Saturday, October 10, 2009

New horizons & concerns

2 posts on the same day!!! Someone must be thinking that I am making up for my relative absence in the blogsphere.

Well I am not so absent! I am on twitter most of the time. And might continue to remain so if twitter doesn’t get blocked in my office anytime soon. Recently I find that I cannot be on twitter as frequently as I used to.

The reason: caught up with some work, away from my pc most of the time, and my mobile internet sucks. But mainly its work. It is researching new stuff, doing some web sites, etc. All of this because I have become a full-time developer in the ofc. Got recently designated as a sr. programmer.

I’ve done a couple of projects that has got me thinking about what is required to keep the show running from a continued production standpoint. You just can’t do the development and cut the ribbon for production to commence. You have to virtually be there all the time, even if it annoys those who have higher stakes in running the show. This is just another facet of the call center life – one that is not bragged about mostly.

But life is not without its share of criticisms and prejudices. I don’t know whats the road ahead. But who does? Life is still going to be like a coconut that fell into the river stream. It can only go where the currents take it to.

PS: borrowed those words from an education seminar I attended way back while I was in school. Still true today wrt students who do engg/medicine counseling.

Router Consequence

Got a new credit card and all. They said that I had to spend something above Rs. 1000 to activate that crap. And I was looking forward it. I figured I wasn’t so indulged into the world of credit cards; so why not venture into it.

So my thoughts were instilled with what to buy for myself that would cost around that much? I thought of buying a titan watch. So I visited ebay.in, checked out on the prices, fixed a budget, and was prepared to make the purchase. Had a model and an appropriate price in mind too.

I shouldn’t have done that

I went to the titan showroom in velachery, and was disappointed to know that the model I had in mind was not there and the price was not what I expected it to be. ebay sells things cheaper! And then I was focused on buying a watch from ebay itself. Then as I saw all the models; titan was not really my style. I mean it wasn’t what I liked. There were cheaper watches that looked even better! Classic! May be prosaic, but classic.

The only dilemma was how am I supposed to spend Rs. 1000 with a watch which costs much lesser than that…?

At around that time (i.e. the same week), my room mate was demanding that we somehow share the internet connection we had. He had a modem splitter in mind. But I wasn’t too sure of it. We asked the broadband customer service if this was a good solution; they said it could cause network problems. It looked like a small device almost like a telephone socket. My room mate was suggesting we don’t buy anything too costly. But my mind was somehow fixed on buying the router. It would save us the headache.

So I went on ebay again, looked up at the prices. I was going to buy it from some shop in velachery itself. I was hoping to achieve a good bargain. And again the prices were dismally too high. Damn, ebay sells better and cheap! Out here most wireless routers start from Rs 2000. The non-wireless routers were priced around Rs. 1600. On ebay the same wireless router I looked at cost only Rs. 1500. Plus, shipping and that came up around to Rs. 1600.

I thought to my self, ebay it is… Thus I have ended up with a wireless router. And I used my credit card to pay for it too. Lets see how the bill haunts me though…

Because of my routers wireless capabilities I used my broadband connection to connect to the internet via the browser in my mobile phone. Gmail, and twitter mobile sites downloaded in a swish! It is awesome. I had downloaded some cool apps from the nokia ovi store for my mob (nokia 5800). It would have taken eternity if I had connected to the site and downloaded with the internet connection provided by my mobile network (aircel). Plus, now my room mate can sit and do his research for online stock trading and stuff and I can do my research and blogging at the same time.

This wasn’t my first purchase from ebay though. I purchased a clipper for my dad. In the end, I don’t know, a simple credit card ended up making me buy everything off ebay.