MAC frightens me again

I was in the middle of some important work,  and was also completing the last edits to my blog when this screen freezed my huge monitor. It asked me to restart my system. And all the attempts of saving my work before hitting the power button failed. Frustrated, I went for the power button, with no hopes of getting my work back. But to my surprise, after the restart, everything was saved for me. :)

Thanks Mr. Jobs, but I thought it would be a good idea to let the user know why exactly the computer wants to shut down.  Weird though, I never found out why did it want to restart.

Update: This has been happening very frequently of late. I noticed that whenever my phone (HTC Hero) is kept connected to my Mac, it either refuses to start or I get this "Restart" screen. Seems the rivalry between Apple and Google have just taken it to new levels. Bad for me :( . 

The apple site says this : http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.4/en/mh2238.html

Just in time - Again

Continuing from the previous post, the journey back to Bhubaneswar on the Scooty was very very thrilling. Every 2 minutes, I used to ask Ashish to look at his watch while I was on full throttle. The Scooty was running a race of it's lifetime. I had never been in such a hurry before, well, may be I was, 2-3 times, :).

Finally, we did manage to reach the airport on time, just before the checking counter shut down. And Mr. Ashish could fly back to Hyderabad that day. What a relief!!!

People had always doubted my Scooty riding skills, but yet again, I have proved them wrong, and yet again, I won the race against time. I was in a similar situation when a friend of mine asked me to drop him at the railway station. It was in Bangalore and I had a Pulsar 180cc with me then. I made it on time then as well. A few days back I was mocking at Vishal and Gaurav for missing their flight, by 10 odd minutes. Now, I realize the importance of each minute, especially when you are running to catch a flight or a train. Hahaha, but in the end, it's the result that matters. They missed it !!! Kudos.

A Scooty’s trip to Puri

For the people who are ignorant of this word “Scooty”, let me first  introduce this to you.

Scooty is an Indian brand of scooters manufactured by TVS Motors. Basically, it was designed for women, and at one time, was the largest selling scooter brand in it’s segment. Equipped with a 60cc engine, it can hit a top speed of about 60 kmph with a single person. However, the max speed dropped to a surprisingly lower value, somewhere around 45 kmph when you add on a pillion. If you want to know more about this scooter, visit the website.

Well, mine, not exactly mine, but my sister’s scooty is 6 years old now. And whoever rides it now, vows never to ride it again. But during it’s initial days, I used to love scooty rides a lot. :) And, so, there is some kind of attachment between the two of us.

Ok, the story continues. Ashish, who was in Bhubaneswar, for  attending Sidharth’s marriage, wanted to go to Puri. I told him that we can take a car/taxi. Not willing to contribute to the already increasing Carbon levels in the atmosphere, he recommended to avail the public transport. Hmm, Bad Idea, I thought. But, I knew that I will not be able to convince him to take a taxi, he would have never agreed. So, I gave him another better (looking atleast) option. My Scooty. And he somehow agreed.

Well, there was one little constraint. He had a flight to catch, the same day, at 6:45 pm, that very evening. And so, I worked out all the calculations (taking into consideration all the factors, including the max possible speed of my scooty) and arrived at our scheduled departure time, 9:00 am in the morning. Well, true to their reputations, NITKians, never made anything on time. Or they always did something wrong. Ya Ya, I am one of them. But, I can give you some more examples. Mr. Vishal and Mr. Gaurav missed their flights by just 10 minutes who wanted to attend Sidharth’s marriage. Mr. Srinath, who is currently a student at IIM, Kolkatta, by mistake booked a train ticket for the day after when he was supposed to travel. He managed his time well, but had all the wrong data and inputs. :) And I wasn’t even expecting Mr. Ashish to make it to my house before at-least 11:00 am. And I still over-estimated. He reached my house at 11:30 and then we started.

Puri is around 60 kms from my house. And, I just did a test ride on my Scooty. A max speed of 43 kmph. Hmm, Well, at that speed, I thought it will take at-least 2 hours to reach Puri. And we did it. YAY!!!

But the return journey was more fun, exciting and tensed. For some reason, my Scooty refused to buzz beyond the 40 kmph. At the place where we stopped for food, we got a bit late and lost a few minutes there (may be 10 minutes). And, it was already 5:00 pm and there was still some 30 odd kms to cover. If at all, Rajhans misses his flight, he and only he would be the sole person responsible. He did all this, wasted time, which could have saved us a few minutes.

Did Rajhans miss his flight? Did Scooty survive the torture? Did we manage to break the NITKians record of never being on time?
To be continued… 

My bike

It's almost 3 months now, and it was high time that I had uploaded a pic of my new bike. Here it is. 2500 kms up, with a few glitches with the battery during the initial days, my first bike has survived the torture. Max speed reached : 110 kmph.

Working on Ubuntu

After my Mac crashed at office, I lost hope. Damn, isn't there a single OS which will never crash!!!! I know, I know, they are machines. Morever OSes are just lines of code and even the best programmers commit mistakes. But, I cannot live with those if my systems keep crashing like this. My data is precious and I would do anything to keep it safe.

Well, I got Linux (Ubuntu) installed on my laptop. Getting all the necessary softwares for Ubuntu is a bit of work, and would require you to look here and there. Now, after around 2 weeks of working on it, I have almost set up everything required. A blogger client called (Blogilo) was the last one and I am writing this blog from that software.

It feels nice to work on this. Shifting from Windows to a Mac and then to a Linux has been painful at times, but hey, ain't I flexible? Just to add another OS to the list, I know DOS also. :)

Blogilo is nice by the way. 

@Update : The post couldn't be updated by Blogilo. It crashed. So, I am on the web now. Damn OSses.

Screens of Death

Everybody knows what the "Screen of Death" is on a Windows machine. To be specific, it's called the "Blue Screen of Death". And we have learnt to live with it. I see it quite frequently on my laptop and I don't freak out any more.

I was pretty happy that I got a Mac for work at my office. I had heard that it's stable, it never crashed and stuff like that, and I had started believing that as well, until the day one of my colleague got the "Screen of Death" on his Mac. Well, the color was different and there wasn't even any text. Nothing was written. Here comes the "Pink Screen of Death" for Mac.

Well, whenever my Windows laptop crashed, I never cared to read what was written. Without any delay, I used to re-start my machine, and it would be back in action. On the pink screen, there wasn't anything written, so we decided that we would wait for some time. 10 minutes of waiting and nothing happened. So, finally, we decided to hit the power button, and within seconds it was fine.

I wonder whats the color for Linux machines, guessing that it should be black. :)