Technology

by Kulbir Saini on Fun, Life, Linux, Placements, Servers, Travel

Mumbai Trip and First Time Flying Experience

As I said in my previous post, I was asked to visit Rediff Office in Mumbai. I thought Wednesday (25th) would be a great idea. Informed the same to HR. I got the return ticket to Mumbai on Tuesday. This was the first time I was going to Mumbai and also the first time I was boarding a flight. Both flights were Indian Airlines.

To Mumbai

Took Aero-Express from Hitech City to Airport. I was at airport (Shamshabad) at 6:15AM. Flight was a 7:50AM. So there was a lot of time that I could waste on the airport. With no idea how to proceed, I kept following a co-passenger (from the bus) and ended up in a queue for international flights 😛 Security redirected me to entrance for domestic flights. I proceeded to check in counters following a very simple approach. Look for counters with hot girls 😛 Among those, look for a counter with smallest number of people in the queue 😀 And it worked out of the box. Got the tickets. Moved in for security check. It was hassle free as I didn’t have any luggage. It was still an hour for the flight to take off. Used the free internet for few minutes. I was a bit nervous 🙂 About half an hour later, we were asked to proceed for boarding.

Ten minutes later, I was in plane. It was Airbus A320. Luckily I got the window seat. I was surprised as there was no in-flight entertainment system and the airbus looked technologically challenged 🙂 Few minutes later, the plane started crawling. It kept crawling at the same speed (20-30 km/hr) for so long that I got extremely frustrated. I was thinking, “Abe Mumbai paidal lekar jayega kya??” (Are we going to Mumbai by foot). I breathe a sigh of relief when it started accelerating. It was a thrilling experience after that long boredom. Things I imagined while playing NFS and other car games suddenly became live. We were on the ground at almost 300km/hr. The feeling while the plane takes off is damn nice. You feel something in the chest for sometime. After the plane is completely in air, things again become boring as the plane looks static with respect to ground. I was feeling like, “Why the hell its not moving??”. As the charm of flying for the first time was over, I picked up the newspaper. It was business line. Couldn’t really figure out a story to read. Then I picked the Air India magazine. While I was turning the pages, saw Katrina on sidebar of a page. Continued reading the story and figured out that both Airbus A319 and Airbus A321 have in flight entertainment systems. It was a real bad feeling to get stuck into A320 when both A319 and A321 were awesome 😐 The food served in breakfast was pretty good. Few minutes later, it was announced that we were in Mumbai. Landing in Mumbai was awesome. Actually, the planes first goes into the sea and then take a U turn. The landing experience was also awesome. It feels great when the plane decelerates.

To Rediff Office (Mahim)

I was warned by Sachin about the taxi drivers charging huge fare for no reasons. So I was a bit careful. But still ended up paying twice the actual charge. I left the airport at around 9:40AM. It was damn hot there at that time. My destination was Rediff office which is located somewhere in Mahim(West). Airport to Bandra (Western Express Highway) was totally jam packed. Taxi wallah turned out to be a bit smart and took the service root and managed to save a lot of time. Still it took almost an hour to reach the office.

In Rediff Office

I met Sumit in the office. He introduced me to a lot other people in NOC team. A small HR interview was conducted which was a surprising element for me as I never expected something like that. But it was fun talking to people from HR department. Then I met Sachin there. He introduced me to a lot other people related to domains I like. After that I had a small chit-chat session with managers from the NOC dept. After that Sachin introduced me to CTO, Rediff. We had a long chat session (almost half an hour). We talked about a lot of things in different domains (mainly open source). After that inspiring chat session, Sachin and me went out for lunch. I felt good to see good north Indian food nearby. We returned to office. Few minutes later, Sachin introduced me to CEO and CFO, Rediff. After that I had a long chat with Sachin about company environment and work culture.

Keeping in mind the traffic conditions, I left for the airport at 4:30PM. Unfortunately/fortunately I didn’t encounter any traffic and reached the airport at 5:00PM which was like 2 hours before the flight. To fight boredom, I headed over to Kingfisher check-in counters and found out a place to sit optimizing the view 😛

To Hyderabad

I was in plane at around 6:50PM. A321 looked really advanced as compared to A320. We were on the runway at scheduled time. But on the way it halted and waited there for another 20 minutes. By the time the plane took off, it was 25-30 minutes late. This time also I got the window seat. BTW plane was almost empty (only 40% of the seats were occupied). We were above sea in a few minutes. The view of the city in night from the sea was beyond my imagination. Every single light adding to the beauty of it. The view was best when the plane took a U turn. The entire Mumbai was visible and lights increased the beauty exponentially. The highways looked like long chains of light sources intersecting each other. It was a really wonderful experience. As we left Mumbai, the in-flight entertainment system was activated. I was browsing the channels and found one of them playing “Sorry Bhai”, one of my favorite pass-time bollywood flick. We reached Hyderabad at around 8:40PM. Took Aero-Express back to Gachibowli.

All in all it was an awesome trip to Rediff Office and also a wonderful first time flying experience 🙂

 
by Kulbir Saini on BC, Fun, Life, Tips n Tricks

Auto Spell Checkers are bad, sometimes

Auto Spell Checkers in Firefox, Thunderbird, Spicebird, Tomboy Notes and whatever else have totally changed the way I write English. Previously (two years ago) I used to make tons of spelling mistakes while writing blogs but these days I hardly make a mistake while blogging, sending mails, taking notes etc. But this enhancement in technology has made me dumber. Previously, I was confident about the spellings I knew but now I am not confident about spellings of anything I spell. Today, I was writing an application (for what?? secret 😛 ) and got damn confused about spellings of “committee”, “admission” etc. (double m, double tt, double s ?? 🙁 ). After two failed attempts, I wrote the application in word processor and took a print out. Damn easy, huh!!!

 
by Kulbir Saini on Life

Afraid

Long time no see!!! After a long wait, I finally gathered the courage to write a blog post. I love to write blog posts but still I am not able to do so. I have so many things/events to blog about, but some of the things have gone really wrong. Wrong to an extent that I couldn’t even gather enough courage to write a blog post.

I am simple boy brought up in a village environment. When I was a child, I used to dream of being a teacher or professor. When I was in 8th standard, we moved to district headquarters and I continued my studies there. In 10th class, I heard about IIT for the first time and being a brilliant student, I started dreaming about getting into one of the IITs. I couldn’t get into IIT, but I landed here at IIIT-H. I used computer (day to day use) for the first time after I joined IIIT. I came here with the dreams that I’ll excel in studies and will land in some company with a handsome salary. Will pay back my loans and live a life full of happiness etc. etc…

Everything was going fine till the end of the first semester. But then I got hooked to this fu**ing awesome thing called Linux. Since then, I never looked back and ignored everything from studies to health to relations (except parental). I kinda become a Linux geek while exploring it day n night. I started writing blogs about Linux which eventually became quite popular. At the same time, I sucked in studies. Got 2 D grades in the same semester and there is only one semester in which I didn’t get a D.

Everything was again going fine and I didn’t care about studies anymore. But then they offered this fu**ing awesome course ‘Social Entrepreneurship and Management’ as HSSM. I don’t know why I opted for that course. I think because friends were opting for that and thinking that they’ll probably teach me for the mid sems and end sem. The professor showed some serious videos of evolution of some social entrepreneurs ( including Mohd. Yunus). I got too much hooked to this idea of entrepreneurship and developed a different point of view. I started reading about the startups and how people actually start startups. I read tons of text about them and realized that its not really a big deal to really get started. But there are train load of risks involved. Its probably the easiest way to go bankrupt. But what if you succeed!!!

After reading a lot I have thought that I’ll give it a shot. Being a guy with open source thinking and having no money to spend on crazy stuff like a startup, I started exploring open source ways of starting startups with no money involved. Current status is that I am working really hard get something DONE. I think I am ignoring other things more than one should. Didn’t have breakfast in Feb so far except Feb 18th, 19th. Didn’t have lunch in Feb so far except Feb 18th. Got fever since last 4 days. But I won’t give up. I got to do it.

Somebody may think that why the hell are you doing all this? Just study and get placed in a company with a very good salary. But my only concern is my thinking. Nobody is going to pay me for sitting in their luxurious office and exploring open source and participating in open source development. I am not after money, I am after satisfaction. I can’t just work for a company which develops shitty softwares which don’t work when you need them the most.

Right now, I am pretty nervous and afraid of doing anything. I am concentrating more on work. I almost read every blog post written by bloggers from IIIT just to digg how people really view this world. I want to thank smr for sharing wonderful stuff on google reader about the emerging startups.

I tag smr for writing a post about this entrepreneurship thingy. I think he is the most experienced person in this field whom I know personally.

PS: Got one of my recommendations noticed in Official Fedora Weekly Newsletter. Search for kulbirsaini in that newsletter 🙂