Kundan 16 months old

New Year 2010

2009 is over. It has brought all kind of feelings this year. Lost a job, found another. Parents came and stayed with us. Kundan (my son) had his first birthday. Anshu finished her MBA (congrats to her :-)). Looks like an eventful year. But the good thing is that it was a fun year.
So we decided to celebrate this year end in a more fun way. We have been living in bay area for more than 3 years now. Many a times we have been to San Francisco, for either seeing Golden Gate Bridge, or Fisherman's wharf. But so far we have been mostly driving through the city and always promising ourselves that we will someday come to see the beautiful buildings and other attractions of the SFO downtown. So this time we decided to just do that.
In advance we have booked a room in Holiday Inn for 31st night. This hotel is on the main street of SFO (Van Ness Ave). If you are planning to stay here, get a room with view. It is definitely worth the money.

We started about 11 from our house, took the bus and reached Fremont BART. It takes about an hour from Fremont to reach SFO. We got out at Powell BART. Last night i had done extensive research on what bus to take and what to do etc. But my god. It is so confusing over there. There are 4 different kinds of buses. We were supposed to take Powell Hyde cable car. But after running here and there for more than 20 minutes we couldn't figure out where we will get it. Finally patience ran out and hired a taxi. We reached on top of crooked street.

(More of the events soon as i am running late for bed.)

Afghan (Frederick Forsyth)

In fiction Frederick Forsyth is simply superb. The first i read was Dogs of War. And since then, most of the other works. Further when it comes to short story collection, Veteran is simply too good.
Lately i have been reading Ram Gopal Verma's blog. His blogs are funny with a taste of like it or not here it comes. Sometimes i wonder if RGV and Amitabh really do have such free time to write blogs, or are they simply outsourcing this work to some junior intern? Call me a skeptic. Anyways in one of the RGV's blog he had praised this novel Afghan. Now i had to read it.
I will say that this is a good peice of work. Research done by author is always good. It looks like he has been to mountains of Tora bora and seen the place himself. So vivid are the description. Story plot was a little weak for me. Or maybe my expectations are too high. I found it unconvincing that CIA and MI5 can simply put their man in a mission critical of AQ at the last moment. Otherwise it is a good entertaining book.

Christmas 2009

I love christmas songs. So i have been playing them from Youtube. Last year when my in-laws were here, we went to Fremont Church near Fremont and Central. I haven't been to a church in long time. It was fun. Then we went to see christmas decoration in a nearby neighborhood. It was simply awesome.
So this year, me and my wife decided to check out decorations again. And we were also looking for some pastry to eat. Most of the shops were closed. Luckily there is one indian restaurant near our house (Peacock Restaurant), which was open. This place also has its own bakery. First we roamed around the places to see lights. Some neighborhoods were very decorated compared to others. It looks like decoration is also contagious. If my neighbor does it, then i will do it too. We went to Peacock for pastry afterwards. After pastry we decided to have chicken biryani too.
So overall we had a very fun christmas.

Book Reading Update 1 (Tipping Point)

I was so excited to find so many books. But it looks like i have put more in mouth than i can chew. Library has a deadline of 3 weeks. In one week i have only been able to finish "Diary of wimpy kid". Ofcourse that is easy, as it is a fun book. Not something for which i have to motivate myself. Now moving onto "Tipping point". I am at page 60 or 70. So far i have found that this book is about special people, who are very outgoing and connect to many people. So basically if an idea is sponsored by those people, the idea is successful. It is not as if we don't know it already. But with the exaples of successful people from real life, it becomes more important. Futher it talks about knowledgeable persons (Mavens). Now i know why the famous build tool in Java is called Maven (sorry if you don't understand what i wrote in this line. Don't worry it is just a software tool for my work). More on the book reading later. Meanwhile Merry Xmas.

Reading Great books

These days i feel very happy. From somewhere i heard about book "Outliers". Got the audiobook from library. After reading it i am so impressed with the author (Malcom Gladwell) that i went to his website and found out about his other works. Just finished reading "Blink" and now i am going to move to "Tipping Point". Meanwhile i went to shelfari to see what other readers like me are reading. From there got the great list of other books. Alas my library allows me only to put 10 items in hold at a time. Today several of my holds were cleared and have got "How the mighty fall", "Diary of a wimpy kid, the last straw.", "Microtrends", "Catch-22" and "Story of Pi". This list will keep me occupied for sometime. So which one to start. "Story of Pi" is audiobook, that i will read while driving in car. So my best bet for today is "Diary of wimpy kid" :-)

Pumdiana pumdiana

My son likes this song very much. Whenever he sees the laptop, he will make hand gestures and drag us to play it. Most of the time it is very cute. Only after hearing it for 30 times in a day it gets little tiring :-)

Astrology on radio in SFO

Recently i came to know of a desi radio station in bay area. It is on 1170 AM. There are several shows. Typically i listen to "Morning Masti with Mantra" and "On Air Dil se with Seema". These shows happen on my commute hours to work.
The format is to either start conversation on some topic, or invite some knowledgeable person on the show. And then people ask questions and share stories or opinion etc. Several times they have invited lawyers (immigration lawyer is typically in more demand), child specialists etc.
But today was special. Today they have invited one "Astrologer". I don't believe in it, but still continued on to listen to it. What was fascinating to see that out of 6-7 calls only one caller was male, rest all were women. Does it mean that women believe in astrology and stars more than men do. Or is it simply that women can talk about issues more easily than men can? Or maybe both?

Anyways here are the questions i could remember. Answers to invariably all were on the format that everything is good. You will get what you are desiring. Maybe a little delayed. Some graha is giving you slight trouble. May need extra pooja path. Call me after the show for more details. (We all know what will happen then.)

Enjoy the questions.

1)Yahi job continue karoon ki change karoon. Green card kab hoga
2)Mera beta padhai main bahut stress leta hai. Usko safalta milegi ki nahin.
3)Main ma kab banoongi.
4)Meri beti college main hai. Uski padhai theek se hogi ki nahin. Usko badhiya job milega ki nahin.
5)Mujhe ek doosra job offer mila hua hai. Main usko consider karoon ki nahin.
6)Mera Green card hoga ki nahin. Main finally india main settle hounga ki yahan.

Hiking trail on mission view

Marketing thugs

It is true that marketing guys are just shameless. (Friends if you are in this business, then it is not a personal allegation but it is on the marketing business in general. )They can do anything to sell a thing to you. Further i think they just take for granted that people are foolish. Following 2 examples clearly demonstrate this.

1)I have a subscription of time magazine. It costs me about $20 per year. Every now and then i will get subscription renewal notice in my mail with some quote. Typically they are about $40 or more. Why will i pay double or triple of current subscription price? And to top it on one of the notice there was something like "Enroll for automatic renewal, so that we don't have to send you renewal notices in mail and it will be good for environment." Common do you take me for that kind of sucker. If you don't want to damage environment then stop sending these junk. If your product is good and being sold at right price, i will get it. Stop emotional blackmailing.

2)I use snapfish for photo development. Lately i ordered about 50 prints from them. Using a coupon i had to pay in total about $9. Not bad. Today when i checked to see its status, i see a funny marketing message below my orders. "You've received the lowest price available for your order. You saved $186.30 on your order". Now this is an outrageous statement. Nowhere in the world anyone will pay this amount of money for photo prints.

My take on how popular is lost symbol

After reading Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons and Digital Fortress. It was very obvious i got excited when i read the news that new book Lost Symbol is coming out soon. I requested in advance in library, patting on my back over my smart move, only to find that there were more than 200 other people in local library who have already done that. So next thing i am trying to figure out how long is this book going to be popular. That i am trying to measure by how is the wait queue behaving. Blue line is for total number of people waiting in the queue. And green line is for my position.
As of day 12, you can see that my position is slowly moving forward. But on the other rate of joining people is higher than people leaving the queue. This signifies that this book is still very popular in library. My guess is that when more people from this queue or other interested readers will get the book from other source (ex. buying it, or borrowing it from friend) the trend should change. More for later.

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.