Woke up this morning and heard this buzz that is unusual for the season. To my surprise, there is a decent drizzle out there. The wind chill is still high and the temperatures are still low. But it is good to see a nice drizzle that hopefully cleans up things a bit.
Bought Mahindra Xylo E8-ABS. White color. Vehicle is delivered today but I haven’t driven it around much. May be I will take it out over the weekend.
The decision to go with Xylo (as opposed to Toyota Innova) is heavily influenced by the following factors:
I didn’t want to wait for the model with Airbags, because the month of January is prime usage time for me. I also know that I am compromising on the engine noise, interior plastics and tested durability when I chose Xylo over Innova.
Today is one of the coldest days of the season. I got up at 4.00am to go to Secunderabad Railway station. I picked up a couple of cousins who arrived from Coastal Andhra. The temperatures are a lot low when compared to earlier days in the month. I could feel the chill even with a thick full sleeves shirt.
Surya’s class celebrated the school annual day on Tuesday, the 22nd. (The annual days are split for each batch of students, so that the place is not too crowded.) The theme of the day is water. Most activities emphasized on the need for water conservation. The thread that bound all these stage shows is also very good. Good care is taken on the costumes and preparation, which is reflected in the smoothness with which kids executed the event.
The arrangements made for the event are very good, including seating, food, lighting and sound. The event ran a lot longer than what I expected, for 4+ hours.
Surya’s team participated in a dance item and it came up very well. The photos and video will be uploaded over the weekend.
I test drove Mahindra Xylo over the weekend. Let me give the ugly details first:
Now let me enumerate the positives:
I would have taken this vehicle if they could deliver it before the end of the month. However, there is no stock for the specific model/color (the one with ABS) I am looking for. So I am backing out.
BSNL used to have a usage check portal on one of the private addresses (10.x.x.x/8). That portal is very useful to check the bandwidth usage for connections (like mine) with limited monthly bandwidth usage. For the last few days, the old portal is offline. I found a new portal on BSNL site. Exploring the site at this moment. There are lot of good features around phone billing. However, I am yet to check the internet bandwidth related details. So far so good.
He is mostly popularly known as “Ranger garu“, for his service as a Forest Range Officer. He made several donations to temples and he funded many kids for their education. He is a very well known name in the West Godavari Forest areas. He passed away on Tuesday, the 15th. His 11th day ceremony will be held in Hyderabad on 26th December.
He is my uncle by relation, married to my mom’s eldest sister. Being the eldest member of the family in their generation, he helped almost every one during their tough times.
May his soul rest in Peace.
I had a few issues mounting a 1TB NTFS disk on OpenSolaris last week. After getting a few hints from one of the OpenSolaris support forums, I could get the issue fixed. All it needs is the FSWfsmisc and FSWpart to be installed on the box. The output of rmformat is very helpful to test the raw disk types, etc. The binaries installed as part of these FSW* packages like xlsmounts are very helpful.
One interesting observation is that the NTFS filesystem is mounted a little different on the local host.
root@agent007:~# xlsmounts
PHYSICAL DEVICE LOGICAL DEVICE FS PID ADDR Mounted on
/dev/rdsk/c14t0d0p0 /dev/rdsk/c14t0d0p0 ntfs 5950 127.0.0.1:/ /mnt/test
root@agent007:~#
Need another weekend to drill down a bit into that…
The November Y-to-Y sales growth of automobiles in India is impressive.
That is a good growth!
Recently got a 1 TB USB Drive (this one.) It needs an external power source (doesn’t draw from the USB interface of the connected PC.) Works fine with Vista/XP installations. Had issues mounting this drive on OpenSolaris 2009.06 edition. Need to followup on that in the next few nights. Yet to check on CentOS. The drive is a bit slow though.