Of This and That

I am no longer blogging here, but have shifted to Medium https://medium.com/@atulgupta_20652 

Along with purchase of new cars, Govt has made it mandatory to issue FASTag sticker. The idea is to shift more and more people to use these automatic toll payment tags, then having to wait in long queues on the highways. All that is fine, but if only things work so smoothly 😏. When a buy a new car, the dealer goes ahead and registers it with FASTag. In my case it was ICICI FASTag. While it is the vehicle registration number that should be fed in their system, but since the new car hasn't yet been to RTO for passing and registration, it hasn't got the registration number. So the dealer, instead, uses the VIN/Chassis no. It is then my (owner's) responsibility to get this updated. So I logged into the ICICI FASTag system and logged a service request asking for vehicle number updation. For many days, nothing happened. About 2 weeks later someone from the call center called and said that I need to login again, raise a new service request, specifically for the vehicle numbe...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ab...

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 t...

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 (...

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 ...

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...

What's it with this grace marking system that CBSE and possibly other boards follow? There was a decision taken by the board recently about no longer giving grace marks. While on the face of it this is a good decision, as it means students will really get marks as per what they have answered in the exam and not get extra marks, which helps boost their results, but was it really so?  Delhi High Court has ruled against it  and for all the valid reasons. However this raises a few questions in my mind.  While this ruling helps the students this year, which as fair enough as that it was they were expecting when they had appeared for the exams, but with the results to be announced only in a couple of days, it would be only logical to assume that most of the checking would be already over and the Board would mostly be in the process of creating the final mark list and report cards. How can it now revisit all the lakhs of papers to add grace marks where applicable, as p...

After almost an year’s break from any travels, to allow my daughter to fully concentrate on her class X, we finally decided to get out of the routine and go spend a few days at some resort. Since the decision was taken at a time when summer vacations of kids had already started, getting a booking at any place, on the weekend, at a short notice was impossible. Also, given the summer heat and lack of water at our home, due to water cut by the society, we wanted to go to a place with enough water. So, we narrowed on Jal Srushti Island Resort  and booked for a 2-night package on weekdays. I had heard good things about the resort and a very good trip advisor rating convinced us to try this place out. We were a bit skeptical of how much water will be there, given that it was peak summer and rains had not yet graced the city, but our doubts were ill placed. Well, to start with, the booking for the place is typically managed via their own site and you need to typically pay about ...

For many years I am doing most of my banking with ICICI and have hardly visited the branch in the last decade or so. Almost all the banking needs are managed online or via the relationship manager. I do have to have to visit SBI once a year to deposit some money in my PPF account. While this is just a once a year task, I was still not keen on making even this 1 day visit to SBI and hence thought to transfer the PPF account to ICICI, which is also a government recognized back to hold PPF accounts.  After multiple attempts, but something or other kept coming up, I finally managed to visit the SBI bank one fine Saturday morning. This was the fist mistake. The bank gets unduly crowded on weekends. I reached the bank by 10.15 am or so.  As I entered the bank, there was a queue with about 5-6 people standing at the "May I Help You" counter. Knowing that this will take a while, I approached the security guard, who is seen more within the bank and less at the entrance gate. He t...

For those of you wondering where has my profile disappeared from Facebook, please note that I have deactivated the account for a while. I was getting overwhelmed with the public exposure. Wanted to live my life on my terms and not worry about to whom to update and not to update. Not worry about having liked or not liked someone's photos, comments, updates etc. Essentially for a while, go back to what being social used to mean to us years back, i.e. meet people in person rather than virtually.  So, you may find me at your door step rather than seeing a picture update of me on Facebook. Knock! Knock!

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.                                                                                             Ralph Waldo Emerson That's exactly how I have spent this last weekend - being stupid with old friends... friends that I had left behind and got a chance to catch up again after 28 years. Some of us looked the same, behaved the same, while some of us had changed in shape and size, but what hadn't changed was the child inside each one of us. The child that had studied with all these other children at K.V. NDA between years 1984 to 1988. I had left the school after doing my class Tenth in 1988. How do you suddenly reach back to people long lost in time? I have already described this ...

For very many years, our education system has been undergoing changes, but little has been done towards refining the course curriculum. I strongly feel that there is a need to change it and hence this petition -  https://t.co/4Pdi4SZCuB If you agree, do sign up and help spread the word.

When programming in ..net, the key things to know where CLR, the common language runtime, which was the core engine to execute .net programs. The .NET Framework, which consisted of framework class library, libraries for WinForm applications, ASP.NET applications, ADO.NET, WPF, WCF, XAML, LinQ, TPL etc. essentially everything that is required to run a .net application. Finally, one needed a language to code for .NET platform so languages like C# or VB.NET or even J#. C# came into existence along with ..net, but over the years they have not kept the same versioning scheme. C# has typically incremented with major versions and current version is 6.0 , while the .net framework is at version 4.6.1 . Parallel in Java world, we have JVM (java virtual machine), acting as the host for java programs, a JRE (java run time environment) which is necessary code/libraries to run a java program and finally is java, the language itself. The current JRE is 8u74 and the latest java version available...