Category Archives: USA

2010 & To do list for 2011

Posted by toalakan-web on January 9, 2011 1 comments

Well I know its a little late to post my resolutions for 2011 but its always never late to do things.

Before going into the list 2010 has been one of the most stablest year in my life.No downturns, no pressure, no worries, no unplanned issues rising up,no resolutions to catch up for, tons of free time to spend time with my friends and I even made a 1 month trip to India for Diwali.  2010 was a year where I just roamed around in my own careless way.

So for 2011 I have a list of resolution that I need get it through and pretty much every thing is possible with a little bit of commitment on my end. Here it goes:

  1. To get my California motorcycle license. No more excuses I live in California and I have to enjoy the summer cruising in my bike. If my finances are good may be buy a bike/scooter to ride to office.
  2. To drop off like 10 pounds which I have gained in all of 2010. No more slacking around gotta hit the Gym.
  3. Spend less time on Netflix online.  This will be the hardest one to keep up since I’m a big time movie watcher.
  4. Work on some open source project and being a Coldfusion developer my first preference would be to work on coldbox open source projects/plugins/modules the best CF framework out there.
  5. Blog more on Coldfusion/Coldbox or pretty much any web related technology.
  6. Visit Yellowstone national park. One of the few places that I have been planning to go for a long time.
  7. Visit Tulsa my alma mater and visit some of my friends back there.

Well that’s pretty much the list I can think of right now and hopefully I will be able to achieve some of it by 2012.

remit2India plz stop ur annoying marketing campaigns(+2230833100)

Posted by toalakan-web on May 15, 2010 1 comments

Remit2India.com has started these annoying marketing campaigns bombarding me

  1. by calling me and asking me to send more money back to India @ odd times pretty much every week , even though I send money back pretty much every month to pay my EMI. I wish I can send a million dollars a month back to India to keep u guys happy but I don’t make that much.
  2. Email blasts reminding me that the US dollar conversion rate has gone up.  I can live with 1 email blast not with 8 of them which is called spamming ur users.

remit2India.com I really appreciate ur service and concern to notify me about higher rates but keep it to a simple email blast or a phone call, not both of them @ same time.

It would be nice if u guys provide some kind of option in the site for the marketing preference and I would happily say no to email/phone campaigns. Me and my friends will be happy,if you can get this done and don’t bombard with marketing campaigns.

If there was any other better service provider to transfer money to India, I would happily switch over to them, but not so I’m stuck with you guys.

BTW if some one doesn’t pick ur calls after 2 or 3 times it clearly means they don’t want to talk to you and Yes I have added ur number to my block list (+2230833100).

Please Google  ur above number and see it for urself how much people are annoyed @ ur campaigns.

Update on May 22, 3;55 PM:

I finally picked up the phone from this number again to complain again after listening to their music for like 5 minutes.

Who calls you and puts up a music and asks us to wait for them?

Long story I tell the CSR that plz stop calling me with marketing and she mentions it was just a reminder call and I still insist that I don’t want them and out of no where she hung up the phone.

remit2India ur customer care sucks but ur service is free, so until its free I will use you guys and also act like a jerk like you guys do.

Stop Rocking when I’m asleep..

Posted by toalakan-web on March 16, 2010 None comments

Just woke up to the news on radio that there was a 4.4 earthquake near Los angles and I didn’t even feel a bit  although I see a few entries from Redlands in the did you feel site.

Well gotta move the bed away from the windows, lets hope I do it by next year. May be I should use twitter for these kind of posts..

too many list of things of to do and too sleepy as well..time for a quick nap between the snoozes and blogging..

Amazon S3 isn’t for everyone

Posted by toalakan-web on February 9, 2010 None comments

Its always been a pain to maintain a  backup of all photos and personal documents.When I heard about Amazon S3 cloud storage with its cheap pricing structure, I was in heaven finally a place I can store my data for eternity for cheap.

But when I started to move my data to Amazon S3 , the reality struck me hard was that

  1. my so called broadband connection which boasts a 512kbps upstream took me more than an hour to push a 200MB file and I have about 10gb of data.
  2. Most of all I can’t even switch to FIOS internet (Verizon) which has better up stream because they don’t have coverage in my locality.
  3. None of the freeware S3 sync applications like S3Fox, cloudberry and S3 Explorer support bandwidth limiting capability on up stream. So they basically occupy the pipeline until the upload is done annoying my room mate who was  trying to figure what the hell’s happening with the connection for like 2 days.

So until I get a better internet connection or smart app that can push data like torrents clients, I will not be able to use Amazon S3 as my primary back up storage.

Amazon S3 back up or file storage isn’t for people who are stuck in the cable world like me.

Windows 7 Vs Kubuntu 9.10 the fight continues..

Posted by toalakan-web on December 10, 2009 1 comments

I recently got a new laptop Lenovo ideapad Y550 which was supposed to come with Windows 7 but came with Vista instead but I already decided that I would use Ubuntu 9.10 to avoid all windows nightmare and started using Kubuntu 9.10 (KDE graphic environment of Ubuntu). I can do a whole podcast on the lenovo issue but I have made my peace.

Setting up an running Kubuntu was the easy part since the installation was seemeless and every thing ran out of the box except

  1. Nvidia GT240m graphics card for which I found the drivers from Nvidia site and spend like another 2 days figuring out how to install them during which I crashed the ubuntu when I removed some packages.
  2. My Audio isn’t audible as vista and my HDMI port doesn’t output audio in Kubuntu which works fine in Vista. Looks like a driver problem.

I have searched through out the net for the audio issue and no one seems to have the right answer that would resolve my issue so I’m actually considering moving to Windows 7 even though I haven’t gotten my hands dirty with it.

I pretty much use this laptop as my home entertainment system which would need the HDMI audio function. I still have 3 more weeks before Lenovo sends me Windows 7 disk to figure out the issue. If not then I guess I will be back to Windows world once again until then I will switch between Vista/Kubuntu.

Believe me Ubuntu is a monster once tamed it’s a pretty good dog and I like it a lot.

BTW Vista sucks pretty bad how the hell can I kill a process from task manager? I’m not even sure how people worked with vista.

I’m a novice in the linux world so if any one has better ideas to fix this issue it would be gr8.

We choose where we develop..

Posted by toalakan-web on November 25, 2009 2 comments

I was always under the impression that my country India was well developed culturally/socially and still developing economically.

Its not more than a year since 26/11/2008 Mumbai attacks happened and already my country(India) government has totally forgotten about it. The Prime minister of India is on whirl wind tour of USA during 26/11 this year and talking about the US – India relationship/climate change/nuclear deal which is good though but not @ the cost of missing out on paying respect to the fallen people on 26/11/2008.

May be

  1. they lost count of days to pay respect for the dead due to bomb blasts or
  2. have a better reason not known to everyone or
  3. didn’t care about it or
  4. technically the head of State is the president who is back there in India or
  5. practically the head of government is back in India :) . you know it

Just think about it would any of the developed countries head of states would have accepted the invitation to vist a foreign country that too on the first anniversary of a bomb blast itself?

Looks like we are trying too hard to develop economically and loosing the social part of it. I do know the PM is taking care of business as a professional weighing on the benefits but still it could have been handled in a better way. Just my thought..

Orkut No Donut for you..You can only add upto 250 favorites

Posted by toalakan-web on November 1, 2009 1 comments

Well who ever has used Orkut are aware the blog post title message which shows up when Orkut’s server are too busy to respond.

But this time no donuts for the whole Orkut team since they have set a hard limit of only 250 video links per profile which I hate personally hate and I’m not even a heavy user of Orkut. Here is the message I get when I add a video:

You can only add upto 250 favorites. Please remove some favorites in order to add new ones.

Looks like the Orkut network is going backwards instead of moving forward by implementing this kind of limit.  Considering India being one the major market for India this is a really bad move since Indian music industry is driven by the film industry with each having 5 songs minimum.  Don’t ask me why we need 5 songs in middle of a movie that’s a whole different story.

The reality is every orkut user bookmarks(embeds) all kind of youtube Indian film songs and this limit is going to make the users move to a different network. Wake up Orkut..

Here are some suggestions Orkut might do to improve the videos section which I personally used to like:

  1. Will it be too hard to create a playlist of all videos so we can listen to all of our favorite song.
  2. Has it even considering enabling search for the videos? It makes me wonder if this product is really from Google.
  3. If a youtube video has been disabled can it at least remove them by default instead of occupying my limited video library limit.

Considering all this downfalls of Orkut I do think may be I should join Facebook but I use these social networks to keep in touch with friends which Orkut does it ok for me.

May be I should depend more on my blog running on WordPress more where I control my app/data than letting them control me what I can and can’t do.

Bitten by the ATT data bug

Posted by toalakan-web on October 12, 2009 None comments

I was caught unaware, unprepared and without guard when it bit me.

Yes, today I was bitten by a huge bill of 120$ of data charge for 12,000KB of data for my ATT wireless phone service.  So thats roughly a penny per kilobyte which is one of the costliest KB that I have ever paid for in my life.

Probably my new phone N85 should have connected to the internet without my knowledge during the initial days of buying it.

If you don’t intend to use data over wireless please call your provider immediately and block/opt-out of it A.S.A.P because one day or the other you will be bitten by this bug and it will be painful.

BTW my friends have warned me about this for a some time but I didn’t care about it much but today I feel the pain.

You have been warned !!!!!

BTW this wouldn’t happen in India because data plans are too cheap then here.

End of Tax Season 2008…

Posted by toalakan-web on February 12, 2009 None comments

Generally I procrastinate filing the tax every year but this year I filed it too early considering my standard.

Although I’m not getting much in federal and paying some to CA :( tax its the free e-file feature, sudden interest to file my tax and get the return before federal govt goes bankrupt  ;)   that motivated me to file early.

Thanks to FreeTaxUSA.Com for providing free federal tax return using the coupon code ‘FEDFREE‘.

People say California is on the verge of going bankrupt but still they made to provide this free e-file tool called CalFile which is pretty good. Instead of free e-file California can just remove the state tax itself :twisted: , I wish……..

Both the free e-file option are basic  and it should be good for most of my single friends in H1b or in F1 OPT.

Free aaah Kudutha ……. :lol:

Is it a boon or bane..

Posted by toalakan-web on October 23, 2008 1 comments

50 is a reality no more a value just for ease of calculation,

50 is a boon no more a night mare for NRIs,

50 is a bane for people buying petrol in India,

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