Look at the pic. I logged into del.icio.us and it says that you've been blocked since you accessed the website too quickly. Whom are they trying to fool? Its a public website and why the fuck should we users be bothered as to what speed we access it with?
Time to switch to a new bookmarking service.
The intelligent person hesitates, ponders, wavers.
The unintelligent never wavers, never hesitates.
Where the wise will whisper, the fool simply declares from the housetops.
This question has been on my mind for last couple of weeks. My colony, Amrapali Society , lies in a tight spot as far as location is concerned. It exactly doesn't come into Kalyani Nagar, where internet connectivity is available from most of the well-known providers. Nor, does it comes into Ramvadi etc where connectivity will probably be present as well.
Even BSNL says that the landline infrastructure in my colony is too old to support broadband and hence they can't provide connectivity there. Hence, unfortunately it lies neglected by most of the providers except Tata Indicom.
Now Indicom is supposed to be providing good connectivity in Kalyani Nagar as well as other areas of Pune. I know a bunch of friends of mine who are satisfied with the service. However, their service in our colony has no words to describe. Pathetic is the closest i can get. I log a complaint with Indicom customer care center almost every alternate day.
Tired with all this, a thought came to my mind that why not I myself start a broadband ISP for my colony itself. I could purchase a commercial connection from Tiger Telecom which I contacted long time before and then distribute it through a wireless network established through Meraki routers.
Dunno what to do with this but the idea sounds pretty convincing to me.
During my search for hosting providers in India, I seriously considered Manashosting.
The offer of unlimited web space and unlimited bandwidth was very attractive. However, surprisingly these folks have all these plans for Windows hosting only! I couldn't believe it at first. Who on earth will host over Windows? Especially startup folks who are generally cash-strapped.
Unfortunately I had to drop my plans to sign up with them since I needed a LAMP stack.
I've been running Goolti.com out of ipower's servers for quite a while. Although the service is great there are some potential problems with the service.
1) I can't get subdomain level traffic stats.
2) The number of subdomains are restricted.
3) I can't get an email like sales@mydomain.com for all the domains I host over the hosting account. I can get those kind of email addresses only for the domain that I signup with when I buy the account.
I got all these services at ixWebHosting.com hence I am going with them. I just want to document this down here so that someone searching on google for the same reason gets this and this probably helps him out to make a decision.
Out of the blue I got a mail last week that my Addsense account was blocked. I had started earning a decent amount through it lately as my website started getting some popularity. Supposedly this was due to click fraud. This site is running from a year. If I really wanted to indulge into click fraud I would have done this long time ago. I went ahead and filled in their online appeal form to re-instate my account, but there has been no response from Google Adsense.
Its really unprofessional on Goolge's part to block account without giving any explanation or any statistics. I am sure I didn't click my advertises over and over, so I desperately want to know who did and what was done ? However, there is no way to know since Adsense team won't co-operate.
Reading about this issue over the web it seems like there are many many webmasters who have gone through this and have eventually switched to a different ad network. This unprofessionalism is the usual arrogance from Google. I have really no other choice but to switch over to either MSN or Yahoo Publisher Network .
One of the most startling surprises for an Indian guy when he lands into US is that for getting a cellphone along with a SIM you need to sign a contract of 1 or 2 years. This seems ridiculous but thats how the US mobile industry was. They were still in 1960's while the world had moved ahead.
I read at GigaOm today that Cingular has finally grown up and realized this mistake and has started offering SIM cards at $25 without any commitment from the customer. This will start a revolution across the US I believe. Most people will switch out of their contracts immediately or after their current contracts expire.
This is a great releif. At least someone in the industry grew up. Hope that others follow AT&T.
Long ago I read a review on some blog that Sabeer Bhatia started a Linked-In clone for India called ApnaCircle. Since I know Linked-In's popularity in the US, I got excited of Apnacircle's prospects here in India and joined it.
Whenever I join or register on a new website I don't give out my primary email address. However, noting the fact that this venture was started off by Sabeer I thought that the website will be pretty professional and would respect people's privacy and follow stringent anti-spam policies. So, I registered over there with my primary email address.
After joining in I noticed that there were not so many people out there on the website and decided to give it some time to mature and market itself. With Linked-In's backdrop behind my head I was pretty sure that this venture would go somewhere because this was one untapped market. The need for personal social networking was filled by Orkut so what remained was professional social networking. Thats where I though ApnaCircle will fit in.
All said and done within a month I started getting emails from folks on ApnaCircle who were interesting in Dating! let alone professional networking! The women who sent out dating invitations often had Russian names like Svetlana and Maria. This was pretty surprising to me. The admins at ApnaCircle seemed not to notice this at all.
Later after another couple of months I got invitation from ApnaCircle itself for checking out their new news section which also focused on local news by the city you lived in !
I thought ApnaCircle was started for Professional Social Networking ! What the hell happened to that? They've gone into news and spam dating invites ! Crap ....I've now signed out of that shit good for nothing social network. I've also insructed GMail to categorize ApnaCircle mails as SPAM!
I think Sabeer really doesn't have any talent to start and run online businesses at all. With Hotmail I guess he fell at the right place at the right time and got lucky. All this later ventures like Arzoo, The online office thing and this ApnaCircle have gone to the dumps.
Conclusion: The Professional Social Netoworking space in India is still open and is up for grabs for anybody who has moolah for advertising.
Today sadly I announce that I have succumbed to the prevailing conditions at my place. Let me explain.
Our house has a perpetual water problem. We get water only 2 hours in a day in the mornings. Later part of the day is essentially dry.
Taking a bath in winter generally demands for warm water. We have 2 geysers installed. Sadly due to the lack of water none is used :( . We now use gas for heating up the water and then have a bath.
We do have a reserve water tank. However, for the water to flow with some force the water tank needs to be at least 15 feet above the roof of the house. 15 feet and above ensures good flow. Our tank is just around 5-6 feet overhead which renders it useless for passing it to the geyser and expecting hot water out of it. We live in a flat. Taking the tank up 15 feet is just not possible.
To add to the woes I am a staunch environment conservationist and do not like heating up the water on gas which is very energy inefficient. I finally found out a way to end up these worries by switching to taking a cold water bath. No energy requirements and no need for waking up early in the morning to take a bath. Cold water bath is the way to go.
A month ago I saw this girl on a dating site. She claimed in her profile that she was an Guyanese East Indian. Her profile looked right. Photos looked good. So I thought why not contact her and see whether she is interested in me.
Pretty quickly she responded back and gave her phone number. I called her and we started to talk on the phone. By now, I've gotten pretty good at charming women on the phone at least. She expressed a desire to meet somewhere in Midtown Manhattan for lunch. Within the next couple of days we decided a time and went out for lunch.
The girl was pretty interesting to talk but not really my type. Nevertheless, its always fun to hold a conversation with an absolute stranger and we talked for about an hour or so. She told me that she was born and brought up in Guyana. A country in South America east of Venezuela. She also mentioned that 53% of population of Guyana is East Indian. This was unbelievably shocking to me. I am the kinda guy whose pretty much read all history there is to India ever written anywhere. Well, more or less. I was really curious to know the history behind this and started off reading about Guyana over Wikipedia.
As the story goes, Indentured Labor traveled with the British for construction and farming from India to Guyana and another country called Suriname. These people are their descendants. Slowly and gradually the population of East Indians out there has grown to a little over than 50%. In Suriname its around 70-80%. We practically run the governments out there. The president of Guyana is a guy called Bharat Jagdeo. Wow, just imagine....
I knew this kinda story with Mauritious, Trinidad and Tobago and West Indies, but South America ? No way ...
I just wish the Indian Govt establishes ties with these far and forgotten countries and gets them some attention in mainstream Indian media. It will be also great if history books taught in the school would cover this aspect of Indian history rather than just giving us an overdose of Shivaji and that fucked up asshole Gandhi.
