Of This and That

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

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

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