Move to WordPress

After contemplating for quite some time, I've decided to move to WordPress.

The new URL will be

www.cashlesscarnival.com

NO.. WordPress does not give such URL's which do not have WordPress mentioned anywhere in it. I bought a domain for 15$ (per year) and re-directed it to the WordPress URL. I will keep both the threads (wordpress and blogspot) active till the end of this year and will finally consolidate to wordpress after that. (an our later). I realized what a pain it would be to manage two threads, especially if the blog you are trying to post has several images. So, hereon, I will be posting only at WordPress.

In the meantime, I will try to see if there is any straight forward mechanism of importing blogs from Blogger Beta to Wordpress to ensure continuity. Currently, the process of moving data appears quite complicated. If you are aware of any simpler mechanism, do enlighten me about it.

Double Entendres

"When Microsoft announced that it would be taking on the iPod with something called Zune, did its branding team realise that the word translated into French slang for genitalia and a Hebrew term meaning getting laid?"

Read on Times Online.

HSBC

Of the different banks I have my acccounts with, one bank which has consistently managed to piss me off everytime I have interacted with them is HSBC. Though I have had an account with them only for about 3 months now, I have already had sufficient experiences to hate not like them for a lifetime.

It all started with the opening of the account. It took the HSBC guys over a month to get the account and the debit card functional. They sent the account details, the debit card and the cheque book after about 20 days and the Debit Card PIN took another 20 to arrive after repeated calls to their office. In the meantime, I used the cheques to transfer money from the HSBC account to the others to draw money. In contrast, When I opened an account with ICICI a lil’ over a year ago, the bank representative handed me the debit card, the PIN, cheque book right on the spot after I filled the form. It was quite simple, he just mapped the serial #'s on these items to the serial # on the form and my account, the card were all functional and I could access the account via the internet as well, which gets me to my next concern with HSBC.

Getting to access the HSBC account via the internet needed undergoing another filling up of online form and waiting for another 15 days for the secure ID to arrive. Apparently, the secure ID provides a second level of authentication after entering the user ID and password. It does not make any sense to me why there is a secure ID to access the account via the net, but not for any transactions done at the ATM. And also, *I feel* the secure ID just has about 10-15 PIN's of which it gives me any one number randomly. I am not trying to say that the device is dumb but I have a feeling that if I note down all the possible numbers it can generate, and enter any one when the web page prompts me to, the site would work. I am quite tempted to experiment this right away but their site is not working.. Thanks to some migration that they have done. I have tried to log in 4 times so far since yesterday when they did the migration, but I have not been able to make it through.

A week ago, I ordered for a new cheque book. The cheque book reached faster than I had expected, and even as I was thinking if it was too premature to form an opinion about the bank, I bumped into 2 extra characters that has been appended to my surname and that is how it is printed on all the 25 cheque leaves. My last name is NARAYAN and not NARAYANAN. Just the 2 extra characters would notionally make my name sound like a tamilian's. NO, I don’t have a problem with it, I am not a person who looks at people based on their geographic origins and don’t really care what someone infers based on surnames. But, I just don't like it when someone tampers with a name especially when someone adds a pair of AN's to a name which already has 3 pairs of them. And moreover, in this case it just goes to show how carelessly these guys operate. I am sure no one would have even bothered verifying to see if the name printed on the leaves is the same as the one in their database.

A friend of mine who has dealt with this bank for longer than I have jokingly once said that the H and S in the name HSBC do not mean Hongkong and Shanghai.. It only means Hyderabad and Secunderabad.

Walk English, Talk English

On one hand, we want to rename all our cities to get rid of the colonial names and on the other we want to teach our policemen english. Can't we ever make up our mind on which way we want to move forward?

On a different note, have you ever heard any announcements being made in international airports for non-english speaking travellers in english apart from the messages intended for Indians? None of the announcements are made in Hindi for Indians. If the same games for which our cops are learning english, were to be held in France, would the policemen be taught english to please the crowd? Don't we go a lil' too far in the name of customer satisfaction?

Cracking Cans

One of the shabbiest places in my office is the men's rest room. From the time I've been here, that place has always had some problem or the other. First, it was the taps not working and now, it is something more severe. A few urinals leak.. eeks !!

This problem has been around for 2 weeks now. As a stop-gap arrangement to ensure whatever you send out does not come back at you ... a dustbin has been placed right below the urinal.

Last week, I had a nasty experience. The stop-gap arrangement was not in place.. and you can imagine what would have happened. A janitor who was standing right out there, did not warn me before I got there.

Mid-way during the process, I realised there was something wrong down there.

I asked the janitor "What is this man?"

"It's OK sir.."

"OK? What do you mean, it is OK? Whatever I am pouring out is coming back to me... and you think it is OK?"

"No..What I meant was, We will take care of the cleaning part..Sir, you can actually move to the next urinal"

"What do you mean? At the middle of the firing process, you want me to hold my pistol and move to the next one? Thank you very much."

Atleast, in this case, it was only the janitor and me who saw what happened. Just imagine, As I am busy hopping from one urinal to the other with the pistol in my hand, a bunch of guys walk in to the restroom" Man !! I do not even want to proceed thinking on this line. The way I am carping about the urinals here in my blog, someone else would be crapping on his blog "Cashless running reckless with his pistol in the toilettes"

Biochemistry?

Yesterday, there was this photograph of Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw and Vasundhara Raje Scindia, the chief minister of Rajasthan in the Times of India (Page 5/6) and The Economic Times (front page). Both the papers had this photograph but neither of them had written anything about what the meeting was all about or for that matter there was nothing apart from a two liner more or less similar to the first 2 of this blog.

When I glanced at it, I was like.. "What the f***, our desi Britney and Madonna?"

The perspective of a pervert apart, what do you think could have actually happened here? I think it was just smart photography. If you were to take a photograph from an angle standing besides one of them, this is what it would result in.

Anyways..whatever it was, I was glad to discover that sending my cerebellum on a wild run was a great way to expedite the process of finishing off the otherwise eternal bowl of cornflakes.

It can't get stupider than this

When I read this article, I knew it was something I had to blog about.

It has been 10 minutes since I read the article and since I wrote the above line. Still can't think of anything to write about it. Just wondering, if this incident actually reflects his awareness about things, how could anyone even consider his candidature for employment?

Also: Linked at India Uncut.

One more to the never ending digital 'To Buy' list

The last weekend, my wife and I were looking out for a good photo frame. My wife has been complaining from the time we've got married that there is not a single photograph of ours at home which has been 'framed'.

I have always been giving her this excuse that when I get the right picture which I think is worth showcasing, I will get a good frame. The other concerns I have had are that once a picture gets into the frame, it inadvertently ends up staying there for good which could look quite jaded and get monotonous after some time and also most of the pictures we have taken of ourselves are soft versions which like any other digital pictures will always stay cosy in the hard disk and will probably never be exposed to ink and paper.

Today, during my regular visitation to the blogs I've subscribed to on Google Reader, I discovered the digital photo frames. Apparently, they have been around for quite some time now. Atleast, that is what I inferred looking at the number of results I got when I queried for it on Google. They look like any other regular photo frame, just that these have a LCD screen to display photos and can display multiple photos in a slide show format. It could connect to the internet to download new pictures. I am sure there would be an option to post any picture from the repository randomly which would address my problem of things looking bland over a period of time.

There are several companies which manufacure digital photo frames. Kodak, Polaroid, Ceiva and Philips are some which I could look at. The Ceiva's cost anywhere between 100 - 200$.

I never felt that the solution for the vanilla photo frame problem would come the flavourful digital way. Now, I have one more digital stuff that gets added to the never ending "To Buy" list.