Walking Kundan

Trip to Point Reyes

Another 'Jha' in bollywood

Looks like 'Jha' people are broadening their horizon. For a background i am a 'Jha', although my name may not reflect it. And why is that, is a long story for some other time. BTW if you don't know what is a 'Jha', then maybe this article is not for you.
So today i read an article on nytimes about a movie called "Sikandar". As being a movie enthusiast, i read this article. Although the movie doesn't have good review, i was delighted to find that it is directed by Piyush Jha. On doing a quick google search indicated that he has directed few more movies in the past and has even acted in some. To get more information about his background i searched him in wiki, but couldn't find it over there. Looks like there was an article earlier over there but it has been deleted by some one with following reason (A7: Article about a real person, which does not indicate the importance or significance of the subject). I don't know what does it really mean. I wonder if someone will create a wiki page soon.
Typically 'Jha's or in general people from Bihar, UP are considered to be good at studies. It doesn't mean that other parts of india are not. It simply means that they are mostly focussed on studying and getting jobs in offices. In earlier days the ultimate aim was to become a civil servant (why will any one want to become servant, i don't know??) or a doctor or engineer or to get a job in any government office. Kind of i am trying to say is that we are mostly focussed on doing one type of work. So it is refreshing to see that people are getting better at other jobs too ex. movie making, business etc. So far the only 'Jha' famous in bollywood is Prakash Jha. Who has made good movies.
Comments are welcome.

Dell problem revisited.

This is a continuous story. Other parts of the story are here.
Part1
Part2

Yesterday i recieved the replacement hard drive. It was shipped using the overnight shipment from Fedex. As i had requested Dell has sent me a screwdriver and 4 spare screws. They also sent another set of installer CD and DVDs. So far so good. When i looked at the hard drive, it was from Toshiba and there was a label saying it is "refurbished". I have never used a refurbished item yet so that made me little skeptical. It would have been real great if they had sent me a 1 page instruction manual for how to do it. Although to Dell's credit, their customer support guy called me at around 7:15 in the evening. But i was away and couldn't pickup his call. He was supposed to give me instructions on how to do the drive replacement. Anyways after dinner, i found some youtube videos of how to replace a dell hard drive. One of them is this. It is real easy. You just need to have a proper screwdriver, little patience and some common sense. So i took out the faulty hard drive. It was from Seagate. I will do some research to find out which hard drive is more reliable Toshiba or Seagate. More on that later. After the new hard drive was properly screwed, on start it did some installation. The whole installation process was automatic. It went on for about 20 minutes. In the end it asked me to configure the OS, saying what language, timezone, what should be the name of computer etc. After that i configured it to connect to my home wireless. Finally back in business. We will monitor its behavior for couple of days before saying that everything is all right. I have spent around 3-4 hours on this hard drive issue. Hopefully this will be the last of problems.

Dell Problem continued...

This is in continuation with my story from here.

Now i have started noticing that whenever PC boots up Windows XP says that one of the disk may have some problem and it is trying to check disk. Then it reported that 2 of the segments had error. I looked it up on Internet and found that it is most likely because of hard drive failure. So now i had no other option left, but to prepare myself with a phone call to Dell. The first thing i did was to burn the data on a DVD, just in case if it fails completely. Today i had a call with Dell tech support. When i explained my problem to the person, he thought it best to refer to senior level support. After a wait time of about 10 minutes finally i got hold of the senior level person. I must admit he was a very genuine and helpful guy. He asked me to run hardware diagnosis program. He explained me what is happening in each step. It took about 15-20 minutes after the memory scan was complete, it came to an error screen saying that 2000-XXX error has happened while testing hard disk. Well that was expected. So i am going to get a replacement of hard disk. It is good thing that i got 1 year warranty on this machine. I will keep updated on it in my next post.

Is recession ending??

Lately some good news is coming out. Hong Kong has shown signs of economic growth. Recent news from Japan also indicates that maybe world is finally coming out of danger. For the past couple of months stocks everywhere also has gone up. But i don't really believe that stock fluctuation can be a reliable metric of change.

One measure of how bad economy is by observing how people are behaving. I live in an apartment complex. It has several trash cans. Earlier i used to see that typically poor people (they are carrying a shopping cart, and wearing shabby clothes) came to pickup the bottles and other recyclable items from the trash cans. I guess they use to sell it at recycle centers. But lately i see a different trend. I see people coming in cars to pick those bottles. And these are relatively good looking cars. So it makes me wonder what has changed. Is the recycling that profitable these days or simply people are anyhow struggling to survive.

Flag hosting ceremony in car.

In the spirit of Indian Independence day.

Latest from Opportunity

It is simply fascinating how advance and exciting work the space engineers are doing. Today i got this picture taken by Opportunity rover from Mars. This one is taken on July 18, 2009. It is simply amazing to know that Opportunity was launched on Mars on Jan 25, 2004 and since then it has been sending us pictures. Hats off to all the persons involved in this project. More details can be found out here.

Bihar Samaj Picnic 2009

Yesterday we had a very fun time at Picnic in Lake Elizabeth Park. We played lots of games had good food and interacted with many people.
Link to other pics.

jigsaw puzzle (my time 28 minutes)

Janmashtami Celebration in Fremont

Book Reading : "Snowball"

First time i heard the name "Warren Buffet" was from my friend Trilok Agrawal (aka TK from ITBHU days). He was then studying management at IIT Kharagpur and was planning to come to US to somehow meet him. So he was telling me he is coming to meet him, and my question to him was who is this fellow? TK was shocked to find that i don't know him despite having been in US for couple of years now. Anyways his plan didn't materialize and this was my way of knowing about him.
After that i did little bit of research on Warren and found out that he is a person who has become rich by investing in stocks. Then from here and there i got tits and bits of information about him. Mostly by chatting with my friends.
Last year i got to know that a book has been written on his life and i got curious to read about this book. I looked up on internet and its price was not in my reach. So i reserved it in Fremont library. I was surprised to find that i am 46th person waiting for this book. Eventually after about 5 months i got the email that this book is available for me. That has been my highest wait time for any book from library.
Wow this book is amazingly thick. 838 pages to be exact. If i were not that interested and curious by so many people wanting to read this book, i would have never thought about reading such thick book.
Anyways i started it, and believe me it is very interesting from the very first page. I have been reading it page by page during weekends and night time during weekdays. So far i have been able to reach the section where Warren has already built a good set of partnership and is working with Charlie Munger. And it is about 25 % of the book. Alas library gives you only 3 weeks to read a book, and my time is up. I have to return it tomorrow as it is already on hold. I will recommend this book to everyone, and i am going to put it on request as soon as i return it.

Good news from Kolkata

Just now read this good news. Looks like government in India is getting serious on pollution issues. It is really a great news for people in India and planet earth in general. By imposing ban on very old commercial vehicles, i am sure it will improve air quality. But at the same time it will also help in preventing so many auto related accidents. I think government should also impose smog test rules on all the vehicles.

My new dell laptop - bad and miserable.

Couple of months ago, i bought a new dell laptop. It is Inspiron 1500 series. I had bought last laptop from dell too. That was in 2004. It was also an Inspiron machine. I have been very happy with its performance. Even now it is serving all my purpose of checking emails. I do some programming on it too. For this laptop i never had to talk to dell technical support guys once. I was so happy with its performance that i recommended it to my younger brother and my brother in law in India.
Now coming back to my new laptop. With totally satisfied from my past experience, i bought this one with cool features. It has integrated bluetooth, in built webcam, 500 GB hard disk, 4 GB RAM, dual core machine. I have bought 1 year at home service warranty too. To make my wife happy i even paid little extra money to get it in red color. Boy lookwise it looks great. But that is where i stop praising it. Looks like Dell is going very easy on the performance testing of its machine.

In the past 3 months i had to call dell tech support many times. First time microphone stopped working. Second time somehow the place where we insert power supply became loose. If anyone had tried to convince the support guys that it is not your fault that it is not working, i totally feel their pain. And everytime they try to sell me the extended warranty. As if they have built the faulty machine for purpose, just to squeeze my money.
Now the machine freezes very frequently and both me and my wife are trying to regain our energy to talk to the tech support.
I am not going to recommend any one again about dell anymore.