So, once again I booked my tickets via Go Air. However, this time it wasn’t a Rs.3,000 return as I got it last month. It was a full 2k more and well, it is well worth it!

I booked the Airlift, which is a really good investment when you are travelling to Bangalore airport which is a good 50+ km from city-limits. My mistake was that I booked the cab for 8am, which arrived earlier than that and I landed up at the airport about 9am! And, as luck would have it, my flight was delayed by a good 30minutes, so my wait at the airport was well over three hours, in which I spent a good amount of time in the Barista at the airport.

It was also interesting to watch people wearing masks all over the airport in fear of contracting H1N1 which seems to have ravaged the country! This was even more in Mumbai which is also one of the epicenters of the pandemic. In my opinion, the whole thing has been overhyped, since, there are more persons dying of other illness than the total suspected H1N1 cases. Anyway, some protection is better than none!

Being Independence day on the 15th, there was extra security checks at the airport. In fact, our luggage was checked twice. Once by the normal security and once by the Go Air personnel. On reaching the plane, there was a lot of confusion and I gathered some information that there was confusion about the number of passengers. We finally took off almost an hour late, but the flight was really smooth and we reached Mumbai rather quickly.

I dozed off on the flight when the exhaustion finally crept up on me! I landed at Mumbai airport and had to walk a small distance to get an autorickshaw guy willing to go by the meter and not trying to fleece me! Gosh! They think I am not from Mumbai!

Found a rickshaw guy home and I first stopped off at my local cable operator to renew the internet connection at home. Marise came over later in the afternoon to spend some quality time with me.

I went to meet Sneha afterwards and Arijit joined us for a quick dinner at Pizza Hut.

And, yesterday was Marise’s birthday celebrations. But, that’s for another post!

Our first visit today was to the ICICI bank in Koramangala to make a demand draft to pay my road tax. The draft did get made, but the tax did not get paid, because our agent was out of town. So, once again, this has been postponed to next week

After a good amount of searching, we finally found the telephone exchange in Koramangala. We picked up the wireless DSL modem and set it up ourselves (not that there is much of setting up to do).

However, we weren’t able to test it until almost two hours later because of the really irritating load shedding we have in Bangalore. Lunch was a simple biryani from “Biryani @ Koramangala”, on which we stuffed ourselves.

We’ve been facing a really irritating problem with the internet, as the connection tends to drop at regular intervals. A restart of the modem fixes it, so I have a feeling the modem isn’t able to take the load of two connections downloading data continuously. We intend to complain on Monday, so lets see how it goes.

This is definitely a great improvement over my GPRS connection that I have been using for so many months.

I may need to work tomorrow, but that I shall come to know in a while. I intend to get some coding done today. My plugins would do well with updates.

This is in fact the first time I?ve ventured out of the safety of Mumbai into the unknown. Two years back when I set out to do my MBA in SCMHRD, Pune, I knew that I had everything planned and fixed with no need to worry about food, clothing or shelter. This time, it?s a question of shelter. So, if any of you reading this in Bangalore, know of a good 1BHK in Koramangala area at reasonable rates, please do drop me an email.

My office is located in Bellandur, so any suggestions regarding where to stay are also welcome.

Another purpose of making this post is regarding support for my WordPress plugins and themes. I?ll be tied down at least for the next two weeks and I?m pretty sure for two weeks after that as I hunt for a place to stay, get accustomed to the new city and job and get all the basic connectivity, which includes a decent internet connection. I do have my Airtel GPRS connection and a Reliance data card, but I hope I get a good signal to ensure I don?t get too frustrated to stay online.

Hence, for the next month, I won?t be able to fully and completely provide the support at the speed I have that I have for so long. Please do post your support requests in the forum. I?ll try to check in once a day or at least once every two days and respond to queries. Sending me an email won?t help. Read why.

So until then, do wish me luck. I?ll try to stay active on Twitter as well as Facebook (at least in the nights).

Room 103 is the first room in college to get placed.

Akshat and me were place by November 25 and late last Thursday night, we got the good news that Aditya too was placed. In fact he’s got an excellent job with one of the highest salaries in campus

And, we are a hungry group.

So, we booked a cab on Friday night and headed out to Stone Water Grill in Koregoan Park. This was recommended to us by a friend and it was a first visit to the place. Turned out to be a really good location with great service and a good ambience.

We ate and drank and they danced and we brought up a bill that justified Aditya’s high salary.

I’ve still to get the remaining photos. I’ll upload them to my Flickr album when I do so.

Anyway, we reached college at 2.30am, which excluding New Year’s last year is one of the latest I’ve returned.

The last few days have been as lazy as it has been. One extremely irritating thing is the lack of a proper internet connection because our excellent network folks (I shudder to use the word admin) are busy experimenting with the wifi adapters. I plan on writing a really dirty post about this so called “wifi connectivity” that is promised students out here.

Made a 30 mark worth presentation yesterday for World Class Manufacturing. A day’s work that completes one half of the valuation for that subject. This week is a little tight with lectures (well comparatively)!

Life here is hectic and we have been constantly getting only 4-5 hours of sleep every night… can be a pain in lectures…

I’ll try making a detailed post sometime soon.

As of now my datacard is disabled so I can’t get online in the hostel, all thanks to the highly inefficient Reliance customer care!

They sure can be a real pain in the ***

We spent the whole morning and afternoon at home, though Crispin and Ruth did pay a visit to the fields which Marise and me visited later.

You must note that I am and have been a city boy all my life, and definitely have OCD when it comes to keeping myself clean! So, walking through a cow dung ridden field was pretty much a major nightmare for me.

Marise stayed in the lead at all times and I follower in her footsteps… literally.

The fields were huge, stretching in all directions. They aren’t normally this green at this time of the year, but due to recent showers a month back, the fields still had a good deal of grass. Grass brought the cows and buffaloes grazing as well as some geese (or were they ducks?) besides some goats.

And, Marise pointed out a strange shaped coconut tree, that just had to be snapped.

The sun sets quite early and the lack of good lighting results in darkness setting rather immediately. I did manage a picture of the setting sun, which I think looks really cool. Feel free to use it as your wallpaper

Before it got completely dark, Crispin and I ventured up to higher ground, where the chapel is, in hopes of getting a signal for the internet. Got the signal, but the speeds sucked as expected so after almost a frustrating hour, we returned.

The rest of the evening was as lazy with dinner and quick sleep. The next day we visit the Mapusa Bazaar.

The first gives you a perfect example of overworked electronics engineers and the second is for all of you online!

Regular readers would have read a few rants about my internet connection.
I have a “broadband” connection with Exatt.

It works using PPPOE and am assigned a dynamic IP everytime I login.

That is fine, but of late I have been noticing that the IP Addresses are all blacklisted in Spam Databases!

The first time I noticed it was with the latest version of Bad Behavior, when I got blocked out of my own blog. Had to downgrade.

And, today I noticed it with Digg.

A spam database lookup for my IP at DNS Stuff finds it in a good number of Blacklists.

I can’t blame Exatt here however, because I am sure that these IPs have been abused by stupid spammers and users with infected computers

I’ve been initiating removals of my IP Address from these lists. But, is there a solution of removing blocks at one shot?

Don’t ask me to contact Exatt for this, because they suck in Customer Care. I don’t think they even know if there is such a thing called Customer Care.

Update:
I wrote to Digg today about the IP address problem. Seems like I was totally mistaken about the reason I was blocked. The reason I was blocked was because I gave UserSubmitter a shot and after a single set of diggs itself, my Digg account was blocked. Digg was kind enough to let me off this time with a warning.

Lesson learnt. Am posting it out here so that all you folks out there will be careful before using such services like UserSubmitter.