Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Deterrent for Officials

This recent news story of the Indian Bank CMD getting sentenced for 14 years is a classic example for officials not to listen to the politicians. As great leader Kaamaraj used to say that the politicians need to listen to the officials and not the other way around. Politicians are adept in getting themselves out of the mess and even otherwise, they don't have a shame. That is not the case with officials. This should serve as a deterrent for all officials in joining the looting scheme of politicians.

Live within your means.

Saturday, April 25, 2009

GPS and My experience

After much resistance, bought the Garmin nuvi 360. A friend of mine reminded that I might get free maps for a specific period of time. Thus, I set out on the quest to update my new Garmin with the latest ones. To begin with you need to register your product on their website. It was frustrating experience as Garmin's website kept crapping out four-five times and I had to retype my serial number that many time. Then one time it failed with half-saved information. I had to wait few minutes so overall, the registration process alone took 20 minutes! On top of that, you have to upgrade your OS to the latest (5.0) before you attempt to get your maps. This process took 30 minutes. Then the mother-of-all process of updating the maps took 1:45 minutes! The maps was 1.9 GB (big) and in my optimum cable connection @ 500 KBps took little more than an hour and then comes the installation.

After undergoing this pain, I wanted to see whether all this effort is worth? I live in Bridgewater, NJ and tried to find my library under the list of libraries. Before as well as after the update, it failed to list my library in the list. Even if not this library, how many roads gets created a year and how often or how far off do you go? Overall, IMHO its not worth venturing this. May be once in 5 years (you can buy a new better GPS every 5 years rather than going through this pain).