Dec 31, 2007

Happy New Year


Another year goes by. Another year dawn. The earth completes one more circuit around the sun. Tonight there will be parties, tomorrow hangovers.

2008 is a leap year. Which means that Feb will have 29 days, and anyone born on 29th Feb will age 4 times slower than others ! For the others, who don't celebrate 29th Feb, we have 1 more day of work.

This year, most of the govt holidays, which we get off , fall on weekends. E.g 26th Jan is ... a Saturday. +1 day of work. As per my company calendar, my next holiday falls in May. sigh !

Oh well, I am supposed to be happy about another year coming. But without even 1st being an off day, how can I be happy about new year ? I am supposed to keep resolutions, which end with the new year. I am supposed to ... oh well, i am getting cynical.

WTF ! Happy New Year ! ! !

Dec 26, 2007

Moto Rokr E6


At the time of leaving the Good Technology Group in motorola, and joining up in Symantec , I had a dilema. I needed a new phone. You see, in GTG, since we were developing on mobile phones, and all the time i was there (almost 2 years) , i never needed a phone. I was using Treos mostly - touchscreen, qwerty keyboard, etc. Now, I had to figure out what phone to use.

Nokia is the prevalent choice in India. But, essentially its the same stuff that has been there for ages. My main criteria was a touchscreen phone, and the ones that were coming close to what i wanted was quite prohibitively expensive. At the same time, being a Moto employee, we get discounts on the mobiles there. Had a look at the portfolio, and the one I liked was the moto rokr E6. Not a great phone by any means, but since it was linux based, had FM and a touch screen with a 2MP camera, and almost half the cost of the next contender in line ( the HTC touch), i bought it.

The plain vanilla phone is not that high on features. It has its drawbacks a plenty, like scrolling your music collection takes ages. Some of the issues are addressable, some are not. Here are things which you can do with your phone. Some of it requires messing with your phone ... so, if you like messing with things, you are gonna enjoy this phone !

EDGE

Frankly, most things that you can do with a phone go beyond the sms and phone apps. Now, you can be connected online all throughout the day using a data connection. The hitch here is that the E6 comes with only a GPRS connection (48kbps ~ 6kB per sec of data). Now , this is ok if you like living life in the slow lane, but what we really want is an EDGE connection ( 236kbps ~ 29kB of data per sec). So, the first thing you want to do is to get EDGE working. Unfortunately, on this phone, EDGE is disabled by default!

This is where the wide user community comes to the rescue. Googling for EDGE (especially since a couple of my friends had already done the updates) threw up direction on the moto mod community. Its been made really easy, just need to have the correct software installed.
NOTE : you need a data connection on your mobile phone. If you call up the service center and ask for EDGE , they will in all probability not know what you are talking about. Tell them you want a data connection for your mobile, and it should do the trick.

Spicing it up

Now, i started looking around for software to go with it. With GMM I always had email at my disposal. But, since that is a corporate software, I needed something similar but for personal use. Google Mail to the rescue ! gmail for the mobile is quite easy to use, and almost similar to the version you see using a desktop. It is possible to browse the emails through the web browser, but gmail gives a much better presentation, and also is faster than the web version for the mobile. The only glitch, the latest version does not work on the mobile ! sigh! So, you need to get an older version.
Next, since I am always travelling, download the google maps application from google.
Another nifty thing is Morange. Its a kind of all in one tool. With it you can read RSS ( a severly stripped down version though, which I find really frustrating), and also chat using any of the usual chat clients.
(A friend suggests fring, but it does not work on the rockr).

Hope this helps all who have a E6 and wondering what all they can do with it.

PS : Thanks to arpan and alok for pointing out the site for EDGE.

Dec 22, 2007

Chai at Lonavala

BN At Lonavala

Planned to go to Chandni Chowk (the pune one, not the delhi one), and ended up at Lonavala... last night was a good ride :D

The initial plan was just to go to CC, as nalin (on CBZ) had come over. But then got a call from Ashvin that KJ from cramster was in town. With Nav also dropping in with a loaned RTR, decided to head to MG road. Praveen also was going to join up with US. Met up with KJ at Diamond restaurant , a seedy kind of joint which offers Beer on MG, and suddenly the plan materialized to go to Lonavala. Called up Praveen to not to come to MG, and hold on as we would be gonig the same way.

While going, we stopped at 4 places, RTO (to fuel up), Baner (to get helmet for KJ, and gloves for myself), Joshi Vada (sync with Praveen), Talegaon (for Nalin, as he had gone to change). Reached Lonavala at 10 mins to 1am. RK was closed so decided to go to the bus station for some chai and vada pavs.

The ride back was one straight rip. Reached home at 2:30am.

Nice. :D

Dec 20, 2007

This is a test

This is a test. I kind of like a black background, so am trying a template which reflects that better. I think its cool, what do you say ?

Also, i am in the process of adding the good posts that I have on the link which is 'hot posts'. If you think there is a post of mine which should go there, let me know !

Dec 13, 2007

Dec 10, 2007

Kids

A pic uploaded by a friend of mine. Though at first glance it looks like just a group, but a deeper look at the pic sends one back into your childhood.

Dec 5, 2007

BN Video

Praveen Sathaye over at BikeNomads created a cool video on BikeNomads. Check it out !

Dec 3, 2007

Thought for the day

We are finally, all wanderers in search of knowledge. Most of us hold the dream of becoming something better than we are, something larger, richer, in some way more important to the world and ourselves.

Too often, the way takn is the wrong way, with too much empahsis on what we want to have, rather than what we wish to become.

- Louis L'Amour,
Education of a Wandering Man