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Showing posts from 2014

Hey there 2014

Little that I knew, the year had so much for me. Soon after downgrading myself from bachelor, unintentionally I raised my responsibility as family man. To put it in plain text I thought getting married was not a big deal, since we have decided to continue living the same way with a small change that we are gonna share same room. How wrong was I? Very wrong, as a pointer my wife delivered a boy baby last month.  I believe I picked a wrong tone to announce that. I'm a Dad now!!! ...and that I'm a responsible family man I started to plan future for my son, Sarveshwaran. Of course I don't want to be the stereotyped Indian parent pushing their child to choose a career of their liking instead of their offspring's. The best example to explain the worst effect of such attitude is Rahul Gandhi, forced into politics (if rumors are rit) brings down the legacy of party with single 'empowering' interview, I don't want that to happen to my child. The world has b

October Scribblings

Deepavali Enam Deepavali is all about crackers and sweets, for me joy starts with enam . It is customary in India that young people get blessed with wishes and money on auspicious days, this gift money is enam. With this money I buy second packet of bijili or pundu vedi, and will use them as weapons for war between Chellam illam and Kamalam illam. Cracking a pundu vedi is tough but rewarding, it requires bullet arm to make a horizontal throw with enough power to cross the vacant land and smash burst on the parapet wall, here it will leave a black mark which is not possible with bijili. Now I earn, I can buy what I want, still the joy that enam brings in me is fresh and silly! For those who are interested Chellam is my grandma, Kamala is our neighbor and I’m not doing this anymore; I don’t know pundu vedi is still available in market, it looks like a onion or unbroken garlic which will burst on forceful impact. Bullet arm is a cricketing term, where a fielder makes a flat throw from ou

Short story: Forbidden love

Setting: Senthil works in a IT service provider, his lead is Yamini, his good friend Surender takes care of seasonal decorations. A new member is going to join their team. The office was decorated with stars and bells, I could see small plastic tree peeping from every cubicle, Ribbons, hanging angles and ties made of shiny cloth were making the whole ODC glow. I looked at the far end of the cubicle where my seat is located, outright dull, Surender has done this in purpose; he knows am skeptic about birthday of Christ and I refer the day as X’mas and not the usual way. He came in front of me from nowhere “I respect your belief machi, I made sure your cubicle is not decorated!” , I had enough time to deliver the friendly punch he was expecting. Yamini called me to inform me that I’m late and formal introductions has already happened, and instructed me to come to pantry right away. Being in her team is hell and heaven, while you can enjoy the company of good-looking ;) team mates yo

Mobile phone network providers can rob you in the name of SMS recharge

I could not stop with local calls analysis article when the SMS tariff was even crueler on us. Here I present you my findings on how easily a network operator robs you, sad part you don’t even know notice it. As I did in my last post I use my own network provider Airtel for the purpose of analysis, and I’m deeply sorry to them for exposing their meanest tariff policies. Straight away I give you all the SMS tariff plans available for Chennai customers from Airtel. Following table is a screenshot from their website. Link - https://pay.airtel.com/online-payments/prepaidResponse.do SMS recharge tariff as listed in Airtel website Now for the analysis part, here plans Rs.18, Rs.49 and Rs.92 are standard & straight forward, the actual amount you pay is equal to recharge amount. So what about the rest – Rs.26, Rs.36 & Rs.61? They are vampires feeding on your talk-time. Previously the content in the bracket was “1 st  SMS of day charged @ 49 Ps” and now they are going to

Why you should choose tariff based on call log?

The article will analyze the tariff plans and tries to help end user find the best way to pick a plan. This will not be a discussion on why or how such charge is fixed but discussion will be on available plans. I’m going to use my network –Airtel for analysis so this will benefit me. To explain my model I’m going to further simplify by choosing only Prepaid- Local call rate cutters for Chennai circle for same period. Plan cost Tariff Period Rs.23 1p/sec 28 days Rs.46 40p/min 28 days Rs.69 35p/min 28 days Rs.85 30p/min 28 days Table 154.1 Local Calls Tariff Listing Naturally from this table you can see that the best plan is Rs.85 as it offers only 30 paisa per minute, while costly plan is Rs.23 as it’ll cost 60p per minute. But this interpretation seems very vague and this is what your network provider wants you to think – “The more you spend on cutter the more you save on talk tim

Walk with Freakonomist

I'm crossing off the long pending, strongly recommended book 'Freakonomics' from my 'Books to read' list. This book was first published in 2005, in the sense its published a decade ago and I still find the content fresh and very much related. I pick books after reading blurb, then I will choose to read if I find the preface and introduction interesting. I found this book to be unique at every level. 'The book doesn't carry any unifying theme' which is repeatedly accepted and quoted in the book which I find awkward. But Why should one have an unifying theme? because every other book has one. Both the question and answer is present in the book itself, such is the book. It is fulled with questions that are not asked by everyone and statistical answers (not empirical), this will amaze the ordinary being, as Mr. Confusion I found them legit. The book is actually collection of papers by Steven D. Levitt, economist, it is co-authored by Stephen J Dubner

If pen is mightier than sword then it could be gun

Fortnight back we had a t-shirt design contest in our office hosted by a very famous blogger. The contest was to come up with an awesome slogan that'll influence the readers to write more, yes we are blogging evangelist. It doesn't just end there you have to pick a plain t-shirt image and embed the quote in it, of course that's how it is design contest else it'll be slogan contest.  And my entry was a reflection of how I tend to use blog, obvious I broke the very first norm of contest hence I was hardly appreciated. But I was not demotivated exciting part was not winning but designing, and hence I share the designs with you guys. I love to be quoted as millennial, its almost like someone calling my Lt Gen - We just don't do things differently we do it with poker face. So I was talking about how I use blog, lets review my reviews - they are mostly critical. In the sense I’m more of a critic than reviewer (Remember Anton Ego of Ratatouille – that sort of thing

20 ways to use tummy to good effect

Be Big Be Happy Dear Readers, The post will have series of situation where you can use your tummy for good effect. I going to motivate you BIG time!  Caution: This might motivate you to become fat and unhealthy. ( But who cares as long as you are happy?!) Famine killer: I know, we all know famine is killer but statistics point that tummy is essentially extra fat that gets deposited so that it can be used in unforeseen situations where you don’t have food to eat. Famine is the first situation that comes to my mind! All your slim, lean friends will die of starvation while you can sit in a place reduce metabolism use all stored fat to cross bad days and wait for WHO/UN to arrive. The same can be said when you run outta money. Easy to demonstrate common sense: Lift etiquette – Leave way for people inside to come out else you can’t go into lift. This lift etiquette is so straight but so uncommon, so take pride in standing in the entrance and refuse to come out till they make en

Dominos Cold Pizza served with the worst customer care and service

It was a real good weekend, had a good mid-day sleep and woke up to order pizza as my cousins were visiting. As you might know my favorite pizzeria is Pizza hut, but since my cousin insisted and more importantly my better half was craving for choco lava cake I had to order it in Dominos(since pizza corner is already a tragedy ). The mood of weekend started to fall down with the time taken to deliver the pizza. I placed the order by 7:45pm, I didn't have any other work so I kept refreshing the page after placing order to see the progress in pizza tracker. Progressed from Ordered > Prepared > Baked > Packed > Dispatched in 27mins wow that's great now I'm going to get the pizza in 10-15mins. No that didn't happen I had to make 5 calls to Pizzeria station - 044 2238 7777 out of which first two answered, third one was mis-handled saying we'll deliver time might differ (that's interesting) and the next two were  severed  soon after I said "my order

RJ Balaji in as Vadacurry

Vadacurry is a perfect entertainment package – comedy, a romantic song, an item number, punch, villian, hero, noble cause – as we know, it is a masala movie. Movie revolves around lead male played by Jai and his immediate needs – getting Smart phone, the way he chooses to fullfill his need brings the neccesarily components to push the movie into vibration mode Director Saravana Rajan’s made the movie lighter enough to remove any sort of thrill from the movie, a team which has wide range of experience in providing laughter made this comedy-thriller into comdey-drama. The movie starts with RJ Balaji saying “my name is vadacurry, but I don’t have much to do here (ref. movie is titled as Vadacurry)”. Director gives Jai enough importance that almost any other character in the movie has little role to play, but when you leave the theater you know why its Vadacurry, without RJ Balaji movie might be rusty. Not a star cast unless you are going to consider Jei and Swathi as stars, whom I

Learning curve: SQL writing by Unlocking HR schema

Its been a long time since I have studied anything with enthusiasm or a goal to achieve. The last time was when I took MarkLogic CCP but I don’t remember anything on that now, I never got an opportunity to work on it, not even a POC. Now I’m part of study group which has a goal, to get certified in SQL writing. The learning is exiciting after all the java codes I write and debug its a refreshing change to use SQL. Wait a minute, does that mean I’m not using any SQL database at the back end? No, Yes – my application uses Oracle 11g but I’m not having any SQL developer to work with it, rarely I open SQL + to check if password is to expire. The bad part is that I have to fill boring tables to query on them, quering is natural to human but not recording :D Some guy said “I’ll find the laziest person to do toughest job so he finds a shortcut” guess he was rit! I found the lazy easy way to query without to having to record. Unlock the HR user So I found there is a user called HR wh

The Oath of the Vayuputras – Debacles

Shiva Trilogy – Tells all the mythologies we already know and poorly explains way that all are humans – what else can you expect from an atheist. Yes Amish Tripathi as we know is not a spiritual guy, he was an atheist but grew faith as he wrote book – an absolute marketing stunt. Thus Lord Shiva smokes marijuana/chillum/meth/ganja or in whichever term you want to identify tobacco. Poor Millennial crowd caught the least message drew tattoo and smoked marijuana. Coming to this book by reading the title I was sure that Vayuputras will have a great role to play in this last book but just one man from their tribe did and we know him by the name Shiva all along. Starting the review with so much negativity gives away all the content that will follow so let’s not do that. Oath of Vayuputras - this time arrow was of use Zipped Plot: Nagas guides Shiva to Vasudevs place, they all join together. Branga, Kashi also forms alliance with Shiva. Shiva sends his sons to conquer Ayodhya; the

The Secret of Nagas - Book Review

Amish Tripathi , banker turned self-proclaimed successful author’s second book in the Shiva Trilogy is ‘ The Secret of Nagas ’. The book starts with where it left of in first part where a Naga attacks Sati , the wife of protagonist Shiva aka Neelakanth . Then proceeds to reveal the secret about Nagas and secret that Naga themselves guards, and then secret about evil. The Secret of Nagas - Book Cover Content Setting: Upon defeating Ayodhyans of Chandravarshini clan Shiva realizes that they are not evil just that they are different, and Suryavarshinis have misunderstood and Shiva was mis-guided from there on. This makes Shiva to come to a decision that he’d travel to meet every tribe in India to learn who is good, who is evil. He also wishes to meet other tribes who are neither Suryavarshini n or Chandravarshini and for now convinced that Nagas are the source of evil. Plot Summary: Since the book had been around for long, I hope this will not be a spoiler. Shiva with his cl