio, 1.3 megapixel camera and a mini USB port, Bluetooth and IR! Everything I wanted.

It's a little flimsy, the body is plastic. It's a far cry from the solid feel of my 3120. And the screen's supposed to be problematic. And the battery doesn't last very long. And the camera's image quality is not great. But so what? I'll be careful with it. And I'll carry my charger with me. And I've got a Sony digital camera anyway, so I won't be using this much. ( Who am I trying to convince again? )

All in all, it's great for me; just what I need, in the price range I can afford, with features and looks that I like. Let's see how this one works out.

Adieu 3120...

I'd got my first mobile phone in 2003; a cousin of mine was getting rid of it. When I got it, it had a cracked screen and a loose cover. But it was reason for me to get a number and those surface imperfections were easily fixed.

The phone was the Nokia 3120, apparently no longer in production. A Series 40 phone with CLDC 1.0 and MIDP 1.0 support, it was just what I needed. It had GPRS and support for MIDI files as ringtones and JPEG and GIF image support as well. I later got a DKU-5 data cable and used it a lot, putting wallpapers and ringtones on the phone and more recently, for upgrading my Java skills to include the basics of J2ME.

It was one solid piece of engineering; I must've dropped it a hundred times and it never gave. Light and durable, it gave me over five and a half years of service. But lately, it'd been acting up a bit; it wouldn't charge properly and there were problems accessing it via Nokia PC Suite. It appears the firmware was corrupted to some extent.

Last Friday, the keypad inexplicably stopped working. And it wasn't mechanical failure, because when I restarted the device, the keys would work again but stop after a while. All except for '5'. And then even that stopped. So I knew, as much as I'd been avoiding it, it was time to get a new phone.

Google Labs India

On 15th August, India’s Independence Day, Google had hinted it had something up it’s sleeves. Today Google’s announced Google Labs India, developing features and tools to provide a platform to work with Indian and South Asian languages for searching for content. Pretty neat.

Also, the Hindi transliteration feature on Blogger has now gone a step further and is now a completely independent tool and iGoogle gadget.

Awesome stuff coming from Google and loads more expected!

Identity

Someone really needs to get working on a better, more ubiquitious method of authentication or at least some way of integrating existing online username/password combinations!

At last count I had:

1 Hotmail Id
1 Rediffmail Id

3 Indiatimes Email Ids
3 GMail Ids
4 Yahoo! Mail Ids

1 Channel [V] India Id

1 Contests2Win Id

1 GoDaddy Id

1 Google Apps Id
2 HDFC Netbanking Ids
1 HDFC NetSafe Id
1 HDFC OneView Id

1 hi5 Id

1 Hungama Id

1 MTV India Id
1 Sun Java Forums Id

1 SXC Id

1 Twitter Id

1 Wikipedia Id
1 Wordpress Id

and about 10 or so assorted Ids for site's that I don't visit as frequently. Luckily, Google owns Blogger, YouTube, Picassa, AdSense, Webmaster Tools and Orkut, so that gives me 6 more sites with the same Google accounts that I use for GMail. Feedburner has also been bought by them so I'm expecting a switch to Google accounts there too.

And then there are the 'real world' Ids/passcodes I need to remember.

2 Debit Card PINs
1 Credit Card PIN
1 Mobile phone PIN
1 Mobile phone PUK
1 Mobile phone PIN2
1 Mobile phone PUK2
1 PIN to the control deck of the Death Star ( Alright so I don't have this one. What? Yes! It is real! )

How can anyone be expected to remember all of these? I'm managing fairly well right now, but I foresee the coming of the dreaded age of forgetfulness someday. And unless Google takes over everything by then, I'm afraid I'm going to have to start writing down sensitive information like this!

PS: I did try to make a simple application to encrypt and save my passwords. It uses a simple substitution algorithm so it's not very good, but it's a shade better than writing stuff down in plain text!

PPS: Quite a few people seem to be working on image based passwords; but nothing seems to ready for widespread use right now.

Status Messages On Mobiles?

How about being able to set a status message for your mobile number? Wouldn't that be cool? Not to mention useful! Instead of stupid 'Caller Tunes' you could actually play a useful, informative message for your callers.

If you're at a meeting, you could activate the service and record a message for people who try to call you while you're busy, informing them of what you're doing and how long you'd be unavailable!

And you could potentially customize your 'Out Of Coverage Area' and 'Phone Switched Off' messages too. If you know you're going to a place where there is no network, you could let your callers know where you're going and how long you expect to stay there. Ditto for when you know you're going to turn off your phone.

I'd love to be able to make an app to do this but unfortunately, as far I can see, this something that will have to be implemented by the providers.

Background Music

Maybe it's because I've been watching too many movies, but I keep expecting and wising for some sort of background score to accompany my doings throughout the day.

Wouldn't it be great though? Imagine striding into a boardroom meeting to the Imperial March! That would certainly make people more accepting of your ideas!

Or consider the possibility of being aware of your boss lurking around because you can hear the 'dum-dum dum-dum' from Jaws!

The music would also be a great way for people to know how you're feeling at the moment; happy, sad, filled with great expectations. This does have actual possibilities though. Maybe with time, we'd have progressed far enough with AI algorithms for music to have personal devices that can be set to randomly generate music based on a particular mood, soundtrack-style.

Of course, the problem with brilliant ideas, like this one, is that they're short-sighted and never factor in all the other people. With everyone playing out their own theme, it'd just lead to cacophony.

Tweeter!

Recently, I discovered Twitter; it's yet another social networking site. But this one is pretty different. For one, it doesn't expect any commitment from you! You don't have to be a part of a community or group. All you do, is post what you're doing at the moment, in 140 characters or less, from your cellphone, IM or on the Web and that becomes your current status. Your friends will see your status along with how long ago you posted it along with others in their friends list.

Why do I like it? Well, it has the potential for saving you the trouble of having to explain what you've been doing for the past week/ month/ year when you meet someone who you haven't been in constant touch with. It's easier to follow what your friends are doing in their lives that have inexorably diverged from yours as time passes. You get this wireframe of an idea of how they're spending their time. It would make it so much easier to catch up when you do meet up.

Of course, you and your friends would need to be on the site and doing this regularly. Unfortunately for me, none of my friends seem to find this appealing enough to sign up. They claim to have enough accounts as it is and don't want to try it out. Sad.

Well, I spent the last two weeks making Tweeter!, a Java client for Twitter because I hated having to leave my browser open to be able to post. Initially, I tried out Twitteroo, a pretty popular app, but it didn't work for me. At work, I connect through a proxy and Twitteroo does not support using proxies as of this writing. At home, I don't have enough space to install the latest Microsoft .Net framework and I can't be bothered to clean out my hard disk right now. Once I discovered the excellent jTwitter API from ThinkTank, I decided to build my own; both for use later as well as a hobby app to teach myself Swing.

It's been done for a couple of days and it seems to have turned out fine. You can download it here. If you do use it, consider letting me know what you think at no.good.at.codingATgmail.com; I'd love to hear from you. If you don't like it, you can always try out other Twitter apps like Twitteroo ( Windows only ) or Twitterrific ( Mac only ). You can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/nogoodatcoding.

NoGoodAtCoding.com

I own it! The it in question being the domain name 'nogoodatcoding.com'. I bought it yesterday and I've been fooling around with ever since. It's made me aware of a whole new dimension to the Internet. I'm still in the process of setting stuff up and so I guess I'll be a little busy for a while...which means no long, drawn-out posts :D

I have managed to publish both my blogs to custom domains using the feature offered by Blogger. There will be a few hiccups though; notably with images loading. I've also noticed that if you type in the blog's original, blogspot name with a 'www.' prefixed, it doesn't redirect to the custom domain.

Also, the blogs may simply not be available as the propagation of the changes across the DNS over the Internet takes some time; most sites I've seen say 24-48 hours, a couple stated up to 72 hours. Though I've already checked that a few people can already access these, it may still take sometime. Actually, if you're reading this, it's already happened; and if you weren't, well, then you wouldn't have known what was happening. :D

I think this post is getting close enough to being drawn-out now; and my domain settings beckon!

Laptop Woes

I finally got my precious laptop back from the service center yesterday; after an agonizing wait of a week. But wait. I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me take you back to when it all began.

A couple of months back, the LCD panel on my laptop went dark. Turned out that the backlight had gone kaput and so it needed to be replaced. Luckily, I'd extended the warranty on my machine and so it was completely covered. I went over to the service center and got it looked over and placed an order for the new screen.

After about 3 days they called and told me I could come get it changed. So I went over, got the screen replaced and headed back home. At home I realized, to my horror, they had given me a standard, matte-finish screen and not the BrightView that I had had. So I called them and the guy was a little suspicious. I think he thought I was trying to get an upgrade for free. I told him that he still had my old screen and could check it out. So they placed an order for the new screen and I went and got the correct one this time.

After about a few weeks, the newly replaced screen started flickering. I went back to them and they kept the laptop under observation for a day and then got back to me and told me that this screen would also need to be replaced. Sigh! So I waited for a couple of days while they got the replacement and went back again to get it changed. Except, this time, they were sent the wrong part! And they didn't know when they told me to come over because they only opened it once I got there! Another 3 day wait followed before I, once again, reached the service center.

This screen lasted a fair bit lesser than the previous one; it started blanking out when I opened or closed the lid. To make things worse, my DVD writer seemed to be not burning DVDs. I tried out 4 DVDs before I decided it wasn't the software ( I'd recently reinstalled Windows ) and took it over to them to get it checked out.

They kept it under observation ( yes, again! ) for another day and then called me to say that the motherboard and the DVD writer would be replaced. I was thanking my stars I spent the extra 7k on the warranty! Finally, the parts arrived and I went over to get my laptop. I hurried back home so I could finally get back online after a week of forced abstinence.

About 15 minutes into surfing, the machine just powered off. Just like that. It didn't shutdown or anything. It just turned off. I turned it on again and this time within about 10 minutes, it did the same thing. I'd faced something similar with my desktop about a year back; the heat sink’s vents had been totally clogged with dust and the processor would overheat and just switch off. I suspected it was the same thing and so, downloaded SpeedFan, a nifty little utility, to track the temperature.

Sure enough, it started off alright, and then steadily climbed higher and higher till the machine powered off. Completely crushed, I took it back the next day, expecting them to order yet another set of parts. They kept it for observation but said I would probably be able to take it back that evening. So I waited. Evening came and I called them. They said it was fine and I could collect it. So I rushed right over and the technician told me that there had been dust in the heat sink and that he'd cleaned it up properly so there shouldn't be a problem anymore.

I took it back home and, well, it's still here :D So I guess all's well that ends well. Though, it wasn't, so bad without it. I got all my stuff done in time. And I got back to reading a few books; hadn't done any reading for a long while now. But I still missed it and the convenience and comfort of being able to sort my files and folders and just escape from the confines of reality into the limitless world of cyberspace.

SMS Spk

U no wat rly irittes me? Wen ppl use sms-spk in situations dat dnt warrant it. In emails n in ltrs n othr plcs. Ive got nthng agnst shrtning wrds n using acronyms; in SMSs, whr dey blong n help u sv a few buks or mayb evry once in a whl, whl IMing 2 sv tim or jst b qk.

Ppl cnt seem 2 difrntte btwn wen its alrite 2 use it n wen its absolutly 4biden. Ive seen ppl use it in apps n on thr blogs n jst about evrywhr dat dey employ da English language as a means of comm. It jst reeks of wannab-ness.

I no da language is evolving n changing wid tim. Ppl r even bng alwd 2 use dis 4m while writing exams n now u can rd ntire novels in dis 4m; its supposed 2 b a new, progressive 4m of literature. I never did get art n stuff.

Its nt dat its hard 2 decifer ( alrite, it is kinda ); I enjoy bng able 2 fathom wats bng said n occasionally its fun usng sum of da clvrer shrtnings of wrds; bt always? It jst seems so boorish n ilitr8.

Wid all dis incrse in bnwidth n dcrse in csts, ud tnk ppl wud tk da opportunity 2 b more verbose bt den life is often counter-intuitive.


For those of you who couldn't figure out what was written above:

You know what really irritates me? When people use sms-speak in situations that don't warrant it. In emails and in letters and other places. I've got nothing against shortening words and using acronyms; in SMSs, where they belong and help you save a few bucks or maybe every once in a while, while IMing to save time or just be quick.

People can't seem to differentiate between when it's alright to use it and when it's absolutely forbidden. I've seen people use in applications and on their blogs and just about everywhere that they employ the English language as a means of communication. It just reeks of wannabe-ness.

I know the language is evolving and changing with time. People are even being allowed to use this form while writing exams and now you can read entire novels in this form; it's supposed to be a new, progressive form of literature. I never did get art and stuff.

It's not that it's hard to decipher ( alright, it is kinda ); I enjoy being able to fathom what's being said and occasionally it's fun using some of the cleverer shortenings of words; but always? It just seems so boorish and illiterate.

With all this increase in bandwidth and decrease in costs, you'd think people would take the opportunity to be more verbose but then life is often counter-intuitive.

Mininova

I'm really into downloading stuff using torrents and Mininova is where I get most of my torrents from. It's a pretty well maintained site with a simple clean interface.

Originally, when I was told to visit Mininova for torrents, I went to Mininova.com. Except that was a scam site. Some guy was asking people for $100 to use Mininova.org, the actual site!

Anyway, a few days ago, they were able to win a court case ( you can read more about it here ) and acquired the Mininova.com domain name as well. So now if you visit http://www.mininova.com/, you'll be redirected to http://www.mininova.org/. Do visit it, it's good.

And if you don't find what you're looking for there, try Torrentz.com. It's not a site for torrents but rather, a search engine. It searches quite a few sites, including Mininova, Meganova, TorrentSpy, Snarf-It to name a few.

Happy downloading!

Picasa Web Albums

I downloaded Google's Picasa the other day, and although I did have some initial misgivings about yet another photo-organizer, I have to admit, it is pretty slick! Very nice interface, cool GUI effects and pretty decent image manipulation features. Some pretty snazzy effects too. I don't think I'll be using it too often, I prefer to manage these things manually in Windows Explorer, but I did spend some time fooling around with it.

I signed up for a Picasa Web Albums account and then spent a day fiddling around with Picasa and Adobe Photoshop to get some pretty decent finals of some random photos I had lying around. Take a look at my public gallery and let me know what you think.

Spam

This has got to be one of the worst parts of being online. Such an immense amount of time is wasted on clearing out your mailbox that could be utilized so much more productively in some other activity.

The origin of the term is from the Monty Python sketch of the same name. The sketch featured a menu which had the processed meat product with every single item. The idea of it being all-pervasive lending itself very nicely to the electronic phenomenon of unsolicited, junk mail.

I can understand that hackers, crackers and seedy marketers would use it as a medium of deception and promotion. It is rather perplexing though, how educated and ( seemingly ) intelligent people can forward mail with information that is pretty obviously fake. I get so many forwards about sick and dying people, victims of accidents and fires, fantastically dangerous drugs, free money being given away that it's a wonder I get any time to check any of my actual mail! I actually get messages that read '...if you forward this sms...'. Alright. I've heard of convergence of different technologies. But since when did messages make the leap from telephone networks into email and remain ( supposedly ) trackable?

On Orkut too, people now forward spam as messages. I've started sending out mails to all my friends when I'm sent any spam ( and no, that does not count as spam! It serves a higher purpose! ). The latest ( but actually quite old ) trend seems to be forwarding messages claiming to be from someone at Orkut and warning people that if they don't forward the message, their account will be closed. Really? Don't they have a news page for where they make announcements? Doesn't anyone stop to think why a member of Orkut would contact some random person and hand them the rather big responsibility of telling everyone what is going on? What if that person doesn't login anymore? And wouldn't the person from Orkut, being in charge of Orkut and all that, be able to message everyone at one go without having to depend on some unknown member?

Similar messages come in on Yahoo! Messenger as well. And I've ticked people off for that only to be told that they knew it was fake all along and were only forwarding it for a few laughs. There is nothing funny about spam! It wastes time and resources and increases costs because providers have to compensate for the extra bandwidth use.

And how believable is it that some major corporation is giving away money for forwarding a mail? Seriously? That's just dumb. No one would just give away money like that for some 'test' ( ostensibly for checking if you're using a particular browser! I'm pretty sure there is no field in an e-mail’s header which tracks what browser you're using! And so much of mail goes through other mail clients like Microsoft Outlook; where does that fit in? ) which would probably not even give proper results. What if you just kept forwarding the mail to yourself? And how would anyone guarantee that the mail would remain trackable across networks, especially if it was converted to plaintext ( assuming that the tracking was being done by some active code; I can't think of any other way ). That said, there is no ethical, legal ( or even foolproof ) way of tracking an email that any major corporation could use. Imagine the privacy concerns.

How can anyone imagine they're helping someone out by forwarding a trail of electrons across the network? Maybe it's because we feel guilty about not doing anything and since hitting the forward button is easy, we take that option and feel like we've done our bit in helping out the world. I'd like to see how many people would forward these messages if they mails read '...your bank account will be debited $1.00 each time you forward this mail. Forward to as many people as you can! Thanks...' instead of '...will donate $1.00 each time you forward this mail. Forward to as many people as you can! Thanks...'. Not as many as right now, I think.

On the lighter side, Google's GMail show's links to Spam recipes on the top of the spam folder. That's rather cute, you must admit. :)

There are quite a few sites on the net that list out all these hoaxes and various, popular spam messages. Here are a few that I find quite useful when I'm sending out an enlightening message to all my contacts who forward spam.

• http://www.hoax-slayer.com/
• http://www.snopes.com/
• http://urbanlegends.about.com/cs/nethoaxes/ht/emailhoax.htm
• http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org/
• http://www.truthorfiction.com/

The next time you get the urge to send out some suspicious mail, do take a moment to check if it is a known hoax or not. And do use your common-sense. You are sensible, aren't you? Then prove it. And do your little bit for the good for the Internet community as a whole.

Now, send a link to this post to everyone in your email contacts list, messengers' buddy-lists, MySpace / Orkut / Facebook / Friendster / Gazzag/ or whatever else it is you use friends' lists in the next 2.5 milliseconds otherwise your newspaper will fall in a puddle of water tomorrow morning and you will have to read it all soggy-wet. You have been warned! :D

Tridecennary

tridecennary (try-di-SEN-uh-ree) noun

1. A period of thirteen years.

2. A thirteenth anniversary.

[From Latin tres (three), from decem (ten) + annus (year).]

I'm a subscriber of A.Word.A.Day ( not that it does me much good! Though, admittedly, I don't really get time to go through the mails properly, so... ). Anyway, last week's theme was the number 13, as it was their thirteenth anniversary. This was the first word and Anu Garg mentioned that Google showed only one hit for this word. I'd run a search for it at that time and seen 3 results; the original plus the Wordsmith site. And a search now shows about 668 results ( with Wordsmith at the top! )

As a Sally Boyson noted in the AWADmail Issue 253, it is a great example of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle which states that you can't observe something without affecting it in someway. Of course, it also reflects the immense popularity of A.Word.A.Day!

हिंदी Transliteration!

I've been busy the last couple of weeks and haven't really put up any posts ( What? You noticed? :) ) When I logged in yesterday and decided to tweak the settings a bit, I noticed a new option under the Basic Settings: 'Show transliteration button for you posts?'. Intrigued, I set it to yes and checked out the Blogger help entry for it.

Well, guess what? It's a totally awesome feature that automatically converts what you type in English, to Hindi! It works phonetically so what you type may not come out right, but they have very thoughtfully provided options to either correct what you're typing or have complete control by typing out letters from a on-screen keyboard. And it seems to work rather well too! It is just fantastically impressive!

However, it does have some limitations and the text may not always display correctly. But I guess they'll work that out sometime in the future.

तो अब हम हिंदी में ब्लोग लिख सकते हैं! क्या, क्या बनाया है इन्सान ने! विज्ञानं कितनी सीमाएँ पार कर चुका है! १-२ साल पहले ही, क्या कोई मानता कि यह सब मुमकिन है?

Alright, very 10-class-board-essay-type sentence there; but it pretty much covers it. And I just have to mention that I didn't have to edit a single letter for it! It came out right the first time around! This feature is just tremendously brilliant!

For those of you who can't see it, try reading this article and till you get it right, here's a screenshot:

After going through the help entry for this feature, I'm quite embarrassed because I realize that my knowledge of my mother tongue isn't as good as it should be. The Google guys probably know much more about the structure, syntax and semantics that I ever will. I don't even know the complete alphabet in order! I've got the option but I probably wouldn't be able to correct any spellings in my Hindi sentences!

Invention

"Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration."

- Thomas Alva Edison ( 1847 - 1931 )

But in the end, it is the 1% that really matters. You could slog at something for weeks or months and get nowhere. Actually, you probably wouldn't even get started if it weren't for the initial 'A-ha!'.

There are so many inventions that are taken for granted but are just so wonderful. Take the safety pin. It is such an amazing design; simple, elegant and yet infinitely useful. Whatever would hold nappies together if it weren't for these little things? Consider also the stapler, paper clips, key rings, sticky notes, clothes pegs, band-aids and uncountable other things that make life so convenient. It's all about finding a niche to fill.

So I've been doing a little thinking about what I'd like to see created. You know how, with computers, you can change your desktop and visual themes to suit your mood or preferences any time you like? It great that when you get tired of looking at the same wallpaper everyday, you can choose another. Now, OLEDs seem to be big. And one possible application I see is in t-shirts. I know it sounds weird, but think about it. You could have a chip and the OLED embedded in you t-shirt and have some way, possibly Bluetooth or maybe through a cable that plugs in to the shirt at one end and the computer at the other, to load an image ( or even images so you have a choice later ) to be displayed as your t-shirt's 'print'. I think that would be really cool, to be able to select what your t-shirt looks like everyday; maybe even many times a day; to reflect your mood or your preference.

But this is something that I feel is more or less bound to happen soon. It's just waiting to be developed, what with clothes embedded with electronics being showcased all over and chips getting smaller in size and larger in capacity and just cheaper everyday. What I'd really want; what I really need, is some sort of contraption that will give me a way to manage my earphones! Something that will allow a quick-release from the 'put-away' state so I can just plug them in and put them in my ears without having to untangle the wires; and also vice-versa - when I'm done, I should be able to roll them up or wind them back or whatever, quickly and easily. Now that would be an invention. :D

I dream about inventing these things and being lauded the world-over. But, alas! I'm more dreamer than inventor. And I certainly am incapable of putting in the required '99% perspiration' !

Addicted

I'm addicted to the Internet. I just can't do without it anymore. I need to check my mail and Orkut scraps daily. There are contests that need entering. And of course utilities, songs and videos to download. And when all that is done, there is so much to explore and discover.

I use the net for everything nowadays. And I *can* use it for pretty much everything. I had to find out the numbers of KFC and McDonalds near where I live. So I Google'd the keywords, found the sites, went to the appropriate city page, and voila! There I had it, all the contact numbers. I downloaded the menu for Pizza Corner from their site. I didn't need to ask anyone for any of those things. And that's the way I like it. :D

Whenever I need to find out about a movie or some application or form to fill or symptoms of a disease or details of anything, the first thing I do it get online. More often than not, I find what I'm looking for. Only as a last resort do I go and ask someone for help.

Of course, it doesn’t help my social skills any. But I'd rather deal with search engine results rather than actual people any day. However, not all sources on the Internet are reliable. It's always better to check out the credentials of the contributor.

Oh, and if I wasn't addicted, you wouldn't be reading this now :D

Bandwidth

In India, broadband is defined as anything over 256kbps. ( By the way, you do realise that that is kilobits per second? Not kilobytes per second which is written as kBps. So 256kbps would be 32kBps. Just something you should consider. ) But even if you're willing to shell out hard cash, there really aren't that many options. Though it has been getting cheaper.

I'd got my first Internet connection in August of 2004. It was a 32kbps dial-up. In 4 months we switched over to a Sify broadband connection of 256kbps. I now have an Airtel broadband connection of 512kbps ( at night ) and it costs me much lesser than what I was paying earlier. And it is a pretty good connection. I've had no problems so far and the speeds are really good.

I'm now drooling at the news that the government plans to increase the speeds of the plans next year. MTNL and BSNL will be announcing the details, independently, in a few weeks. Of course, the private players too should follow suit soon. Though I'm sure it'll be a long way off from the 1 Mbps connections with dedicated 512kbps upload links in the US that I keep reading about, enviously, I might add, on forums on the net. But still, you can never have enough bandwidth. Even it increases just a bit, it's a step in the right direction right?

More bandwidth to the people!

The Break-Up

Britney Spears, Phil Collins and Jessica Simpson all have something in common. Other than the fact that they're in the music industry. Britney Spears and Phil Collins broke up with their ex's by SMS and fax, respectively. And Jessica Simpson was dumped through a text message. And more and more people seem to be heading the same way. Youngsters are following this trend of 'delayed mortification' as opposed to 'instant gratification'. They want to avoid, or at least delay, the unpleasant confrontations. And now, there are even experts who help you through the whole process or even do it for you! There is a 'Separation Agency' in Germany whose specialist does the job in 15 minutes on an average.

It is just so ridiculous. If you were in a relationship with someone, the least you owe them is an honest and open discussion and a face-to-face explanation. How can you do it over the phone or by SMS? It just shows how much respect you have for them. Actually, it shows people how much respect they should have for you. It reflects your character. If you don't have the courage to face up to someone who you claimed to have loved, then you don't deserve to be with anyone.

In my opinion, if I was at the receiving end of something like this, I'd be thinking, "Good riddance! If this is the kind of person she really is, then I'm better off without her!”

( Based on the article “Splitting? Get the ex-perts” by Jaya Drona from the Delhi Times, New Delhi edition, dated 20th November 2006 )

Yahoo! Time Capsule Page Link

Have you seen the Yahoo! Time Capsule project? It's pretty cool and has a very slick interface. You can find it at :
http://timecapsule.yahoo.com/

And do check out my contribution to the first ever electronic anthropological collection at :
http://timecapsule.yahoo.com/capsule.php?i=18312&t=hope&l=en

It's someone who I love more than life itself. Someone who is unconditionally accepting of me. Someone who knows me better than I know myself. Someone who has loved me like I've never been loved before. Someone who brings joy to my life and light to my days.