Category: Journal

Consists of site updates and the various events happening in my life.

  • The tragic story of Chandrashekhar

    Hi guys,
    Today I am going to narrate the tragic story of one of our employees who had been betrayed by another employee of our company and has now become a “Devdas”.

    This is the photo of Chandrashekhar, our company mascot and a loyal employee.

    Chandrashekhar

    He was a happy person and very productive until one fine day a lady “Chaitanya” joined our company. You might have just heard and read in books but I saw with my own eyes how this gal (as naive and innocent she may look) actually played with the feelings of Chandrashekhar. Even though Chandrashekhar did not show any interest, she used to affectionately call him “Chandu” and show him a lot of importance. So much so that she even shifted his position from near my desk to near her desk by bribing the higher officials. Gradually he also began to treat her in a special way and started calling her “Chaitu”.

    Everything was well n fine. Their affair went on for a month and then she began to lose interest in him. Gradually, she again bribed the higher officials in our company and got his seating position shifted back. This poor guy wasn’t able to understand why Chaitanya was behaving in such an odd way. Papam pasivadu vaadiki emi telusu amayulu naaga paamulu ani. Now he has gone into a depression and now he wears a pink hat, a black shawl and just keeps boozing all day.

    He has shared all his happy and sad moments with me. The happy times when Chaitanya showed so much importance and the sad times when she dumped him. Below is the photo of Chaitanya.

    Chaitanya

    Andaaru baaga chudandi. This is the same person who has reduced our Chandrashekhar to such a state. And you won’t believe this. But she even went to the extent of physically abusing Chandrashekhar upon my asking her as to why she had dumped him. If you ever come across her, please maintain your distance. More importantly if you see her flirting with anyone, be sure to warn the boy. You will be doing the entire humanity a favour.

    I hope that at least after reading this mail, Chaitanya will realize her mistake and accept Chandrashekhar back into her life. And if not, I hope Chandrashekhar comes out of the depression soon and will be the same old cheerful guy.

    An observer to a tragic love story,
    Rahul.

    Follow up

    The latest update is that I spoke to Chaitanya yesterday night. I think her intentions were good though her actions did not reflect the same. She told me that she left Chandu because she felt for his personality and his social status, he would find a much better person than her. Anduke she took that drastic step of dumping him. I am so sorry for misunderstanding you Chaitanya. Please forgive me ^:)^.

    And lastly the good news is that Chandrashekhar is recovering. He quit boozing and has thrown away the shawl. I guess he thought about it over the weekend and has finally concluded that life is very short and it is not worth wasting it. That’s the way to go buddy. Yippeeee!!!

  • Domain Name Changed Again And …

    Do not forget to checkout my latest post on domain registrars – New Domain Registrar.

    Hopefully the last time. Yes, rahul.ind.in is soon going to be obsoleted. The new domain name is rahul.amaram.name. And now I also have my own personal email id which is of the from firstnameATlastname.name. The reason for the shift of the domain name is:

    1. I got tired of switching to a new email id whenever I changed my email service provider. Initially, I had a hotmail id, then started using a yahoo id and currently using gmail id. Tomorrow I may use another email service provider. Hence I decided to have one email id for mail and have mails forwarded from this id to the current email service provider.

    2. My current domain name “rahul.ind.in” had a .in extension. I didn’t want my domain name to be country specific. Moreover .name extension is for personal domain names (http://www.name). Hence I decided to change my domain name.

    My old domain name “rahul.ind.in” was due for expiry this month and I decided to search for alternate domain name providers as I did not feel my current domain name provider (sify) was very feature rich. One very important thing to keep in mind while choosing a registrar is to make sure that it is reputed or else they may pose a problem later when trying to transfer the domain to another registrar.

    Features to look out for while choosing a registrar

    – Total DNS control (Managed DNS for modifying A,MX,CNAME records including those of sub-domains)
    – Email forwarding (useful if you want to forward all emails coming to your domain (ex. john@smith.name) to some external email service provider (ex. john.smith@gmail.com))
    – Url Forwarding/Masking
    – Preferably instant DNS record changes
    – Private/Hidden whois (if privacy is a concern for you. A hidden whois will hide your details from the world)
    – Support for various domain extensions in case you have multiple domains (for ex. I am the owner of three domains – rahul.ind.in, amaram.name and diya.in. I would definitely want to have a single provider which would allow me to register all these three domains with it so that management becomes easy for me)

    Recommended Indian Accredited Registrars (especially if you plan to purchase multiple domain extensions)

    http://www.mitsu.in
    http://www.answerable.com (not Indian but ICANN accredited registrar)
    http://www.name.com (this provides great features for a very reasonable price but customer support may not be that great)

    Other accredited Indian registrars offering the some/all of the above features

    http://www.enames.in
    http://www.net4domains.com
    http://www.signdomains.com
    http://www.netandhost.com
    http://www.indomains.net
    http://www.indialinks.com
    http://www.netlynx.org
    http://in.incyberinc.com
    http://ikon.myorderbox.com
    https://registry.sify.com
    http://www.onlinenic.com (Real bad reviews on the internet)

    Other non-accredited Registrars which provide many free features

    http://www.hostindia.net/domains.php (has very good customer support)
    http://www.bagfull.net
    http://www.webhosting.sanver.com/domains.htm

  • A Visit to Anantagiri Hills

    I along with few of my IIIT classmates had planned a get together yesterday. Not wanting to go to one of the regular places, we decided to pay a visit to Anantigiri Hills (75 kms from Hyderabad). Not a bad choice but at a completely wrong time. We’ve heard this place is really good but that is only in the rainy and winter season. Only too bad, we went in summer :). All the trees had shed their leaves. Some of us tried trekking for a while after which we got so exhausted that we just lazed about for a couple of hours in the shade and then started back. The best part of the visit though was the highway drive and lunch :D. Later in the evening I visited my friends place, played with his niece for a while and then had dinner at another friend’s place. Photos can be accessed here.

  • My morning alarm is gone on a trip 🙁

    To begin with, I’ve spent some time last week with my cousin Appu. Well, only a couple of days actually. One was all day out and the other day was at our aunt’s place. We went to the movie 300 in PVR, did go-karting and played a few games like FooseBall, Air Hockey at Runaway 9 and to end it went for a boat ride and had dinner at Eat Street. The first time I am taking someone out for an entire day driving all by myself. So this makes it quite a special event for me :). She left to U.S. yesterday night. Pictures can be accessed at Day Out With Aparna

    It surprises me that I have hardly been in touch with this person for the past 7 years, believe that our frequencies don’t match (probably because of the cultural and lingual differences), just spent a couple of days with her and yet feel such a pain when she leaves and go :(. I know I’ll get over this feeling but oh boy, I’ll never understand human emotions, probably the most illogical thing on this earth :D.

    Among other updates, there is some great news. After years and years and years of worship, I am finally going to be an “UNCLE”. Yes you heard it right … especially some of you out there who have nephews and nieces and make me suffer and keep me in control by talking about them, listen to me loud n clear “I’M GONNA HAVE A NIECE OR NEPHEW SOON.”. My cousin is pregnant and the expected date of delivery is sometime in October. So for you mean people out there who control me exploiting this weakness of mine, you better think of something else … mu ha ha. I just pray that it is a baby girl :D.

    Last but not the last, my morning alarm is off on a Europe tour. Oh yeah, I am talking about my “Item” buddy Swetha who has decided to ignore her responsibility of giving me a wakeup call daily and go on a 10 day trip. End result … I reach office late by 2 hours with my employees cursing me and deciding to make me kneel as a punishment for coming late. Oh yeah Swetha, enjoy your trip but be sure when you are back, you are gonna have a hell of a time with me.

  • Rahul’s Getting Busy …

    Online, I’ve made quite a number of posts last weekend. I’ve also updated the About Me page which I must have probably edited last in 500 B.C. :). As the number of posts are increasing, I am realizing that my blogging is mainly oriented towards informative (especially technical) articles rather than personal views and updates. So I guess this is where my writing interest lies in :).

    Among other updates, I’ve become really hectic. There are two new employees who have joined our company last week and I am responsible for their training. I really need to prioritize things right now to help me spend the next few months productively rather than making a mess of it. And one of my close buddies Swetha has volunteered to help me out by giving me a wake up call daily morning :D. Hey Swetha if you are listening “Really appreciate your help dude”. Anyway, now that I have made a mention of her, I think I should also make a mention that this gal has been really sweet the past few weeks tolerating me and answering all my stupid questions patiently. So once again hey Swetha if you are still listening “Really Really appreciate you being a part of my life” :D. For those of you who’d like to know more about this wonderful gal, kindly visit her website.

  • Website Reloaded

    A new year … a new look. My site has gone a complete redesign to make it more aesthetic, more feature rich and make maintainence for me easier. And the entire credit goes to Drupal (http://www.drupal.org) for building such a wonderful CMS.

  • Update

    Howdy! Happy Chirstmas and a Merry New Year!!! I hope everyone has a fun filled year and also hope I contribute more time to my website :D. In case you have not noticed (which I am sure you didn’t :)), I have spent quite some time in converting the urls to SEF (Search Engine Friendly). Apart from that I am planning to implement the following in my website:

    • Captcha (for avoiding spamming)
    • Comments for user feedback
    • RSS for delivering content directly to feed readers

    What I recently realized is that I am spending quite sometime in implementing all these functionalities. No problem with that. Except for that it would make more sense in utilizing the same time for writing blogs. Hence I have decided to switch to drupal, a CMS (Content Management System). Some additional reasons for this decision being:

    • Better navigation system for the blog
    • The biggest headache of maintaining a website is checking its compatability across different browsers on different platforms. I belive switching to a CMS will help me address this problem.
    • I was not following any good standards for storing data. I was planning to store my data in XML format but clubbed with other reasons I felt a CMS is a better choice.
    • While I certainly can implement much of the functionality (like adding comments, RSS), I seriously think it is not worth the effort because these solutions are already implemented by CMS.
    • With new features being implemented in web designing, these CMS would implement them pretty early and hence I needn’t have the headache of implementing any new web designing features in my website.
    • Last but not the least, I did not feel there was much of a value add to me by implementing features such as comments in my website. I rather felt that moving my site to drupal would at least help me to get comfortable with drupal.

    So there you have it :). Agreed, you can have more control over the look and design if you hand code every page, but the cons of moving to a CMS simply seem to be huge. Sooo, very soon, you can expect a new look and design for my website. I considered switching to WordPress initially but from the reviews I read WordPress is supposed to be good mainly for blogging. If you want to do many other things with your website (like Photo Gallery, Social Bookmarking), then drupal is the best choice. So keep visiting and keep watching for a completely renovated site.

  • Update

    It is my mom’s bday and I am celebrating this by adding two great features to my site today 😀 – “Recents Posts” and “Google Search”. I initially thought of writing my own search engine but due to lack of time, I have for the time being settled for Google Search. Very soon the comments section is also going to be added. Once that is done, I am planning to take up blogging more seriously.

  • Update

    After a looooooooooooooong time, I am back :D. As I had already mentioned, I plan to add some great features to my website to make it more convenient for visitors like you. But not being as free as I was earlier ;-), it will take time to implement these changes. To start with, the first major change was to make the site compatible with XHtml Strict 1.0 and make it dispaly uniformaly across all major browsers. This also involved writing the code for the above menu bar by myself :). The next major features planned are adding comments section to all my articles and adding an excellent search system !!

  • Why we adopted Buzzi

    It was November 25th, 1998. A rather hot afternoon. Ring Ring! We heard someone ring the doorbell. It was our friendly neighbourhood … spiderman .. no … it was our friendly medical rep :). And he brought Boozi to our house. Actually when Boozi first entered our house, he had many lollipops. Being the mean me, I took away all his lollilops and also snatched the one he was eating. He began to cry loudly and uncontrollably. When mummy saw this, she spanked me properly and then decided to adopt Boozi.

    Coming to the history of Boozi, he is actually from the Himalayas and he had lost his mother. Even to this day, he doesn’t know this and we do not even intend to tell him the truth as he may not be able to accept the fact. Boozi is impulsive and very possessive of his mom. Whenever my mom pampers me, he immediately comes in between and starts to shout “Me too … Me too”. I remember one incident when a small soldier named Vikki came to our house (he was my mom’s friend’s son’s toy). Initially he felt jealous that we were showing him importance but within no time he became so attached to Vikki that when we returned him to his master, he cried like hell. He loves to fight with his sis and never loses and opportunity in teasing her (and this is in spite of knowing that Pallavi would not keep quite if he passes any comment). Due to some unknown reasons, he has developed a phobia towards my dad. Whenever Daddy enters the room, he becomes quiet and tries to hide behind me / mummy. Mom tried explaining to him many times not to be scared of Dad but somehow that fear seems to be deeply embedded within him.

    Boozi is probably that part of me which I cannot express / which I am not. We celebrate his birthday religously on November 25th every year. If you are interested in attending it anytime, kindly let me know.

    Below is a chat conversation I had reg. Boozi with my cousin. If interested feel free to go through them (my cousin’s id has been masked due to privacy concerns):

    (20:36:53) *****: so whats buzzi doing?
    (20:37:00) Rahul: sleeping …
    (20:37:06) Rahul: he does it most of the time ..
    (20:37:06) *****: oh..ok
    (20:37:14) Rahul: when he is awake he plays with his friends ..
    (20:37:16) *****: hhmm
    (20:37:27) *****: he never hangs out with u??
    (20:37:35) Rahul: not much …
    (20:37:46) *****: oh ok does e sleep with u??
    (20:37:47) Rahul: he has been to a couple of movies
    (20:37:52) Rahul: with me ..
    (20:38:01) *****: ok which ones
    (20:38:03) Rahul: and he comes with us sometimes when we go to the club ..
    (20:38:11) *****: which club?
    (20:38:18) Rahul: Secunderabad club ..
    (20:38:22) *****: k
    (20:38:24) Rahul: but we put him to sleep in the car
    (20:38:29) Rahul: have our dinner and then come back
    (20:38:31) *****: hhahahahah
    (20:38:38) *****: doesnt he eat anything?
    (20:38:50) Rahul: what kind of a stupid question is that …
    (20:38:54) Rahul: he has cerelac …
    (20:39:03) Rahul: what else do kids have ?
    (20:39:06) *****: hhahahaha he is 7YRS OLD!
    (20:39:09) Rahul: yeah ..
    (20:39:11) *****: 1min
    (20:39:16) Rahul: kani still he has cerelac only ..
    (20:40:25) *****: ok
    (20:40:39) *****: do u feed him??
    (20:40:52) Rahul: sometimes me .. sometimes mummy ..
    (20:41:03) *****: ok
    (20:41:04) Rahul: why do u ask so many questions ?
    (20:41:09) Rahul: haven’t u ever seen a kid before ?
    (20:41:20) *****: nothing like that
    (20:41:40) Rahul: I’ll introuduce you to him when you come over next time 😀