This is what the bill I needed to pay back then looked like:

So I logged into their website and went through the whole process of payment using a credit card only to get a timeout error in the end. So I restarted the process, choosing to pay using my bank account. The same error resurfaced. I got a little worried now so I checked my bank account’s statement immediately only to find out that Rs. 1908 had been debited from it. So I called up Tata Indicom customer care (cc) and I was informed that they had in fact received the payment both the times but it was alright because that just meant that I wouldn’t have to pay the bill the following month. Phew! So I had payed double the amount I was supposed to, right? Wrong!

The bill I got in October looked like this:

So instead of Rs. 3816 that I had actually paid, they somehow received Rs. 22896! Could it be that they are trying to make up for the hell I had to go through because of them? I don’t think so. I still called up cc and asked the guy about it. He told me it was a system fault which would be rectified and that I didn’t need to worry. Since I had already paid for one extra month, I didn’t care much and forgot about it.

Funnily enough, if I look at my transaction history on their website, it gives the correct details:

But this month I again got a weird bill:

The due date has already passed and I did not receive any warning. My connection is also working perfectly. I still thought I would pay the Rs. 1123 that I should but their bill pay screen scared me. They want me to transfer a negative amount. Take a look!

I called the cc again today but I was told to call later because their systems were down. Lets see what happens now!

• I was feeling low for few weeks in Jan-Feb and I reached the conclusion that I was going through a quarter-life crisis. I don’t exactly know what caused it but without wasting too much time, I decided to do what I generally suggest people to do in such situations. Yeah, I decided to get over it and the best way was to do something that would make me feel good about myself and keep me busy.
• This brings me to the second significant event – I joined the gym! Yes, after contemplating doing it for years, I finally did it! And I like working out. I don’t understand why I didn’t do it earlier. Its been over a month since I started working out and I’ve already moved to a bigger, better gym. And I do feel better now than I used to around two months back.
• One of the major developments is also something I consider to be a significant achievement of mine. After months of fighting a losing battle with Tata Indicom broadband, I finally won the war. They replaced their copper wiring with optical fiber cable in my area just for my connection. Now isn’t that something! Of course, I showed my gratitude by upgrading my plan.
• After using Wikipedia extensively for a long time, I finally decided to give something back to it and have since become an active contributor. I generally stick to what I’m good at – Television and Movies – and looking at the low standard of most India related articles of these fields, there’s a serious need of more contributors like me (If I may say so!). And being somebody who is a good follower of rules, I am good at finding, tagging and sometimes fixing violations of policies.
• Once my broadband connection started working properly, I realized the power of torrents. I started downloading lots of movies that I wanted to watch and soon I was addicted. I now download at least 4-5 movies a week and since its really hot during the daytime nowadays, my weekends are spent watching these movies rather than going out. I’ve seen dozens of movies in the last few months and I will start writing a new kind of posts in which I would review three movies with some similarity. I think such posts would keep the blog alive in case I do not wish to write anything personal for some reason so that the blog doesn’t run the risk of being abandoned again.
• Last but not the least, I completed one year at my new (don’t think I can call it that anymore!) job. The going’s been good so far. Hoping it would be even better in the second year.

And I’m sure I must have already left a comment or two on the blogs I used to read. If not, expect one very soon.

Looks sexy, doesn’t it? (The pic has been deliberately cropped to ensure that you don’t see the wire clutter.)

And now, the second showcasing of the post. Yes, its my brand new iPod 80 GB.

Please note that my palm just made its second appearance on this blog.

And I know that its not a very good picture but its difficult to take pics of gadgets for me so I can’t help it.

Now that we’re done with the aforementioned show off, lets talk about something else. Like how crazy I am about Tropicana’s Lychee Twirl. I drink it like water. Thank god I don’t drink alcohol. Otherwise, I would have been an alcoholic. I have absolutely no self-restraint.

Also, I’ve luckily found some awesome DVDs to add to my collection. I now own Airplane! which is like the funniest movie ever. Hey, its not just me. American Film Institute thinks so too. Plus, I have its sequel, the Police Academy series, The Naked Gun series and Hot Shots and its sequel. I’ve seen quite a few other movies and would recommend Finding Nemo and Khosla Ka Ghosla to everyone.

This post was written by me four days ago but thanks to the unbelievably excellent service from my broadband provider, Tata Indicom, it got delayed. Its only been 23 days since I first came in touch with Tata Indicom people and I already hate them so much. I never knew I was capable of so much hatred. I want them to be wiped off the planet. But lets not talk about them in this post. They deserve an entire post. Actually, they deserve much more but that’s okay.

• Do what you feel is right.
• If people are bad to you, be worse to them.
• If people are nice, be nice to them.
• If people are too nice, be rude to them until they r nice or rude to you.
• Once you realize you did something stupid, try apologizing. If it doesn’t work, forget about it.
• Create a new rule when needed.

And I like the way I live my life, so the rules must be working for me.

Moving on, have I ever mentioned how much I love Pandora? It’s simply fantastic. In case you haven’t tried it yet, do so now. It creates a radio station based on your favorite artists and the sound quality is excellent. Lately, I’ve had a chance to listen to lots of new music and my current favorite is “Crazy” by Gnarls Barkley. Even its video is superb. I’ve recently discovered Frou Frou too. I love their electronic sound. The tracks “Flicks” and “Breathe in” by them are truly addictive. It’s sad that they disbanded. Speaking of music, I woke up today with the song “SOS” by Rihanna stuck in my head. I have no idea why but it was. I tried hard to get it out of my head but failed. As a result, random people on the streets I passed by got a sample of the song cos I kept humming it and every time I hummed the line “Someone help me, Its not healthy”, I thought to myself that this isn’t healthy either.

I was talking to a close college friend on ym yesterday when I told her that it’s very easy for me to hate someone. And it’s true. I’m a man of strong feelings. The smallest of faults in others can make me dislike or even hate them. Then she asked me why it is so and I thought for a little while and said that that’s just who I am. But after thinking a little more, I’ve decided that it’s because finding faults and shortcomings (in mostly others n sometimes myself too) is the very basis of my existence. And that’s what I’m best at (besides my work, of course). And it’s not like that people don’t deserve my hatred. I mean some guy who’s a friend of my colleague used my system last weekend and left a blue pen mark on my monitor. Now, I don’t know the guy but I know that he a freak. I mean who uses a pen to point to a TFT monitor. Now all I can notice on my monitor is the blue dot. And there’s nothing I can do about it. I can’t ask for a new monitor cos this one has a small blue dot on it, can I?

I was extremely thrilled to finally see Lucknow. I quickly located my home, my school, my college and a lot of other places. I was also surprised to see that the ariel view of Lucknow is a lot better than most Indian cities. There are no big slums or anything and most of the city especially the trans-gomti area (where I live) looks beautiful. It’s heartening to see that large parts of Lucknow are not congested like in big cities. A lot of other cities in UP such as Kanpur, Agra, Bareli, Varanasi, Allahabad, Gorakhpur etc. are also available in high-res. I could even see Mangalore and parts of Mysore.

Coming back to Lucknow, I immediately searched Keyhole Community to see if somebody had uploaded placemarks for Lucknow and I did found one large folder there. But a lot of important places were missing so I decided to do something I had never done. Create a folder of placemarks and upload it. It took me two hours to finally do it. And will take even longer to write a list of all the placemarks and post the KMZ file on the boards.

But all of you can download the KMZ file here. Now I know that most of you may not be interested in it but download the file and watch the places if you have time. Do it for me. You’ll like what you see, I think.

For people who do not use Google Earth, here are a few screenshots of Lucknow.

In the meanwhile, here are some new developments:

• The new blog toy, cocomment, is really cool. Its definitely one of the “in” things right now. It allows you to keep track of all the comments you make on others’ blogs and also allow you to share your comments on your blog with help of a blog box, which can be seen on the sidebar of my blog too. You can customize it so suit your template but I haven’t done that because of paucity of time. Its still in beta but then so is Flickr and even Gmail so it’s okay.
• I met Sher-e-Jalandhar last weekend and for some reason he thinks that I am very serious which I don’t think I am. I’m only a little serious but don’t mind being called “brooding types”. He seemed like a fun and easygoing guy. (Sorry SeJ, I don’t do compliments very well. I am far better at criticizing.)
• I also met an old friend from school after 14 years (the one I mentioned in this post). It was fun to meet her after such a long gap. Also, NamesDatabase has now linked to that post and I am getting a lot more hits than usual. But what makes me really happy is when someone they refer checks out some of my other posts too.
• Our company is taking us for an outing this weekend and since the location is top secret and we are all supposed to have loads of fun there, if I don’t blog for next few weeks, it would be safe to assume that I died bcos of all the fun.
• Update: I always wanted to apply for The Amazing Race. But now that they are actually allowing Asian people to apply for an Asian version, I realized I couldn’t apply. Firstly, I don’t have a teammate and secondly, I can’t take a leave of 30-40 days if I get selected. Actually, I don’t have a passport either but it is expected any day now. So looks like I’ll just have to be content with watching TAR.

I wanted to write a post on Friday but since Kamasutra worm was supposed to manifest itself that day, our infra guys decided to shut down the proxies completely.

Now, you need to know that Internet is an energy source for me so without it, I felt extremely weak. I was unable to work properly. I did have some fun though. I watched two episodes of Family Guy that I downloaded some time back.

So anyhow, I promise to be regular now. In the meanwhile, please read this post by one of India’s most elite bloggers, TTG, who is in Melbourne now. I share his views on the topic of the post and if I could write better, I would have written something like this.

I started to look around on flickr for other photos and I was awestruck by the beauty of all the photos. I am addicted to flickr now. So many great new photos are posted on it everyday, its difficult to stop oneself from all the flickring.

In other news, I have been shifted from the ground floor to the third floor because I’m part of a different internal group now. The new cubicle is small and the chair too has a different design so I am trying to make myself feel comfortable here.

Now, I started visiting this forum way back in 2003. At that time, there were hardly any Indian forumers but as time passed, more and more Indian forumers joined in and now there’s even an Indian subforum there. So it seems like more Indians are interested in skyscrapers. Also, till some time ago, there was a dearth of good high quality pictures of indian cityscapes and skylines but that seems to be changing too.

The following are few new images of Mumbai (India’s best skyline) taken from the forum. These show some new areas of Mumbai and few old ones from new perspective. Please click the images for a larger, better view. The third picture is the best of the lot, in my opinion.

All images are copyrighted by their respective owners.

Rule: Go to Google and write, “Your name needs” (i.e. “Raj needs”) and paste the freaky results.

So here are the results:

Raj needs some encouragement.

Raj needs a wake up call.

Raj needs the money urgently.

Raj needs a job.

Raj needs to submit his timetable to Rachel.

Raj needs to let this one drop.

Raj needs someone to get his life back in order.

Raj needs a playmate.

Raj needs no introduction in Indian cinema.

Raj needs a 7 to double up and survive.

Raj needs babysitting.

It’s a fun tag so I want everyone to do it but since I already tagged everyone just a while back, I am not forcing anyone to do it. So if you are reading this and you want to do it, do it.