Localized Gujarati Geek

* Many many returns of the day to my dear Kavin, his birthday was on 16th and we had very small party too. Some pics are uploaded to my flickr and thanks to barkha for giving her digicam for capturing great moments.

Now back to Ahmedabad and waiting for rain to use my new umbrealla.

* Just feeling so good at /home. I reached home (Mumbai) after 18 hours of road travel by bus. Funny thing was that my son refused to recognized me He has become so naughty too.

Fixing my system which wasn’t updated from last 3 months at moment!

* I had really nice experience yesterday (oppose to my usual real life experiences nowadays). I was trying to get ticket to Mumbai (home). Since, I don’t own credit card (and wish to in future), I was not able to book air tickets, agent was option but I wanted it as early as possible. There wasn’t any train ticket, so I took brave step and decided to go by road (bus). Checked redbus.in and found that tickets are available and they are giving facility to book ticket by debit card too! I try to book ticket but somehow it was failed transaction But, to my surprise, I got call from redbus customer care and they told me that if I can book ticket on phone. I said, oh yes! And, today I get my ticket delivered to office.

I am now loyal customer of redbus

* I just removed all local and international news feed from Akregator feed list. They are not for me. Local news channels are full of IPL news only and international are useless for me. Also, deleted some useless feeds like my own blogs feeds etc.

* In other news, I went to my first visit of any BLR mall today. Met Harsh at lunch and had good time and talk in Gujarati in Real Life. Feeling very very good. We went to some foo places for his PG accommodation too. And, me and Kushal went to yet another nearby mall, Garuda. Pretty nice and good eye-stoppers there. And got a book, ‘The Emperor’s New Mind by Roger Penrose‘.

* Some time life worth to call it good.

* Bubulle and Sam has already seen it. But, if you ever likely to coming down to BLR this tips and tricks can be useful. So, print it out!

- Do not catch rickshaw on one-way. Even if your offer 1000 INR, they will not come to place where traffic is terrible.

- Do not ask them where cop/policeman is not near.

- Do not catch auto near biggie place like MG Road. They are smart and they will tell you tripple amount of fare because they know that people near these places are rich and can pay whatever they tell.

- Keep your half of your budget for traveling inside BLR, half for rest of the things (like airfare, shoppings etc).

- Learn Kanndda properly, if not, do not speak in Hindi.

- Keep asking to auto drivers, probably after 45 or 50 tries you will get auto which will come with proper meter based fare.

- The last advice: Hire a bicycle. Good for health, Good for brain.

PS: This post is due to our (/me and Kushal’s) frustration of tomorrow’s attempt to get auto from Residency road to Ulsoor.

kthnx.

* With uncertainty principle playing in full form with me, I decided to go to Fossmeet@NITC. But, came to know that there is no bus tickets available! What to do? I called up dear tuxmaniac aka Aanjhan and he suggested me to go by taxi. wow. Pretty expensive it will be, I thought. What ever, we decided to go with burning (hip) pockets and the journey was terrible. I did such long travel (7 hours) in taxi after long time. Anyway, we reached at NITC around 6 AM.

The Keralian atmosphere was excellent and I felt similar humidity like Mumbai and that made me a bit sad. Ah. The event was already kicked off the day before and I attended Praveen’s talk on openid while figuring out that wifi is not working for us (proxy and they didn’t care to let us know password etc).

So, we headed towards lab and enjoyed some Internet while seating in ‘Foss for school children’ workshop. Lunch was ok, but I enjoyed talking with different people and it was nice talk with Ani Peter about current localization work from Redhat. These guys simply rocks! Got my conference tshirt before ‘Medium’ size is out-of-stock.

We were eagerly waiting for our dear Pradeepto, and voila, he came and started his talk! I was attending his talk first time (always missed due to some or other reasons..). Excellent and interactive. No slides. /me need to learn something from this fellow!

We were 100% tired at evening. So, first we changed to better ‘room’. Thanks to NITC co-coordinators who did quick action for this (Why we requested for changing room? Answer: The previous room had only one power-supply plug! and we want to do hacking at night!). We then headed towards ‘Malabar Palace’. Excellent South Indian food and beer.

The next day — I was suppose to give talk on ‘Contributing to Debian’ but by some magic, the talk was disappeared from schedule. Sad. Anyway, we (me, tuxmaniac and pradeepto) gave live talk on ‘How to contribute to free software’. We used SVN, Bugzilla, Wiki, SF.Net and other tools (IRC!) to show how students can use these in college projects and make it much better and how it can lead to Free Software development. I did svn commit for KDE Gujarati (Idea stoled from Rusty’s talk at Foss.in/2007).

We then decided to leave the place. The return trip was amazing. Pookat lake and Mysore Palace. Amazing places. We had nice dinner and Kamat Hotel and I bought one wood penguin too (Total number of Penguin toys=4, Now).

I learned that Calicut is also known as Kozikode

Can you see anything like this in BLR?

Originally uploaded by aanjhan

No, I will not see

* Wake up early, catch bus in early morning. Avoid rush-hour traffic.

* If you can’t wake up early, you will have crowded bus, go inside with hard try and look for person who has next bus stop to get seat. You need to study hard to become master in this - if person is moving his/her bag, keeping mobile/pen/paper in pocket, go nearby and wait he/she stand up and grab the place!

* Make sure that you are not standing near door, crazy drivers shuts it suddenly and chance of injury is high.

* Do not seat on seats reserved for ladies (either marked red or written on it).

* Still, if you can’t find place, play ‘frozen-bubble’ or finish pending calls and wait for your stop!

And, yes. Don’t assume that ’same bus number’ will reach you at ’same place’. The bus number on BMTC is volatile. And, please don’t ask ‘How to travel at evening’, I have left it upon your luck!

* I was called to take small session on Debian at RVCE (Rashtriya Vidhyalaya College of Engineering, Mysore Road, Bangalore). Me, Praveen and Srijit went there by somewhat long journey by changing two buses. The college building is awesome and faculty who arranged all day, Renuka Prasad is more awesome than that. Shyam was already there and he came down from Kerala to take session. Vikram Vincent was also there and he talked about translation of Kannada (I don’t understand why Kannada translation is so lagging behind as even I took inspiration of Kn-OO.o team!). Well, event was kicked off by Praveen with Google Summer of Code presentation. Meanwhile, I prepared slides My session was good (Ah!). And people were more interested in Compiz-Fusion on my laptop. I tried my best to show all cool things in Debian. We are planning to have one full day session on Debian+Localization+Kn Aspell Dictionary Sprint.

* I am optimistic for this college and yeah I missed ‘Welcome Lunch’ arranged for me by #linux-india freaks due to this event, but I don’t have any regret

* Just say ‘Hi’ to me, if you are in BLR. I’ll be here Even, after journey of 22 hours, I am very much fresh like lime soda. Work is not yet started, but getting into it. I have joined Comat, where very familiar guys - Jace, Parthan and Kushal rocks.

Thanks guys for warm welcome!

* I am not going to Freed.in/2008 too! Damn. I’ll miss amazing talks and friends.