Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category
Broadband ready!
I got my broadband connection today. Yooo hooo.
My new music system
Long long time ago, when I was a kid my father had bought a Telefunken music system. That had been captured by me for my own use and that started my journey onwards on music.
These passion toward music lead me to try understanding the underlying technology and resulted in lots of DIY projects in electronics. It also caused me to taking up electronics as one of my subjects in college.
Though I cannot lay a claim to be able to play any instruments I still love listening. At one time I had more then 400 CD’s in my personal collection and it has been my dream from when I can remember to own one of those audiophile systems.
Every time I came close to buying a music system always some other expense used to kill this one 
Imagine for past 10 years I had no music system on which I could really listen from. Other then my PC/Car stereo I was banished from music.
I had been planning to setup a system for my new flat from the moment I bought the flat and y’day at last my dreams materialized 
A good friend of mine (Kriplani – thx from bottom of my false heart) y’day brought my system from Singapore and I haven’t been that excited for such a long time.
He was expected to land in Bangalore around 3:00AM, and to my surprise I was up by 4:00AM plainly excited about the whole thingi. I tried sleeping but just couldn’t. I couldn’t wait more longer and SMS’sed him around 4:30ish.
He was surprised and so we ended up having the systems in my house by 7:00 AM.
I managed to setup the amplifier/speaker/CD player in the morning.
By evening I had the whole thingi up and running. Sweet. I slept around 12 in the night! Maan was I excited.
My setup:
- NAD C372 Stereo Integrated Amp. (I just cannot afford a Power amp – pre-amp combo)
- NAD C521 BEE CD Player.
- NAD C422 Stereo AM/FM Tuner.
- Squeezebox 2 Network Music Player. (All my CD’s are already/will be ripped to FLAC)
- Mission M35i speakers.
I have hooked up my Linksys WRT54G wireless router and my PC to stream music from the PC to this Squeezebox.(I ended up setting up my wireless network and the rest of music system y’day night)
The whole shing-bang costed me around 1lakh (~$2200) and maan are my pockets clean. Sigh. But still a good feeling.
Music never felt so good …
Linksys hacks
I own one of these babies Just a bookmark for me to investigate
Linksys hacks
Hard selling or phising
A call on my mobile phone on 14 January, 9:41 AM IST from +91-80-5119300 went
on the folowing lines:
Caller: Hello, Am I speaking to Satish?
Me: Yes.
Caller: Hello sir. I am calling from Hutch. We are providing an email
intimation service. Please give me your email ID.
Me: I haven’t asked for this service.
Caller: Yes sir. You have been selected for the email bill notification
service.
Me: I am not interested.
Caller: Thank you sir.
hangs up.
What’s wrong with the above call? Something was not right.
First, someone calls me up and asks for my email ID without explaining to
me why they want it. Second, no indication of the privacy policy and if they
are going to use it for further marketting or sell it to spam people!
Is this marketting gimmick or email harvesting?
What got my goat was the subtle way of ensuring that they get your email ID. If
you notice, the first step is to ask for the emailID. It’s your responsibility
to ask the right questions before divulging the answers.
How different is this from phising?
What saddend me in the whole process?
Am I getting a cynical view of the world? Do I see schemes under everything?
Have I started to read too much in my day to day setup?
My natural reaction on the call was very paranoid and defensive. Moment I heard
Hutch, I was on A-Alert mode.
I am not sure if I like progress/capitalism anymore . This guy sums up my feeling to perfection!