Ten days back when I reached Singapore from Los Angeles by Singapore Airlines (my favourite next to Jet Airways) I realized my checked-in bags haven't reached Singapore. I had through checked in the bags with United from Seattle, and though in LA there was over 3 hours time before the Singapore flight the bags didn't make it. It was not only my bags, but that of 10-12 other passengers. The saving grace was when I went to the Lost and Found counter of Singapore Airlines (SG), they already had a printout ready with information tracing my bag, where it was and when it will come to Singapore. So the bag technically didn't go missing, but didn't make it in the flight I came.

SG teller at the Lost and Found, gave me a printout acknowledging the incident, SG$120 to cover one day of my incidentals, a toiletry bag with a spare T-shirt all without asking - the way it should be done. I was promised the bags will be coming in the next flight from LA, they will call and leave the bags with my hotel; and the next day morning when I get up the bags will be in my hotel. So it was there next day. I really felt I was handled with respect, professionalism and the incident was resolved quick and well by Singapore Airlines.

Windows Live Search seems to have introduced a video search recently. When I searched "Vishwak" the results page impressed me - you can mouse over on a result image and see the video playing in place with audio. Surprisingly it included results from Google's YouTube as well and playing it in a Live branded page.

This is yet another post on Chennai's traffic. Traffic in T.Nagar area is becoming worst day by day due to the bridge constructions.

Every month TiE Chennai conducts their monthly events at 7PM mostly at Hotel RainTree, St.Mary's Road. I don't attend every month, but whenever I attend I get stuck bad in traffic and go late. I leave my office (Habibullah Road, T.Nagar) around 6:15PM and reach the venue around 7:15PM or so, though the actual journey shouldn't take you more than 15 minutes. I have tried all the different (so called side roads) routes but of no use, either I get stuck at Pondy Bazaar/Mount Road junction or at Vijayaraghava Road/Mount Road junction and so on.

Today I decided to brave it out. I left office at 6:30PM, went through Panagal Park, Venkatanarayana Road, Nandanam Signal and believe it or not, I reached the venue at 6:50PM. And this at the peak time driving through two of the Chennai's renowned traffic choke points. I am now more than ever confused on the routes that take less time in Chennai.

Being in the IT Industry you can feel the energy of growth, innovation and excitement that's in India now. You can relate the present scene to the one that was there a decade back when IT professionals were rushing to United States and India suffered a brain drain (as it used to be called). Now the scene is completely the reverse where you are seeing many of those professionals returning back to India. They have had time to enjoy the western lifestyle, save some money and return back to India which was unheard of few years back. I personally know few of my friends at least who have returned from their high-paying/senior profile jobs in companies like Siebel, Microsoft, etc. in the last few years to India. In this connection I saw this Video in Hindustantimes that quantifies this to be about 60,000 Indian IT professionals who have moved back to India in last few years.

Moreover, nowadays people in the mid to senior roles don't want to leave their family behind and want to go to USA - they are getting salaries in India itself that are attractive and comparable.

I came across these two references today.

One was Web Browser Standards Summary that summarizes the level of support for web standards and maturing technologies in popular web browsers. It covers the Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Opera web browsers, with focus on the HTML, CSS, DOM, and ECMAScript technologies.

Second one is the Audio interview with Chris Wilson, the Platform Architect for Internet Explorer at Microsoft. "Chris has been building web browsers for as long as there have been web browsers, and it was a pleasure to sit down with him at the end of the final day of the conference. In his talk at the conference, Moving the Web Forward, Chris gave the audience a glimpse into the realities of developing the most popular web browser in the world. With over 500,000,000 users to answer to, the words Don’t break the Web have become an overriding mantra for the company in its work to develop the next version of Internet Explorer (currently known as IE.Next)".

How times have changed?

When I was in school, we had this orange cool drink called "Gold Spot" that was hugely popular. They had a campaign at that time - to collect the stickers inside the crown of each bottle, stick it in an album and exchange them for gifts. The gift I was eagerly collecting the stickers for months was a full colour book of Walt Disney's Jungle Book. Remember at those days we had no CD/DVD and books were fancied items that had mystical powers to tell you a story, transport you to a new world. And the world I wanted to be in (just like every other kid around me) was to the wonderful jungle world of Mowgli.

Unlike today's kids I was not given any pocket money, for that matter I was hardly allowed to handle currencies till I was grown up. So there is no way I could drink those many Gold Spots to collect the stickers needed that would have got me the book. So whenever I got a chance (which is not so often) I drank a Gold Spot - I did this months but I could hardly collect more than few. That's when I sought out the help of a local Pan shop vendor who gave me permission to collect thrown-away crowns in his road-side shop. Living in Ranganathan Street, T.Nagar had advantages like you being known to every shop keeper in the bazaar. Then one day my mother came to know that I was scavenging (can this be called scavenging, I was on a mission) and I was warned severely not to go to the shop and my cousin warned the shop keeper not to let me near the shop anymore. With this supply cut-off, I was deeply disappointed. Then thanks to my maternal uncle Nandakumar who knew someone in Goldspot office, who got me the book directly. Though it removed the fun associated with collected the crowns and exchanging it with friends, I was delighted that I got the book.

OK, why I am going in this nostalgic journey now?. Recently when I was in Canada I purchased the Platinum Edition of Jungle Book (DVD) for $23 for my son and that's when I remembered these childhood memories. Just now I told the story and played the DVD to my son who is enjoying the fun. Coming to think of it, what a timeless piece of work Walt Disney has created. His work captivated me 25 years back, today it is being enjoyed by my son and I am sure it will be magical for future generations as well. Interestingly I noticed it in shops today that the DVD is available for Rs.600 ($15) in Chennai itself, I needn't have bought it abroad.

I am not the only one who is nostalgic about Jungle book and Goldspot, when I googled I saw many other posts who feel the same (one more). Finally my son today didn't scavenge, he didn't even ask for it, yet he got the DVD on his bedroom. That's why I started by saying - Times have changed.

I have started on a journey to centralize all my digital assets in a central computer (a.k.a server) in my house. The server will have all my digital photographs, music & video. The easiest of the three is to move my photos from my desktop to this server. Current plan is to stream audio to the music systems in the house, use XBox 360 Media Extender to stream video (DVDs) to the TVs in the house. I am considering using Windows Home Server for the central server. Though I planned it long time back only today I am finally started it, will keep you posted on how it goes.

The time consuming and manual process is to convert all my old audio cassettes into Audio files (MP3, WMA) and to convert all the DVD/CD into Video files (WMV, MPEG-4). This is the reason I was lazy to actually kick start the process. 

In this effort to have a fully digital archive, I bought Slim devices Squeezebox from Amazon to stream audio to music systems few months back. Only today I focussed and got it working. The device was extremely easy to configure both Wired and Wireless. The tough part was getting the SlimServer installed in the Windows PC and have the firewall opened correctly. These two articles were very useful: How to setup in Vista & Firewall Settings in Window. When I finally got the device working, I was surprised to see it showing Tamil (Unicode) characters. It didn't come correctly (as I guess it doesn't have full Indic Rendering support) but it showed Tamil Glyphs and we could guess the rest.

Microsoft announced recently a new Sync Framework. This is a CTP release that is targeted for release in Q2 2008 and it supports P2P and Online/Offline synchronization of data. Currently though customers require Outlook like Offline/Online Sync scenario, it means developers doing custom coding. The Sync Framework is claimed to support P2P sync of any type of file including contacts, music, videos, images and settings. And has built-in support for synchronizing relational databases, NTFS/FAT file systems, Simple Sharing Extensions for RSS/ATOM, devices and web services.

I welcome having a standard framework for doing this repetitive job, it also removes the complexity of handling multiple connection types, scenarios, fail over, retry, etc. Download CTP from here.

Today I saw in The Hindu/Business Line newspaper an advertisement from Emirates Airlines about their new route from India to Toronto. It talked about Toronto having the world's longest Road - Yonge Street at 1900Kms. I was surprised on this for two reasons - 1) I thought the longest road will be in Russia just like the longest train track which is the Trans-Sibera rail which runs for 10,000Kms, 2) How come a city have 1900kms of one road, no city can have a diameter of more than a hundred kilometres, so this road had to be running across the country and I thought the longest road will be US I101 which runs from Canada to Mexico - some of the stretches of this which I have been to in San Diego county happen to be beautiful pacific coastline drives.   

When I searched in Wikipedia I learned that Yonge street was called as the longest road way back in 1998 when people wrongly attributed it to be the same as Highway 11. Currently as per Guiness Book of Records the world longest road is Pan-America Highway. Pan-Am Hwy is a network of roads nearly 48,000 kilometres in total length. Except for an 87 kilometre rainforest gap, the road links 15 countries in mainland of South and North Americas.

WOW, writing the above headline made me wonder how far software has come from the time you bought it from guys with coat and suit, to online, to free and now to rental. And what better product to signify this, other than MS Office.

I read in news that Microsoft India has announced MS Office 2007 in Prepaid model - which for me essentially resembles a rental/subscription model, as software always has been prepaid in the true sense. May be MS didn't want to use either subscription or rental words, they probably want to embrace, extend and change the game. Whatever said this is certainly a welcome move especially for a country with low income like India, where MS Office at say Rs.15,000 can be about 50% of a PC price.

The price of Rs.1499 for 6 month usage is affordable, but each extension there after at Rs.1299 for 3 months somehow looks exorbitant. Hopefully they are testing the waters on the pricing and will come to their senses. Ideally for bottom of the pyramid (for whom this is targeted) I will love to see a price of in the range of Rs.100 to 200 per month (in the same range as your cable TV fee per month) and it should include license for usage of Windows OS as well.

I am a fan of Bruce Willis - not so much for his Die Hard action series, but for his other master performances in movies like The Sixth Sense (where he brings the Night Shyamalan's creation into life) and Armageddon. The first time I have watched Bruce Willis on screen (small screen) was in late 80's TV serials Moonlighting.

Today on the flight from LA to Taipei (14:30 Hours journey), after getting some sleep completing all the comedy shows I had to watch some movies to burn the time - so it was Die Hard 4 and Tamil Kreedam (next post). The actions performed by Bruce Willis was just like any other Die Hard movie and were good but not impressive, the story line was pathetic. It was about an ex-government IT security expert turning bad, who tries to shutdown all the computer systems in USA including Traffic, Power, etc. Bruce Willis along with a teenage cyber-hacker saves the world. The screen play could certainly have been fresh, it reminded of all many previous Hollywood movies. This post will go for pages If I listed all the goof-ups I noticed, but select few here:

• Why is that all Hollywood Action movies have their villain operating out of big trucks - is there no other mobile offices available?
• How come the villain get high-speed connectivity to all places around the USA from the truck - even with satellite dishes you can't get high-speed
• You can't even get a webpage rendered correctly even on 3G with Mobile phones, but it was interesting to see a Nokia 9300 (my previous phone) used for connecting into high-security computers
• Even on any critical banking back end applications, the entire architecture is not known to one person. Here the entire countries backup strategy was build and known to one guy
• How come the teenager effortlessly connects and accesses all computers?. How does he know the commands of all systems, understands Power Plants, Nuclear Plants, etc. In practical world, even moving from a Windows PC to Unix Workstations is difficult for best of geeks out there
• Won't the government have at least one equally intelligent guy like the villain or at least better than the teenager, surprising
• Finally, how on earth can you hit a helicopter with a car

May be I should have not watched the movie.

இது ஒரு சண்டைப் படம். வாழ்க்கையில் சாதிக்கும் தருனத்தில் கனவுடன் இருக்கும் சாதாரண ஒரு இளைஞனின் வாழ்க்கை விதியால் எப்படி மாறுகிறது என்பது தான் கதை. கண்டிப்பாக கதை புதிதில்லை, ஆனாலும் அழகாக அதை எடுக்க முடியும் என்று காட்டியுள்ளார் புது இயக்குனர் விஜய்.  அதற்காக அவரைப் பாராட்டலாம்.  அஜித் அசத்துகிறார், அச்சாரிமாக இருக்கிறது - எப்படி மனிதர் நாளாக நாளாக வயதைக் குறைத்துவருகிறார் என்று.

சினிமா தனம் இல்லாத யதார்தமான முடிவு. வாய்ப்பு கிடைத்தால் இந்த படத்தை கண்டிப்பாகப் பார்க்கலாம்.

From LA I went to Redmond (WA) where I will be in our US Office for a week before returning to India. Since I have been to many places around Seattle, I decided to go to Vancouver (BC) for the weekend. This is my first trip to Canada. Canada requires Indian Citizens to have a valid VISA to enter, I had got mine from India itself.

We booked for the trip from Seattle-Vancouver-Seattle through Clipper Victoria for about USD 212 per person including the hotel room at Vancouver, entrance to Aquarium, hotel transfers and Grayline tour on Day 2. Today morning (Saturday) we left by Amtrak from Seattle at around 7AM and reached Vancouver at 12PM. Just like in an airport, you have immigration happening at the arrival. We stayed at Fairmont Hotel Vancouver, which is a nice hotel and well in the downtown accessible to all places easily. Taxi's are easy to get by calling in Vancouver and many places cost about $10 per trip. Since this is Winter, it was drizzling almost through out the day, but it seems to be a beautiful city.

The Vancouver Aquarium at Stanley Park is hyped a lot, I found it ordinary especially after seeing many of them around the world. One show that was worth seeing there was a live Necropsy (autopsy done in a fish) performed for a dead Shark - though the event was staged it showed live the inner organs of a shark. In the same park we walked for about 20 minutes or so and saw a live Rugbe match being played and little far the Totem poles.

After this, we went to IMax Theatre and saw a 3D Movie on Dinasours, on our way back we went to Chinatown - where most of the shops got closed at 6:30PM itself. For the dinner, we went to a nearby Indian Restaurant (Original Flavours of India) on 1232 Robson Street, though the food was little pricier it did tasted good.  Sunday when we went back to the area in Robson street we found atleast 2 other Indian restaurants with in the same block.

Vancouver Nov 2007

On Day 2 (Sunday) we took the Grayline half-a-day tour of the city which took us to Lookout point, Chinatown, Stanley Park, Lions Bridge & Granville Island Public Market. The public market was an World War II abandoned warehouses (5) that were converted to shops - now they house few hundred eateries. Being a Vegetarian I didn't find anything that interested me. Post lunch we went around the shops in Robson street.

In the evening we took the Amtrak back to Seattle. Unlike in an airport, the immigration for USA happens in Vancouver Station itself, customs happens only after the train enters the first station in USA - just like in India State to State buses border checking, the US Custom officials come into the train seat by seat and check.