This Pujas, I had no big plans. Hang out with school friends – that was all I had in my mind.
It was in the Sasthee morning when we started our pandal-hopping spree. A Tata Sumo was hired and we gorged through the streets of Kolkata. There were 10 of us, good old friends of school – all Lawrencians.
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My cabinet was groaning for some days and yesterday my computer went off for good. I guessed the SMPS has went wrong. Fortunately my old Pentium 4 system has most of its parts intact, I took out its SMPS and fitted into my current system. And voila! here goes my PC running again 🙂
I was just wondering about this… 
When one dies, his material properties are inherited by his successors. That is good. But what happens to his online belongings? Will no one ever open the dead person’s mailbox and it will be shut down one day forever when the user inactivity period is over? His descendants will never get a taste of his mails. But letters (the hard copy ones) are kept with care. In fact, I have a collection of letters, that my late grandpa wrote to me when I was a kid. If I consider my own mailbox, I find that many memorable mails – that my pals wrote to me or I wrote to others – are there that can be cherished from time to time. And what if a blogger dies? His last post won’t read that he is dead. The blog will also gradually die out with the death of its creator.
Yesterday I got the BSNL broadband connection. Oh boy, what great speed! My download times have decreased ten times at least and, not to mention, superfast page loads. I am really impressed. I chose the Home 500 plan that gives me a monthly bandwith usage limit of 1 GB and a speed of 256 kbps (plus free usage between 2 a.m. and 8 a.m.). All this for 500 bucks per month; reasonably priced–I must say for I was paying the same amount before to my cable operator who provided a speed of 32 kbps at the most. It took only 10-15 days for the connection to come, during this period they called us at least 5 times to check the connection (because this is broadband on phone). Very cool service man. Simply rocks! They have supplied a sleek looking ADSL modem of Chinese make that connects between my phone line and LAN port. I can receive phone calls and surf the net simultaneously. Only drawback is that the ADSL modem heats up at an awfully fast rate. Setting up the connection is a breeze–attach the wires in their places, ‘create a new connection’ in network connections, select broadband, type in your username and password and get connected instantly. You can set your LAN properties to ‘Obtain an ip adress automatically’ at first. Then once you are connected, see configuration instructions at this link.
BSNL offers other plans as well to suit different users. The cheapest one comes at 250 bucks per month with a monthly bandwith usage limit of 0.4 GB, a real deal for the casual surfers esp. who have been on dial-up this far.
Google launched its chat software recently. Now in its beta release, Google Talk has little to offer its users. A crisp interface and close integration with GMail is all that may catch one’s fancy. When it comes to features, Google Talk seriously lags behind its competitors. The fancy emoticons which are the very essense of instant messaging are missing. No support for webcam or file transfer either.
I have internet via cable. My local cable operator claims he is providing a broadband connection. Now this is the biggest lie. The Indian government has framed laws clearly specifying that a connection with a minimum speed of 256 kbps may be called as broadband. And the speed provided by my cable operator is a meagre 32 kbps! I am planning to switch to BSNL who are providing broadband over phone, they are providing 256 kbps of speed in their ‘Home 500’ plan. The rate is exactly the same as my cable connection package. And like my present connection, the BSNL one is also 24×7 i.e. unlimited package.
Just finished reading Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. This book is amazing. Based on facts. The best part is that I learnt so much. Came across the word hermaphrodite so many times in biology but never knew how it came; why the Olympics are held every 4 years and also the reason behind its symbol and other such facts. But the Divine Number PHI is simply mind-boggling. And all that ‘holy grail’ knowledge – mind-blowing and worth knowing. And believe me, Leonardo Da Vinci was my hero ever since I read about him in history in class 7 – renaissance period. He was a versatile genius – architect, musician, anatomist, inventor, engineer, sculptor, geometer, and painter. So nothing could equal my pleasure when I got a book in hand that champions Da Vinci’s brilliance. Superb story telling and great suspense. Louvre Museum now tops the chart of places I plan to visit in future.