Really Caught up..

I don't know when this happened, but I am not the same person anymore. I just got to know from Nik that Ubuntu has come up with a new alpha release code named gutsy gibbon. Call it for the flavor of open source or strong community support, none of the Linux distros have excited me more than Ubuntu. More about gutsy gibbon.

The first thing that I am going to go today is hit www.torrentz.com and search for partition magic for Vista. Install it. Simultaneously download gutsy gibbon and get back to my good old days of playing with Linux. I am sure I haven't lost a technique to prove myself worthy of being "Crusader of open source". Long live community development. Peace!

Never shop at indiaplaza.in-Part II

What a service. Those sorry bas****s are yet to deliver my shipment even after 20 days when the shipment time promised was 10 days. I am still waiting for the shipment to arrive. With the kind of experience I am having I am sure those Ass****s haven't even shipped my product.

I am lodging a complaint with the Consumer Online Resources & Empowerment Centre

Affirmative NEVER SHOP AT INDIAPLAZA.IN.

Finetune

I think over a period of time I have become too critical of technology and new stuff coming up. However, not that critical as well. How about a wonderful site that caters to your need of unlimited music. A very dynamic site with amazing features and music.

The site in question is Finetune. A very nice site I came across as an alternative to pandora.com. Unfortunately, pandora doesn't allow music anymore to people outside US. Kind of racism. IP filtering is the basic idea with which the site filters it's traffic. However, there's an alternative. I am not comparing the 2 services because I've hardly used finetune.

Another great feature of finetune is it's desktop player. It requires Adobe AIR. So in case you want to have music right at your desktop you might wanna check out Finetune Desktop. Free stuff rocks ! Peace......

Long time..

I know it's been a long time since I have posted something on the blog. The reason for that is because the term is ending and I am having nightmare of a time to get the assignments done. And other than that there is also an urgency in learning the art of reading a research paper. It's getting a little concerning that I am not able to critically examine a paper.

Anyways I also know that it's not an excuse for not writing frequently. I'll be writing a more on my research progress and how I am getting fascinated in classes I am undergoing. All that will be coming soon. Please keep posting your valuable feedback.

Boastful to the extent of being obnoxious :)

This is called having a great image of yourself within you.

* There is no theory of evolution. Just a list of creatures I allowed to live.
* Outer space exists because it’s afraid to be on the same planet with me.
* I counted to infinity - twice.
* When I do a push-up, I am not lifting myself up, I am pushing the Earth down.
* I am so fast, I can run around the world and punch myself in the back of the head.
* I don’t wear a watch, I decide what time it is. (LOL)
* I gave Mona Lisa that smile.
* I can slam a revolving door.
* There are no races, only countries of people I have beaten to different shades of black and blue.
* My house has no doors, only walls that I walks through.
* I can divide by zero.
* Newton’s Third Law is wrong: Although it states that for each action, there is an equal and opposite reaction,
there is no force equal in reaction to my turnaround kick.
* When taking the GRE, write “Vivek” for every answer. You will score over 1600.
* I have 12 moons. One of those moons is the Earth.
* I grind my coffee with my teeth and boil the water with my rage.
* Archeologists unearthed an old English dictionary dating back to the year 1236. It defined “victim” as “one who has encountered Vivek”
* If you Google search “Vivek getting kicked” you will generate zero results. It just doesn’t happen.
* I can drink an entire gallon of milk in thirty-seven seconds.
* I don’t bowl strikes, I just knock down one pin and the other nine faint.
* It takes me 20 minutes to watch 60 Minutes.
* The Bermuda Triangle used to be the Bermuda Square, until I kicked one of the corners off.
* There are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, I live in Gurgaon.
* I once ate an entire bottle of sleeping pills. They made me blink.
* James Cameron wanted Me to play the Terminator. However, upon reflection, he realized that would have turned his movie into a documentary, so he went with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
* Thousands of years ago I came across a bear. It was so terrified that it fled north into the arctic. It was also so terrified that all of its decedents now have white hair.

Getting Heavy on sports..

Almost a week now and the series of events are more or less focused on sports. From daily Gym to Table Tennis, Volleyball and Basketball. And the sessions are grueling and exhausting. But getting back to Games (I should say Sports rather) is fun. You have that piece of mind that your day is not wasted lying on the bed and not doing anything.

I hope I am not pushing myself too hard. And I am sure to take up cycling soon. How soon is a question. Just waiting for my home theater to get delivered so I can rock my room. For a change I am not talking studies, research or papers. Interestingly I am feeling happy about it. BTW yesterday I bought a Nike's Release model basketball with a sexy black attire.

I had a visitor..

Wow! I cannot believe I had a Flock ambassador visiting my blog and commenting on the post where I talked about Flock. Here is comment section of the post that talks about Flock. Evan Hamilton is the person who commented on the post. He also has a blog that's actually pretty related to my interest areas as well. And I thought I could be lazy and get away from regular blogging. But these kind of visitors are the one's who encourage me to blog. And yeah trust me blogging about things other than the theme of your blog pays of sometimes.

Zotero - Unleasching the power of community development

I've had the privilege of playing around with quite a good number of open source softwares and various their flavors. And I keep falling in love with Firefox each time there is a new extension that redefines my browsing experience. With my endeavor into Academic research and a basic requirement to read research papers and use them as citations made me look for a software that could manage bibliography. I was introduced to Zotero by Sumit; a colleague and senior at MDI. Zotero is a great piece of firefox extension that can make your research journey a very exciting and smooth one.

Zotero sits right into your browser and manages the research papers/journal articles for you. It's so smooth that even a novice can get addicted to it in no time. The power of community development is wonderful. May god bless open source. Amen!

Cool Web 2.0 Template

I've just finished installing the Neo Template on my other blog and it looks awesome. I'll need some feed back though. Please keep commenting.

Changes to the Blog.

I have been getting a good amount of feedback about the style of my blog. And after consolidating all of them I've finally decided to make a few changes. Please let me know your feedback. This will make me change things which you might not like on the blog. Thanks everyone for the valuable comments.

Systems Approach

Systems Approach is a very popular approach for creating knowledge and being a researcher/consultant/investigator is systems approach. Following are the few terminologies applicable in systems approach.

1. Synergy: Effects in a reality (or model) that mean that the total is not the same as the sum of the parts.
2. Teleology: Purposefulness
3. Finality (dynamic teleology): Purposefulness over a period of time.
4. Systems Language: A terminology developed according to the systems approach.
5. System: A number of component and relations among them.
6. Open Systems: Systems that have connections to their environment.
7. Closed systems: Systems without connections to their environment.
8. Systems environment: The surroundings of a system.
9. Real systems: The object of a system study.
10. Systems model: The reproduction of this model.
11. Systems components: Parts of systems.
12. Subsystems: Systems that are parts of larger systems.
13. Supersystems: Systems that contain smaller systems.
14. Magnifying level: The degree of details in a systems analysis (or construction).
15. Systems relations: The connection among the components of a system.
16. Systems structure: Fixed, stable characteristics (static structure) and regular processes (dynamic structure).
17. Systems process: Courses of events of both regular and non-regular kind.
18. Systems perspective: Structural and/or processual.
19. Systems analysis: Description, explanation, and (possibly) understanding of an existing real system.
20. Systems construction: Building a new system.
21. Systems theory: Systems models and /or producer-product relations that are valid for more than one real system.
    

Never shop at indiaplaza.in

If you are wondering why am I writing this post; the reason is because I faced the consequence of trying to shop online with a pathetic online store called as indiaplaza.in. Let me tell you the whole story. I was working for Google Hyderabad, before I moved to Gurgaon for my PhD. I got some gift voucher from my team at Google as a reward for achieving some milestone. The gift vouchers were to be redeemed at indiaplaza.in. I had Rs. 7500/- worth of gift voucher. And I wanted to buy a home theater worth Rs 12499.

I redeemed my gift voucher of Rs 7500 and the rest Rs 4999 I chose to pay through cheque. Now as I checked out I saw that they'll ship me my stuff once they'll receive the cheque and will be able to en-cash it. I realized this could take more than 20 days for my stuff to reach me (including the 10 days of shipment time indiaplaza talks about). So I chose to cancel the order and use my debit card instead. Now comes the funny part. I canceled the order and now I cannot redeem my gift vouchers as it says I've zero balance to redeem the amount. I called up their customer care at my expense and I get the wonderful news that they are going to take 4 days for revoking the redeemable amount. Are we talking about information age and internet shopping. This whole shit defeats the purpose of online shopping.

Another irony of all this sad experience is that I wrote them (customerservice@indiaplaza.in, info@indiaplaza.in) a mail yesterday evening and I am yet to hear from them. Following is the copy of the mail I sent them:

I just talked to your customer care, on my bloody expense of making a phone call (because ideally, it should be a toll free number). I was told by your customer care executive that it will take 4 freaking days to make my gift vouchers redeemable again. Are we talking about online shopping? What kind of a pathetic company you guys run. I canceled my order 010820070431 because I wanted to use my debit card so that I can avoid the delay of you receiving my cheque and can have my order shipped instantaneously.

I am sorry to say but this bullshit of taking 4 days defeats the purpose of having an online shopping company like yours and me doing online shopping with a company like yours. I am very disappointed by this and might not think of shopping with you guys. I am going to also ask my company Google India to stop buying gift coupons from you because others from my company will face a similar problem like this. I am going to mark this mail to the person in Google responsible for buying gift coupons for our company. I am going to blog about the pathetic service on my blog and you can see the story in couple of hours at

http://bloggingtheweb.blogspot.com

Thank you very much for the excellent online shopping experience that you are providing.

A really angry customer,
Vivek

I am waiting to hear from some moron sitting there and reading mails, if they are not busy licking somebody's a**.

Powered by ScribeFire.