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When I was up North, I used to think of Hyderabad as a very nice place to be in. I dreamt of smooth roads, beautiful gardens, and most of all an enthusiastic and highly professional working class. I included the latter in my list because many MNCs opened their offices here, and not in any other Indian city. Low labor and infrastructure costs were the hallmark of all cities in India. So what made the MNCs choose Hyderabad? The answer that came to my mind was the working class of Hyderabad. I couldn’t have been more wrong!
The working class of Hyderabad really sux. I must add that I am not referring to the entire population (including myself), this post is dedicated to those special souls doing blue-collared jobs. Carpenters, electricians, washer men, house maids, drivers etc. rule the roost and making them do jobs for you is impossible. Believe it or not, Tina and I have went without a house maid for more than ten days at a stretch. Its not that maids aren’t available. Contrary to that, take a walk down any road and you will spot at least ten of them. But you can cry, crib, shout, or plead but they will not come to your house for work.

Continue reading “The Deadpans of Hyderabad”

Yes, India’s World Cup campaign is almost over. When I when I checked the score last they were 161 for 9. One after the other, all Indian batsmen have gifted their wickets to the Sri Lankans. After hitting a big hundred against Bermuda, Sehwag thought that his bad patch was over and became complacent. Yuvraj seemed to be on a suicide mission, backing up to the middle of the pitch to take a single that just wasn’t there. What was he thinking? Even the once great Tendulkar fell cheaply, which is happening quite often these days.

See winning or losing is all part of the game, what bothers me most about India’s exit from the World Cup is the way they lose. Forget about trying to win, they don’t even try making a fight out of it. They fall like a pack of cards. This is how India is. The bottom line is that the Indian top order (Ganguly, Sachin, Dravid, and Sehwag) have about a hundred centuries between them, but today they played like kids. Their records are good enough to keep them in the team, in reality at least half of them should be dumped for good, including Sachin and Sehwag

I am really looking forward to see how the Indian news channels react to this. They are a spineless lot and will have little trouble in blasting the same team and coach, who until a few hours ago were like gods.

Earlier today, when I tried running Notepad on the system, the Windows Media Center window diaplayed, until yesterday double-clicking notepad displayed the Notepad application. I tried opening “notepad.exe” couple of times but the result was the same. I tried other applications as well, but again, the Windows MCE window just kept popping up.

Wonder what’s wrong, is it a virus, malware, or is somebody using a trojan to stop me from completing my upcoming best seller, “Taking Blind Monkeys for a Shit” Let me do a thorough scan of the system and see what comes up. Will post once I am back.

UPDATE:  After spending the last two hours trying to rid the system of theW32/Sality.t parasitic virus, I am back online, in all possible ways.

What this wicked virus does is that it infects all Windows portable executable (the ones that end in “.exe”) on a system, and launches an application other than the one it belongs to. In my case it turned out to be “Windows Media Center Edition” hence the title. Guess I must apologize to the folks at Microsoft for falsely accusing them, but nah forget it, they can’t hear me anyways so why bother.
But then again, you can’t blame me entirely for it. I tried launching every other application on my system, but each time time the Windows MCE window displayed. Microsoft too must share the blame because ultimately it was one of its apps that got infected. Then I got the brainwave that this could be MS’s latest trick to trouble people like me [:)]. The only executables that didn’t get infected were the ones I had running at that time, namely, Firefox, FlashGet, AVG Anti-Virus etc.

This is where I made my second mistaker. I decided to reboot the system before running a virus scan. After rebooting, even these applications stopped working, so running a virus scan was no longer an option. Ultimately, I was left with one of two choices, either I could plug my hard drive into another system and run a scan, or I could format the drive and reinstall everything. Yes, I lost all my data as well because the virus would not allow me to burn a DVD. Most of you would have chosen the first one. But I guess I’m too lazy to go looking into people’s systems. I decided to reinstall everything even at the cost of losing all my data, which included six movies, and my master piece I had written to educate people who have pet monkeys.

Now everything is up and running and I am protected in more ways than one. Unfortunately, the world will have to wait a few more months so that I may be able to re-wtrite my book. Hope they don’t go on a rampage on hearing about this.

March 18th 2007 will always be etched in the memory of cricket lovers from across the world. Less than 24 hours after Pakistan’s exit from the World Cup at the hands of Ireland, Woolmer was found unconscious in his hotel room in Jamaica and was pronounced DOA (Dead on Arrival) on being taken to hospital.

I can never forget the look on Woolmer’s face after Pakistan’s loss to Ireland. It looked as if he would shatter into a billion pieces if touched or spoken to. The manner in which he packed his gift to World Cricket, the laptop, it seemed that life would never be the same again for him. Indeed not only did life change, he lost it altogether.

Continue reading “Did Pakistan's World Cup Exit Hasten Woolmer's Demise?”

I managed to get hold of a Windows Vista RTM DVD in December 2006 much before the official release date of January 30th, 2007. I was so excited that I sat up late one night to install it on my Lenovo 8823 3AQ desktop. The installation was slick and fast, taking just 20 minuses to install. But this is where the feeling of excitement turned into one of despair. As I discovered, Windows Vista had turned my Pentium IV powered desktop into something similar to one using a Celeron processor. Not to mention, the graphics sucked big time, the awesome Aero and Flip3D features just weren’t there, which was fair enough as my system didn’t have either an AGP card or an AGP slot which I could have used to insert one. Lenovo had taken Intel’s 865 chipset and removed few slots (including AGP) to bring down the price.

Anyway, after shedding a bucket full of tears, I removed Vista and reinstalled Windows XP, hoping that soon enough I would get a new board, a high-end graphics card (hopefully nVidia), and more RAM (the Lenovo system came with a paltry 512 MB.)

Continue reading “A Bitter Sweet Transition to Windows Vista”