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Showing posts from 2018

Travelogue: Swaminarayan Temple

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The Swaminarayan Hindu Temples were started by Swaminarayan, as part of his Swaminarayan sampraday and promote his philosophy of belief in God and idol worship. The most known and fascinating attribute of any Swaminarayan temple is the architecture, and in many cases, the overall construction spread across acres of land. These temples are not just in India but are found worldwide . We recently visited the one in Pune at Narhe and true to its name, this one is also beautifully made. If coming from Mumbai side, after your cross Warje and the Sinhgadh road, you take the Katraj bypass going towards Bengaluru. Continue for about 2 kms and take the side road. This road is narrow and that means traffic could build up here. This road eventually crosses over the highway on the other side, taking right to the Swaminarayan temple. You do need to go right and then left, towards the parking, which is huge. That said, there is bound to be additional rush on weekends and festivals, so you may

Minor's Passport Renewal

I have earlier shared detailed experience with regards my passport renewal here . Now it was time for my daughter's passport renewal. She is yet to be 18, and hence is a minor as yet. Few years back, for minors, there was no need to take an appointment at a passport seva kendra (PSK), but it seems now that is not the case. Appointment is mandatory, and being minor, one of the parents needs to accompany the child.  The process is similar to what i have shared in my case. Login into the passport website, download the form, fill the PDF, validate and then upload. We had some constraints with regards when we could visit the PSK, as daughter is in XII and cannot miss school that easily now. So I kept a tab on the next date available for the appointment.  Once I found a comfortable date, i went ahead in the portal for the payment. Interestingly, before making the payment, the site shows the next available date and one could hence decide to go ahead and make payment and book a slot

My 2 cents on Reserved Instance Billing and Savings

If you are using Azure Virtual Machines (VMs), you have an option of using Azure Reserved Instance (RI) VMs instead. Microsoft (MS) claims these can help save up to 72% of your spend. While this may be true on the surface, but it will be good to get a deeper view to understand what benefits you really stand to make, if at all. Yes, using reserved instances, doesn’t automatically means cost saving. It is hence important to understand how this works and plan accordingly to get the right kind of benefit. I will try and point out  key things to keep in mind when planning and using RIs. The reservation cost that is paid upfront, covers the cost of running the reserved VM instance. If you are using additional software on it like Linux or Windows OS, or SQL Database, then these are charged on regular rates as per their consumption units. If a reserved VM consumes more than reserved hours, then the additional hours are charged on regular VM pay-as-you-go rates. You can read up more about

Being cautious is for your own good

The other day, we were at a restaurant having lunch and there was another family sitting near by, who had this cute little daughter. She must be around 4-5 yrs old. Was happily eating and once done started to generally walk around the place.  She came and stood by our table for a min to see what we were eating, then went to roam around the restaurant and event stepped outside, all the while mingling with the staff at the place. Surprisingly, during this entire duration (of maybe about 10-15 min), the parents were busy eating and chatting and never looked up to see where their daughter was. Fortunately the staff was good and they only kept getting the girl back inside. Some were playfully chatting with her and would get too close to her (it would have made my uncomfortable had it been my daughter).  Me and wife were talking about given the sorry state of affair these days, how could these parents be so callous with such little regard to their daughter's safety. Multiple times

Moto G5S Plus OREO Update Initial Reactions

A few days back I had heard about the Android Oreo update finally being rolled out in India for Moto G5S Plus. I immediately went to the System Updates to check for it, but there was none :-(. But the news did say that it is being rolled out in phases. So it was wait and watch.  Today morning I say the System Update notification and I immediately started the download. Took a few hours, given the size of the download was a little over 1 GB. The installation was to take about 30 min, as per the message, but it really took just about 10 min and it was done.   On restart the things that were immediately noticeable are Icons within grouped box seemed to have become bigger in size Notification circles indicating that there are some unread items, now appear along with app icons Color theme changes and top notification panel has bigger icons and more spaced out  The picture in picture worked like a charm with Google Maps, but didn't work as expected with YouTube (seems one needs

Team Offsite

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It started off as a meeting with select few people, due to limited time that our CEO, Phani , had during his India trip, but then we decided to invite all. After all there had been lot of new people in the team and many had not met each other. The team is spread across Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad, Delhi, Gurgaon, Mumbai, Jalgaon, Ludhiana etc. (we work from home most of the times) Our team of 4 from Pune initially thought to be a bit adventurous and thought of driving down to Bangalore, a journey of about 850 km , that takes about 12 – 14 hrs. We were excited about it and were into finalizing our hotel stay for 2 days in Bangalore. But things don’t always happen as you plan then. For reasons unknown, my BP shot up one fine day, which turned out to be not so fine for me. There were still few days before our trip but didn’t want to take any chance, given that it was me who had to do most of the driving. So we took the usual option and booked ourselves on flight, reaching Bangalore

The rotten state of connectivity

In this era of online world, being connected all the time is an expectation that all of us have. Being off the network for a few moments is almost like we aren't able to breathe. Checking WhatsApp messages every few minutes is the way of life and if there are no new messages, it is almost like a depressing feeling. From a time 'what is internet?', to having multiple connections at home, now, is very common. These connections would be in the form of a broadband/cable internet/wi fi router at home, and also the mobile network from 2G to 3G to 4G.  For a long time I was a user of Vodafone and when they started to get subscribers to upgrade to 4G, i realized that it wasn't working on my Xiaomi Mi phone. After many months of back and forth, we finally figured out that the frequency on which Vodafone was operating the 4G services, wasn't supported by my Mi phone. So I could now either change my phone or change my network.  Interesting, all in my family were on Voda