Nirenjan’s Space

Kartik was talking about traveling in the big bad city of Mumbai. His post prompted me to write a post about traveling in metropolitan cities in USA.

Basically, the public transportation infrastructure in most cities will make seasoned Chennai/Mumbai travelers cringe in horror. (Well, not really, but I’ve seen more frequent 29C buses in Chennai than a 500 bus out here in Pittsburgh). You really need to have a car to get anywhere important.

Having said that, I must still comment that Pittsburgh has one of the best bus networks across the US. Like the Mumbai trains, the buses here follow a rigid schedule (well, mostly). You can pick up a schedule free of cost from any bus, the University Center on the Carnegie Mellon campus also has a number of bus schedules of all buses that pass in the vicinity of the university. These schedules give daily timings, along with major stop points and a map of the route. You can also go online to the website of the Port Authority of Allegheny County and enter your starting location and destination intersections, and the website will automatically give you a few routes which you can follow, along with the timings.

Make sure you book your flight with at least an hour between connections, or you’ll wind up running the four minute mile in one…

I bought a bluetooth headset for my Nokia phone over a year ago…

The HS-26W was plagued with problems from the day I bought it. A week later the gadget died. Since it was just a week since I bought it, I managed to get it replaced with an identical piece. Two months later, that died.

I took that piece to the Nokia service center on Mount Road. They told me that they could not repair it and would replace it. Fine, I said, but the replacement took another two months to arrive. Two weeks later, the replacement gave up.

Finally, when I went back home last month, I managed to return it and get a refund on the product.

Come on, I can expect one piece to fail, but all the replacement pieces as well???

After a long hiatus, I’m back… with a fizz… and not a bang ;). The usual story, loaded with work, blogger’s block, yada yada yada…

Anyway, to keep you dedicated readers updated, I’m now in the “land of dreams”, to be precise, I’m in Pittsburgh, PA, to get even more precise, I’m doing my masters in embedded systems engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.

After coming here, I realize that my experience with traveling, cooking, housekeeping, etc. could be very useful to a lot of other people. Let’s first start of with cooking - it’s not all that most people hype it up to be… it’s damn simple, even a kid could do it; however, it does take time. That is the only trouble.

Traveling - depends on where you are. Pittsburgh has one of the best public transportation networks in the USA, and you can even go online and plan your bus trips. I hear quite a few other cities have a good transportation network as well, though I haven’t been anywhere yet to comment on them.

Housekeeping - now comes the hard part, but I kid. Assuming that you rent an apartment, you would usually look for one that has all features, namely microwave, dishwasher, laundry, etc. So there go the majority of the chores, save mopping the floor/vacuuming the carpet.

Shopping - you would pretty much find everything you need here.

Future posts would concentrate on individual topics…

So, here goes, my latest gadget acquisition…

Nokia HS-26W Bluetooth Headset to be used in conjunction with my old toy - Nokia 6681.

Nothing great by way of features, but then again, a headset is a headset, not a toy. Anyway, the voice quality is pretty good, although it does get a bit cumbersome wearing the set for a long while - tends to press my ear a bit.

It’s not everyday that you get to shake hands and chat with a former first president of a country. Yes, I shook hands and chatted with Kenneth Kaunda.

Yes, yes, I know. You want photos. Here you go…

I couldn’t resist this. Today when somebody from ICICI called me for a personal loan, I told them that I wanted a loan for Re. 1. The lady on the other end was flabbergasted to say the least.

Thanks Gautam.

I picked up a Hitachi 80 GB 2.5″ hard disk for my Thinkpad R51 laptop. The only problem - my laptop doesn’t recognize the disk. On the other hand, it does work beautifully with the USB enclosure that I bought to keep the old 40 GB disk in…

The laptop is a 2887-NQ7 model. So now, my questions to the world.

1. Do you have any idea of what problem could cause the laptop to not recognize the disk, and if so, how to fix it?
2. Is there a way to install Linux on the external USB disk, and to boot from the disk at powerup?

Update: I think I should have made this point more clear. I tried to replace the primary hard disk (40 GB) with the new one (80 GB). But the laptop does not detect the 80 GB disk in the IDE bay. However, it has no problems when I installed it in the USB drive case.

Well, this is a delayed informative post to inform you folks that I’ve quit my job at HCL Tech and joined the SSN School of Advanced Software Engineering and am pursuing my Masters in Information Technology, with specialization in Embedded Systems Engineering.

I’ve taken to surfing the earth from the skies. Google Earth. Now that they have a fairly detailed aerial photograph of Chennai, I’ve become addicted to locating famous landmarks in the city just by their aerial view.

So far, I’ve identified the airport, Kathipara junction, Ashok Pillar and the two nearby theatres, Gemini flyover, Shastri Bhavan, to mention a few. Unfortunately, the hi-res map is available only for a limited area of Chennai, bounded by Adyar Depot and Music Academy in the east and by Sterling Road junction and CMBT in the north. The map however, extends south a fair distance, and by my reckoning, covers Perungudi, almost upto Shozhinganallur. In the west, it seems to terminate outside the city limits, but I’m not too familiar with that region.

Download the KMZ file

One man is about to do the unthinkable…

Like Sudhish did quite some time back, I’m taking a new vow now.

(more…)

What do you do when you find yourself talking to a client and rapidly switching between an Indian and an American accent?

Thathuvams seem to be the rage of the day. Everyday, I get at least 10 of them. Sample this:

Teaspoon vechu tea kalakka mudiyum, aana tablespoon vechu table kalakka mudiyumaa???

How’s a guy to survive an assault of these?

Even though I no longer have my laptop, I still have a state of the art machine from 1998. It’s blazingly fast…

As fast as a snail.

Seriously though, it is an excellent configuration for it’s time. Pentium II - 233 MHz, 64 MB SD RAM, 10 GB Hard disk, 1.44 MB Floppy drive (which incidentally, no longer works), 8x 4x 32x CD Writer (upgraded after the original 24x CD-ROM conked out, and the writer doesn’t work. It reads CD’s well though). What else? A 2 MB SiS 6215C graphics card (on which even Quake II won’t run, leave alone CnC Generals), a 10/100BaseT ethernet card, a Yamaha soundcard (for which drivers are totally unavailable, except for Windows 98, which brings me to the next point), Windows 98, and NO office software. Not MS Office, not StarOffice, not even OpenOffice.

As of now, the only thing this computer is good for is for playing Sudoku and browsing the internet. Oh yeah, and listening to music…

IBM called me up a couple of days back and gave me one hell of a heart attack. They said that the motherboard on my laptop had gone kaput and that it would cost about Rs. 54000, plus taxes, to get a new board. Hell, for that price, I could buy a brand new laptop!!! Naturally, I said no.

I collected my laptop yesterday morning and started backing up the data in the evening. Even though I was pretty certain that it wouldn’t power up, I still couldn’t resist trying to turn the power on. Surprise! Surprise!!! It actually turned on!

Even though it works, I still want to trade in this laptop for a new one. Any recommendations for a particular brand? I am thinking of continuing with IBM.