VISITOR COUNT

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Poor Man's YouTube

I bought this Reliance data card connection. I got carried away by the impressive pro's of this device. Connect seamlessly across 5700 towns ? Thats a boon. Who knows I may have to work from Lakshwadeep sometime. Access speeds upto 144Mbps ! 1GB Transfer per month at just Rs 650 ! To top it, they have cool pictures of intelligent looking people sitting probably somewhere in Goa, hooked on to their laptops. I was beginning to imagine myself amongst them.
So I went into the nearest Web World and got myself a connection that took only about 1/2 hr (I had all proofs with me). Little was I to know the future. I excitedly brought the setup home, and inserted the card, installed software.....blah blah..

The connection is so pathetically slow, it is not even 1.44Kbps (The faithful dashboard told me that my average data transfer rate was 0.09Kbps). On top of it, Reliance Coverage was not very strong inside my living room (coverage-wise they are better than Hutch). So I cannot lie down on my couch and surf the web, as I previously imagined. I had to move to the balcony and point my laptop wierdly in directions. The kids next door stopped their play and watched me eagerly, expecting me to drop my PC anytime and create an amusement break for them. To me, not much avail. The speed did improve, but it became a measly 2Kbps. Google took 15 seconds to load.

The images of me zipping across my car, and checking my mail from a remote location started blurring into insignificance. Youtube and Google Earth became a distant dream. Blogging has become a big pain. I sometimes double posted my comments, and had to waste as much as an hour trying to correct small typos. Suddenly a dial-up connection seemed faster.

This thing is a big rip-off. I'm sure Airtel is no better. The Worst is that the damn card reduces your on-battery time of your laptop by Half !!My Thinkpad T42 already gives me a degraded 2 hrs on Battery. Now it is reduced to 1 Hr !! (This is a ZTE Card). It is unfathomable of how could people come up with such a stupid product-cum-service that a) Sucks your battery dry, b) Gives you a speed of connection that can go down on speeds so unimaginaby slow, that the software makers probably had good sense to put in 4-5 decimal places before zero whie computing speed.

A silver lining is that I discovered the poor cousin of Youtube. It is called scribd (I think someone made this stupid rule that any site to "sound" web2.0, should have a name that is a verb, but missing one or two vowels in their name. Eg Flickr ?). I have started going through some of the material posted, and some articles seem to make good reading as well. Some articles, though are extremely hilarious.

Monday, March 05, 2007

Wayfaring

Just discovered Wayfaring. A very good web2.0 concept that uses google maps API in a very user friendly way (No coding ! Just Copy and Paste).

I'm still trying to use this to capture my Paris Sojourn......

Thursday, March 01, 2007