The Y-AXIS LIVE!

A year back, when Chandrayaan was a less known item, I happened to read about it somewhere, and wrote a critical post doubting its journey to the moon. Some folks left comments calling me names (mostly anonymous, which I rejected). Others were more charitable, who merely doubted the knowledge of my imbecile self. I even picked up issues with one of them till I decided to put a tap on my own mouth.

Post the success of Chandrayaan, there is yet another set of comments that have poured in, on that old post, this time rightfully cheering hurrah for Chandrayaan and more scorn for me. I have allowed most of them to go through, except those in which I had concerns on decency. I want to let all those folks know that I am as thrilled on Chandrayan success as they are. In fact, I have written a subsequent post on Chandrayaan launch that they may want to check out. Cheers to Chandrayan.

Links:

• The offending post
• My recent post on Chandrayaan launch.

First the similarities:

• Both hail from the state of West Bengal .
• Both have a connection with the masses.
• Sourav floored the Lords, Mamata floored the Lords too.
• Both are all over TV.
• Both are in and out of the team.
• Both have the grit to take the opponents head on.

But then there are differences:

• Sourav is a sportsman, Mamata is a politician.
• One brought laurels to the country, the other brought, well, how do you spell s-h-a-m-e?
• People switch channels to see one and switch channels to avoid the other.
• You buy ticket to watch one, and buy (train) ticket to escape seeing another.
• Both are winners. But one led an Indian team against foreign teams, the other led a team against Indians.
• One feels slighted, the other slights others. 
• When Sourav wins, India wins. When Mamta wins, well, you guessed it right.

Ganguly dada has announced his retirement. Is Mamta didi taking any hints here? Wish some people could give their country this small little precious gift.

As an entity, Google keeps expanding its services and I am one of those who don’t bat an eyelid before trying them out. My friends think I am nuts about Google because I keep lecturing them about their cutting age innovation, how they induce trials and how they successfully build interdependencies on their products, and all so subtly.

Your confidence on all-that’s-free courtesy of Google starts to shake the moment you need their help. Last week, I requested for a migration of my Feedburner.com feeds to feedburner.google.com. It was executed overnight. Then I wanted to experiment ads in feeds and how they work and realized I need to move my blog feed to another account. There is a defined process for that, only that it failed to work, with the error message even suspecting if I really owned my own blog feed!

I tried an alternate one prescribed, that in effect said, release the feed link (URI) from one account and quickly recreate in the target account. I would never have done so myself, but this was Google saying so, to me it was God’s word.I tried, and it bombed. Now I am unable to claim my own feed back with the comment, this URI is take, please take another!

So, I searched for help, which took me to some discussion forums in which Google’s staff reportedly avatars itself to help panic stricken folks like me. After leaving multiple cries of help, I  am yet to see anyone avatar to help me out.  I am taking comfort in the fact that it has been only one working day since I made a help request, but what does not comfort me is the horror of other folks asking for help for about three or four weeks and hello, no avatars around to help.

It brings up a painful realization that there are no SLAs for free services. I have lost my RSS subscribers and praying some of them will again rediscover this blog. Is there anyone from Google reading this?

Update 1: Matt S from Google has responded, asking me to stand-by. There is hope.

Update 2: Matt S has restored the feed. Thanks Matt. The system works!

I have stayed away from this blog so long that I do not know where to resume. But I see that I have quite a few options.

Few gripes:

1. Chrome does not install on home PC: Nope, the installation system is not made for installs behind authenticated proxy. That’s true. Here’s Google’s humble admission. In 2008, Google forgets users in campus and corporate networks. Note: If you have also faced the same, please refer to this user provided solution. In my case, it worked. But after seeing Chrome for few days, I am wondering what the hype is about. Certainly, Firefox remains a browser of choice for me.
2. Symantec charges me wrongly: I have remained a Symantec (Norton Systemworks) customer for two years and this year despite me opting out of auto-renewal within the specified date, I found USD 49 charged to my card. What’s worse, the license provided did not work so I assumed they’ve corrected the transaction and invalidated the license. I manually purchased a renewal and am still struggling to recover my USD 49. Been about 4 weeks. The banks charged me its monthly interest as well, plus non payment penalty (since this was the only charge on this card and remained unpaid).Assumption as they is the mother of all …….
3. Car AC stopped working:Just as I believed that summer in Chennai is slowly giving way to relief, it has given a robust denial of such misplaced assumptions. And then, the car AC stops working while driving to work! With barely enough time on hand to visit the service station, I have been suffering a sweaty sultry car. Tomorrow I might decide to put a wet towel under the collar, unless it rains!
4. Reading a book on Steve Jobs. Its titled iCon. (Stay away if possible - an iPod tells you more about Steve Jobs than than this book)

Few good things:

1. Restarted my alumni blog. Still looking for partners.
2. Discount season at Landmark bookstore. I heard they are offering upto 50%. Thankfully, I did not visit them so I managed to save 100%. What a deal.
3. Noticed a nice site for ads with some finance content in leftover space. Check it out.
4. Found a star tortoise in the neighbourhood. 

Blocked the road with my car to make sure the cute fella crosses the road unharmed.

Few things to look forward to:

1. The festival season’s here!
2. Vacation planning’s starts now. School closes in exactly 90 days . Lots of places to go.  Train booking also opening tomorrow. Overnight must decide, wake up at 5 am , login to the site and keep trying till their ‘link’ works. If  you have done online ticket purchase on Indian Railways, you’d know exactly what the pain of ‘link down’ means. But wait, I am not starting yet another gripe now!