For Feed readers only!

Hi guys!

This blog post is only for those of you who subscribe to my feed using a RSS/Atom Feed reader.

When I started blogging there were hardly a couple (read 2) of people reading my blog. But now I guess the count has increased to a number which I cannot count with one hand (read more than 5) :) !! So, I decided I change my feeds to a more professionally managed site (Feedburner)!

What this means to you?

If you are subscribed to my blog using an RSS/Atom Aggregator (eg Google Homepage/ Bloglines etc), the feed will go dead within a week. You will have to resubscribe to my feed using the following url:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/gmuz

If you were tracking my blog by visiting the site http://gmuz.blogspot.com, then there is no change for you.

I am sorry for the trouble! And thanks for reading and keep commenting :) !!

Airline travel

Okay, so the procrastinating me didn't stick to my own deadline of writing two blogs before Feb end :) !! Right now, I am in the Heathrow airport waiting to catch my connecting flight. Its 2 hours from now, and 2 hours for me is too short a time to do anything... You can't sleep because if you do so, there's a chance you might oversleep .. you can't sit and chit chat with strangers (I don't need to explain why :P !!). So I decided to utilize this time to write something. I bet this is a lot better way to spend my time..

Have already had a 10 hour flight before and my entire body is aching. Airline travel is an interesting experience. First you say goodbye to your family and feel low about it... Then comes the security check and you are scanned left right top bottom with no concerns for your privacy. Your bags are probed to the last pocket, innocent looks meet no concern. Then comes the cramped airline seat. The seats are designed soo good that if they were made any smaller, people like me would prefer go standing in the flight :) !! I believe 5 years from now, all airlines will have one big floor and every passenger will have to get his/her own sleeping bag and find a spot on the floor and sleep. Business and first class passengers will be treated with respect by giving them complimentary pillows along with their bags :) !!

Then comes the nutritious airline food. The less said about it the better.... I bet most of us have no idea what we are eating. I once ended up eating up the container ...

If there is one thing that has always intrigued me, its the airline Toilet. Each time I visit it, I feel like bowing down to the person who designed it. How could some one soo efficiently squeeze in sooo many things in a tiny space of 1x1 foot? Next time you board a plane, get up in the middle of the night (when everyone else is sleeping and there is no queue to visit the heavenly abode!) and study this place. There are shampoos, creams, tooth pastes, brushes, hot/cold water dispensers, towels and any other toiletries you can think of! I bet there is a Playstation somewhere inside too, I just couldn't find it out yet.

Then come the duty free shops. I bet all duty free shop owners consider airline travellers jet-lagged idiots who have no idea of the correct price of an item. Imagine a serial shopaholic like me finds the prices on some of the things ridiculously expensive (not that I refrain from buying anyways .. there comes the idiot part in me :) !!)

Lastly comes your co-passenger. If you take a window seat, you will get a co-passenger who is horizontally challenged (read obese) and sleeps for the entire time of the flight. So you have no chance to move out. Then, if you take an aisle seat then you get hyperactive neighbours who want to get out every 15 minutes, and the friendly air hostess steps on your foot each time that she passes by you :)!!

Well all said and done, I love airline travel, cause it makes me realize I am just a population statistic in this big bad world. I am just a boarding pass holding airline cargo who is given a seat and carries with me tonnes of other mundane stuff from one corner of the world to another.

Sigh.. how depressing :( !!

The Great Indian Art of Car driving

My apologies for getting lost for a while now. I have no lame excuses this time. My sister's wedding is less than 4 days from now. My computer at home is dead, and the net which is delivered by the infamous *cable walla* is not working because of an earthquake in Indonesia 1 week back. I have never felt more cut off from the (cyber) world, the way am feeling now!

Finally I landed up in a friendly neighbourhood cybercafe, and typing this blog cost me Rs.20 :) !! Hehe, so this one is an *expensive* blog, so you better appreciate!!

Most of you already know my undying attraction towards anything on 4 wheels (read cars!) and minutes after landing in India, I wanted to get behind the wheels of my stick shift (Santro..). However driving in US for more than 6 months made me realize that I had actually forgotten the *Great Indian art of car driving*.

Driving in India is an art. Period. No wonder not everyone in India can drive. Any monkey can learn to operate a car, but driving requires different skills. For the last week or so, I have been trying to understand this art again, and here are a few of my observations:

1. When you drive, you are the king of the road, and everyone else must understand and follow your will.
2. The bigger the vehicle you drive, the more respect you command on the road.
3. You can either drive on the right or the left of the road, as long as you yield to bigger vehicles coming in the opposite direction (vehicles smaller to your's must take care of themselves).
4. You yield to only those drivers who are more aggressive than you are. But the moment you yield, you let the other driver know your displeasure by honking loudly.
5. Pedestrians, cattle, stray dogs, and bicyclists do not exist. As long as they do not directly come in your path, they are an illusion and they should watch out for you for their own good.
6. Red traffic signals are used to decorate the road, they do not serve any purpose.
7. You should honk every 15 seconds for everyone around you to know that you are coming.

If you understand these basic rules and you know the geometry of your car to the last millimeter, then nothing can go wrong. You can squeeze your car in to the last millimeter and cause traffic jams and be proud about it.

Once I started following these rules, I figured that I was back to my roots, now I can comfortably drive in India. I guess I will have to go through the "California Driver's Handbook" once I am back in Uncle Sam's land :) !!!

Whirlwind tour of motherland

Most of my readers are my friends, so I bet you already know that I am on a 1 week work and 2 week vacation in India. I thought I say hi to all you guys!! Life has become a bit hectic (the bit part is an obvious understatement!). I am craving for sleep and food now :) !!!

All said and done, I do intend to continue blogging even while I am on vacation. So hold on... I have a personal deadline of writing atleast 2 blogs before February, so lets see how well I stick to it :) !!

Thanks for dropping in...

Road Trip

Yawn!! Living up to my reputation of procrastinating, though I originally intended to write a blog before the *dawn* of the new year (yeah! dawn makes it sound all the more important :) ), I somehow managed to get into 2007 without a post. All said and done, I decided I force myself to write today, before I get out of your oblivion for at least one more week.

I had 4 whole days of new year weekend (I know you guys are jealous, but I couldn't help mentioning it :P) and I successfully managed to do .. ahem .. nothing. I am really proud of my accomplishments. How many of you can actually sit at home for 4 days and not do so much as even reply to emails?

Well, I understand most of you must be wondering by now, that this guy has no specific topic in mind to write about, and hence he is just wasting his blog writing this and that. After all, if 4 years of engineering has taught me one thing, it definitely is to *attempt* to answer every question in the paper, knowing the subject being strictly not imperative :) !! Its like the essay I used to write when I was a kid. Remember those essays in 5 sentences we had to write about our Mom/Dad/Grandpa/Grandma/Dog/Cat etc? And I would always have the first sentence as 1) I have a [put subject here]. and end with 5) I love [put subject here] very much. So there was no problem filling up the rest of the 3 sentences.

Nostalgia apart, I had been on a tour to Las Vegas, Grand Canyon and Death Valley on Christmas weekend. I know this sounded like a dream vacation for most of you (even I felt so, till I went on it). Let me describe the tour, so that you guys can re-live the pleasure with me :) !! It was a 4 day *Bus* tour, and we covered more than 2100 miles in 4 days. If you do some simple calculations you will realize that most of our day time was spent in the bus going to our destinations, and the evenings were actually spent sleeping at the destinations.

I kinda figured out that it was more of a restroom (RR) tour of California, Nevada and Arizona. We were actually evaluating the RRs that would come on our route once every two hours. You can very well name a city, and I bet I will be able to tell you how good the RRs in that city actually are.

Here is a rough itinerary of what we did:

Day 1:
1) Evaluate the RR in the Starbucks @ the Bus Departure terminal .. Rating **
2) RR in San Jose .. Rating ***
3) RR in some esoteric city (have you guys ever tried to relieve yourself while holding your nose? Tried doing that here ...)

Anyways, in short, neither did I see Las Vegas (I am lying, I checked out the RRs in Bally's, MGM Grand and Stratosphere) nor did I see Grand Canyon (the tour guide gave us 1 hour to see Grand Canyon and the RR line was longer than the Golden Gate bridge! So I had to make a tough decision between, whether I want to see GC or whether I wanna relieve myself. I bet you figured out what I did :P)

But the optimist in me refuses to die. I finally decided, I can be a RR critic. I have read columns by food critics, and lonely planet's guides to "Places to see in Las Vegas". But I bet no one has ever written "A guide to the best Restrooms in Las Vegas". I think I am gonna en cash on my idea and put my experience to every one's use. But since you are my loyal readers, I will give you the advice for free :P. I found the one in Bally's to be the best. Can you imagine a men's restroom complete with a fresh towel for everyone who uses it, and also a cologne to spray on? Wow, that's a nice way to attract visitors :) !!

Jokes apart, from my personal experience I would like to warn everyone that, "never ever go on a bus tour, if you wanna enjoy your vacation!". Bus tours just let you take photos of all destinations but they don't let you assimilate it :) !!

Upcoming blog ... the difference between a restroom, washroom and a toilet.. so read on...

Happy New Year

Hiya there! Just thought I wish you all a happy new year 2007. To ring out the old and bring in the new, I thought I change my blog design for 2007. So here is a redesigned layout to help you to sleep when you read my blog. Those of you who use RSS readers, I don't think you ever noticed my template, so no change for you :)

This is probably my first new year where I have kept no resolutions at all. And I am proud of it cause if there are no resolutions, you are not gonna be worried about not keeping them :) !! So I decided to take the year as it comes, starting with no alarm to wake up today morning :) !!

Hello there readers!

This is an apology blog to all those who regularly read my blog :) !! I have been kinda caught up in other things over the past two weeks, and haven't had the time (or rather the inpiration) to write about anything.

And with the Christmas weekend coming up in a day, am all the more caught up in planning for my weekend ;) !! So there will be no blog for the entire of next week too...

I am trying to write this at 6:30 in the morning, as I wait for my roomie to get ready, so that I can take him to office :) !! Learn time management from me ;) !!!

Merry Christmas!

Mr & Mrs Girish?

Hiya reader! Welcome back to another edition of my ego-centric rantings online :) !! Hey hey, you can't complain. You are on my blog, and I can write only about me . I tried writing about world peace earlier, but somehow neither the peace keepers nor the trouble makers got my message. So, I decided I stick to writing about the things I know best. You guessed it right .. me myself and Girish :) !!

A couple of weeks back I got an innocuous looking letter in my mailbox (Post box you geek. There is life outside the Internet and email too!). It was addressed to a "Mr and Mrs Girish"!! That was shocking.. It proved two things:

1) I look too old to be single
2) I dress too shabbily to be actually a single!

Singles are supposed to be good looking and on the lookout for ... ahem .. you know, the "fairer sex". And I look all withdrawn and content with life, kind of a married guy with four kids who has seen and done it all, who works late in the office and comes home to a nagging wife, and crying kids!

That mail kinda hurt me (a lot!), but then I thought I will give the sender the benefit of doubt, and continued my peaceful non-existence. Until day before when I happened to meet a man dressed as a Santa and mistook me to be the father of my colleagues' 16 year old son! Now, a self-respecting man like me, can only take this much. I imagined myself punching the ol' Santa in his stomach, pulling his beard and telling him "Man gimme a break, I am just 25 :(" !! Being from the country of the great Gandhi, I let peace prevail.

This blog was more of a warning for you. So next time when you meet me, admire my youth :) !!

Shopping

Here comes Saturday and I am in all enthusiasm to write. I have realized that in the last two blogs, I have written too much about my fat. Enuff said, no more cracking jokes on my transport vehicle on this planet now (my body!). When we aliens invaded this planet (That is a closely guarded secret! But I know human beings to be so naive that even if we aliens leak a secret unless its sleazy it doesn't spread :)), we had no option of choosing bodies. So I got into the one that I got. Now I have to stick with it :) !!

Now, let me get onto some other interesting topics.. shopping!
With Christmas just two weeks from now, you can't escape sales, discounts, mail in rebates etc. etc. A day is incomplete without at least 10 visits to Deals2buy. I have realized that slowly and steadily I am being infected by SSS (Serial Shopping Syndrome).

What is SSS?
SSS is a new type of disease infecting wanna-be geeks like me. The victim in question gets attracted to words such as "sale", "buy one get one free", "mail in rebate" etc. And then the victim's subconscious mind takes over. Thereafter the subject reaches for its pocket, withdraws its credit card and buys the product in question. In advanced cases (like mine!) the victim has already memorized its credit card number, so it just goes and enters it online and buys things left right and center. At times, while driving down the road, this disease suddenly takes control of your hand and makes you enter a shopping mall parking lot.

There is no known cure for this disease.

Symptoms:
Well, how do you figure out that you have SSS? Its simple, if you tend to stock upon things because they are on sale, or because you will need them 45 years from now (like buying a walking stick when you are 25, or buying diapers when you are still single!), or if you find out that the mail man delivers parcels to you everyday, and you have no idea what is inside, cause you do not remember what all you bought online.

I am now a victim of this disease and I am hoping someone somewhere saves me! The obvious short term cure is that you guys donate a few hundred bucks per head so that I can buy some more stuff for this shopping season ;) !!

Talking of shopping and money reminds me of Microsoft Money. I use it to manage my expenses. I know I know, I should use GnuCash instead. Trust me, I went through a lot of pains to use it (including installing Ubuntu 6.06 LTS on my laptop, configuring my stupid Broadcomm wireless card etc). But at the end of all that, I realized that there was a small problem. I do not understand accounting :) and you ain't gonna get any where if the only knowledge of double entry accounting you have is by reading its article on Wikipedia :) !!

Money on the other hand is a typical Microsoft product (read - extremely user friendly! I bet when MS makes products the end users in their mind are chimps like me :)) Well, coming back to the topic of Microsoft Money, it kinda keeps on reminding me that I will go bankrupt if I continue with my current expenses :) !! Hehehe, typical doomsday warnings which I conveniently ignore. After all, predictions always go wrong :) !!

Money also helps me to plan my life ahead. So I told Money that I want to retire at the ripe old age of 35 .. and it predicted that I need to earn at least 500 times what I earn per year now for me to live a happy life in an old age home somewhere in *istan :) !!

That doesn't leave me with much of an option but to look for alternate sources of employment after the age of 35 :( !!! So here is a list of things that I have compiled, which I can probably do..

What I would like to do after I retire at 35?

Become a full time cook: I know most of you who have eaten my food (or atleast tried to look at it!) will die laughing at this statement. I know, I know my cooking is absolutely bland and tasteless and you would rather graze on the lawn outside than eat my food. But let me explain. I will be a cook for someone who is very diet conscious. That way, the person won't be able to eat what I cook and would automatically control his/her diet :) !! Solutions are always out there, you should just know how to look for them :P !!

Non-lethal weapon for crowd disposal: For those of you who don't know, I have awesome vocal chords. I can sing and make the slowest of snails zap by me. I know there are bad singers out there, but what I do is just generate a lot of noise. Cacophony at its best :). Imagine how useful I would be for the Police to control unruly crowds. Instead of using tear gas and other tactics, they could just make me sing "Unchained Melody" in my *original voice* and in no time, not only the protesters, but also the police will be displaced from the scene.

No wonder when I introspect, I find myself to be the most talented person on this planet :) !!

Amazon filler items

Hiya shoppers! I bet most of you (like me) do not buy products online unless you get free shipping :) !!

Amazon has many products on which it offers free shipping if the total cost of your order is above 25$. Now the problem that I face many times is that my total cost is around 19-23$ and then just because I can't cross that 25 margin, I end up paying 5.99$ on shipping.

Today I came across this site which gives you a list of "Amazon filler items" so that you buy them and take your order total above 25$. I just bought a 22$ camera tripod with free shipping thanks to a filler item (Sony wrap around earphones!).

Check out the site... SlickDeals.net

And that reminds me, I don't get any referrals for doing this :) !! I know, most of my friends have this misconception that Mozilla Firefox gives me referral bonus for forcing them to use Firefox on their computers :) !! I have this something about small companies that compete with the giants. Thats why I swear by Mozilla and AMD (have been using their processors for the last 4 years with AMD Athlon 64 in my desktop and AMD Turion 64 in my laptop) !! Wait until they become giants, and then I will start hating them too :P !!!