payday

today i got a payday ( a candy bar with slightly salted peanuts glued together with caramel and which i really like ) for FREE!! u might ask, “what the big deal mate?” well, the last time i got something for free was many years ago.. the big guy who refills the vending machine had couple of extra candy bars and asked me if i wanted one… i happily said yes, flashed a big smile and said thanks at the end.. for some reason, that act of “chewable philanthropy” made me so happy… although its just 75 cents and 250 calories (seriously!!), i was very happy about that gracious act… wished if i got some more things for free, but definitely worth some more than 75 cents!!

sept 11, 2001… 5 years later..

i view the events that happened on 9/11/01 in couple angles.. i’m not being insensitive, just objective..

1. years of meticulous planning executed in almost precise fashion in just couple of hours..

2. a catastrophe that brought majority of the whole nation under the banner of prayer… when was the last time a prayer was offered in the congress? when was the last time a day of prayer was declared?

3. the sudden death of around 3,500 persons who might/might not change the course of history.. but one thing was certain.. sadly, they became part of an event that did change history…

today i was watching a movie on ABC ( i think they made it) about the events that led to the 9/11 tragedy.. it was all avoidable.. some lapses here and there, some neglect here and there, led to that tragedy…

i pray that such an event never happens again.. but the 9/11 commission report points otherwise.. in december 2005, when it came out, out of the 41 recommendations that were put forth, today the status of implementation of four of them are graded with F and 12 with D.. the only A that was given, was for counter terrorism spending… how much are we ready? is anyone even thinking of ways to counter digital terrorism? what if the whole internet infrastructure was brought down by some kind of sophisticated attacks??

xv6700 firmware update and s/w

went here and installed the new update as per instructions… although it said itll take 20 min, it just took around 10… also applied the

1.portrait/landscape speed increase and

2. storage card cache increase

registry changes as seen on the linked page… was concerned if it would screw up my phone but it didnt… now i have a lock/unlock device link on the “today” screen.. the communications manager looks better.. and best of all it now allows u to simultaneouly use the wifi and the phone service… heres a piece of advise… setup a verizon wireless sync account and sync contacts, calendar, tasks and notes before the update coz the update wipes away everything stored on ur phone memory, not storage memory…

here are a couple of free things i’ve installed on my phone…

1. pocket e-sword – u can put different versions of the Bible, commentaries and dictionary on ur phone..

2. eten dialer – gives u a cooler and bigger phone pad.. i installed the vista theme..

3. tre – registry editor

4. metro – awesome s/w that gives u shortest routes in the major cities of the world, including ny, bombay and delhi… it also gives u info about nj transit, mta subway, lirr, etc routes..

here’s a great site for a lot of free/cheap pocket pc and smartphone softwares

good opensource alternatives

to spare myself from some guilt (for reasons i dont want to discuss here… coz i can see MS eyeballing this place! peekaboo!! i c u!), ive decided to turn to free/cheaper alternatives… listed below are couple of ’em i found pretty OK but honestly not as satisfying as their commercial counterparts.. (prolly because of the many years of familiarity i have with them)

MS Office = OpenOffice 2.0

Adobe Photoshop = PAINT.NET or GIMP (GIMP is not perfectly stable on Windows)

Internet Download Accelerator = FlashGet (not OS, but free!)

note: this post may be updated as and when i come across new “discoveries”

steve irwin and reuters report

great guy.. everyone in my family was awed with the risks he took… “crickey!”… though not an avid follower of his show “crocodile hunter” on animal planet, i felt sorry when i heard about his freakish demise..

i saw two reports on reuters about him.. the headings were different.. posted approx 12 hours apart.. but exactly same content… prolly the reason for the two postings was because there was some grammatical issue with the earlier heading.. here are the 2 posts…

1. Irwin pulled barb from chest before death (Sept 5 1.02am EST)

2. Irwin pulled barb out of chest before death (Sept 5 1.14pm EST)

happy labor day!!

thanks to all the labor force who fought for thier rights… social security, healthcare….. without the fight, this country would of had existed as a capitalistic country in its purest form…

wireless frustrations..

for the past couple of days, i would loose connection to my wireless connection, ceteris paribus.. i would get it back but only after 15-20 min… right when ur in the middle of doing something, ur connection looses.. really frustrating.. but the funny part was that the dumb card wont admit to that fact… the all loving windows vanilla colored pop up would just say “limited connectivity”,falsely giving some hope… i peered a lil more and found out the error message was “IP could not be renewed”.

my IP was obtained from the DHCP service running on my router… there was no straight forward reason for that error message.. so i thought that if i would change all the IP on the network to a static one, my prob wud be solved (besides i could save some precious bandwidth by avoiding the DHCP packets) .. i was right.. only partially though… heres what i did..

1. i disabled the DHCP on the router

2. i set the IP address of all the comps accessing the network to a static one.. all the above mentioned steps should of solved the prob but without the next u wudnt be able to access the web..

3. i also set the gateway and the DNS address of all the comps to the IP of the router.. this took me a while to figure out. if this isnt set, you would be able to access the network but not the web… this took a long time to figure out…

for now everthing is looking good..

the BB boys – Blair and Bush

what happens when 2 world leaders join hands? u come across a scene where there is plenty of blood, misery, distress, hunger…..

go to google.com and enter ‘failure‘ and press the ‘im feeling lucky button’ – u’ll be taken to george bush’s biography

go to google.com and enter ‘liar‘ and press the ‘im feeling lucky button’ – u’ll be taken to tony blair’s biography

quite true… dont u think so??

does God still punish?

YES! God’s punishment = death.. nothing less than that.. Nahum 1:3 says “…the LORD will not leave the guilty unpunished…” punishment for both believers and unbelievers is death … Romans 6:23 say “…for the wages of sin is death…” but for a believer, God inculcates disciplining measures too… If you are a legitimate child, God will discipline.

eg: Paul says that since people mistreated the handling of the Lord’s supper, many of them were sick and put to rest..

Ananias and Sapphira were killed because of their pretension.