If there is one thing a geek needs, then it is a good internet connection. Now, that is one thing that has always eluded me and there is no chance of it changing in the near future!

That is one of the reason this blog has seen absolutely no updates for a long long time.

The past week and more can be summed up as follows:

Choir

Practice has been on in full force for Good Friday. We’ve had practice four times in the last week and things are shaping up.

Had to sing for a funeral mass on Thursday at the Oshiwara Cemetery. Few of us from the choir decided to drop in at the “Mega Mall” just across the road. The place is still coming up and the only thing there was the super market. We weren’t out shopping so just moved on to Inorbit food court.

Headed home and back again to choir practice.

Yesterday was Passion Sunday and we were singing for the 6pm mass. Father dropped the bombshell that we had to do the part of the crowd in the liturgy. With no prior practice, I think we carried it out well

Computers

My internet connection sucks. I’ve been calling Exatt up every single day for the past two weeks to ask them to come fix the connection. I dropped in at the office today and waiting for the folks in charge to come. The problem is they have no clue how to fix the frequent switch hanging.

I’ve been considering the MTNL Triband, but my mom is too terrified about “incorrect” billing on their part. I’ve decided to chuck the idea. If my net is down, a cyber cafe shall have to serve as my resort.

On the computer front, my Dad was down last week and he brought me a Kingston U3 DataTraveler.

I am very impressed by the drive. Besides functioning as a normal 2GB memory drive, the U3 Software adds autorun capabilities with easy installation of portable software to run directly from my drive. I’ve got my browser and other software installed on the drive, so no privacy issues at cafes

Dad also got me a 120GB external hard drive. It’s small and portable and a real life saver. This will all be part of my baggage to SCMHRD in June.

College

On the college front, I received the results for XIMB. I’m 101 on the waitlist which is definitely not converting. Besides, I don’t think I will be taking it up anyway. SCMHRD seems a better option after weighing in a lot of factors.

The SCMHRD Foundation course which was supposed to start on April 1 has temporarily been postponed. I’ve received the confirmation letter and receipt for the payment.

Also metup with the several SCMHRD folks from Mumbai on Saturday. Will save that for a small post later.

Personal

The mouse dropped in on Wednesday to say hi. Someone should be studying

Accompanied a pal to town on Friday. Have been digging up some stuff about studies in Australia. Maybe in the future. Then again, maybe not.

Have also made plans for a holiday in April. Things are shaping out well. I’m not much of the holiday person with hardly any trips at all.

But, the holiday always makes for some good blog tales…

The Sunday that went by the big Maharashtra MBA CET 2007 which opens doors to Management colleges in Mumbai. I had already received news of me being accepted in SCMHRD.

My center for the test was IES School, Dadar. I wasn’t sure of finding parking, so took the train out there. Reminded me of the times at Agrawal’s for my HSC classes.

This time I was a lot more prepared than last year and hence attempted the paper better I believe. However, I don’t think I did well enough to get me into JB, but time will tell.

The paper was a lot more calculation intensive this time. However, there was a pattern that I observed. There were many sets of five questions which has all the different five answer choices within that set. Hence, if I knew four, I guessed the fifth. No negative marks definitely helps!
On the downside, you will get only one correct for every five that I attempted

I rushed home immediately after the paper as I had to make it for mass. Had intended to go in the morning, but just slept through the entire thing!

I received my SCMHRD offer letter yesterday and spent most of yesterday and today getting everything ready. The packet is ready to be sent

Had to take new stamp size photos for the same, also got a huge bundle of my certificates and marksheets attested (Thanks Mouse).

I’ve also finalized on a Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop. It’s working out to be around Rs. 62K including taxes. Will post complete specs once I get the baby, which should be four weeks.

The rest of the week was rather uneventful, but for few exceptions.

Except for yesterday the week so far has not let me sit down and take a deep breath. I began the week by helping a friend setup her new computer. This took up both Monday and Tuesday.

The only thing frustrating about both days was the travelling, which was at a snails pace for a good distance. Constructions and continuously increasing number of vehicles has resulted in horrible traffic right from Kherwadi, Bandra upto Juhu Airport.

As I said, I spent all of Wednesday at home except the evening to get some documents attested, which was only a few minutes.

Today was the most tiring day of them all. I went to Government Polytechnic in Bandra to complete the formalities for CET 2007. Last year I had headed off to this place after standing in a long line at SPCE and expected a small line this time too.

This was not to be as when we got there we were at the entrance of the building and had to climb another three floors.

The result was a long wait of four hours before the work could get done. Also ended up joining others in shouting at shameless people who broke the line. Sure can be pissing off. But, the shouting was totally uncharacteristic of me!

Have finally got my hall ticket. My center is IES (King George) School in Dadar for the test and Jamnalal Bajaj for the the GDPI.

Met up with James after a brief stopover at home to go shopping. Had to pick up a gift, but ended up picking up three tshirts for me.

We stopped over at Subway after this as I needed to get some food into my stomach.

Before this, I had also visited a Hutch shop to shut down a billing number only to be told to fax the letter. Will get this done tomorrow. It’s extremely simple to get a new number, but it sure is complicated when you want to disable it!

I’m really exhausted. My internet is still playing tricks on me and a visit there today has resulted in promises of two days. We shall see…

As is normal of my internet connection, early Sunday morning the net went down. Decided to grab the opportunity to do what is much needed for computer health but I have neglected for a long time viz. defragmenting my harddrives.

Got down to doing that yesterday. Used SpeeDefrag to perform the defragmentation.

It’s taken me more than 24 hours to format two 120Gb partitions and two 30Gb partitions!

Need to ensure I defragment more often

Seems like one crash followed the other.

My computer had started to give major problems since last week. These problems just seemed to spike about the weekend. Managed through the weekend until the big crash took place early Monday morning.

I wasn’t able to boot into Windows at all. Did the next best thing and booted into Recovery Console and rank chkdsk.

Had to leave the unit like this when I went over to a friends place to finish off application form work. All done but one.

chkdsk usually solves the problem and it seemed like it had done so this time as well but Windows refused to start.

Had no option but to reinstall the OS. This time I installed it on my Samsung Hard-disk instead of the Maxtor. Wanted to preserve the data on Maxtor and restore what I could.

The installation has always been a breeze because of my unit is powerful, so no complains there. Have spent whole of last night and early today restoring my applications!

There is a lot to be done. But, thankfully things are a lot faster now

Had two completely antithetical days yesterday and today (actually, that would be day before and yesterday, given the time of this post).

Awoke early Sunday morning and went for the 8.30am mass for which we were singing. I haven’t awoken at 7.30am since a long long time and as a result I ended up feeling extremely drowsy during mass and a good portion of the morning after that.

Would normally have hit the bed for a while, but the geek in me just refused to let go of the computer.

I ended up writing another article and releasing another plugin.

I have also create three new Software Category, where I shall post about certain useful freeware, open-source and shareware programs.

Finally ended up going to bed post 1am Monday morning.

Was up before 9am, did a bit more computer work and then went over to my study partner’s house.

And spent whole of Monday there solving and analyzing a SIMCAT. Performance has to be improved. Reached home only at 9.30pm

This will be a daily schedule (atleast planned) to ensure that we write as many mock exams as possible before D-Day!

Going to sleep now. Good night.

Have just created a new category on this blog, which shall contain posts exclusively about some of the best apps out there.

And let me inaugurate this category with one such software I cannot live without. It goes by the name Notepad++ and it could very well have been called Notepad++++ !!

For those of you not aware of this great application, Notepad++ is a free Notepad replacement for Windows, which supports several programming languages.

It comes with a huge list of features:

• Syntax Highlighting and Syntax Folding
• WYSIWYG
• User Defined Syntax Highlighting
• Auto-completion
• Multi-Document
• Multi-View
• Regular Expression Search/Replace supported
• Full Drag ‘N’ Drop supported
• Dynamic position of Views
• File Status Auto-detection
• Zoom in and zoom out
• Multi-Language environment supported
• Bookmark
• Brace and Indent guideline Highlighting
• Macro recording and playback

You can get a detailed explanation of the features from their site.

Few things that I really can’t live without is the multi-document, syntax highlighting and the brace and indent guideline highlighting.

All my PHP and a good deal of HTML development work takes place exclusively in Notepad++.

Non-English users too have nothing to complaint about, because the software also comes in several languages.

You also fantastic Find & Replace features, including the very important Find in Files, which you can use if you are searching for a specific string in a whole folder. This can however do with some improment.

Download and start using Notepad++

Have you searched for Ajay on Ixquick?

I’ve had an extremely frustrating week. Began Monday itself on a really bad note (details soon).

But, it kind of helped me get through the rest of the week

The rest of the week was quite exhausting as I have been working on completely the handover process which is nearly done.

I also started a countdown to 11th August, which is my last day at work, by changing my display name on IPMessenger. This has created quite a sensation in office and I was reminded when I forgot to update it last morning.

Sleep has been pretty much on the back seat for the past two days because of the release of my meebo me plugin. With an aim to get one out first, I ended up sleeping at 2am day before.
Last night was also a late night because of the update. But, no complains.

Got quite a few plugins in mind, which I plan on releasing once I sit at home.

And as usual, my weekend is packed. Need a rest.

Meebo has already gained a lot of popularity among the masses for their amazing web based chat service that lets you simultaneously login to MSN, Yahoo, Jabber, Gmail, AIM and IRC networks and chat with your friends there.

Though I usually login to my respective messengers, I have been using their service quite extensively and am a very satisfied user of the same.

With the launch of MeeboMe, they now let visitors to your site chat with you live, if you are logged into Meebo. While this is not a new concept, this is usually a paid service offered by several companies.

I am not sure if I will make full utilization of MeeboMe, but I have generated a widget as you can see below. (you may not be able to see it if you are using a feed reader)

Have given it a test run and I am pleased with the results so far. I may just decide to make it permanent!

One good feature I noticed is it’s tracking of the visitor even across browsers (I assume using their IP Address ?)
I’m sure this may be considered by users to be a privacy related issue. I don’t think it should be that much of a worry, because a good number of stat scripts are already doing basic tracking.

Just wish that they generate XHTML Compliant code. Or maybe I should write a plugin for this? The meebo me Plugin for WordPress is now available for download.

I have signed up at their forum and am providing some suggestions for making it even better.