I haven't had time to update my blog in a week. It has been really busy at work and at home. Dinner at T's place last Wednesday was good - his kids are great and every time I go to someone's place who has lil kids it makes me wonder how tough it is to keep the house in order and really scares me. Dad came last Thursday which is very good and kinda strange since I can't recollect ever having him around while I grew up. I saw him for a mere 8 hours last summer in over 2 years.

The best part of these last few days was the weekend at Portland. It is such a beautiful place. I was so sad to leave on Sunday. There was such a drastic change in weather from mid-west to west. It snowed in Denver, Colorado and it was over 80 deg in Portland. The Rockies were snow-clad on Friday and on my return, the snow was all gone and the temperatures had soared back to the 70s in Colorado. Colorado is so flat and dry. There are these huge circular patches of fields all over. The landscape from Colorado to Oregon is amazing. It starts with flat( in the true sense) and dry, followed by the Rockies soaring high just a few hundred miles out of Denver and then there's Mt. Hood in Oregon and then the greenery of Portland. Portland was breathtaking from the air. It is so green that makes one want to stay there all the time. The weekend was so peaceful - THE place for one to stay after retirement!

In other news, it is a month of travel - this weekend I'm off to NY, D.C.
Countdown update - roughly 4 more months to go!

"My way or the highway" - that was the crux of the converstaion. I hate it when someone shouts at 6:30 a.m. It is not the right time to practice one's wits either! Got a feeling its going to be one lousy day.

Mundane conversations for courtesy ---------
A typical Monday morning starts with

"How was your weekend?"
"It was good." On second thoughts, "It was veryyyyyyyyyyyy relaxing. <30 second silence> How was yours?".
"Good".

This is what one hears in the hallway of a office, in an elevator, at the coffee shop!
So here I go..my weekend was uneventful but for a 3 hour online-session on Project Initiation (part of the Project Management course that I'm taking), a dinner at a friend's place, cleaning up the house. No bike rides this weekend as the weather didn't cooperate. Talking of bike rides, I was stopped by a gentleman who looked like a doorman at the big condo building around the corner. He signaled me look at a sign on the opposite side of the road ..."No cycling on sidewalks". He said I would get a ticket if I wasn't careful. From "no rules" to rules sucks. Since it was late when I left from work today, the sidewalks were relatively free of pedestrians.

Some tidbit on password sharing practices --
What would it take for to you give up your password to your computer? A survey in Liverpool, England says 37 percent of you will give up your computer password if somebody asks you nicely. 34 percent hold out until somebody offers up a candy bar. Other passwords statistics, 40 percent of you know your coworker's pass words. And 55 percent of you would tell your boss your password if he asked for it.

2 more days to go before dad comes!

The Gmail Experience - Note: there's no hyphen between "G" and "mail" - some habits die hard :)

Things I liked:

1. Conversations - when someone replies to a message, it is grouped with the original message. As a new message comes in, it gets stacked, which makes it easier to read and associate. For a free-mail system, this is a good feature. Consumer is the king and it rules!

2. 1 gigabyte of storage - I hate seeing that "you are currently using 80% of your storage" - please upgrade to blah blah..for a mere 6 MB of storage space in other mail providers.

3. Text box for "Searching mail/web" at the top of the page.

4. "Delete forever" option is indeed there (contrary to the rumors), though not very obvious to one. Once you move a mail to trash and choose the action "Delete forever", the messages get deleted. On deletion, this message is displayed - "No conversations in the trash. Who needs to delete when you have 1000 MB of storage?!" - which is true. But as a user I expect to have the rights of doing whatever I wish to.

Things that I didn't like:

1. The user interface is not very intuitive, which is surprising as Google is a master in simplistic design. "Compose Mail" at the top left corner doesn't stand out.

2. There is no link in the "Compose Mail" page to use the "Auto-address complete" feature. I hope they don't expect users to remember it.

3. The "help" links and other links on the help page open in a popup window. If one click on the "inbox" link, the mail opens up again in popup window. Guess it isn't all that bad as I sound - probably the effect of working on ADA compliance.

Not sure how efficient the anti-spam software is that Gmail uses. If it is anything like Yahoo!'s, it is not great. Having all those junk spam mails in the spam folder will be annoying. And I hope there is no limit on how many mails you can report as spam if you are a free user.

It is nice to know that there is someone else who uses "Search Options" too. Advanced Searching options for mails in Gmail is called "Search Options".

Otherwise, it is great. Go google! Time for Yahoo! and Hotmail to catch up and get those mass storage servers.

More stories on Gmail at:
Gmail Saga
Gmail still sparking debates

G-mail

The user interface for managing posts on BLOGGER has changed. It is neat. Blogger also has a promotion on its website for active bloggers (atleast thats what it said) for subscribing to G-mail. Blogger is owned by Google. It is amazing that one has 1000 MB of free storage. Wonder how this will impact Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail. If G-mail has IMAP, then it would be neat to read the messages on Outlook/mail client. One more thing I like is that since this is just in the beta version, the probability of getting a mail-id of one's choice is high, like the one I got today. With Yahoo!, you almost never get it before 5/6 tries and it isn't quite what you would have wanted.

The Road Ahead
Uncertainty has been a certain part of our lives for the past 2 years. Location,duration is almost never known until the last minute. And that didn't give too many choices, so we have been going with the ride.
I'm not quite sure what lies ahead. The thought of giving up all of this is making me really sad. I will miss this, the past 9 months has been the best part of the past 5 years, despite all the crazy stuff that demands a lot. I keep telling myself that I don't care and want to go back, hoping it will make quitting easier but it isn't working :(

Anyways, so this week has been really busy because of Vinay's visit. Next week, dad should be here by now. It is going to be great for a month.

Happy birthday!
Today is Vivek's Birthday. Happy Birthday :)

I talked and listened to so much technical stuff today that my head still hurts. It helped to an extent to keep my mind off the whole incident, however not completely - I'm still feeling bad. Despite all our efforts, no hope of recovering any of it.
Took my bike to work for the first time today. It was fun on lower Wacker Drive, not knowing where to go!
Vinay got me a book by R.KNarayan titled The Painter of signs. He is best known for The Malgudi Days. The serial was a brilliant portrayal of the book and an instant hit. After all who wouldn't remember the characters played by Anant Nag, Girish Karnad - brings back fond childhood memories of all those nice serials - the only 30 min time during the day when we kids were allowed to watch TV.

Spring is finally here- it looks like Spring and feels like one too. I came here around the same time last year and it was cold in Boston and raining all the time. However, it is so beautiful here and that is the only best part about this weekend. I wish V was here this weekend. Whenever he is here, it is cold.
I don't want to remember this weekend. Coming to terms with reality was tough. Ignoring it by thinking it didn't happen to us was foolishness. After all there are very bad people in this world who do really mean things. It is stupid on one's part to trust anybody just like that. I was really upset and very sad yesterday about the huge loss. I am trying to come to peace with it - took a long bike ride along the lake shore, went to meet a friend today - diversion is helping. Need to stay away from the comp so as NOT to remind myself about it.

Internet Fraud

"Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterward."
-- Vernon Law


Now we know what this quote exactly means after being burnt badly.
If you are trading online, always keep in mind these important points before buying anything:

1. Do not get carried away by the credentials of the seller - it can be faked easily.
2. Do not be involved in direct transactions with the seller, if you are outbid on e-bay.
3. Always pay thr PayPal and not in cash or wired transfers such as Western Union or Money Gram.
4. Avoid transactions with sellers who are helping/obliging more than is required.
5. Be extra careful when transacting for goods of very high value.
6. Get the contact details of the seller and speak to the seller before paying up.
7. Do not always pay in full if directly dealing with the seller unless you receive the item.

Read more on Fraud Tips here:

The recent experience has reaffirmed my faith in brick and mortar stores.

A Year of Blogging
It is exactly a year today since I started blogging. It will continue to stay a personal journal with a small/no audience. I have taken down comments since I don't really expect to see one.