Oook! Eeek! – Page 5 – Random wanderings from the mind of a moody orangutan

New Phone!

Sony Ericsson K750i

After complaining about my old LG phone that never seemed to do what I wanted it to do, not even make or receive calls well, I finally went and bought a new phone.

While I had been planning to get one for a while, it was a mostly impulse buy as I had already decided on getting a Sony phone and did zero research beyond that. Well, not really, I actually decided what features I wanted and picked a phone that I could afford to buy and was quite happy with it. Except, when I went to the store, that model was not available anymore!

So I looked at other phones and while the shopkeeper kept trying to sell me a Nokia phone, I saw this nice looking K750i and decided I wanted it.

It had a MemoryStick Duo slot so I could increase the storage on it, it came with FM Radio, a media player and a 2 megapixel camera. Perfect. Or whatever. I wanted a new phone!

And that’s how I ended up with my new phone.

Of course, I spent the next couple of hours ignoring my girlfriend and transferring numbers from the old phone via the SIM and then playing with settings, clicking photos. Even at dinner!

Kuala Lumpur Walkabout

As promised, here’s pictures from my one afternoon walking around Kuala Lumpur (with a little help from the trains!) Be warned, it’s a long post!

I started the day waiting for a phone call from a colleague to let me know whether my flight could be rescheduled. It was almost 11am by the time I figured out that nothing was going to happen and finally got off my ass and took a shower and packed my stuff.

I was staying at a friend’s home in one of the distant suburbs, so it was a long and uneventful bus journey back to the city.

A quick sandwich at Subway, an hour on the bus and I finally arrived at KL Sentral. If you’re flying out on Malaysian Airlines and you have a ticket on the Express train to the airport, they allow you to check your bags in at KL Sentral. This was huge relief to me as I didn’t see myself wandering around the city lumbered with a large duffel bag!

The check in process was smooth, I was the second of two people in line! What next? I wandered around the station for a bit, debating whether I should try to buy some ringgit (I had only a 100 or so)

Decided against trying to buy more currency (especially since they wouldn’t accept Indian Rupees as payment and I’d have to use my credit card!) and instead looked around for a tourist kiosk of some kind where I could pick up a map of the city.

The lady at the Mlaysia Tourism kiosk was quite bored and when I asked her for a “walking” or tourist map, she pulled one out of a drawer and handed it to me and went back to staring at her computer screen. Well, no worries, I had a map now!

A quick scan of the map and a vague plan to visit Petronas Towers among others formed in my head. Also, I decided to try and take every one of the KL train systems, especially the funky looking monorail I had seen in the city centre the previous day.

I hopped onto a KTM Kommuter train heading from KL Sentral to an area called Masjid Jamek (?) which I thought was close enough to the KL Tower (or Menara KL) and also would provide for some interesting sights along the way.

The train I hopped into was painted a deep purple colour and carried the “Incredible India!” series of ads to encourage tourism to India. Ironic. While trying to take my camera out to take a picture of the interior of the train, I saw this interesting building pass by and quickly took a photo of it. Unfortunately my stop was soon after and I couldn’t get a shot of the train!

I next had to find my way to an entrance to the park in which the KL Tower was situated. There was a conventional entrance where all the cabs and buses and most sensible people would enter from and there was the entrance through a “jungle trail” where overenthusiastic tourists like me would enter from. The Lonely Planet book that I had consulted for 5 minutes at a friend’s place sold me on this “jungle trail” and the tourist map I had went on about how KL was the only city that had a reserved jungle bang in the middle of the city and that the communications tower was built with a lot of ecological considerations, etc.

So I had to see it. I tramped through a few very busy streets, almost got run over once, saw a Mahindra show room selling their Bolero SUV-type vehicles and finally about 25 minutes later arrived at the very small, unassuming entrance to the Jungle Trail about 20 metres away from a train station that I could have just travelled to in the first place!

Right then, looked like a bunch of stairs heading in. I guessed I could handle it.

In about five minutes I was huffing and puffing and there seemed no end to the stairs. Also, while I could see the road through the trees in the distance, all I could hear were typical jungle noises. And the helpful Malaysia Tourism notices which told you to beware of snakes and bugs. Nice.

Finally, through the trees, I could see the tower. Phew, I thought. I’m getting there. Not quite. A tramp up a rope bridge, some more stairs and I was at the base of the tower.

By now, I was pooped. I was breathing heavily (dammit, I’m in bad shape!) but luckily for the me, the ground level of the tower was filled with souvenir shops and a couple of restaurants. I bought my ticket to the top of the tower (20 ringgit) a bottle of water and a bar of chocolate and wandered around looking at the shops for a bit until I was a little less out of breath!

Time to go up! I rode up the couple of hundred metres up to the observation deck all alone in the elevator and stepped out to see this:

My next stop, the Petronas Towers was also visible from the deck and the afternoon sun shining on them made the metal exterior glow with a pale golden hue.

The view was amazing! I just kept wandering around and around, looking out the windows and when I got bored of that looking at the display they had around the inside of the deck about the world’s tallest towers and took a few random pictures of buildings and the general view.

Time to leave. I took the elevator back downstairs. Stopped to take a picture of the famed ceiling of the entrance area and then wandered out the regular road back into the city.

I was lost for a bit, since the road names on my map didn’t match the signs! And some buildings seemed to have the same name. Gah! I took a breather and sa t on a bench on the sidewalk and did some people-watching before I tackled the map again. This time I managed to figure things out. I decided it was time to ride the monorail!

I was a short distance away from the nearest station and I didn’t strictly need to take the train since my destination was the very next station, but nevertheless, I bought my ticket and hopped on!

The Petronas Towers were a short walk from where I got off and along the way I saw these:

And this:

Looks like there’s no escaping Bollywood or Pakistan! 😉

I also saw this interesting building which was sadly being demolished. In all probability to make way for a another glass and steel high rise. Sigh.

At the base of the Petronas Towers, after successfully dodging a guy who tried to sell me a cheap watch, I did the usual touristy thing and clicked a bunch of photos. You know the kind, right? But I just had to include one here! I was exhausted. I didn’t see much of the city, but my feet sure met a lot of pavement! I stopped for a coffee at a cafe next to the towers and sipped it while doing some more people-watching.

Time was running out and while I considered for a moment entering the shopping centre next door, I decided I couldn’t risk it and I did so want to see the KL railway station before I left.

Hopped onto another train that dropped me off near the KL railway station (which the 5 minutes with the Lonely Planet had told me was worth looking at) and I was being my usual click-happy self again, when time and the batteries started running out!

So back it was to KL Sentral. A slightly longish walk from where I was and I panicked about missing my train, but the trees, grass and beautiful buildings (including the National Museum) along the way made up for it.

I was sweaty, grubby and bone tired. It felt sooo good to step back into the air conditioned comfort of the station. And in a lucky break, I got there just in time to catch the next express to the airport.

A short ride (and nap) later I was running through the airport to get to my gate on time. Guess what? The gate printed on my ticket was wrong and I had to go to one about 20 gates away. Aaargh! When I arrived at my gate, the queue was huge! And this was about 30 minutes before the flight was scheduled to leave!

Not surprisingly, the flight was late. In fact, the airplane hadn’t even arrived yet. We had to spend a boring 30 minutes standing in line until we were finally allowed to enter the waiting lounge.

So, if you thought you couldn’t do much in an afternoon, you’re mistaken! Of course, I could have got a lot more done if I’d actually planned it out. But I still had fun! I was completely knocked out by the end of it though. Slept soundly for the short flight back home.

p.s. View all of these photos and more on my Kuala Lumpur set on Flickr.

Foiled!

I was supposed to be in Malaysia on Thursday and Friday and fly back to India on Friday. Since my office doesn’t work Saturdays anyway, I thought it should be easy enough to get my ticket for Friday evening rescheduled for Sunday evening and thus get myself a nice mini-vacation in Kuala Lumpur!

But no. When I called up Malaysian Airlines, all flights until the 21st were fully booked! It’s just my luck that my trip to Malaysia was on one of the busiest weekends in the year!

This meant that in one afternoon I had to catch as many of the sights as possible and make sure that I don’t miss the flight back to India in the evening!

Kuala Lumpur Impressions

I went to Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) for a couple of days on work. That short trip has given me ideas for three blogposts, this being the first of them, so that’s a good thing…

The first thing about Malaysia is that it’s quite easy to begin to talk like them, lah! See, even I can do it now, yeaaah? Secondly, even coming from India, the diversity in Malaysia is quite amazing. Also, since a decent portion of the Malaysian population are ethnic Indians or Sri Lankans, I didn’t get stared at quite as much. 🙂

My first impression of KL was based on KLIA, the international airport that I arrived at. It was gleaming, squeaky clean and very very easy to get around. I haven’t seen a lot of international airports, but from among the few that I’ve been to (O’Hare, CDG, Heathrow, JFK, Frankfurt, Detroit) this is definitely the best one.

The second was how every available surface on the taxis were given up to advertising! And mostly job websites. Funnily enough, the person travelling in the taxi with me worked for naukri.com, an Indian job site!

The traffic is KL was completely crazy but the people amazingly polite about it. I barely heard any honking or loud yelling!

Despite the crazy traffic, public transport in KL is awesome. There are plenty of regular buses and also a railway system that extends to the suburbs. Despite these systems being run by 4 different companies, they’re quite well integrated with a lot of points where you can cross over from one system to the other. Oh, did I also mention the KLIA Express train that takes you from KL Central to the KLIA (KL International Airport) in precisely 28 minutes? And that’s a distance of around 60km!

Speaking of KL Central, that station is fantastic, if a little crowded! A neat well designed hub for the four railway lines, the express to the airport and bus services. It’s located just outside what is actually Kuala Lumpur and a short distance from the Kuala Lumpur railway station (where all the trains from outside the city arrive.)

I’ll put up some pictures of my trip in the next post with more impressions of the city!

Ghost phone!

I got this message from a friend online:

9885195629 This is a girl’s phone number who comitted suicide 6 months back. God knows who recieves her calls even today. If u try this number before midnight it says that this number is busy. and after mid night it starts ringing and u can hear female voice crying for help. Beleive me try it out…….But at your own risk……Take care. Weak hearts dont try…………..

I am not willing to try so do let me know what happens.

Weird, huh? Well, I’m going to wait until midnight to call that number. In case you never see me blog here again, you know what happened! 😛

Blogcamp.in – Second day

Most people dashed off for the beach party at the end of the first day, but somehow the thought of a large bunch of nerdy boys and a lot of alcohol was not terribly tempting and so I just went to my friend’s home for a quiet dinner of pizza, chicken wings and vodka! That was followed by general catching up with my friend and yakking on into the night. (When he was not whispering over the phone with his girlfriend!)

All of which meant that I woke up late on Sunday morning and so missed the first session at BlogCamp.in on Corporate Blogging. Apparently I didn’t miss much since I popped into the IRC channel caught a bit of the presentations on the live webcast.

By the time I got to Tidel Park, that session was winding down and the next scheduled session was the talk by Sunil Gavaskar and followed by Robert Scoble‘s live webcast.

Mr. Gavaskar’s talk was very measured and accompanied by a general hush around the entire hall. Only the flashes and clicks of cameras broke that silence. In fact, sitting at my table at the back of the room, it seemed like a surreal, choreographed performance as people glided fowarded, clicked a photo and glided back while Mr. Gavaskar talked in clear, slow tones about his experience with pod-casting, being in the commentary box and possibilities for blogging in the commercial sports world. While he didn’t say anything revolutionary either about the technology or the technique of blogging and podcasting it was nevertheless interesting to hear his take on things.

One of the bloggers at the conference made a rough transcription of his talk. You can read that here.

What seemed like a perfectly organised half an hour with Mr. Gavaskar was followed by a completely chaotic and pointless couple of hours as they tried to get Robert Scoble up on screen. Since apparently there was a while to go before he could come online, a couple of other guys filled with some talks. When it was finally time for Scoble to go on, numerous technical hitches held things up.

Now, I didn’t care to listen to the man, so I would have been perfectly happy to go sit in another session except there wasn’t any other going on! All the guys who should have been hard at work making sure that other stuff went on as scheduled were too busy waiting to worship at the altar of Scoble! I even heard one nerdy kid say to another, “Scoble is the King, da!!” It took a lot of strength to not burst out laughing at that!

What this meant was that the session that was to start in the other room on Community, Languages and Bridges was delayed inordinately until each speaker in that session got barely 5-6 minutes to speak!

Oh, Scoble did go online finally and wittered on about God knows what. He also pitched for PodTech India, but oh well, who cares? I was busy eating lunch and catching up with other bloggers who weren’t particularly interested in Scobleizing themselves.

The Community session was interesting with a fairly wide variety of talks. If only there was more time for discussion on those! Aparna Ray of newsmericks fame spoke on the difficulties of blogging in her native language and in characteristic style ended with a limerick!

Back in the auditorium, some twit read an interminable speech. Apparently he was a local journalist. At the time I sat there gritting my teeth and wondering why the guy couldn’t have just put that damn thing online somewhere and tell us all to go read it. Apparently he did have the whole bloody speech on his blog, but still insisted on reading it out!

The last session was the most interesting one of BlogCamp and probably one that witnessed the most participation. Kiruba, Peter and Dina lead a discussion loosely on the responsibilities of writing in a public medium.

Blogcamp.in – First Impressions

In case the badge at the right is not “in-your-face” enough, I should mention here that I’m attending Blogcamp.in on my company’s steam.

In the interest of keeping this blog as anonymous as its always been, I’m obviously not going to mention what I’m speaking on but people who know me can obviously figure that out!

The conference is happening at Tidel Park in Chennai which is a fairly fancy tech park but with some serious security! We had to pass through 3 levels of security before we even entered the building (after passing through a metal detector.)

My first big gripe about the conference is that during the registration (when we pick up our freebies, which by the way are fairly decent) is that we had to fill out a short form from Yahoo! (who are the “platinum” sponsors of the event) where we basically agreed to let them spam us. I quickly overwrote the bits where they said “I agree” and “Yahoo can” blah blah changing them to “I DO NOT agree” and “Yahoo can NOT.” The guy at the registation desk mutely took back my form, I’m not sure if he actually saw what I did! 🙂

The entire morning I was offline since in a very “doh!” moment, I remembered that I should have packed my wireless network card only after I got to the airport. I thought this place would have ethernet ports around that I could use, but no. And that was my second gripe. The connectivity is provided by Sify and they have a pretty decent WiFi zone set up but if you want to plug in through ethernet, you’re out of luck. I’m also carrying along my portable HDD which has all my portable apps on it so I thought I could just plug into the desktops they have around for free access. Except the desktops were the junk iWay systems which wouldn’t let me plug in my HDD into their USB ports. Gah!

I only managed to get online because I had a crossover cable and connected it to a helpful guy’s laptop. Phew!

The talks in the morning were quite blah. Someone from Sulekha was up first and I missed the bulk of his talk since we got here late. An open session where bloggers shared their experiences followed which had some fun anecdotes but also had some guys drone on about some story that only they got the point of. After a coffee break, Atul Chitnis was up with “Blogging in the 90s: A Dinosaur’s Tale.” The only thing to like about this was that Toolz is finally calling himself a dinosaur. Lets hope he goes extinct soon!

The parallel session going on in another room seemed interesting on paper. Intro to WordPress, WordPress Hacks were a couple of the topics. But when I popped into that room, it was mostly geek boys using the word “like” altogether too many times!

Lunch followed which was quite yummy but only veg.

I’m sitting right now in the afternoon session which is on “Collaborative Blogging” while a session on Podcasting is going on upstairs.

More later or tomorrow if I’m too bored today! 😀

“Looking” Muslim

A funny thing happened to me on the way home yesterday. Well, it was not really funny, but I managed to laugh at it anyway.

I was taking the train back home and it was quite late (around 11:40pm.) I was also busy texting messages to a couple of friends with my cellphone while sitting at a window. The guy sitting next to me kept looking at me each time I removed my phone or looked at it. Apparently he was keeping a good watch on me, since even when he leaned back and shut his eyes and I removed the phone, he sat up very quickly and glanced at me again.

Terribly annoying but I guess tolerable. But not what he did next…

As the train neared my station, I picked up my umbrella which was beside me and got up to leave. The guy sits up, stares at me and then stares quickly at overhead luggage rack before settling back into his seat!

I couldn’t help but to laugh out loud and shake my head, but it didn’t seem to bother him much.

All of this reminds me of an exchange I had with an Indian when I was riding a bus in Michigan. Once again it was late at night and so we were the only two people on the bus. The conversation went roughly like this:

Him: “Are you a Pakistani?” (Yes, that was his opener)
Me: “Nope. I’m Indian”
Him: (after a pause) “But you’re a Muslim, right?”
Me: (a little surprised) “Nope.”

A long pause and then,

Him: “Ok.”
Me: “Why do you ask? Is it because I have a beard?”
Him: “No! No! I just asked. It’s not because you have a beard.”

Once again I couldn’t help but to smile at that.

I’m writing a blog…

I saw this hilarious cartoon on Get Fuzzy.

For those not in the know, Get Fuzzy is a pretty cool newspaper strip about a cartoonist, his pet cat and dog. Sounds familiar? But unlike that other strip, this one is actually funny albeit in a sort of edgy way.

Mostly Harmless

I just finished listening to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio series even though I’d had the mp3s lying around for ages.

I had downloaded the original radio series of 12 episodes years ago and dumped them onto a CD and had then forgotten about them completely. Last month I stumbled upon a site[1] that had mp3s of the new series broadcast in 2004 and 2005 which covered the story from the last three books (and in hoary Hitchhiker’s Guide tradition flatly contradicting quite a few episodes from the original series!)

Through most of the new series there are a number of additions, omissions and modifications, the majority of which are mostly harmless. The one change they made that annoyed the hell out of me though was the end of the last episode.

**SPOILER**

By the time Douglas Adams wrote the fifth book in the series he was pretty much fed up with people asking him to write more Hitchhiker’s Guide books and so he wanted to pretty much end the series definitively. Thus in Mostly Harmless (written many years after the previous book and with definitely darker tones) he kills off all the major characters and destroys the Earth quite completely.

I had wondered how they were going to handle that in the radio series but I assumed it would only be cosmetic changes. But no. In the radio series, every one lives. And happily ever after too. At Milliways[2]. And Fenchurch returns. As does Marvin. And worse, Arthur gets TWO happily ever afters. On one probability he lives with Fenchurch on an Earth that has popped into existence again and on the other, all the major characters spend the rest of their days at Milliways. Worse still, Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged[3] who I quite liked as a bit character is killed off! By Zarquon!

**END SPOILER**

To cheer myself up and forget this hack work, I need to dig out my DVDs of the TV series and watch them again. Its been a couple of years…

[1]: Email me and I’ll send you the link to the site.
[2]: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
[3]: The immortal guy who decided to insult everyone in the universe.