Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Connecting to Internet in new PG.

I shifted to a different PG from company provided guest house. The first thing I wanted to ensure was internet connectivity in the new PG.I had a wifi connectivity in guest house. I thought of having the same in PG but I was told that getting a wifi from airtel was a tedious process as it requires address proofs and it will take 1-2 weeks to get it. Airtel has very good GPRS offers these days. So I took a new airtel connection here which is yet to be activated. So I am still using my Karnataka airtel number for calls and internet access.
Well after unpacking my things I switched on my lappi and tried to access internet through nokia PC suite and found an error that my remote access connection service is stopped. To increase my laptop speed I had stopped some services which I felt I can stop.I just opened services windows and tried to start it but it had dependent services which were stopped(to increase speed of laptop). If I could have explored the services window properly I could have started the service in 2 mins. But I first thought to google the solution for this. Since I had no internet access, I called up my friend and told about this error and asked him to see the possible solution for this error. He was trying from his end and meanwhile I uninstalled nokia pc suite and installed it again thinking it would resolve my problem even though this was not at all required.
Later I googled out the solution and it turned out to be very simple. On checking the properties of the service there was a tab listing all the dependent services, I just started them and Bingo! My service started. I thought of accessing the net. But since I reinstalled nokia pc suite and for some reason my laptop was throwing another issue “USB connected in non compatible code”. I guess the uninstallation screwed some compatible drivers for my phone.
I needed to download these drivers in my laptop but I can’t connect my phone to laptop. Then I tried a new thing, I used Bluetooth to connect my computer to internet via phone and downloaded the drivers. Then I tried connecting to my phone to laptop and it finally worked. So i could post my blogs again.
So that was an action packed 3 hours for me, what I learnt was don’t do unnecessary things to solve any given problem and if we explore all options on anything on computer we can resolve our computer issues in less time than googling it out and wasting time. Third thing is even if we go in the wrong direction don’t be disheartened as it will help in exploring new solutions and learning new things. I learnt to connect to internet via Bluetooth in above episode.
So moral of the story is “all izz well”.

Monday, February 1, 2010

First weekend in Delhi

Weekend was approaching and i had two plans one to shift to a new PG and to roam around Delhi. I had been hearing about a lot of people in northern side of India. I had a first experience of it on this weekend. I was told by one of my friends of lucknow(in UP) that people might misguide you here when you ask them way. Well it was 6 years back when he told me that and I experienced what he told then, now. I was with my colleague in Connaught place of Delhi and we had seen in map Jantar mantar was very near to that place. We asked a passer by how to reach there, well he guided me how to reach there. Following his guidelines I was wondering if we are lost because the distance between 2 places was hardly 200m and we were walking for almost 25 mins. On returning we just tried some other route and reached back to our original place in just 10 min!

Jantar mantar(Yantra Mantra) is an observatory for movements of sun,moon etc in Delhi and was built on some great mathematical precision. It’s also shown in BBC’s documentary “The story of maths”. I don’t want to detail the maths behind it here, you can Google it out. Well the place is not exciting unless you know some facts of the place which I was aware of luckily. The good thing about it was, it was well maintained.We did the routine task of taking photos at different places. I am not much interested in taking pictures. I feel very strange when I see people simply clicking pictures at historical or other important places as if they have visited the place to have a nice background for them:).

Well what I really enjoyed this weekend was the first travel experience in Delhi Metro. Every person moving inside the station was thoroughly checked. I felt like I was in a different country for a while. The stations were vey tidy and so were trains, I guess people respected the fact that they are travelling in one of the best train services. Let me brief how the system works.

You need to take a token before entering the gates, the token is a kind of smart token when swiped open the gates. Once you enter the gates, go to the platform from where you need to take the train. Maps and ofcourse people(not always) will help you in this. Once you get down from the train at your destination station, you should move towards exit gates and the gates will open once you drop your token into the box attached to the exit gates. Well, the system is smart enough to handle travelers who think of cheating by taking a token to a particular location and moving further. Don’t try that.

We came back by cab by 8PM. Well that was an interesting day and came the hectic day of Sunday when we shifted from our company provided guest house to our PG. Though our PG is very near to guest house, it was a hectic task of loading and unloading your whole luggage on the same day. I believe many of you might have experienced all of this.

Well, thanks for your patience.