Personal

For some (probably conceited :) ) reason, I felt that my blog was getting overrun (or about to really get overrun) with non-technical babble arising from my frustration about where this country is headed. So before I turn off those three of you who read my blog, I have decided to split my blog on a very fuzzy boundary of technical/non-technical lines. My non-technical rants will now be posted at the appropriately named http://rants.

Takes me an hour to travel just this 2 km stretch every morning and every night. (Pai layout on the left. RMZ Infinity in the background)

Very embarrassingly, after a spate of reinstalls, crashes, backup of wrong copies and my policy of destroying old backups in the house, I discovered that I have lost the secret keys of my GPG keypair(I had not used them for a while). The revocation certificate, printed on a scrap of paper, was lost during my relocation to Bangalore.I was always procrastinating its re-generation, and I seem to have paid for this now.

My first brush with the stock market, and you can see how well I am doing. Shit! 😬

On Jan 9th, 2006, I joined Yahoo Bangalore. Am living out of a suitcase in a guesthouse right now. Will be moving in lock, stock and car next month after I find an acco. All those who live here and can help, I am looking for a place in the Koramangala vicinity.

After my terrible experience with Sify broadband early this year, I decided to stick to dialup - Reliance rconnect over FWP actually. But the idea of keeping a phone busy all day doesn’t appeal to me much even if the plan I have (Platinum) doesn’t have download caps or per minute call charges. So today I decided to bite the “broadband” bullet once again, and registered for a Tata Broadband connection.

I bought my first wireless equipment a couple of days back - A Linksys Wireless-G router model WRT54G. I had selected this model after spending a number of days poring through online reviews of various routers. The Linksys WRT54G Wireless-G router The box cost me Rs. 3550 (with bill) in Nehru Place. I immediately started working on how to place it in my network. Finally an hour back, I could figure out the right way to configure it.

For quite some years now, I have been having an odd problem. I seem to get charged up with static electricity very frequently. As many of my friends and relatives would testify, they have suffered many painful and shocking handshakes with me. Then there are time periods when this problem becomes especially acute, and touching anything from door curtains to basin knobs to car doors gives me shocks. Sometimes I can even see a blue streak of electricity zapping across my hand to a door handle I am about to touch.

Here is the letter I sent to Sify contact points in Delhi yesterday. It chronicles my Sify broadband experience here in Delhi. From: Sandip Bhattacharya <sandip AT lug-delhi.org> To: Sanjay Bhandari <sanjay_bhandari @sifycorp.com> , Puneet Sharma <puneet_sharma @sifycorp.com> , anamika <bbcoordinator_delhi @sifycorp.com> Cc: India Gii <india-gii AT cpsr.org> Subject: Official complaint - My sify experience and a request for refund Date: Fri, 04 Mar 2005 14:21:23 +0530 Mailer: Evolution 2.0.2 (2.

Inspite of my contempt for their loathsome Internet fleecing plans, I had to reluctantly sign up for a Sify cable internet plan today. Cost me a neat pile for installation and pre-payment for one month. The most painful part of this transition is going back to a NAT-ted private IP. This means no more gnomemeeting, no more yahoo voice/video chat, no more Bittorrent, no more gnutella/fasttrack/openft and other P2P networks, no more logging into my home machine when stranded outside my home office to retrieve a document I left at home.

It was my parents anniversary yesterday. We had cake and flowers and candles. Uploaded pics for the day to my Flickr account. The pictures are collected into a set here. I am loving Flickr. Having a hosted services for storing my photos is the best thing that has happened for a while. No more running to upgrade the gallery software whenever a patch is out. Flickr allows me to store the high resolution photos itself, something that can easily cause your own web site to get out of hand in a short while.

From today, I have decided that anybody who wants a copy of any Linux distros from me, has to buy them from me. In other words, I am withdrawing the option of giving me blank CDs in exchange for copies that I burn using my CDs. The cost per CD is Rs. 20. So an FC3 copy (4 CDs) will cost Rs. 80. I am also offering an FC3 update CD with updates that I have downloaded from four major FC3 repositories.

I am getting married to Dipika!

Aargh! Just discovered from my logs that my college photo gallery is the first result given by a Google search for “REC Jalandhar” (Check here). Even before the college website itself! Since I have forbidden robot access to the Photo gallery (to keep it a little more private, if such a thing is possible), I expect this “anomaly” to get corrected in a month or two.

Over the years I have tried various software to manage the content on my personal home page. From hand edited HTML, to a bunch of my own PHP scripts, to some *nuke software, and finally to Drupal. So why did I finally shift over to WordPress? The answer is simple - if all you would really be doing on your site is blog … get a blogging software. The blog module of Drupal is good, but: