I had to take last Friday off and head to West Godavari district for a funeral related event. I stayed in Bhimavaram till 9.00pm and headed to Poolapalli, my parents’ place, which is about 22km from Bhimavaram. Being tired, I chose an option to take public transport than driving to the place. So got into a local bus which charges Rs. 10.00 for that 22km travel (thats about 23 cents for a 15 mile travel.)
That was a fantastic bus travel after a long time. Its almost a fullmoon day and moonlight was spread across the fields. Most of the copassengers are local farm workers and started napping the moment the bus started. There is near silence, except for the noisy engine of the bus. The interior lights of the bus were off for the night trip. Being in a window seat, I could get a clear view of the left hand side of the road in its natural moonlight, thanks to local power outages and go-to-bed-early communities. So the 45 minute travel feasted my eyes with green fields in solid moonlight. Could enjoy every moment of that. Thank God I took a bus that night.
I returned back to Bhimavaram next morning, but that time I drove my father’s Bajaj Chetak. Thats a good experience again, driving a two-wheeler on a near-zero traffic road.

After a gap of about 8 years, Latha started working again. During these 8 years, she started with a company but couldn’t manage much with kids, relocation and other activities. Now she started working fulltime from today.

All the best!

This week, there is a loss of two good people I personally know.

• G. Ramalingaraju: A very respected figure in Kompally and Bhimavaram areas. He passed away unexpectedly on Tuesday am due to severe heart attack. For past few years he is residing in Bhimavaram and holding honorary positions in local Kshatriya association. He is serving those positions with lot of zeal and dedication. A person who mingles with people of all ages. He is is approached by many of us for advises on a wide range of issues. His passion for well being of everyone in the family is exemplary. He is a father figure for the entire family. His absence is going to leave a huge gap in family relations.
• D. V. Narasaraju: With 40+ years of Telugu movie industry presence, he is treated as a father of satire and wit in telugu movies. Popular for story writing and script writing, he is behind many of the telugu industry gems like Gundamma Katha, Yamagola, Ramudu-Bhimudu and so on. A man who could wrote stories and dialogues that survived multiple generations of Telugu movie goers, lot of his works are re-made into other Indian languages. He is maternal uncle of my father-in-law, and I had some memorable occassions of meeting with him in the last 15 years. He passed away on Monday after a few days of hospitalization.

May their souls rest in peace.

For the first time in 5 years after relocating to India, Latha and me have got some time to go out for breakfast together. We dropped off Spurthi at school for a painting event and wanted to try out for advance booking of a movie. We had about 40 minutes time and wanted to try out breakfast at Chutneys. By about 08.10am, the place is very crowded and we had to give out the car for valet parking. Our wait was relatively short when compared to other patrons, needing just two seats.

We ordered Onion Masala Rava Dosa for myself and Steamed Dosa (also known as Chiranjeevi Dosa) for Latha. As usual, we shared and tasted each item. At the end, both of us are so stuffed that we didn’t want to order coffee. The food is good, but the chutneys are the ones that make is special. The ambience and  cutlery worth special mention. The copper glasses and the water at right temparature made me drink lots of water. I feel this is a worth-paying-visit kind of place.

This week, I got a couple of surprises from kids.

During the weekend, kids came to me and declared “we have passwords setup for our login accounts!” Spurthi is 11 now and Surya is 8, and their passion for using the login accounts is interesting. About 3-4 years ago, I gave them separate login accounts on the Linux PC I have. At that time, I created their passwords and told them how to enter it. Earlier this month, I bought them a new PC, with no passwords for accounts, mainly because it is not yet connected to our home router. Looks like they got bored of having accounts with no password. They created their own passwords!

This evening, my daughter came to me and asked if I can decode some cipher text. She didn’t use the word cipher, but the idea is the same. I spent some time to decode it and told her how I decoded it. Its a very simple substitution cipher with ROT-(26-x). Then she said she will use some other code and gave me a much tougher one. This is a cipher in which each two character tuple in alphabet is substituted for one another. Then we spent very short time looking at Chapter 2 of Security in Computing by by Charles P. Pfleeger and Shari Lawrence Pfleeger. She has exams for the rest of the week, so probably we will take a closer look at other cipher techniques in that book during weekend.

Pleasant surprises from kids!

Yesterday, we are scheduled to receive my brother-in-law and his wife arriving from NJ, USA at about 02.45am in Hyderabad airport. Woke up at 02.00am and called the Air India numbers. No response. Tried their website. Their arrival information page doesn’t work at all, at least with Mozilla family of browsers. So I headed for airport anyway. Upon reaching the airport, the TV information system showed that the estimated time of arrival is 03.45am. So stayed back there with entire family members, including kids, my inlaws, and my brother-in-law’s inlaws.

The wait was not that easy, given that the airport lounge is closed due to increased security threats in the recent days. Had to stay out standing at the gate. We waited and waited, as the airline TV system didn’t show any further information, except for the rerun commercials. The whiteboard that is supposed to contain the flight info showd data that is two days old, dating back to 11th Aug. Nobody from Air India even cared to erase it.

Hours passed by, and till 6.00am, nothing happended. The security person at the gate kept on saying that the flight didn’t arrive and he doesn’t have any further info. Only at about 6.10am, the TV system is updated with info that the flight is due for arrival by 07.00am. Since the kids are there for quite sometime, and it is almost time for maid servant to comeover for daily cleaning, some of us had to head back home. Latha had to stay back home for getting things done at home. Rest of us went back to airport by 07.30. Only at about 07.15am, I could get a operator of Air India respond on their phone, with info that the flight arrives at 07.30. That too after waiting on the line for about 10 minutes.

Finally, the TV system stayed put with the arrival info of 07.20am for flight AI 0600. By the time these people got out of customs area, it is almost 08.40am. The long wait outside the airport ended only after 6 hours. Spurthi and Surya are very much tired from the wait.

However, our side of the pain is much better. Passengers in this flight had to go thru much bigger pains in Mumbai airport. All of them are given pretty much zero information about the flight’s planned schedule. They are made to wait long hours for the very limited security check infrastructure (only two gates for eight long lines of people.) There is mere chaos in terms of when the plane would start. There is no way to call home from the Mumbai airport. So they waited there, simply uninformed, waiting for something to happen.

There is obviously a greater need to emphasize more on security at this time, but that doesn’t mean that airlines can simply put people in absolute chaos. They can improve their information systems to be more accurate and current. In that respect, Air India seems to be doing no good at all. For an airline that has a bad reputation for quite some time, this current situation is not helping at all.

I travel weekly between Hyderabad and Bangalore on trains of Indian Railways. Starting 1st July, the train timetable has changed to run the trains faster. However, all the trains I boarded since then ended up being late. May be the stations en-route are adjusting to the new logistics of traffic.

Today, for the first time in the last month, the train from Bangalore is dot on time while arriving into Hyderabad. Managed to get an hour’s sleep at home, due to rainy and sober weather.

My employer encourages employees to blog. One of the employees, whose position is reduced earlier this week, posted a blog entry commenting heavily on the company strategy in a specific area.

There is an interesting debate on whether the employer should yank out the blog entry or not. I am impressed by the thoughts on the mail alias that the employer shouldn’t censor the blogs. Rather, people feel that it is individual bloggers that need to refrain from communicating offending, inaccurate, incomplete or unethical information in their blogs.

Freedom of speech is a good thing. But it should be well augmented by the role a person plays in the rest of the eco system.

Hope to encounter less and less of immature blogs in future.

For the last few weeks, there are growing number of requests from people I worked with for last 11+ years to get connected in LinkedIn. Got some time this morning, so started with signing up at LinkedIn and started adding connections. Here is my profile at LinkedIn. Still incomplete, but a starting point for getting networked in this forum.

I started shopping frequently at the Big Bazaar that is opened near BMTC-Double Road in Bangalore. A week ago, I received my Citibank credit card statement that featured a Rs. 1354 charge as of 2nd week of July from Big Bazaar – BMTC. I would have simply overlooked that, except for two reasons. In the last four weeks, I haven’t bought any expensive groceries etc. Also, I have been in Bangalore for only 5 days in the first 3 weeks of July and I didn’t have enough time to step out from work for shopping. I started being at work much before that shop opens and reached home long after the shop closes, for the entire month of July.

So I started checking my previous bills. There is exactly the same amount of money billed to my credit card, from the same shop, in the first week of June. What this means is either the shop or the credit card company billed me twice!
I called customer service and filled in the required forms. They said it takes about 3 months to investigate. Let us see how long it actually takes. It is surprising that neither the credit card company nor the merchant have cross checks to avoid duplicate billings.