Who said Time n Tide waits for none

Today in office we had a design issues discussion n few of my team members who r taking care of the SNTP (Simple Network Time Protocol) module had some query with regards to Daylight Saving Start Time parameters….. blah.. blah..Now I was curious what the hell this DST mean.
After a bit googling this is what I got to know :

Daylight Saving is a mechanism of adjusting your local time, prevalent in regions where there is a stark variation in daylight hours in different seasons( North America, Europe n Polar regions ). Usually for summer(at March end), the clock is set ahead by 10 mins to 1 hour n in winter(Oct end) u again sync ur timing with the set World Time. This ensures there is a better utilization of natural sunlight.
In short "make hay while the sun shines" .

There is a universally accepted date n time when the clocks of the particular region r set.
All the watches of the region & in the international community the time for that place is modified accordingly. Most operating system (inc WINDOWS) r DST enabled which automatically takes care of ur system time.

Now i m wondering of the options where we make the tide wait for us???

India Simplifly

“Fly for Rs 3” – screamed an ad in last Tuesday paper marking the 3rd anniversary of the launch of Air Deccan. In the past , I have been fooled by many such ads by diff low cost airlines only to find myself doing an added 100-150 Rs service to Airtel and just hopping that “the customer service personnel will join me pretty shortly”.The cheapest fare that I have managed till date is Rs 1500 for a Chennai-Delhi GO-Air flight, which in itself is quite a good deal.

So I was quite skeptical about this offer. I was in a hurry on Tuesday morning, so I checked the site in office( feeling quite sure that the travel agents wld have made the most of the offer) ,n found the Rs 3 ticket avbl!! But unfortunately their server was down so I cldn book it online n I was not ready to call them, so I jus gave up.

While returning home in suburban train, I just dialed once n lo, I get connected n the customer service personnel is indeed speaking to me. It took me a while to recollect the date I intended to book for. When all the formalities got o’er, usually the chap at the other end asks for the return journey details also, but this time arnd he hung up.

So for the next 1 hour, I again ended up doing whatever possible service I cld do to the telecom service providers. Next day morning, “while I was sleeping” my mom called up n after a mere 10 minute ordeal she booked another Rs 3 return ticket.

So now my mom is a proud owner of two Rs. 3 ticket (plus Rs.875 tax for each ticket) for a journey to Delhi she is gonna make next year Jan!!!!

Jokes apart, “Thank U Air Deccan” for making air travel so v normal n affordable to the la R.K.Laxman’s “comman man”.

Just a sip...

It has been now 2 months since I got transferred to Chennai. I was jus thinking abt the most significant change that my 2 year stint in Gurgaon has brought in my personal front
: COFFEE!

pre gurgaon:
"Coffee was never my cup of tea well neither was tea".I was a die-hard juiceholic ( n m still) .I belonged to the endangered species of Chennaites who don’t like or avoid drinking coffee. Although I simply adored the aroma of freshly roasted ground coffee powder.

post gurgaon:
my fav beverage: black coffee

well the reasons:
cld be attributed as an occupational hazard.

I am by default a v lazy sleeper( I sleep for v few hours) so I didn’t want to increase my waking hours by drinking coffee but once in office I had to…..( now do I need to xplain this)
Moreover I like spending time in coffee houses for which I had to drink coffee. (somehow I prefer coffee Day to Barista)

the genesis

I started of with Irish Coffee, a fren of mine persuaded me to have it. I liked it v much. It was v much of my kind. Slowly I got hooked to it n advanced to black coffee.

Well when we r into the topic , I must also say abt my off. pantry coffee ( Fresh n Honest). The coffee is made of real milk(u can skip this) n coffee beans (unlike the Ggn branch) n it tastes yumm. It literally charges u up ( a v good strategy by the mgrs to keep u working).

nebody up for coffee with me now !!!

• InQUIZitive????
  
  

August 15 is Independence day for India but for Chennai it also means the largest open quiz of the city "Landmark Quiz".I knew that if i am there in the city i had to be there come what may even if the venue is 1hr 20 mins travel from my place.Chennai is a land of Quiz loving ppl. If u need a proof u shld have witnessed the crowd at the huge hall that was enthralled by the volley of questions thrown by Derek O Brein.The chief guest of the evening was Vikram Chandra who was in town for the release of his book "Sacred Games"

My team partners were my office colleagues but not from he same project, Ankurnath( he is a keen quizzer n was also my partnerto the Tata Crucible Biz Quiz that was held 3 weeks b4) and Elavarsan ( i met him at the quiz venue).

The prelims had 40 questions. It being an open quiz , the questions catered to all age group and hand picked from varied fields of interest.

The plummest lot of all the q were

- one that dealt with cockroach( q: the animal that has retained its structure for 200 million years)

-one that required to identify the voice of Monty Panesar.

- the country that scored the highest no of goals in FIFA finals - Brazil

the toughest questions were

- one that had a list of non- comprehensible collection of alphabets to form 12 words which turned out to be 12 finches that were under Darwin ( now who is bothered abt these birds)

- connect : Leonardo da vinci, a dog in a basket, an indian lady with a beautiful long hair .

Try exercising ur grey cells for a while, i m not going to give out the ans for this

There were few that gave out surprising infos like

- Hitler was a landscape artist!!! b4 becoming what he is know famous for.

- Its Sears Tower n not Petronas tower that has the largest commercially occupied floors.

- the pic of Florence Nightingale in a totally different angle (w/o a lamp)

I liked this one q which was v well cracked by Ankur

- Which organization have members who work as boss, under-boss, soldier, under-soldier - MAFIA

n as usual there was a list of q that makes u scream "how did i miss this!!!"
- The book cover of "Indian Summers" with the pic of tha author,John Wright missing

- the most commonly used English noun acc to Oxford- time

- pink ribbon symbolizing - breast cancer (considering the fact that it was also the week of "Spreading Awareness abt Breastfeeding")

The cut off was 23.5 n 7 out of the 8 teams on the dias had this score.The IIT team "No questions asked" had a clear lead of 25 pts due to their prelims score but they cldnt capitalise on it n finished third at the end of the day.

The finals had many superb questions which were even more superbly cracked by the teams.I cant recollect many but few of my favorites were:

1) 1 square feet of this weighs exactly 205 gm - the cloth from which the Indian flag is made

2) Connect Architect Louis Blank, Anna in the book Anna Karenina, Arshad Warzi in Sehar - all of them died in railway station.

3) Whom did the English press dub as "Abnominal noman" - Charles deGaulle for preventing Britain from entering the European union.

well the list is endless... For further details join the Yahoo "Quizkreig" group n c my post.

The best moment of the evening was when a 60+ aged man from the audience came up to the stage to collect his gift for answering a question that was thrown to the audience n amidst a group of we so called future of India who r so cynical abt our future he proudly said that "the country has developed v well n in the right track". The best part was yet to come, when we got to know that his son, Swami was among those in the podium n eventually his team "QED" emerged the Winner for the 2006 edition.

To sum up it was a gr8 evening ( now this is an understatement).

P.S : the ans to the connect q is "parachute" now try connecting ;-)

Fare Unfair

I was surprised to find that IIM-A has included a case study "Lalu Prasad and his Railway ministry".

reason: the turnaround of Indian Railways from a bankrupt organization to one having a surplus fund of 20,000 crore within a span of 3 years.

Now I am not going to do a propaganda for the railways n talk abt the steps that brought abt this transformation.just wanted to share couple of my observations.

During the first weekend of this month, I traveled to tuticorin to visit my sister.

The train: aptly named as " Pearl City express" (Tuticorin is known for its pearls).

It has been recently clubbed under the super-fast class of trains. This resulted in the fare of the train to be increased by10 Rs. But with no change in the train journey time!!!!

What was even more baffling was that,while I was booking for my return journey the ticket cost me further 10 Rs. more.

logic: From now onwards if u are to book a ticket for a journey from point A to point B, from anywhere other than point A the ticket is gonna cost u more.

Now kindly tell me what's the all hullah about "computerisation of train ticketing". May be networking by wires have no affect on networking by tracks.

I Blog



This is my second effort in blogging and my first as myself(the previous one was under false identity), well that justifies the name of my blog.

I always wonder why do ppl blog (particularly the personal diary types).Its quite unusual for the author of this blog to ask such a q but still....

No one likes to discuss their life with perfectly strange ppl.
then why do ppl put their ideas in public domain?

the probable reasons that i can think of:

1)BULLETIN BOARD :Its a good way to broadcast the happenings of ur life to all ur frenz (if few starangers also get to know of it, no probs).
2)SUCTION PUMP: a blog can be a good ventilator to throw out all ur heated emotions .
3)CITIZEN OF THE WORLD: for few,more the frenz better the life, what better way than a blog to acheive this?
4)CHRONOMETER: u spend more time in net than @ home, then what better way to record ur events for future .
5)IN THE CROWD:All the other ppl are doing ,why be left behind, its the most in thing ( frankly speaking the first time arnd, this was the reason for me to blog).
6)PLAIN TIMEPASS: bored of being bored, so blog

do get back with ur reasons for blogging.