New Phising Scam

Be Careful, as I just noticed that this email came to me.

http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/google-account-phishing-scam-hooks-users-fake-google-drive-login/#!TAN2t

--
--

Siraj

The first phone

People now a days take for granted the mobile telephony services. It was not like this always. I was born in to a home without a telephone. It was not until I was 8 years old that we got connected. And it was a major event in the household.

The process was long and cumbersome. Apply for a connection. Line man comes home to check feasibility. Comes back another day with adequate tools and material to provide the house with a telephone line. No internal wiring in those days, the line man actually attached wood strips and laid the line on them till the table.

The family discussion was another entertaining activity. Where to place the phone because, once placed it would be difficult to move it around (no cordless phones then). The line man completed his job of laying the line. He then asked the question to my father, “What type of phone would you like?”

“What options do we have?” asked dad

“You can either have the older phone with a rotary dialer or the newer model with push button dial pad”

With this, my father asked the children of the house, including me, “Which one shall we pick?” We were astonished, after some mumble jumble, we knew it was the newer model that we would love to have.

Note: I thought I had lost my first edit of this blog, and wrote up a completely new one. Refer the next post for the conclusion of this post.

The First Telephone

I starkly remember the day our house got connected with a telephone. My father came home and announced that our application for a telephone connection has been approved and we will be getting a telephone shortly.

Our wait started. Within a week the telephone company lineman visited our house. He asked us where we wanted the phone in the room. When we pointed out place he did some inspection and said that he will connect it there. Soon, he got out some wooden planks and went hammering away to lay the line. These wooden planks had metal ties to hold the telephone wire reaching our house.

After he finished the installation he asked us a question.

Will you be wanting a normal telephone or a push button telephone!!

My father looked at us and asked our opinion. WOOO!! Of course, we want a PUSH BUTTON TELEPHONE!! YAYY.. it was such a futuristic concept back then when the connected homes had only the circular dialer phone.

And again the wait started for the arrival of our telephone piece. Once it arrived (in all its maroon and black glory) and got connected, we called whosoever’s number we had and informed them of our new number. The whole of my class also got to know that I now had a telephone.

Now when I look back at those times, they are still fresh in my mind. The time we used to dial 161 to make the telephone ring to adjust the ‘ringtone’ volume or the tone itself. Also used sometimes to wake people up saying they got a phone call. Sometimes used to play the April Fool prank. Don’t think anybody uses a normal landline phone to do such things anymore.

Aldiko eReader

As I had earlier mentioned that I am now in possession of the beautiful Nexus One (Have been for a while), I’ve wanted to share my opinions about the applications (apps) available on Android. No better app to start off with Aldiko.

This brilliant app is an e-book reader. Very good interface. Supports multiple formats, especially the current e-book standard format of .epub.

While you are reading the book you can change a number of settings, a few of which I love:

1. Fonts – Some inbuilt fonts come with the app, but they are not the best, you can get a few more as a separate download and there are some beautiful/ pleasing fonts in here.
2. Brightness – you can change the brightness by simply swiping down on the left edge of screen. Amazing shortcut and this feature has crept in to few other apps as well
3. Go to page and Bookmarks – awesome features, must have for e-book reading!

So, Aldiko comes with a couple of books in the open domain, one of which is White Fang by Jack London. I simply loved this book. They way the author makes you the center of the novel by being the protagonist, the Wolf called White Fang. You can download this app just for this one book.

Hopefully, I will write about more apps in the future.

Speed thrills, but kills

No better example than what happened to Azharuddin's Son, Ayazuddin. My heartfelt condolences to a budding young cricketer's death. He looked so much like Azhar too. Inna Lillahi wa inna ilaihi rajioon.

Bikes are meant to be raced. Getting one as a gift, a youngster is bound to try to find a place where you can rip the beast. Everybody knows as much. Then what could be the solution. Where will a youngster go?

A race track, of course! If only there were enough race tracks in Hyderabad, Ayaz would have had a place to race his bike without inhibitions. He wouldn't have needed to break the law and enter upon ORR which turned out to be his and his cousin's death trap.

A controlled environment for racing with all the safety precautions taken care of is a healthy need for this generation where bikes and cars are easily accessible and are faster than ever. Eventually, India will be richer with racers like Narain Karthikeyan, Karun Chandok and the likes. That's all I have to say about this. Peace!

An accident on road

We were traveling to my office today and the traffic was quite a lot for that time of the day. After I dropped off my car pool mate off at her office, I was heading towards my office when I saw this on the road.


Amazing!! Everybody was passing by this and rubber-necking.. just like me. :)

Hope the guy got out unharmed. A day before this, in the same region, one lorry failed to make a turn and another made too big a turn and ended up in a ditch on the road side.

I think truck drivers are being over worked. :(

The Indian Cricket Team

What has happened to the Indian Cricket Team? After being the top team in Tests and ODIs, it is taking lessons in base jumping and trying to reach the bottom of the heap.

After the World Cup win (how sweet was that??!!) I wanted to write something about it, maybe after enjoying the sweet taste of victory, but the immediate onset of IPL turned me off.

But the 4-0 drubbing that we received against England, really turned the screws for me. So here is my take at what went wrong with the Indian cricket team.

In one sentence, “The Indian Cricket team is a victim of black magic”

Have you noticed how all the players were getting injured? I can clearly envision small little GI Joe style action figures of the Indian Cricket team on a wooden table in a darkly lit room with layers of dense smoke.

A scrawny hand picking up Zaheer Khan’s figure first on the first day of the first test match and piercing his leg near wherever the hamstring is.

Off goes Zaheer Khan

Snapping Gambhir’s hand which made the ball hit him on the elbow in the silly mid-wicket position.

That did put him down for one test, but he came back. So he got more, this time on his head to put him out of contention for the entire series including the T20 and the ODIs.

Yuvraj and Harbhajan also got some sting from the man cloaked in the black.

Sachin fell sick at Lord’s. Couldn’t have been any other reason apart from the magician poking his stomach.

They also had some black magic on the Captain MS Dhoni, did you notice how he was dropping all those balls behind the stumps. The most obvious indication of the Black Magic on Dhoni was his insistence to get in R P Singh (Fatso) for the last test. Geoff Boycott’s mum could have picked a better team than that!!!

There were also some other action figures on that table, those were that of the Indian Cricket team management. They let Sehwag play with a partially healed shoulder and off goes Sehwag.

This has become a serious problem for the Indian team. The only person not affected by the black magic was Rahul Dravid. Can you take a guess why he was not affected?? Obviously, because he is THE WALL!!! And inanimate objects seldom fall for black magic… at least from what I know.

Please do lookout for these signs of black magic in the ODI series. I do not know who is responsible for the black magic but I will conduct my investigations during the ODI series and come back to report on it.

I might have missed a few more players here, do point out who all were affected by the magic.

Disclaimer: This article is of course part of the non-sense motto of my blog. England was the better team and Indians were stuck in practice mode in all the four matches.