kinshuk sunilit aint no, dessert if therez no caek

Yesterday, I was invited to the Nokia Music Store India launch event – the Nokia Music Bootcamp. I have written about it here. I went to the event with fellow bloggers Honeytech, Praval, Gaurav Mishra, Sachin Khosla, and Abhijeet Mukherjee. Also met Sayantan Pal and Priyanka Sachar at the event. The event was a splendid experience, what with Nokia doing a new service launch, but more about the music band – advaita, that performed at the event. Advaita is coming up with their new album – grounded in space, and has made some amazing music. Their way of blending rock and folk is very new and fresh and the music feels soothing.Look up these guys, they are amazing.

What was more about the evening was the company of these bloggers – makes you realise how much more there is to learn and yet their friendly demeanour keeps you at ease. Abhijeet and I have had a small stint as co-bloggers during my authorship at the Make Use Of Directory. Meeting him was an old wish that finally came true. After all that I had heard about Honeytech, meeting him was a very different exeprience – energetic, wise, and young. And his affection for good music.

I look forward to meeting these guys and a many more bloggers and community people across the nation. Just realised there is so much more to learn :)

I guess, learning is a constant process, it keeps going on.

0626 Hrs. Get a call from home. Rise and shine sleepyhead. Thomas is coming over too. He is a fellow camper from chennai; he needs a place to keep his luggage and to take a bath. I need some company; I invite him over.

He is there by 8AM, by the time I was fresh and ready. We start at 8:20 for the venue. I am the organizer for chrissake! I have to be there early, get things arranged and organized. But first – Breakfast!

Me and Thomas head over to the Kabini Canteen for a quick breakfast while discussing FOSS. It feels so great to be talking like you really know what you are talking about, even if you don’t. Post breakfast, Thomas and I start on our mission to find and reach the venue. I was to experience the vastness of the IISc campus, now. 40 minutes and 15 guides later, we reach the CEDT Building. Welcome to OSScamp Bengaluru!

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I continue my experiences from my previous post where I described my journey till the point where I was on-board the aircraft. Now, I shall try to pen down my thoughts through my maiden flight. I am sorry, this might turn out more like a philosophical rant.

While I was sitting in the craft, waiting for it to taxi and take off, I was very anxious. Here I was, travelling alone for the first time, unsure of how things will turn out. I had just some cash on me and a mobile phone to help me out. Just in case. I was nervous. Yadu was sick and so he wasn’t going to be around, local help was also limited. I had been warned about likely language and traffic troubles in Bangalore. I was afraid it might be a hostile city, after all, for a newbie like me. There were so many things that could go wrong in Bangalore.

Captain Hardings updated us on the status of the flight. We are on ground hold for engine start and taxi for another 20 minutes. Sorry for the delay. I whiled my time away looking at the distant airport and the nearby crafts. Soon, the plane started to taxi and the crew asked us to put on the seat belts, keep the seat straight, and brace ourselves for take off. Off all the people I could see, I was the only one following the instructions verbatim.

The plane, now, approached the runway but took a halt. A jeep was flying down the runway. It stopped a few hundred metres away. A guy stepped out and fired a green flare into the sky. Soon an international service by Air India took off. We were next. We taxied onto the runway and stopped again. The engines suddenly roared to life, the plane started running and a few moments later the nose was up, then the craft, and we had taken off.

Suddenly, blood rushed into my head; my ears went all red and hot and I couldn’t hear a thing. Three seconds and a gulp after everything was normal. I was flying and with it came a surge of confidence. All my anxiousness and nervousness was gone. Bangalore, I am on my way and you better be ready for me baby! That was what I felt – pure exhilaration and curiosity. Now before you go “Gross!” let me tell you that this was the first time I was above 20ft of land. My eyes were stuck to the window, now, taking in all possible details. I was trying to identify places and landmarks and everything else I could see down below.

And then I realised, at the speed I am travelling, I am already far past Delhi. I wished they built huge name-boards for all cities, villages, and every-possible-where so that air travellers could identify places. But alas! no help there.

Beauty, they, say is skin deep. You know, like beauty is what you see. Incorrect. Beauty is a lot more than that; lot more than what you see. Beauty is, always, felt. Its the emotion that fills you up when you see anything beautiful; the glow that you glow with. That’s beauty. I had seen many pictures and footages of aerial views but that can never equal first-hand experience.

Its a sense of grandeur that you feel – a grand scheme you are just a minuscule part of. It is, in a way, a belittling experience, sort of, simply transforms you into a small fleck of life compared to the totality. The Whole Picture. It is also a Whoasome!® experience. :P

This is my maiden journey alone; my first flight experience, and I wish I could share the sight with my family and some dear friends. I am feeling lonely like I have never felt. I have never been this lonesome, in other words. Perhaps I shall feel more lonesome at Bengaluru. Whatever.

At 3pm, I run into bad weather. Gawd! First Flight and bad weather already? I am flying over somewhere around Hyderabad. I should be. Its kinda all white outside the window. The plane is shaking slightly. Feels like its being played with by high winds. I am taking a lot of pictures with my mobile phone. I hope they turn up good.

Amidst these thought of grandeur and loneliness, and bad weather of course, taking in the beautiful sights of flying over clouds – I have approached Bengaluru. In the meanwhile, I had something to eat on-board; the prices were overkill. Hell! They got a monopoly here. Its like Leave it or Take It.

Landing was smooth; we were actually flying over the runway seconds before landing and I thought we had landed already (pretty smooth huh?) but then came the thuds and the shakes and the rumble and we had finally landed. Bengaluru International Airport. 4:20 PM IST. The temperature outside is 28.6 degree celsius. Have a pleasant day. Thank you, captain Hardings.

To be continued.

I had only heard about the abysmal quality of the Idea Customer Care but on 8th I managed to experience it first hand. It so happened that I had finally discovered Nokia Maps and how to use it on my N73M and a friend’s N95. So on 8th, after my End Term Semester Exam of the day, Jitender (the friend), Myself and a few other friends (Varun and Manish) sat together to try out the Nokia Maps. So began the ordeal:

First, I tried installing Nokia Maps on Jitender’s laptop but it needed Microsoft .NET Framework 3. Hence couldn’t install it on the Laptop. Thus, I first downloaded .NET Framework 3, installed it, then installed Nokia Maps, and then downloaded the India Map and the English (UK) Language Files. Presto! Now Jitender could use the map of Delhi in quite a detail and search around for places. However, he couldn’t use the Navigation feature since, it needed GPS. Looking around the Nokia Maps web, I found that N95 comes with A-GPS which uses GPRS to co-ordinate GPS data with the satellite and is a very speedy process using very less data. Awed, started our quest to activate GPRS for Jitender’s phone which is an Idea Number.

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Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 is now available for PC users to try, though Microsoft specifically says that the beta is targeted at Web Developers and Designers. I am neither, but I like to try new stuff when I can.

So IE8 is sleeker and smarter. I have used it for half an hour now and have faced no problem yet (but then I haven’t even thought of looking under the hood). What is new this time? Activities, WebSplices, Automatic Crash Recovery.

“Activities give users ready access to the online services they care about most from any page they visit, and developers gain an easy way to extend the reach of their online services. It’s as simple as selecting text to get started with an Activity.” (Microsoft.com)

“Developers can mark parts of webpages as “WebSlices” and enable users to monitor information they rely on as they move about the web. With a click in the Favorites bar, users see rich “WebSlice” visuals and developers establish a valuable, persistent end-user connection.” (Microsoft.com)

And just in case you don’t like the way IE8 works, you can shift back to IE7 ‘mode’ with the click of a button. IE8 features an ‘Emulate IE7′ mode with a nifty ‘7′ icon on the standard tool bar. Though I haven’t still faced a scenario where I would like to do that (chances are I’ll never face one either).

This time “Internet Explorer 8 includes built-in tools that work well for professionals as well as those trying CSS and scripting for the first time.” (Microsoft.com) These tools include a JavaScript Debugger, a utility to work with the DOM,  CSS 2.1 Support, Data URI, AJAX enhancements and more.

Automatic Crash Recovery will help you during your ever-so-frequent crash experiences with Microsoft Software (though I must agree that in the post-xpsp2 world I have faced these crashes rarely).

IE8 has even got one of those cool bookmarks toolbar that we are so used to in Firefox, Opera and all the other browsers. And needless to say, IE8 is the most reliable and secure IE-edition to date.

All in all IE8 looks good first hand, but yet it is Internet Explorer. Will I switch from Mozilla Firefox 2.1 to Windows Internet Explorer 8?

No. Will you?