So this weekend I went to brand factory to scoop up deals. And guess who I bumped into – Vijay Mallya himself and had a quick guftagoo with him.

VM : Hey venkat what are you doing here?

VK : Oh recession time in US boss and the hike letters are just not coming. But you tell me what are YOU doing here instead of roaming around with your wife in Louis Vuitton showroom?

VM : Louis Vuitton – yes yes my wife wanted to go there. I had to lie to my wife that I have a board room meeting . I heard they are selling Royal Challenger’s TShirts 2 for price of 1. Tell me if you find it. You know I have sunk so much money and pride and now I am really struggling to pay these pensioners. Have to cut costs to keep them well fed.

VK : Its alright. You have world class players in your team they will turn it around.

VM : Really? Tell me do you believe in it?

VK : No. hehe

VM : Damn you. Anyway – coming back to my team – you know I cannot fire any one. Seems I have to pay 3 years worth of money. Have to live with these pensioners for 3 more years. Then will wash my hands dry of this mess. Cricket is a bad sport you know. I was reading Outlook – and you know instead of thrashing the cricketters they are taking their side. They are painting me bad. I just cannot believe it. It seems I should not expect victory. Then why should I be paying all these gentlemen all the dough. Just does not make sense.

VK : I understand your frustration Mallu. Do what they do in NFL and MLB – trade the non performers next season.

VM : Who will buy them?

VK : Sweeten the deal a bit. Give your cheer leaders free.

VM : Now thats an idea. Anyway I heard that Mukesh is also visiting Brand factory today. I gotto leave before he sees me.

VK : Mukesh? Does not ring a bell

VM : Woh Ambani bhai. We are in the same boat – dont you know that.

VK : Oh then I will hang around for some more time and have a chat with him too. Nice talking to you boss.

“Wow I am so excited this is my first 20-20. That Dhoni will not let me play one day nor 20-20. Now here is my chance to prove him wrong. Imagine if I hit it big I can do more advertisements. Already I am an icon. Take that you Dhoni fool. Mallya will let me fly one of his kingfisher flights, or let me drive one of his F1 cars and put me bare chested like Fisichella and Sutil in one of the volvos, and I will dominate Bangalore like never before. Perhaps they will rename airport road as rahul dravid road. Then that loser blogger venkat who commutes on airport road every day will have to say my name.

Now let me concentrate. In test I have a full day before I hit my zone. But the umpire will say it’s stumps and I have to start all over to get into my zone. Here already those Washington red skin cheerleaders have distracted me enough. And this Ishant Sharma is on the other side. Its getting difficult to see the ball nowadays – perhaps I have to see a doctor. Gotto ask Sachin or Saurav who they are seeing. Somehow they are able to keep their heads above water. Let me concentrate. If I send this ball to the ropes the crowd will start chanting my name. Oh how it was at one point in my career. Even if I defend the ball the commentators will go gaga over it – and the crowd will appreciate the style. I do not know what has changed. Perhaps I will show these T20 fastfood buffs how you can defend the ball in style.

Bring it on Maga. Ok here comes the ball. Man this Ishant is quite tall. I will tell Pepsi not to feature him next to me in my ads – he will make me look really short. What was that noise. Oh crap my leg stump is on the floor – how did that happen. Alright time to hang my head down and put a stunt as if I am disappointed at this lose of wicket. I am the captain right. If I do not act well perhaps they will think I am not committed enough. I hope they do not show the new ad that I shot yesterday for that – what was the product? – anyway it doesn’t matter – it will be quite embarrassing if they show that ad now. But I hope they show some other ad soon and I go off the tv screens. The crowd is anyway watching the cheer leaders. Neck is hurting. Why do not they make an underground tunnel to the dressing room from the pitch directly. Have to go through this ignonimity often.

Anyway why should I care. I am making 4.5 crores in this one month. Tomorrow have to make an appointment with my auditor if I can get this waived some how. Hey venkat want to look at my tax return? Oh you are busy writing a post about me. Carry on dude, now let me go relax and pray the wickets fall soon so I can go home and get some sleep. Today traffic will be horrible – these damn IT people. “

Last week I got on beach ( in Thoughtwork’s parlance – rest of the world calls it the bench for awaiting project allocation ). And I got vista ultimate installed in my Dell 620, 2GB RAM. Had to make some free space – actually lots of it – to install vista. Then once installation began I got an error on step 1 – An installation error has occurred. Restart installation. I did that a few times till my co beacher found that you need not enter the key and click next – thats what I did. Later I found while activating that the key I have is for enterprise – perhaps thats why the installation error?

Now I glanced at my harddrive after the installation. It had consumed 10Gigs. Now thats lot of stuff. Is the OS going to predict my next click?

Being an ardent Mac fan and an ubuntu fan I had lot of expectations for this contender. However I had to turn off aero’s animations because its not smooth. I turn off compiz’s goodiness too because it gets in my way. Only in OS X I let the graphics be on because they do not hinder me.

Pluses :

1. Hibernate and waking is instantaneous – just like how my (now) dead 800MHz, G3 ibook used to do in 2002. Good job MSFT – finally you have recreated something thats been there for ages.
2. The dethrottling controls on the battery power icon – it turns off network adapter. I dont know if the network adapter is a sucker but I feel good that my laptop’s battery is stretched.
3. Search button on start. So useful.
4. Network – finally MS has got it right. Connects to my home wireless internet – automatically. For some reason in xp I had to manually search and discover every time.

Cons :

1. User Access control or some feature the MS overlords thought about – gave me a headache till I turned it off. Deleting a harmless file – does it warrant an annoying warning. Each and every step it annoys you. Dont they have high paid usability analysts – how didnt they see it?
2. Its not smooth and gliding – I cannot blame my laptop – come compiz running on the other side is so smooth and gliding? same hardware right – when I come oranges to oranges why does vista aero suck so much?
3.Indexing is a joke. Howcome I never read any complaints from leopard users about timemachine being a drag. I got a good performance boost by turning off indexing ( Thanks Sanchit )

Can go on but now time to play with my sonny. He is now up and wants attention !! More fun than talking about vista.

is hidden here : http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/downloads/ls/lsds/?S_TACT=105AGX13&S_CMP=LSDL

go kill yourself.

it was smooth sailing on my new amd 64 bit kickass box. And suddenly eclipse failed to start with this error message : java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: eclipse/configuration/org.eclipse.osgi/bundles/104/1/.cp/libswt-pi-gtk-3235.so: eclipse/configuration/org.eclipse.osgi/bundles/104/1/.cp/libswt-pi-gtk-3235.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Also my jdk was java_1_5_05..so I downloaded jdk_1_5_09 and all was well. Also I remember having some plugins – for web development – perhaps they screwed it up – anyway hope this helps some one.

Here are some of my observations the past year.

I got back to India for good during the middle of 06 – after 6 years in US. There was lot that had changed meanwhile.

* Any bill gets rounded to 50 paise. No more 5,10,20 and 25 paises. And I see 50 paise rairly too.

* Indicas – it was a time when I was working in TCS the GL ( Group leaders ) got a Tata indica free or for some discounted rate I dont remember – and were going gaga about it – now 7 years later Indicas have replaced the black and yellow ambassador taxis. They look good nevertheless – but the mere sight of an Indica brings some anger in me – daily I see thousands on airport road waiting to cut into my lane( lane – something thats in the figment of my imagination ) – and also on the road – parked in the middle – creating a traffic jam. I dont know the GLs still drive aroun d in their indicas or given them away to the taxi wallahs.

* Pulsar -somewhere in the middle of 04 or 05 I dont remember – heard about this new pulsar which people were buying in droves. I thought – no one can shake hero honda’s stranglehold on the market – but I was shocked seeing the black good looking pulsars everywhere. The new one is even more awesome – led tail lights, digital display dashboard. The roads are full of good looking bikes – unicorn, apache, cbz…bikers paradise this land is !! And hero honda’s net profit dipped by 20% for the first time in its history in the last quarter.

*Cellphones – its a festival everyday everywhere – you get to hear long lost tunes, there is this colleague of mine in another project – who has malgudi days tv serial tune – every time it rings it makes me smile – tananaanaaa tannaanaa !! Only issue is train journeys are a pain with all the phones going off all around you. But its a festival out here – should just enjoy it !!

*Indian railways – Its been 7 months since we got back – make atleast one trip every month on train, and all the tickets get booked on internet – havent visited those railway booking counters at all – a big big BIG pat for the folks who made this happen.

*Cricket – give me a break please. There are dedicated sports channels ( what happened star sports, ESPN to all those rugbies, dart throwing competition, trick ball billiards ) – its that boring game all the time, every time. And yesterday – after dont know how long – Mr.TendulAdmanPeddlerOfAllStupidThingsWeDontWantWasAGreatBatsmanOnceButNowBoringMeToDeathkar
hit a century on a flat pitch ( where the other Mr.Rahul….fill up with more stupid things…Dravid was able to hit a 50+ ) and headlines screamed – Tondulkar and what nots – Its been ages and ages before that Mr.Tendulkar won a game for India. Anyway he has cemented his position till 2011 world cup. Good luck you Gambhirs, Dinesh Karthiks, Uttappas.. Learn from Schumacher and Pete Sampras to bow gracefully at your peak. Ganguly you listening right?

Alright…guess thats it for now – until later – tanannana tannanana !!