Of This and That

The journey started towards end of May 2010. From the initial discussions with the publisher on what the book should contain to getting Sudhanshu on-board, to working long hours to get the chapters and code ready, to finally this day!! My first technical book and I am glad to share that the book ASP.NET 4 Social Networking is now live. Do check it out here .

The 30 min long serials that we see these days on TV, still manage many breaks in between. No wonder the story hardly moves forward. Spruce that up with some good, some bad, some pointless revenge, some multimillionare families and you can easily build a serial that lasts not just months but years. and if you can't figure out what to do, take a 20 year leap and leave everything behind.. the part that gave the serial its name as well Anyway, this isn't to disect the serials. There is a new serial these days based on the english movies series - Twilight. The serial is called "Pyar Ki Ye Ek Kahani" and comes on Star One. This has a very peculiar tune when it has a break and for reason we keep hearing this tune very often. Seems like as if there are 4-5 breaks that happen in that 30 min time slot. So we were watching this the other evening and I complained about these so many breaks. To this my daughter immediately retorted - 'They probably shoot the next sequence in ...

Indian market hasn't been a very strong customer focused market is something that we all know. Customer is God or never say no, aren't things that work here. It is the provider who usually has the last word. More and more home service is something that we as consumers also seem to like. However that incident the other day made me realize that it isn't really in our best interest. Some Sanjay/Sandeep from ICICI Direct called me the other day and wanted to set up some time to meet me. I said no. He persisted. I said that he must be having some new product to sell and I had no interest. He said, he will not sell anything, and we can just sit and chat and that I can treat him for a cup of tea !! Now that's an intersting customer service. I host him at my home, treat him for a cup of tea and invest in something that I have no real desier, but he wants me to. Wow !! this is amazing

Flavors is a hotel close to my place and it used to have a executive lunch buffet for Rs 199. Recently they updates the cost to Rs 250. The other day we decided to try it out and in short it isn't worth the price. The buffet included 1 veg 1 non veg soup 1 veg 1 non veg starter 3-4 salads 2 veg dishes and 1 non veg dish dal, rice, noodles, roti and 2 items in desert Fairly good number of items, but it was the service and the taste that killed it. The non veg dish seemed like as if cooked in tomato sauce gravy. The veg/non veg starters were very slow to refill. When we started with the soup, one of the salads had got over. 10-15 min later when I finished the soup and went to check again, the salad still hadn't been refilled. Same issue with roties and hence we decided to start with noodles, which were a bit on spicy side. The sweet included an ice-cream and moong dal halwa. The halwa, for a change, wasn't over cooked, as happens in most cases, but it could be easily be confu...

This one dates back about 9 years. It won't sound that funny now, but it sure was a real funny incident then. I was newly married and we used to go out often for dinners. Bangalore had loads of hotels and hence we were never short of trying out new places. One evening we noticed a new place by the name "veneta cucine, the italian kitchen". It sounded very interesting we hadn't ever tried italian cuisine. We were a bit surprised by the spelling of "cucine", but thought it was probably an italian word for cuisine. So one evening we decided to try it out and landed at this place at around 8 pm. The placed looked like it was closed and we were surprised. Anyway, there was a person inside, so we walked to it to ask him and he said - "we close at 7.30 pm, but you can still see our kitchen". I and wife looked at each other and wondered how can be a hotel close to early and why is he offering us to see their kitchen???? As we walked in, we realized it was ...

Packt Publishers recently published this book. This book gives examples on what typically goes wrong when wrinting code and how refactoring tools in Visual Studio help follow design patterns and refector code to be aligned with them. It also covers details about which patterns can't be directly refactored by Visual Studio and require manual effort. And the important point is that I was one of the reviewers of this book :-)

There is no shortage of funny incidents in our lives, but i feel nothing beats this one. We had once gone to a local exhibition. My kid typically in such journeys, takes one of her many baby dolls along and plays on the way. This occasion was no different and she was having a baby boy doll. There is no doubt that the dolls these days are very realistic, but we realized that day just how realistic these can be. As we got down at the exhibition, I told kid that she needs to leave the doll behind. She agreed and we left it at the back seat, got out of the car and locked it and started to walk away. Just then the parking attendant came running our way and shouted - "Sir, you left your baby behind!!" :-) :-)