Air-India: The Maharajah experience?

10 01 2010

As a frequent traveler, I’ve flown several airlines to several places. However, the one airline I’ve categorically avoided in the past is India’s own Air-India (AI) for international travel. I guess it’s because pretty much all my life, I’ve only airindia2heard bad things about its service, quality of airlines etc from my parents , their friends and friends of friends. But this was 15 years ago. Times change. However, I was still not willing to try AI due to its (in)glorious past track record that was handed down to me by word of mouth and from generation to generation.

A week ago, I had to travel to India for work. This was January 2010 and the fog conditions in Delhi were particularly bad. As I sit in my hotel in India and look out of the window and write this article, the fog is really bad – hardly any visibility. With this much of fog,  most flights that arrive in Delhi late at night get rerouted to other cities and make it into Delhi only during daytime the next day. My colleagues who arrived in India earlier warned me of the condition, so I looked around for flights that landed in the day in delhi. Pretty soon I realized there was only one option for me to try: Air India. Drat. All the other flights like Lufthansa, United etc all arrived late at night and the only other daytime options were ridiculously expensive. I had read that Air-India had recently re-done its entire international fleets and there were new planes and newly re-designed business class and first class seats which according to their marketing was “comparable to other international flights”. Furthermore, the fact that it flew directly from IAD to Delhi with a short stop at JFK was a very attractive option for me, so I decided to take the plunge and try out this carrier for the first time in my life. What follows next is my experience.

Read the rest of this entry »



More tweeting, less blogging

24 09 2009

Twitter-bird-001I finally get why people tweet. It lets you speak your mind the way it is, without requiring you to make a paragraph out of it. When I blog, I think, then form, then rehearse then post. When I tweet, I think and tweet. The link between my thoughts and the tweets is more direct. And of course, very often, I don’t have paragraphs to talk about, but still experience exciting new things that can be written in 3 lines. So now I understand the subtle difference of tweeting vs blogging. I’ve wiped the dust off my twitter account. I will use that more often now. I will still occasionally post, but only if I have lots to say.

Follow on at http://twitter.com/arjunrc



The power of estimation

20 07 2009

XKCD has a hilarious cartoon on “Estimation”. I just burst out laughing when I read the footnote. If you are a windows user, you will burst out laughing too.

Estimation

Estimation



Fanboy post: Iphone 3GS shipped

18 06 2009

Like all the apple fanboys like to squeal and shout, here is my obligatory squeal of delight on having my phone shipped out today. Let me join the ranks of the ‘I feel so proud that apple condescended to ship me something I paid for’ list with the obligatory, but totally useless details:

When did I order: July 11, 6:44AM PDT to be exact

What did I order: Iphone 3GS, 32Gig, Black as an AT&T upgrade

Where did I order it from: Apple Store (online)

When did I get my “shipped” status: June 18, 2009, 2:14 PM ET to be exact. Interestingly, I happened to be on the appstore site hitting refresh so I saw the status change from ‘Prepared to ship’ to ’shipped’ (Another squealing shout relevant only to me)

What does the fedex tracking status say:

Picked up from Memphis TN

Delivery on: Jun 19, before 3:30PM

Read the rest of this entry »



(Offtopic): From Blogger to Wordpress.com – what a bummer and I am to blame

3 04 2008

11.jpg You know, one would think a person interested in technology always would do his research before adoption. Well, in my case, my heart always conflicts with my mind. Consider my sudden move from blogger to wordpress.com. It went sort of like this “oh cool, there are some neat wordpress.com templates, I’m bored of blogger, so let me migrate”. I know, it was a ridiculous reason. I did not research wordpress.com’s limitations. After migration, I realized:

  1. No google-ads allowed. Darn. I had just about started to see a reasonable return on my old blog
  2. The import tool imported the articles alright but did not import images – they kept the blogger URLs. Once I removed my blogger blog, several of the images disappeared. My guess is others will disappear over time
  3. No detailed stats. Wordpress.com’s own stats is very limited. Statcounter was far superior, but since I can’t plug in JS code, statcounter works with wordpress, but cannot show referrer stats
  4. No linkage to analytics.
  5. No customizations to CSS unless I buy it.
  6. Article URLs were not rewritten – so if you go to my yearly roundups (which I forgot to do for 2007), they will all point to my blogspot.com URLs which don’t exist.

Like I said, a badly researched option for me. Guess I deserve it. Can’t blame wordpress.com at all. Gee, maybe I’ll migrate back and pain my readers to re-do their entire subscriptions etc. Or maybe I’ll just stick to this limited functionality. Gee.

On the plus side, I think Akismet rocks. It’s a godsend for spam.



Conceptualize your startup in 1 minute

16 08 2007


Presenting the most powerful framework for conceptualizing your company.

Credit: here
Source I read it from: here

See this: http://www.tdbspecialprojects.com/

Click on the central ’shuffle’ button for ‘innovation’.



When have you just about had enough with the ‘Always on’ Blackberry?

2 08 2007

When do you know you have had enough of ‘always connected Blackberry’ ?

  • When your blinking of the eye matches the rate of the red LED blinking of your Blackberry
  • When you wake up at 2AM to drink water, check your emails instead, then go back to sleep wondering why you are still thirsty
  • When your hand automatically reaches down to your holster because it ‘vibrated’ only to find your phone is in your pocket, or worse, not even with you
  • When you promise your wife not to sit with the laptop all the time only to scroll through your blackberry hidden on the other side of the couch
  • When you like to keep holding your phone because of its ‘warmth’
  • When you make it a point, while traveling, to smile at someone else using a blackberry and then take yours out for a second, polish it an place it back thinking this is some sort of camaraderie of blackberry users
  • When you have spent more money buying ‘screen protectors’, ‘glass replacement screens’, ‘skintight covers’ and other gadgets as compared to the cost of the phone itself
  • When you get withdrawal symptoms if the red ‘new mail’ LED does not start flashing every two minutes
  • When you find yourself opting for a $400 a month blackberry plan which includes unlimited data, unlimited roaming, gazillion calling minutes, ‘just in case you are in the middle of tanganikya and need to make a call home’
  • When you keep checking what is your current GPS location (you know, in the new 8800 series), even though you are sitting in your OWN friggin’ house on your own friggin’ recliner
  • When you loctite glue your blackberry holder clip to your belt, so you never forget to ‘latch on’
  • When your pastime involves how smoothly you can maneuver the ‘pearl’ so that the cursor moves in a nice circle around your icons (applicable only to pearl users)
  • When you own a wall socket charger, a USB charger and a hand-cranked charger for your blackberry to make sure it never runs out of juice
  • When you have downloaded Yahoo Go!, Google Mobile, BBMaps, Telenav, WayFinder and other local search and/or GPS apps and use them ALL for every search, just to see which is better for this particular query
  • When you insist on posting notes/messages from your Blackberry even though you are in front of a computer, because the “Sent via BlackBerry® from Cingular Wireless®” tagline at the end of you message makes you feel sophisticated.

And you think adding ‘Presence’ to such devices will be a success in the consumer market! Ha. Bite me.

(Sent via BlackBerry® from Cingular Wireless®)



2010: A year of so many promises

6 06 2007


A friend and I keep talking about how magical 2010 is going to be. No matter what report you read, they promise 2010 will be the harbinger of wealth and prosperity for any market.For example:

“…mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) market will reach $10.7 billion in service revenue by 2010″

“..the IMS market ,…,investments on IMS equipment are expected to reach US$4.5bn”

“…WiMAX revenues increasing …to $3.3 billion in 2010″

“….consumer VoIP market revenues will reach $4.07 billion in 2010″

“…The mobile entertainment market …will grow to $59bn in 2010″

“….worldwide RFID spending to surpass $3 billion….”

“…mobile-Phone Premium Content Market to Reach $40 billion by 2010 ”

!!Awesome!!

Then, I actually searched:”What will fail in 2010″

And the response was:

More than half of global tier-one telecom carriers trying to establish new lines of business will fail through 2010

Is this irony or is this irony :-)



Off for a few weeks

25 02 2007


Hi Readers,

Just a short post to let you know that this blog just may be quiet for the next few weeks (hopefully shorter). I am in the process of discovering how lovely yet strenous it is to manage our newborn son :-)

A Note to my friends from Russia: Thanks for your email – I apologize for not having responded yet – I will certainly put some thought on your questions and write back by next week.



Lemonade 2.0

15 02 2007



(c) Corporaterat (please retain copyright if you copy)

Oh just a cartoon. Sometimes, I get the itch to draw.