Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Wild flower drive

This blog is dedicated to the people who are in Austin, Texas and like the wild flowers that have sprung all around Austin. If the wild flowers that have sprung in and around Austin have made you want for more then here is the drive you should consider. 

Take TX-71W towards Llano and take TX-16S towards Fredericksburg. You will truly will be in for a feast. Fields are filled with colorful flowers. I am not sure how long will these last, so if you want to make it do it soon. While you are there you can take FM 965 and visit Enchanted Rock and the Wild seed farms in Fredericksburg. If you are even more enthusiastic consider the willow city loop (we didn't do this).  

Here is a glimpse of what you might see. 




The above red flowers were not on the way but at Wild seed farm Fredericksburg. 
  

Some times simple solutions isn't what I want

After I posted a comment on my friend's blog, I realized when it comes to myself, many a times simple solutions is not what I look for. Here is one example for the same. 

I retired my old Athlon based PC and built a new Athlon X2 based PC. Everything was new including the hard disk and the OS and all. The PC was running fine for a few months and then started blue screening and complain "Insert OS disk and boot". I used to faithfully re format the disk and re-install the OS, until I realized I can solve the problem  by unhooking the SATA cable from the hard disk and the motherboard and re insert the same after some time (cooling time). 


Over time the blue screen became more and more frequent, it was like sitting on a time bomb not knowing when it will go off. I suspected the memory interface, so I slowed the memory speed in the bios. I downloaded memory stress test and ran the same, there were no errors in the memory interface. 

Since I had already invested too much money on the new PC, I had to fix it and make it stable. I debated on changing the hard disk. but I wasn't sure whether it was the hard disk or the motherboard that was faulty, I decided to ditch the SATA disk completely and installed the OS on an old IDE hard disk. The 80GB space on the IDE disk was not nearly enough to hold the pics and the music among other things, hence I decided to use the SATA disk for data. 


The instability of the PC got solved but every now and then the data disk would drop off and become unavailable. The only way to recover was to unhook the SATA cable and hook it back. I did some research on forums and based on those suggestions, I uninstalled the nvidia SATA drivers. This step did help to some extent and the data disk fail became less frequent. 

One fine day I realized I had an extra SATA cable and decided to swap the cable, I can't believe all my problems with the PC is solved. The fact is I had this cable for ever and could have done this long time ago but my logical mind couldn't accept the cable could be at fault, but turns out it was. If only I had taken this simple step in the first place, I could have saved myself a lot of agony. 

In hindsight I think the cable was failing as the temperature of the CPU box went up and the system used to blue screen once the cable failed. For a long time I had setting "Reboot on failure" and hence I used to get the error "Disk not found". Uninstalling the SATA drivers helped because the data transfer rate reduced and hence the heat generation reduced.  

Wednesday, April 07, 2010

Not fair at all

Mr. Shoaib Malik - Ms. Sania Mirza wedding hurdle has finally been cleared. For those who read times of India online you couldn't have missed the dispute. For those who don't, turns out the cricketer was already married to another girl by name of Ms. Ayesha. 

Times of India has been running articles on this every day for the last couple of weeks and made sure it got the prime time. I was pissed that the paper is giving such importance to this. They had interviews with this lady Ms. Ayesha and they were posting comments from Mr. Shoaib and Ms. Sania also, in the end they managed to keep the issue alive very well. 

Till today Mr. Shoaib kept denying that he ever knew this girl Ms. Ayesha from Hyderabad and denied even meeting her let alone marry.  Today all of a sudden he decided to divorce the girl he has never met. 

The unfair part I am screaming about is the settlement, a paltry Rs 15,000 that too to be paid in 3 installments over 3 months. To top it all, everybody is happy with the settlement. I feel it is one of those settlements that is not even worth the paper it will be printed on.  

I wonder if the TOI forgot to add a couple of 0's in the end.  

Thursday, April 01, 2010

Rainbow inside the apartment

Couple of weeks ago we managed to capture a beautiful rainbow formed on the window blinds. Before the geek inside you start to wonder where was the prism for the rainbow, the light was going through the aquarium. 


Here is another view of the same (playing with settings on the camera).