I’m… I’m still settling in to the fact that it’s been twenty-five years.

A few weeks ago, the BSNL SIM that I had purchased when I moved here to Bangalore, stopped working. The iPhone did not detect it and other phones gave a “SIM Corrupt. Contact Service Provider” error.

Knowing how the workings in a governmental agency in this country are and considering that I had physically cut the SIM down to a Micro SIM so it’d fit in my iPhone, I did not have any hopes of getting a free replacement. So I head out to the local BSNL Quick Service Station to get a replacement, stating that I had lost the SIM. I was asked to fill out a form, give a photocopy each of my address and ID proof and Rs. 10 for the replacement SIM card. To try my luck, I asked them if it was possible to get a Micro SIM instead, so that I wouldn’t have to cut it down again. Technically, they could just give me a Micro SIM and use its SIM number instead of the fresh SIM they were going to issue. Sadly, they were not ready to go out of their way to do me a favor.

Fast forward to yesterday, where I had this sudden urge to purchase the iPad special plans from BSNL. BSNL offers three special plans for iPad customers in India, wherein Rs. 99/day give you unlimited data browsing, Rs. 599/month gives you 6GB of data while Rs. 999/month gives you unlimited data browsing. What’s interesting is, BSNL actually gives out Micro SIMs if you opt for this service. I figured I’d just give it a try.

I dropped in a request on the website yesterday and received a phone call this morning from the executive who was willing to visit me at home and collect the documents. This was pretty cool in itself. I submitted the documents this morning and received a Micro SIM that was supposed to be activated by 6PM. Surprisingly, the card started working by 3PM itself, but the 3G data service wasn’t yet active. I tried a few hours later and viola, I was browsing at supersonic speeds again. Well, not really.

While I was told that you cannot make or receive phone calls on this service, turns out you can. I just tried to make and receive phones calls and what do you know! It works.

I guess if you’re looking to get a new BSNL connection and want to use it in your iPhone, you have this as a choice.

After spending about eleven months in the beautifully pleasant city of Bangalore, I’ll be making a move back to my beloved city of Bombay for good.

Back in June 2010, I took up a gig at Sourcebits which required that I work from their offices in Bangalore. In my 24 years of existence, I’d never lived out of Bombay except for the yearly travel trips we take. So this was a great new challenge for me and saying that I was excited would be understating it. This was also going to be my first full-time employment after having worked as a freelancer for close to 5 years.

Since I was a total alien to Bangalore, I decided to reach out via Twitter if anyone could offer a helping hand. Dkris did, which is by far the best thing that has happened related to my move. He set me up with a booking in a small hotel and gave me directions to get there from the Airport. He helped me look for places in and around the area I wanted to stay in and was of great help. I’ve had some great fun times with him and the other friends and I’ve made here, specially since November when we officially became roommates. I love the house I’m currently living in and having him as the roommate has been the icing on the cake.

Unfortunately, the landlord has asked us to vacate the place by May. I left my job at Sourcebits back in December, so I’ve been working from home on things at iXyr Media while also taking up a gig with old friend Aayush at Caramel Cloud. Instead of going through the trouble of finding a great place all over again, I’ve decided to get back to Bombay. I’ve missed all the fabulous things about Bombay while I was here, so it’d be great to touch down there again.

Bangalore has been a fabulous host for these last nine months and the general culture here is awesome. I’ve spent some fantastic moments with friends here, which would have never been possible in Bombay. Sure, I’d prefer Bombay over Bangalore any day, but have I a chance to come back here, I’d jump on it faster than a pack of lions on a baby deer.

I’ll be leaving the city at the end of May, so I still have a good 50 days more and I hope to make the most of it.

Cheers, Bangalore. You’ve been awesome.

A little over two years ago, a wrote a post called Things you will always find in my Backpack — that peeked into my then backpack. I figured I’d just update about the bag I carry today and the stuff I carry around in it.

Today, I usually carry around a booq Taipan Shadow XS. It’s a fabulous bag to carry around your iPad along with a few other things.

The booq houses the following —

• 16GB iPad (WiFi)
• Allen & Heath Xone XD-53 Headphones
• iPhone 4
• Reynolds Trimax (Black)
• iPhone dock cable
• Staedtler Mars micro

If I have to carry my Unibody MacBook Pro with me, I carry the Kensington Contour. It’s a sturdy and solid backpack, specially design to carry around notebooks. It has a special adjustable plastic support for your lower back, which helps when you’re carrying a heavy notebook.

It usually houses —

• Unibody MacBook Pro
• Allen & Heath Xone XD-53 Headphones
• Ultimate Ears MetroFi 170vi
• A T-Shirt
• Reynolds Trimax (Black)
• iPhone dock cable
• Staedtler Mars micro
• Pogo sketch

This pretty much lets me move throughout the day without any hassles in getting my work done. What are the must-haves for you?

∞

So…

1. That’s Zooey Deschanel
2. I love her eyes
3. Jonas posted an image on his tumblog
4. I converted it into a wallpaper
5. The Dock is hidden
6. The apps in the menubar are all listed here.

Tim Van Damme came up with this fun little idea and Sam Brown and Pat Dryburgh followed suit. Following the same path…

A simple game: Go to the address bar in your favorite browser, and type one letter. Start with “a”, end with “z”.

Here we go!

• A: adsoftheworld.com
• B: beautifulpixels.com
• C: cotweet.com
• D: digg.com
• E: emberapp.com
• F: flickr.com
• G: google.com
• H: howstuffworks.com
• I: ixyr.com
• J: jquery.com
• K: kottke.org
• L: localhost
• M: mail.google.com
• N: notespark.com
• O: onefusedlife.com
• P: presh.it
• Q: qdb.us
• R: rajasthantourism.gov.in
• S: smokingapples.com
• T: twitter.com
• U: uploadpie.com
• V: valendesigns.com
• W: web.appstorm.net
• X: xtremegaming.in
• Y: yahooanswerfail.com
• Z: zapak.com

I’m a little surprised that Zapak and Howstuffworks make it to the list, considering I have only visited these sites once or maybe twice.

I’m awestruck…

Throughout my academic life, I’ve always had the fortune of getting into the some of the most characteristic of all educational institutions. As much as I wanted to call each of them “one of the worst” out there, now that I think about it, they had their own different characteristic features. While one was exceptionally good at infrastructure, ambience and similar facilities, the faculties were downright pathetic. Co-incidentally, most of them have had arrogant and retarded faculty members, who most of you will agree, know nothing of what they are doing or what’s happening around me.

Currently in my last year of degree, I’m slowly nearing the end of the semester after which we’ll either be set out in the open with a headlight torch looking for jobs in the recession-hit market (We’re the I.T fellows), or some of us will just board the train to ‘Masters‘land. Although it’s not going be easy, is it?

As it is with most degree courses, the last year/semester has to have a 200 mark project that needs to be done. We’re working on one too. But that’s not all. We’ve also been assigned two other projects which include making a presentation on 4 major problems faced by Nokia in its history and making a web-based CRM portal for Apple. Now, you see, this is too much work for most students in the class. We’ve got plenty of work on hand, and much less time to complete it. Add to that, students are known to be excellent time managers anyway.

Yet, that guy up there has more troubled waters set for me. Apparently, I’m making a bad year even worse by missing out on important practical sessions due to work related Smoking Apples and ill-health. And this is so bad a case now, that I’ve been told to not attend any further classes, because I’ve missed out on 3 sessions. Wow, that makes sense, right?

This is exactly what infuriates me. While I agree it’s a mistake on my own part, how does penalizing in the way described above do any good? How about making me go through the cliched techniques like making me wait in the library till 6PM for studying or making me re-write stuff for 5-10 times. At least all that has a return type.

/rant

It has been a long time that I’ve spoken to you. How have you been all this while?

Me? I’ve been great managing all the daily hectic tasks that I do.

Changes to the site

As you may have noticed (You! Yeah, you, reading in your RSS Feed Reader. Head over to http://preshit.net right away, because), the theme has undergone a major makeover by me. I’ve implemented a completely new color scheme and the blocks have been moved around a bit. The biggest change comes in the form of Asides. Most of you might be aware that I used to maintain a tumblelog at http://presh.it . However, now I’ve integrated both my Tumblelog and my blog into one. All the linked posts, photos, tid-bits will now be posted as Asides into this blog. I spent a few hours hacking the CSS to change the look of Asides, so they show up differently on the homepage and are easy to make out. I also cleaned up the Sidebar by removing the Skribit widget and moving my Flickr Photostream down to the Footer.

On the other hand, http://presh.it, which previously housed the tumblelog has now been converted into a static, imageless site powered completely by CSS. The site showcases some of my online activities.

Changes to the Backend

Thanks to all the traffic, the site is now powered by a (dv) from Media Temple. I’ve been planning to move my sites onto their (gs) for quite a while now, but I was able to manage to pay a few extra dollars and got the (dv) at a nice discount. It will be a great learning exercise for me, managing my own server and at the same time, will be a relied to the site. I didn’t want to put extra load on ExperTrio‘s Servers, considering the fact that I don’t pay a penny to host there.

Also, I’d become a terrific fan of Shaun Inman‘s Mint Stats, so much so, that the analytics of my sites are now Minted. Sure, Google Analytics may be free (maybe even better), but ever since my move to Apple products, I’ve realized the importance of three things.

• Design
• Ease of Use
• Elegance

And mint satisfies all of the above with a high margin.

Changes to the RSS feeds

With all these changes, I’ve made a few changes to my RSS feeds too. Kindly make note of the changes as follows.

• Blog’s Main RSS feed is now: http://feeds.preshit.net/preshit/blog
• Blog’s Comments feed is now: http://feeds.preshit.net/preshit/blog/comments
• My Flickr Photostream has a feed now: http://feeds.preshit.net/preshit/flickr
• My Twitter updates have a feed now: http://feeds.preshit.net/preshit/twitter

I am aware that I may have lost a bunch of subscribers here, but I believe I can build up more along the way.

Smoking Apples

I’ve been having a great time working on/with Smoking Apples. Having launched on August 15th, 2008, the site has evolved into a popular Apple blog and “the” source of information for quite a few. Here’s some info from out ‘About‘ page.

Smoking Apples is a website and blog dedicated to all things Apple and with a special something for our Indian readers. From Macs and iPods to the iPhone and Apple TV, we strive to be your one-stop solution for any and everything related to Apple Inc. and its products. Throw in a podcast, few great authors, regular blog posts and reviews, some screencasts, and various other extra-curricular activities and you’ve got yourself a full fledged website. Yeah, even we were surprised. 

Check out who’s behind the site here.

In these three moths, we’ve managed to pull a daily average of over 10,000 pageviews and counting. Everyone on the team has now taken on a dedicated role and yours truly is officially the ‘Advertising and PR Manager‘ of the site. Of course, writing still remains the core duty.

We launched a monthly magazine a few days back, the response for which has been terrific. It managed to gather over 2400 downloads and many of the readers appreciated the design and content. I’d like to specially mention the efforts of dear friend Milind here. Splendid job, my friend.

The blog now has two new authors and we’re even more psyched. We’ll be reviewing some Apple products and some exclusive accessories in the coming days. You can subscribe to the blog or follow us on twitter.

Miscellaneous

There’s a ton of work left EWS and with just one more paper left, I’m confident I’ll take care of that in a week’s time. I need to announce the winners of the Hosting Account Giveaway, which I’ll be announcing on the 21st of November, just three days away.

Thank You

Regards, Preshit