Closing of HSBC credit card == End of woes

Posted: May 25, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Service Experience | 2 Comments »

A story  in rediff reminded me of the decision I should implement with HSBC credit card. For long time in US as well as India I did not want a credit card and did not posses one. It was a blissful life, most of the things could be accomplished through the debit card and official work could be done through the corporate card. My experience with the credit card is two fold –

1. It gives inflates sense of buying power.

2. The sub-clauses, fine print is all convoluted and against the customer. In India recently it was reported that most of the banks process the payments slowy so as to “levy” the charges etc.

In my case in month of april 2007 I knew I had overspent and did not want to delay the payment so dropped the payment for that month earlier than 10th april, which somehow the company failed to connect to me and came back after the due date to ask for another cheque and I was told no late payment fees etc will be charged. They took another cheque for same amount. By that time I came to know I have been charged late fees and something etc. This is after confronting on 22nd april about earlier cheque not being encashed by them or the fact that latter cheque too has been given.

I have decided to end the card and not plan to get another.  Reason – no timely statement, no timely encashment of cheques given on time.

Do not buy local edition of books

Posted: May 23, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Reading, Service Experience | 4 Comments »

Other day as I am prone to do, I was visiting the bookshop in jayanagar and planning to spend time and money on books. I saw one of the books which I wanted to buy for long time but was apalled to see the quality of the publication. It was horrible compared to regular copy you can get on corner. (It is not mainstream book, otherwise a copy would have been available). Here I am ready to pay a good price for a book but unable to get the complete feel and look and instead being served with bad version. I decided not to buy the book. Heck Amar chitra katha is printed on better pages. This all links into Ani’s discussion about developing bric nations getting raw deal/standards for similar things.

Cost of living in Bangalore – a perspective

Posted: May 21, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Buying apartment, Service Experience | Leave a comment »

After Chetanya went ahead and published the links to Ani’s hard work, I had to step up give him the push. What Ani/self had done was to collect information about staying costs across general activities and provide an idea to many of the folks who might have that question. This is Bangalore specific and data wrt rent can go down depending on where you stay in Bangalore.

In general Bangalore is very expensive compared to other metros. The apartment sizes are reducing  and many of the folks have mutliple flats etc which are being rented out at exhorbitant rates. Prices are coming down but since money flows here from rich Telugu land, malabar land, Tamizh area real estate prices have maintained high peak. The infrastructure status is such that any thing which gets done – is good thing.

Some more new folks

Posted: May 21, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Friends | 4 Comments »

I decided to add new folks who have diverse interests and lucid posts.  All through nonoscience(arunn) -

1. Sunil  -  I made a light remark, which hopefully will forgive me for and continue to write the lucid thoughts.

2. CuriousCat - Has some of the best posts on Vegetarianism , rahman,  rahaman(corrected after “ivy-generally” pointed out the problem with the link).

3. Mohan - just see the quine post

Adding new folks

Posted: May 18, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Travel, visualization | 5 Comments »

After visiting non0science (nOnoScience) (via Suhasini) for few times I have decided to put him into the blogroll as the writing is witty, diverse and has more depth. I finished reading Stephen Few. After waiting for Tufte’s book I went through this book which criticized modern “dashboards”,  reports presentation and came out with winning colors wrt to dashboard information presentation. I needed something like this for long time after being frustrated with loads of  data and lack of good representation techniques. So hopefully in the current project we will be able to come up with better looking, more impactful dashboard which can provide insight.

Via nOnoscience - I picked up Mohan’s site which provided John Hick’s enjoyable paper on Web Typography. I found wonderful chart from Stephan Few’s site with good way of presenting information.  

Good smiles of the week follow

1. Somehow I have stumbled on balancing life and had the heartiest laugh in long time. Very -2 nicely written and invokes all the memories of the ncc camp.

2. Situational vegetarian habits  had me in split. I concur – no logic suffices in most situations. Post on Rahman - bring back the similar memories – actually I always maintained the doubts about Rahman till Guru Sridhar made me listen to May maadham about sometimes crappy work like ” Rukumani Rukumani” (think of Mani rathnam picturising it)”. I guess the translated Hindi lyrics turned out to be the most unthinkable I had heard to date in those days.

Forced to post :) – “God delusion” == “No God Delusion”

Posted: May 16, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Religion | Leave a comment »

Dawkin’s book is good discussion subject which enrages either side. The challenge with this book is that it dismisses everything else and says it is right which is as good/bad as the confirmed religious right nutheads do. If you do not believe – good for you. If you believe – good for you. Move on. Don’t take yourself and beliefs so seriously. It does not matter in the end in face of death. Let each have his opium and find his/her own conclusion.

YABA needs some mojo :) , so the post.

<afterthought>

Their will always a challenge with straight jacketed religion with dos and donts with one authority in form of center/harbinger of goodness/books. But religion is not the only problem with this world.  Bigotry of any kind is dangerous.  True religion or lack of it or thoughts related to it will always have to be understood personally. To say having atheism or having religion will solve the challenges and just opposing for the sake of it either view is dumb. </afterthought>

Virtualization

Posted: May 11, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized, virtual machines | Leave a comment »

In an attempt to kickstart writing , I decided to cherry pick few from old home and start this blog. I collected bunch of papers, books while trying to understand the virtualization over sometime. I have just put them together in one place for people to refer to.

Core

  •  ESA/390 Interpretive execution arch, foundation for VM/ESA
  •  Xen & art of Virtualization  
  • Virtual distributed Environments in Shared infrastructure
  •  Intel Virtualization technology
  • Virtual Machine Monitors: Current Technology and Future Trends (Rosenblum, Garfinkel)

    • Other

  • Design and Implementation of the Second Extended Filesystem (Card) 
  •  The Google Filesystem (Ghemavat)
  • Zebra Striped FS
  •  Frangipani
    Books

  • Smith and Nair, Virtual Machines: Versatile Platforms for Systems and  Processes, Morgan Kaufman, 2005
  • Wolf and Halter, Virtualization: From the Desktop to the Enterprise, APress 2005

    • Links

    Bottomline – this is not groundbreaking new stuff. Only recently since last 3-4 years it has caught the imagination of consolidators/dev-test teams/data center folks etc.  Only about tiny 5% of the servers have been virtualized if you see the analyst reports.

    Hello world!

    Posted: May 11, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Moving | 3 Comments »

    I am moving from my old home . I need ability to create clean simple blog entries. Let us see how long wordpress effort lasts. 

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