I have recently started using OneNote and quite like it. Just discovered that it has an option to post to blog. Trying it out now.
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Archive for the 'Miscel' Category
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All you people who criticize us for paying bribe, have you ever really stopped to think why would one want to bribe instead of sticking to his right? It’s easy to comment that the system is corrupt because people easily agree to pay money instead of going about the business in the proper manner, but have you ever considered the hypothesis that perhaps people are forced to bribe because the damned system is corrupt? Let me try to put my opinions in a very neutral tone and you people can decide.
I am staying in Bangalore. I have a bike, a license and all the documents and ID’s. It was 1 am. Just having watched the last show of Thor, we decided to go to the airport to have a cup of coffee. Please don’t ask why would we want to drive 50 km for a cup of coffee – it’s my wish and discussing that here would be deviating from the main point. At the entrance of the road which branches off towards the airport we were stopped by a police and told that airport is out-of-bounds for people on bike. Fine! We decided to return. However, after travelling some more time, we were all tired and wanted to just stop by the side and stretch our legs. It is now that a police jeep pulls over and the officer demands our license and bike documents. We produce all the documents. But now instead of letting us go, he tells his subordinate to get our bikes towed to the nearest police station. WTH! Apparently, in the city of Bangalore, this is a suspicious activity. They need to verify if we are terrorists or not. The officer told us that the bikes will be locked up in the police station, that a case shall be opened against us and that we will have to appear in a court. It’s a simple case and most probably you’ll be cleared – he says. But the bike will have to stay and it’ll take a week to have the case resolved he adds.
I admit I am afraid of police. I do not think they are my friends. They are certainly not the people I trust to keep me safe. We tried to reason with the officer. We claimed the airport police to be an alibi of our intentions. But no! He was hell-bent on confiscating our bikes. It was 2 in the night now. What were we to do? Yes, we asked the officer if he could settle all this for some money. He smiled and demanded Rs. 2000. After some negotiations we settled for an amount of Rs. 1000.
Yes I paid a bribe. Am I ashamed? No. And if you had asked people of Bangalore what they would have done, they would reply the same. It’s not a crime if we do not want to be harassed by the police. I have a job and I cannot spare time to go to police station and get my bike back. I certainly do not have the patience to put up with all the nonsense they would throw at me. My life is no Bollywood movie and I am definitely not Sunny Deol who can fight against the corrupt administration and come out victorious.
I was reading few other stories. A guy wanted to open his restaurant. He files an application for TIN number. The official tells him that if he were to use an agent things would get done sooner. He decides against the advice. A couple of months pass by and the application is still not processed. He visits an agent this time around. The agent demands him to pay Rs 7000 more as he would need to bribe a lot of officials. A couple of weeks later the work is done! Paying the bribe was the right business decision. It put him back by a few thousands but at least got him the license. He can make up for the loss in some time. But if he have had to wait another couple of months for the application to go through, he would have lost much more money.
A friend of mine told me his story. It was 11 in the night and he was coming back from the office on his Bajaj Platina – a 125 cc bike. A policeman stops him and demands the documents. After the documents were produced the policeman tells him that he’ll need to confiscate the bike for dangerous driving! My friend never drives above 50. He insisted that he was not over speeding, to which the policeman simply answered – “Look, I’ll simply record that you were speeding. You can choose to come to the police station tomorrow and have your bike back or cough up 100″.
So if you people think that I was wrong, write down your stories in the comments and I shall respect you more. But without having fought against injustice please refrain from advising others. Things are easier said than done.
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I recently bought an item on eBay. The seller promised to update the tracking id of the shipment in a weeks time. But even after the week had passed, there was no update. I contacted the seller and he just gave me lame excuses. Patiently, I waited a couple of weeks more for the item to arrive, but nope! I checked the item page again and lo! - the seller had been de-registered from eBay. Scammed!
I immediately opened up a case with eBay customer support. Their procedure requires one to fill up a form and provide contact number. The form is then forwarded to the seller, who is given a weeks notice to respond. Well, in my case, the seller obviously did not respond. Another week passed by.
After the stipulated time of 7 days, I escalated the issue. When you do this, you transfer the power to the eBay customer support to make a ruling. Within minutes I received a mail telling me that the customer support had ruled in my favor and that the entire amount has been refunded back to my PayPal account. 
I logged into my paypal account and verified that the amount had been credited. In fact, PayPal had actually transferred the amount to my credit card which was used to make the payment.
Now I trust eBay more. Having gone through this process once, I can be more confident buying items.
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I do not know if this is the norm or rather an exception, but I enjoyed more at Le Rock than Purple Haze, both at Bangalore. Asked for an opinion, I would definitely prefer Le Rock to the other. The reason – playlist.
At Le Rock, the DJ played lots of rock songs and as the stipulated closing time drew nearer the songs kept getting better and better. We knew every song that was being played and enjoyed it by singing out loud. It was not just us, every table around us had people standing, swaying and head banging to the classic songs.
Purple Haze on the other hand played metal for most part. Had they stuck with heavy metal I wouldn’t have complained, but very quickly the genre changed to death metal. Amon Amarth was followed by Arch Enemy. Next was Children of Bodom. Then came Cradle of Filth. After that I did not know any of the songs that were being played. It was the same across every table. Only towards the end, the last half hour did the DJ play Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin.
Le Rock scores more in every aspect in my opinion. Though nothing even comes close to the time I had at Hard Rock Cafe!
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This is the second time I’ve really had to call them, and it was just as bad as the last time. Sometimes you get the feeling that the person on the other end of the phone doesn’t understand English at all. Here I was telling him that a certain number I have been asked to call is not getting connected from my handset. And those people reply – Sir, please call the number we have provided you. I do not know any simpler way of putting this!
I wanted to activate Airtel Mobile Office on my Sony Xperia X1a handset. I called up the call center and asked them to activate the RC98 plan. In this plan you pay Rs. 98 for broadband connection having 30 days validity and 2gb data transfer free. Also you get free Airtel to Airtel calls worth Rs. 98. This seemed like a good offer to me. The airtel guy who answered the call told me that settings shall be sent to my mobile and that I had to activate the connection by dialing *567*14#. Simple!
Then started the problems. I did what was needed to be done on my part and was waiting for the settings to arrive. I get an sms telling me that settings shall be sent momentarily. A minute later I get another message telling me that settings have already been delivered to my mobile. WTH! I checked if settings had been updated and the answer was no. Still I tried connecting to internet and obviously my phone tells me that no network settings are available. What do I do?
I call up the call center once again. I go through all the steps to make sure that no mistake had been committed on my part. The airtel person tells me that he’ll send the settings once again, and that if I am still not able to connect then I should call up 12118 for further support. The whole process repeats and no settings delivered.
What was to be done – call 12118. I dial the number. A brief pause and then a message – The dialed number is invalid! Frick!
I call the call center again. Go through the whole thing. Tell them that 12118 is not going through from my mobile phone. The reply – Sir, please dial 12118 for any further assistance. To which I tell him once again that I am not able to dial the said number. The reply – Sir, please dial 12118 for any support regarding mobile internet.
I had serious doubts if he could understand english. So I repeated the whole thing in hindi, slowly and politely. The reply – Sir, please dial 12118 for any further assistance.
I gave up on the guy and disconnected. 121 again. A new guy. Thank lord! I tell him the whole story. He was a smart fellow. Tells me to hold on while he checks back. Sure. Couple of minutes pass by listening to Airtel’s new song. Song stops and he answers back – Sir, please call the alternate number provided to you. And what is the number I ask? 121 he replies and disconnects before I could say a word!
I gave up altogether. Googled up and realized that I could request for the settings from my phone itself. Did that and I have Airtel Mobile Office (EDGE) working on my Xperia X1. 
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Gmail has this feature using which a person can delegate someone else to read and reply on his behalf. This could be an interesting and useful feature for a lot of people, myself included. I have two email ids, Earlier I had enabled multiple sign-on to be able to open both the gmail accounts in the same browser. But the multiple sign-on is a beta feature.
The delegate feature on the other hand simply lets me delegate the second id to the first one. So logged into the first one, with the click of a button (two actually) I can have the second email id opened up in a new tab. I can view all the mails of both the id’s and reply to the mails as well.
One important thing to note is the sent-by and sent-from addresses. The sent from contains the original email id and the sent-by contains the email id of the delegate.
The setup is pretty simple. One can turn on the delegate feature from Settings -> Accounts and Import -> Grant Access To Your Account.
Once the access has been granted, a drop down option appears besides the email id on the top right corner of the screen. In my case, I have delegated s.anuvrat to take care of my singh.anuvrat mails.
Now when I click on the singh.anuvrat link in the Delegated Accounts sections, a new tab opens up to show the inbox of singh.anuvrat. I can compose any mail on behalf of singh.anuvrat.
Gmail displays that the email is sent from singh.anuvrat but by s.anuvrat. And when you click the reply button, the default to-adress is the singh.anuvrat address.
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Woke up in the morning and found this mail in my inbox.
I checked the from-address and it was indeed from Google domain : chrome-notebook-team@google.com.
The mail contains a link to a form which contains questions about how one uses a computer, which applications are preferred, etc. And finally there’s a text box in which you have to justify yourself as an ideal candidate to receive the notebook.
Unfortunately, I am not a resident of USA. I might forward it to someone though.
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In twitter, you can always change your username. One can be XYZ today, and YZX the next day. While some people may think this gives them an extra luxury of changing the username to suit a mood/tweet/occasion/whatever, but I see it otherwise.
The problem I am referring to is this:
Say I have a friend XYZ. I mentioned him in my tweet saying – Hey @XYZ, how are ya? Now suppose XYZ changes his username to YZX. The impact this has is that all the tweets which have mentioned him as @XYZ now point to a nonexistent user! Now this is ridiculous.
This problem can be easily solved, or at least I suppose so. For one, twitter could decide to change all the name tags to match the new name. A simple search and back propagation of the change will do this. I am not sure how the third party applications will make the same modification though.
Another solution would be to assign unique user id’s to every user and have all his name tags point to that user id. Say the user XYZ had an id of twttr01. So we have a hashed map in which XYZ is associated with twttr01. Now if XYZ changes his name to YZX, the hash map will be updated to point both XYZ and YZX to user id twttr01. This will solve another problem – the problem of identity theft.
Say I had been using the username XYZ before making a temporary switch to YZX. When I make the switch, the username XYZ becomes free and available for others to use. Anyone else can claim the username XYZ and all my earlier mentions will be redirected to this new user! I do not think you would be wanting such a behavior in your system, ever!
In fact, I do not really see any point in allowing username changes at all. It is one feature which should be done away with.
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