K World

Been long time, after thinking about future of gmail, I got lost for a long time some where in my work, life, etc and etc. Just thought to come back to routine of writing here at my K World. Well, last two months were .. different.

After coming back from London, I had another assignment and I went to Finland for 4 days. That was an all action trip that I wouldn’t want to miss any time. There was some political party meeting going on in Madras on that day, and all those party guys along with biryani packet guys were roaming all around the city. I thought I’m going to miss my flight for sure as I had lost all hopes of reaching airport within time. But, some how traffic got clear at the end I managed to reach the airport within time. After boarding, the irony was that flight was delayed by 30 minutes as they had some technical issues with their radio.

Well, the story continued in the morning as we (trip was along with Ashok) missed our flight to Helsinki at Frankfurt. Airline guys told that next flight is after 6 hours but getting a seat will be tough. So, we decided to roam around Frankfurt in the mean while. Frankfurt is a nice city (though a dirty airport .. don’t fight, I hated it), ‘Main’ river was cool and fall has made sure that trees look all colorful. Then, we returned back to know that the next flight to Helsinki was full and we had another 6 hours at our expense.

We reached Helsinki and finished our work for two days, and again we had a day more to do something. Ashok got to know that we can go to Tallinn and come back in a day. Tallinn is capital city of a neighboring country Estonia. We took a ferry to Tallinn (it was my first travel on sea and I was travelling to another country :P) Tallinn had preserved its old city carefully and it was one of the most beautiful cities I’ve seen (I’ve hardly seen 10 cities in my life, but … come on, you get it) While coming back on a ship named ‘Superstar’ we realized that people from Helsinki usually go to Tallinn to buy booze ( could be cheaper there, Helsinki is a very expensive city as taxes are very high in Finland)

Reached Madras on 5th day after all the action packing trip. Now, if you press >>> for next few weeks, its today. I’ve got hands back on to my second most favorite tool from MSFT – Windows Live Writer (my first is Visual Studio :P), I think I will be going to post regularly again.

Yesterday was a boring day. It was so boring that I don’t want to think about it one more time by blogging about it. In short, yesterday I took a ride on open-top Original London Tour bus sat through out the journey thinking where should I get down and take a look at the place. By the time I made up my mind (by not stepping down any where because that place is huge and I will be bored to roam around alone there), I reached by starting destination again. But, I’ve almost covered all major places in Central London - from outside.

Today, is a good day. A very good day. My best bud connected me to one of his friends in London and I went along with him and a colleague of him. Before telling about where I went, I need to tell about London Underground Railway a.k.a The Tube. Its the best thing that any city can have. Period. Makes life so damn comfortable when it comes to travel. City is huge, but The Tube challenges the vastness by transporting people from one end to another end within an hour. Everything is very well maintained. One card, you can travel either in Tube or any bus (They call it Oyster card). To go any where in London, all you need is to know “where you want to go” and a Tube map. All the railway lines are distinguished by color, you can get into any train with a valid ticket. City (Only The Tube) is divided into 6 zones, where Zone 1 consists of Central London, where all the action takes place. With a 5.90 pound ticket, you can travel in all the 4 zones (I’ve no clue where are Zone 5 and 6) for a day. With a 28 pound oyster card, you can travel the same for 7 days. There are trains for every 5-15 minutes. Though some times trains are over crowded, they are never like our local trains where people will be hanging out. All trains and buses have cameras for safety reasons. Doors won’t open unless they driver does and he doesn’t open unless its a station or a stop. The first time I got into a bus, it was hard for me to believe that, it was the first time I’m on a double decker bus.

There are few things I observed. People are always in a hurry (some folks tell that Mumbai is more faster, but I’ve no clue). You listen to many languages around .. except English. Tubes are excellent and unless you are extra-over-intelligent, its tough to get lost. Its supposed to rain a lot in London, but dint rain for last three days, rather it was very sunny (Did I bring Chennai weather along with me ??) You dont feel like you are one of the biggest cities ( I felt like I’m a in a huge bollywood set). Its expensive to live there. Period. Wow, lots of churches and lots of history behind each one of them. Very old buildings (These guys are hardly building anything new, they are just rebuilding old buildings, the nearest railway station to me was started in 1863 !!). Roads are narrow. Cars go slow - most of the time (avg speed in London is 8mph). Great traffic sense.

Enough about London, I went to Buckingham Palace today. Every year in Summer, the palace is open for few days (Queen goes to another castle) and The State Rooms are open for public to view. Its an expensive ticket inside (28.5 GBP) for view State Rooms, Royal Mews and the Queen’s Gallery. Photography is forbidden in State Rooms and the Queen’s Gallery. Palace, architected by John Nash is a very well designed one. Rooms are huge, some nice art etc., but .. I’ve no clue why I wanted to see that. Then, I went to Royal Mews. Its place for some Horse Carriages, a Car and 4 horses. Then, I went to Queen’s Gallery, it contains few statues, nice paintings some jewels acquired/collected/.. from else where. Some stuff from Maharaja of Jaipur, Tippu Sultan where there. Thats, my artistic brain told - Enough boss, take me else where.

After that, we headed to St. James Park. Its a lovely park. London Cycling Campaign was going on. It was a carnival atmosphere and people of all age groups were cycling around. Nice sight indeed. As per their website, around 50000 people participated in it. Well, I haven’t seen so many, but there were many on cycles.

Then, we went to the London Eye, also known as the Millennium Wheel, is the tallest one of that kind in Europe. Well, its a huge giant wheel, with 32 rooms (they call them capsules) rather than boxes attached to it. It was a great ride up. You get a very good view of London City. A very very good view. I took some photos there, an invitation to the album should be there in your inboxes by now, if not, it should be on its way After that, I went to Trafalgar Square. There is Nelson’s Column (Nelson standing on a 46m granite column) surrounded by four lions there, which Hitler had plans of moving to Berlin, if he had won the WW II. After than I headed to the Tube and reached home.

A shocking revealation. A good friend of mine was hiding some thing from us from long time and he revealed it finally in his blog post. This image will make it straight forward for you guys to understand what he was hiding from us.

Yes, I was as surprised as you guys are when I came to know this truth. But, I ‘was’ happy to know that he was doing something what he loved from his childhood. He followed his force and became what he wanted to become.

But, being a guy who sits next to him through out the day at work, I wanted to see his light saber skills. I was astonished by his skills when I saw them. Later I had to accept that he is far better in coding skills than his saber skills. Well, you need to know the shocking reason.

This is ME after the exhibition of his skills.

I request you all to sign this post as a petition for him to stop being a Jedi. Yoda, if  you are reading this post. Please, leave the Jedi council, ask him, you must.

My host has informed that the he is moving the server and asked me to take a complete backup. As a good boy, I did the same. But, just realized that he didn’t move the server for past 10 days and I had done couple of posts. Now, all of a sudden the old server stopped working. I’ve updated by NS entries to make my blog point to correct IP and realized that last two posts are missing in the database. Well, I found one of them on my desktop blogging tool and the Aamir’s injection is lost. Upped everything. Blog is back in action. Peace.

Being a guy who wants to learn something new all the time, I had a wish to keep three computers one on windows, one on Linux and one on OSX and see them talking to each other. Well, being a guy who is neither born with a silver spoon nor working for Apple or Google, I can’t afford a mac(book). I’ve to adjust with my bulky-yet powerful Dell. My cousin got a VAIO which runs on Vista. My Dell runs on Gutsy as well as Good-old-XP. Apart from these two laptops, I’ve a desktop under my control which use to run XP. I wanted to share screenshots of 3 great Operating Systems - one which is maximum used OS and definitely a favorite for gamers, one which is hacker’s OS and the third being - the designer’s paradise.

1. Windows XP SP2

2. Gutsy Gibbon - Ubuntu 7.10

3. Leopard - OS X 10.5.1

The third one was something which I was missing from long time. Very long time. I wanted to buy one but not in my budget. I wanted to try one, none of my friends got it. I wanted to experience one atleast on my laptop, I wasn’t very sure of risking the data on it. Finally. Today is the day for my Hackintosh and it worked out. I will write a detailed post sometime regarding the care that needs to be taken while trying this. I messed-up my partition table by missing just 2 characters and later I managed to recover couple of partitions, I went for a clean installation. It is a great experience and is for a great OS. Now, saving each rupee for a real mac book.

If you see carefully, theme of my XP is variant of famous “Bluecurve”, which is a Linux theme and the mouse theme is of OS X Tiger. Theme of my Gutsy is theme of OS X Tiger and theme of Leopard is not changed (yet)

Update : Just saw that post got nothing to do with the Title. Uhmm, I started to post about my journey and ended up posting just screenshots. Anyway, I’ll tell you how to tame the leopard some time soon.

Update : No more hackintosh. Using work’s macbook pro.