Raju Alluri’s Personal Blog

And the moment I wrote about Dow’s stay above 10K, it sinks 1% to close at 9.9K range. Bad!

Spurthi’s class celebrated their annual day at Meridian School on Saturday. The day’s event is a musical play based on Ravindranath Tagore’s Chitrangada. It is a very well orchestrated play by a cast of about 300 school children. The visuals are great, the preparation is very good and the overall play is superb. A couple of hours well spent…

Headed to InOrbit mall this week, to celebrate Rishita’s birthday. It is my first visit to the mall and felt that it is very well maintained. Still lot of construction though. Roamed around in the mall for an hour and then settled for dinner at McDonalds.

In addition to all the nice shops there, I really like the parking facility. I also like the open food court.

Markets in Europe are causing ripple effects around the globe. India’s BSE has gone below 16K for the first time in many weeks. Despite all this, Dow Jones in US did an interesting feat. It closed above 10K for 3 consecutive months (since Nov 05th 2009) and that is interesting.

I have a feeling that India’s finance ministry and RBI didn’t capitalize on a golden opportunity. There are feelers of interest hikes and also many of the tax benefits are shown the door. That would have a long term effect on the cash flow into the markets.

Tried Firefox 3.6 in middle of last week. I am so impressed by the performance as well as look and feel that I upgraded all my desktops (including the primary one running OpenSolaris) with this release over the weekend. If you haven’t tried already, try Personas on Firefox. I installed Personas Plus and having lot of fun. The foxmask on the bottom left corner has become a regular visiting place now a days, to check the latest Personas.

Finally, got our new vehicle registration completed this weekend. It turned out to be a simple yet longer process because of lack of communication. It took two Saturdays of presence for me and Latha. Last weekend, we went there for reserving a specific number. We roamed around throughout the day for a couple of things: right documentation from dealer and PAN card in original. There is no mention at RTA (Khairatabad RTA, AP 09) that these are essential for number reservation. So we had to go to the car dealer and then home. In addition to that, I went to the bank in the last minute to get a couple of pay orders done. That took care of the entire first weekend.

Yesterday, after managing the long queue, we were told that the car dealer gave one less form in the documentation. So we had to rush to the dealer again and get the documentation searched and delivered. What could have been a 30 minute activity turned out to be a 3 hour process. In addition to that, copying the chassis number onto the paperwork is a big process for these heavy vehicles like Xylo. I had to get right between the front wheel and engine and transfer the image of the number there on to the paper using a pencil. Finally I managed to a bad job and requested one of the guys at RTA (who does it frequently) to help me there.

In this whole process, I realized that the lack of good communication and better paperwork from the dealer led to me wasting a lot of time. Also, the lack of documented list at the RTA is another cause for the delay. The processes are simple and straight forward. There is absolutely no need for bribes, brokerage or any other incidental charges to get the work done. That entire process made me feel better.

The Khairatabad RTA serves lot of posh areas and there is a mad rush for fancy numbers here. On that day, I have seen auctions for certain numbers go to the order of Rs 45,000. I spent Rs 5000 for a number totaling 9, based on Latha’s interest.

Earlier this month, we (NetEnrich) went through the surveillance audit of our ISO information security certification. It is a very good exercise that helped us to take a comprehensive look at the information keeping procedures followed throughout the last year. Our policies are checked, our checklists are validated, our processes are reviewed and our documentation is verified. All in all, it is a very time consuming exercise with a decent ROI on the fundamentals. Eagerly waiting for next year’s audit.

Best Wishes on India’s 60th Republic Day. Long Live Republic!

BTW, got a glimpse of “Phir Mile Sur …” on TV earlier in the day. Carries the baton forward, but may be not the same level of spirit.

I got custom seat covers made for our Xylo. I went for a private supplier and got low end covers done. The colors are chosen to match the interiors of the vehicle. Here is how the car interiors look now:

xylo-seats

Here are a few pics from our drive and stay at our native place. The first set is taken during the drive on 10th Jan and the second set is taken on 13th. The second set features our vehicle while parked next to our house.

Xylo-countryside-jan2010