Vivek live and kickin'

This advert can be the summed as the best in terms of making fun of the impatient ones. The new Airtel broadband is 16 Mbps but with a slight hitch. At Rs. 2999/- with a Data Transfer Limit of just 20 GB. Just listening to a few hours of music videos on Youtube should be enough to exhaust the limit in no time. Thinking of downloading torrents is something one should not even think about. Not sure who Airtel is targeting with this plan. If you bought this plan do leave a comment.

I had bought an Acer AspireOne around 6 months back. I've used it for less than 3 months and the network drivers have been deleted like twice. And both the times the reason was a Live-Update . I went online and checked that the only way to bring back the thing to life was to reinstall everything. I want to believe that I know a thing or two about Linux, my first distro was Slackware in 1998. Its been a while and won't consider myself to be a linux noob. Given the fact that I know a thing of two about Linux and I was still frustrated. I could have spent 2-3 hours and somehow got the whole thing to life again, but I am just thinking about people who don't know thing about Linux. For them its just an OS that runs and they don't even have to bother about it. But when you laptop stops working what do you do? This is a laptop without a CDROM drive and the only way to reinstall is to use the recovery DVD. I am just thinking about all the people who got the update around two d...

I wanted to watch a divx movie on my aspire one laptop which runs a Linux based OS. I tried to play the file but I did not see the video in the preinstalled video player. My next logical step was to download VLC for Linux. But as it turns out there is no VLC for Linux, there is a VLC for Ubuntu, Fedora and Source Code for any other flavor of Linux. It took me a good 30 minutes of searching on half a dozen forums to figure out a way to install VLC. It takes less than a minute on any windows based machine even if you download the zip version. And I thought this was a problem just with windows. As it turns out if you are using Mac OSX there is a separate version of Safari for Leopard and Tiger while a single binary edition for Windows XP and Vista. Guess Microsoft is doing something right somewhere. I was working on one of my friends computers which had OSX and Safari 2.x and figured it would be better if I installed Safari 3.x on it. I downloaded Safari and the moment I tried to install...

After writing about the Indian version of the show I took the test on the fox network site. And I have the certificate to prove it ;). Thought I don't live in New York and I took the test in 2008 and not 2007. Apart from those mistakes I am so much smarter than a 5th grader, or am I? Just made me realize how little I know or care about social studies and history. I always ended up taking questions about science and maths. The two three times I choose social studies or history I ended up giving the wrong answer. The concept of the show is nice and would go well with the Indian audience who seem to be having an overdose of the reality tv shows, and one more would not hurt.

UPDATE: You can play the game online at http://www.fox.com/areyousmarter/features/ . I played it and here are my results . कया आप पांचवी पास से तेज हैं? / Kya aap panchvi paas se tej hai? is an Indian version of Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader? and would be hosted by Shahrukh Khan. Now I am not really talking about how great the program is going to be or going to harp about the host. I just like the clever marketing technique by the company developing the show in India. In most states in India lottery is illegal, but paying money using premium SMS is not. These days they have this clever little advert on the Star Network channels which asks users to SMS the answer to a simple question to get on the program. Now the adverts been playing for a month with a new question everyday. And they entice you with a million dollar prize. You need to send the SMS on a premium number, so its almost like an underground lottery with dreams of a million dollars. Even if they get a million SMS's ...

Its really rare to see anyone who can actually think out of the box without their fixed set of ideas. If a person knows a "x" language or technology making that person think beyond it seems like an effort. Specially when you look at technology of any kind we have the language nazi's who will make every effort to protect their language as if they would die without it. So lets take an example of a Java programmer programming in JavaScript he/she will try and make sure that JavaScript works and feels like Java. There is no harm in it as long as that is not being preached as the only way of working. I tend to do that a lot (program like "x" language in "y") but I will never say that this is the only way of doing it. It just WFM , and I tend to learn from looking at other peoples code and changing my practice whenever I see something that I feel is better. Then we have the Mac, Linux and till a certain point Microsoft fanatics. They seem to have their fixed...

After every few years I feel I know everything there is to know but along comes something new and my myth is shattered and I come back down to earth. In most cases its not even something new just something I've never bothered to look but something which actually changes my perception. Most of the times I work on multiple projects at a time and in the end the result seems to be zero. There is always that one thing that seems to hold back the complete project. Be it something small or something really big. But there is something bigger than these projects that I seem to get out of these personal projects and that thing is experience. I end up learning things that I normally think I know or seem too trivial to learn. This weekend I was working on CSS and trying to get a native look and feel on a web page. I searched all over the net. But in the end the whole information was sketchy at best. I ended up learning a lot and finally figured out how little I knew about the topic and how li...

After all the ranting this was bound to happen, I wrote about how future bazaar sucks , airtel gprs sucked and a couple of other rants about products or services that were not up to what I expected them to be. I was going through Google analytics and wanted to know where the traffic was coming to my website. There were the usual search terms that are there normally but the one search term that really caught my eye was " vivek sucks ". I tried it on google and behold the first result was one of the posts on this blog. I could not help but laugh at the irony but I am still hoping it was some other Vivek that this person was searching. Meanwhile the search term " Vivek " which I have been trying to target for a while dropped to page 6 on google. I hope it comes up to the point of Vivek Sucks some day :) So next time if you want to visit the blog and you don't rememeber the url to the blog just search for Vivek Sucks on google.

Just my list of why food from McDonald's might be probably provided by Satan. Just check out the phone number you have to call, it has 666 written all over. From what I remember 666 is the devils number. Look at the brands color RED . Thats like the official devils color. Thank god its not black, but since Satan is supposed to be red the color just makes the statement. The food from McDonalds makes you fat, and just goes to reduce your life and that should make it easier for you to meet the Satan :) Thats the list so far incase you have more to add to it leave it in the comments. Technorati Tags: funny , sarcasm , mcdonalds , stupid , satan , devil