I have a bunch of books piling up unread (or read very slowly): Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander, Iain M Banks’ The Algebraist, Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s Shadow Of The Wind, as well as Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere and the first two volumes of Dan Simmon’s Hyperion, as well as several others.

On top of that, two recent reviews — of JPod and Farthing — have gotten me interested enough that I’ll probably end up buying them inspite of all the reading list congestion anyway. Ah, the delights of plenty.

Comment »

The Tube in London is not as art-laden as the Paris Métro, but the Poems on the Underground project does get some good poems into the tube-cars from time to time. Frank O’Hara’s Animals was one of the best poems (that I was not familiar with) I’d come across on the Tube, and I was very pleased to be able to find it on the ‘net today. So without further ado, here it is:

Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

it’s no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners

the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn’t need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

i wouldn’t want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days

I am not sure why this poem appealed to me so much, but the vivid imagery and uneven meter (…want to be faster / or greener than now if you were with me O you) probably played a part.

1 Comment

Karthik blogged about my leaving Chennai even before I managed to land at Gatwick.

Yes, I have now left Chennai for good and settled (temporarily) in Hertfordshire, not far from the beautiful Chiltern Hills. Photographs ought to follow shortly if I can get my camera to meet the winter sun that manages to peek out of the clouds for two hours around noon each day.

The last 4½ years have been a blast, and for that I am very grateful to many CSS India-ers and folk who sweated blood to make Synaptris a reality. This post is meant for each one I couldn’t say goodbye to in person. Of course, I expect we’ll continue to see each other from time to time! Until then, you know how to contact me.

1 Comment

I’m back to posting after a long hiatus. Lots going on now so posting will be light; however I’ll try to keep posting once in a while.

* * *

I was in the beautiful city of Sofia on a business trip. Even after years of Communist rule, it has managed to retain its old world charm. Some photos:

* * *

Windows XP SP2 is out. This is a must-have upgrade; now Windows users have no excuse for letting spyware all over their systems. MSFN notes that even users with pirated copies should have an easy, hassle-free upgrade:

There have been a number of discussions on this newsgroup regarding whether SP2 will install on non-genuine (aka “pirated”) versions of Windows. Here is the official Microsoft position on this topic:

We expect that nearly all Windows XP users, running genuine or pirated Windows, will have access to the security technologies in SP2. The same users that were blocked from installing SP1 - those that have used a small set of legacy pirated product keys - will be blocked from installing SP2. We believe that there are very few systems in use today that use these keys — in other words, the pirates have moved on to other keys which we are not blocking.

So how do we characterize our policy?

We want to make sure that the broadest number of people can install SP2. The nature of malicious attacks on computer users is constantly changing and we will continue to evaluate how we deal with security updates for pirated versions of Windows to best protect our genuine Windows customers.

Thanks,
Gary Schare
Microsoft

Given the number of users running pirated XP and jamming up the net with trojan traffic, this is great news for the net at large.

Comments Off

Set-top box activated (on Tuesday, 48 hours after signing up). The most helpful feature of this is the Electronic Program Guide, which means I no longer have to wait for ages to find out what movie is playing when I tune in mid-way.

Comments Off

Set top box update (boy, that’s sure a lot of posts for something I won’t be watching most of the time): not yet activated. Apparently Hathway will process the OCR-friendly form I filled up and then activate my set-top box, this is expected to complete by Monday afternoon. Sucks — SCV, a competing operator, has apparently already activated its customers.

Notes on the technology used by Hathway — their set-top box is a Humax box running News Corp’s NDS (of chequered history) VideoGuard. Interactivity is possible, although the manual says “this feature is not currently available”. Pay-per-view is possible, again, not implemented. Overall, not quite up-to-the-minute, but very decent technology: it brings India’s cable tv business out of the technological dark ages and frees the viewer from the whims of the neighborhood cable op. Of course, the unfortunate bit is that most Indians would gladly pay a pittance (Rs 100) and watch the all (free+pay) channels on offer, a sleight of hand possible in connivance with their cable op, which under-reports viewer stats to upstream cable ops.

While writing this post, called up Hathway and cribbed about the activation lag, and a couple of other issues (Here’s one of them: the audio gain on NDTV 24×7 seems to be set too high, sibilants are cracking as a result. This isn’t a TV set problem — NDTV Hindi and other channels are fine). My impression: for a cable op that’s set to get into a direct billing relationship with households in some of the world’s biggest cities, they have a lot of work to do on customer support helplines. They do have a customer helpline (96220 01122 in Chennai) but the support folk seem confused and only too ready to pass on the buck to the local cable op, and only after much pushing on a string did they even listen to the issues I have. Unlike Airtel (which has a decent helpdesk) or HSBC (which in India has a kick-ass helpdesk in my experience), this one is new and raw, and its rawness is compounded by what I believe is a failure to make up its mind about whether it is a wholesaler or a retailer.

I believe I can help Hathway make up its mind: their logo is plastered all over the set-top box and the set-top box remote control. When things go wrong, who do you think customers will curse? Especially when things seem to work fine for their neighbors running SCV set-top boxes? If it’s your brand name and goodwill on the line, you better take ownership of customer complaints and solve them fast.

Comments Off

Got a set-top box from my Hathway-affiliated cable operator for Rs 999 + Rs 1 a day. Plus a Star/Sony-heavy package that lets my cable bill stay relatively constant around the 250 mark. Folks used to paying ~Rs 100 a month for cable tv, though, will get a rude shock in the CAS regime, which I’m still not convinced is going to fly.

Comments Off

Airtel aren’t the only ones looking to drain your wallet. With the introduction of set-top boxes, a.k.a the Conditional Access System (CAS), your friendly neighborhood cable TV provider is about to as well. On midnight Sep 1, pay channels disappeared from across Chennai — the only city in the country where this happened. CAS is being rolled out in Mumbai as well, but channel blackouts I understand haven’t yet occurred. Seeing that I watch about 4 hours of television a month, I have yet to be bothered enough to call my cable TV operator about that set-top box, but I understand a kid used to Cartoon Network might see things differently. Here are the monthly package rates I got, from memory:

There is also a base fee (Rs 98 here) which fetches you 31 free-to-air channels, including NDTV, Aaj Tak, MTV, the all-important FTV and BBC World. Add Rs 30 for the local
favorite, the Sun network, which I don’t watch, and it seems the average family that paid ~Rs 250 for their monthly cable bill will now have to shell out ~Rs 320. Not good, considering many families grumble already about how “too much time is being taken up by the idiot box.” I expect many cable operators will see reduced collections per month at these rates.

More interesting is the individual channel pricing. Mainstream channels like Sony Hindi Star Plus are at Rs 20 (Zee Hindi is overpriced at Rs 25 — unless it’s expecting its
cow-belt appeal to see it through), and others cost Rs 10-15 (exception: Animal Planet is a bargain at Rs 4). Yet already, the once-niche Discovery is priced at Rs 20, no doubt mindful of the fact that it has the blessings of many Indian educators and parents.

Now that the industry is forcing audiences to put a price on their viewing pleasure per-channel, I expect to niche channel prices to rise slightly, and mainstream channels to fall, as audiences discover that the time spent with mainstream channels is not enough to be worth the money they’re asking for. Besides, mainstream channels by definition have little differentiation: Zee Hindi, Sony Hindi and Star Plus are all pretty much indistinguishable (unless you’re a fan of of a particular soap and would die if you didn’t get to see what happened next), and in a budget crunch I expect one or two of them to be axed from a household’s purchase list.

Wishlist for the CAS: I don’t really need 31 free channels. Give me 10, and charge me Rs 49 as the base fee.

1 Comment

Catching a cold in the middle of an excruciating Indian summer (40 C/104 F) is one of the most irritating things in the world. (sniffle)

Comments Off

Well, what can I say, I got lucky :-).

Comments Off