Nirlog.com

For last few months I’d been craving for a DSLR. I thought it was about time to take a step forward from my old point n shoot Canon Powershot S50 and upgrade it to a decent DSLR. BTW, my wife and I are expecting our second child in mid July and thought it’s the right time to have a quality camera to take nice pictures. Spent quite some time researching which camera to buy that fitted my requirements and budget. I narrowed it down to Nikon D90, Nikon D5000 and Canon Rebel T1i / EOS 500D, and finally decided to go for Nikon D90.

I was keeping my eye on the price of D90 in UK at Camera Price Buster (very useful site indeed!). When I was ready to buy it from Currys (it was £709.00 at that time), just decided to do a last minute check on Amazon (I prefer buying from Amazon because never had any problems in the past) and to my surprise Nikon D90 Digital SLR Camera, 18-105 VR Kit was there for just £649.99 by a seller called “rodneyjwillis”. Almost £60 cheaper, Excellent - I thought. Checked the sellers profile/review - it had 100% positive feedback from the buyers, nice comments and seller was with Amazon for almost a year. So, ordered it from Amazon marketplace. I didn’t see anything phisy at that time and anyway I was aware that paying via Amazon will guarantee my purchase with their A-to-z guarantee scheme.

When all other stuff I ordered together with D90 arrived (camera bag, sd card and d90 book), but there was no sign of my D90 being dispatched, let alone delivered. I sensed something was wrong. Went back and checked the seller’s profile - there was one new feedback saying

“BEWARE! This account is being used in a scam - items don’t arrive!”

Read the rest of this entry »

Suddenly my MacBook Pro failed to wake up from it’s sleep. I thought it’s one of those problems which gets fixed after a hard reboot, but I was wrong! There’s no display after several power cycles. My MBP is one and half years old and I regretted not buying an apple care. Pressed the power button and turned it on again, it chimes, and after a while I could increase/decrease volume using the keyboard, but there’s no display.

After Googling a for a while I found about MacBook Pros with faulty Nvidia GPU.

Apple has determined that some MacBook Pro computers with the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics processor may be affected. If the NVIDIA graphics processor in your MacBook Pro has failed, or fails within two years of the original date of purchase, a repair will be done free of charge, even if your MacBook Pro is out of warranty.

Good - I thought, if that’s the case it’ll be a free repair. My MacBook Pro fitted all the descriptions, but I decided to do some further troubleshooting myself as per apple’s recommendation, tried external display and even changed the RAM (I had the original 2GB RAM, which I’d upgraded few months back to 4GB). Finally called apple, and the support guy asked me to take my MBP to apple store to be seen by a Genius.

I made an appointment with a Genius in Apple Store, Bentall Centre. A friendly Genius took my MBP in to do some test (they’ve a special test for nvidia issue) and came back to tell me that the logic board was faulty. I told him that the OS is actually booting, only the display is not working. Showed him that the volume key works, but he told me that volume key actually works without the OS (but I was not so sure). So, finally he gave me a £771.65 repair estimate quotation for the logic board replacement. I came back with my MBP and was already thinking about buying a new one.

Back at home, I turned on the MBP again and left it on for a while, I could see it joining the wireless access point and could even ping it’s ip address from another pc. At this point I was pretty much convinced that it’s not the logic board but only display problem. I booked another session with Apple Genius, but this time in a different store at White City. Showed my MBP to this Genius, explained him what happens. He said - he’ll need to do one test, booted my MBP using an external hard disk and told me “Yes, it’s a NVIDIA issue, we’ll repair it free of charge”.

So, apple took exactly 2 weeks to repair my MBP, the logic board was replaced. The receipt shows £771.65, but with payment method - “No Charge”. I’m glad to have this fixed free of charge (was nearly duped into paying £771.65 or even buying a new MBP).

If you have a MacBook Pro with display problem it’s very likely to be a NVIDIA issue even if one Genius says it’s not!

My son was very excited from yesterday after he saw the snow forecast in BBC news. This morning he just jumped up when I opened the curtain to show him 10 to 12 inches of snow outside. The best part was yet to come - he started dancing when he knew his school was closed . It was the heaviest snowfall in south-east England in 18 years. London public bus was completely shut down in the morning and only few trains were operational. London was almost brought to stand still, most of the flights were cancelled.

As for myself, I decided to go to office but my car needed some work.

After 15 minutes of shoveling the snow, it was ready for a drive.

The road was pretty slippery, it took half an hour to drive to work (it’s a 10 minutes drive in normal conditions).

Office was almost empty. No public transport and road closures made it impossible for most of the staffs to get to work.

Came back home and played in the snow with my son.

Just came to know that my sons school will be closed tomorrow as well. He’s very happy.

After a vigorous job hunt of little more than a week, I’m glad to let you all know that I’ve joined Vanco (Reliance Globalcom, Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group) as a Security Engineer, which provides global managed network solutions with assets and expertise of FLAG, Vanco and Yipes:

Delivering customer-focused managed network and application delivery solutions that leverage a global network with unrivalled reach, depth and breadth to multinational, service provider and global carrier clients. Over 1400 enterprise customers and 200 carriers depend upon Reliance Globalcom to manage business-critical network solutions and address complex requirements for their businesses and partners throughout the world

Vanco is now Reliance Globalcom, Anil Dihrubhai Ambani group, which is also well known because of it’s chairman Anil Ambani, currently 6th on The World’s Billionaires List.

I feel myself privileged and honored to have this opportunity. At Vanco my role will be exclusively focusing on security, I’m really excited about it. This is a perfect opportunity for me to bring forward my previous network/security expertise as well as learn and grow at this truly global organization.

Yup, I became a victim of global credit crunch last week. Our CTO and VP for finance politely explained that the company didn’t meet it’s target last quarter and it’s nowhere near meeting it this quarter too. So, several jobs will be cut and mine was one of them. I think more than 30% of the IT team was made redundant.

Watching news about the economic downturn, global credit crunch and job cuts is one thing but experiencing it firsthand is a different matter altogether.

How does it feel?

Awful, I felt something swirling in my stomach I can tell you it wasn’t a pleasant experience to be on this side of the table (it used to be other way round). Anyway, there’s first time for everything. It felt awful for a while, but the fact that this redundancy had nothing to do with my personal performance, and I had no control over it provided me some consolation. I was over with it pretty soon. I didn’t see it coming though and was caught with a surprise after enjoying my Dashain holidays…

After all it’s just a business decision for the company. I believe that whatever happens, happens for good. So, hopefully ShipServ will be able to weather out this storm. As for myself and other affected colleagues at ShipServ there might be something good waiting for us.

Its slightly painful now (you know you start thinking… oh my god how am I going to pay my rent, bills, food, blah blah…) but I’m absolutely positive that something good will come out of this. Lets see…

BTW, Cnet has an excellent list of 14 things to do if you are laid off from a tech job

Looking at the brighter side… I’m excited about new opportunities and have attended few interviews, which look promising. Also, it’s a good news for prospective employers; thanks to the credit crunch there’s one more very talented and experienced network, security and infrastructure engineer available on the job market

Anyone interested?

Grab my CV here.

Some of my friends have been asking me why aren’t any updates here. I don’t feel good about leaving this blog unattended for so long, but frankly didn’t have time and energy to keep up with it. Now I have decided not to feel guilty because this was just meant for fun anyway. So, this blog will go with the flow of my life, without any stress… Things have changed slightly. Mainly the time. I’m pretty busy running a rat race, like most of the people, work, home, work…. Weekends are good time to get in touch with reality and re-charge your battery. I try to devote the weekends to my family.

On personal account, life is pretty good, trying to climb a property ladder, probably good (or bad) time for first-time buyers… On professional side, enjoying the challenges at ShipServ, grateful for the opportunity to serve and learn… My son is having a good time (very little homework and lot of play). My wife is quite worried about the teenage stabbing, drugs and alcohol abuse…

The weather was very good last week. It was warm and sunny for the whole week! That’s something to celebrate here, English weather is so unpredictable… you can truly see 4 seasons in one day.

Here are few moments I’ve captured from my life in UK…

April snow, my wife and son enjoying their first encounter…

Read the rest of this entry »

Apple has finally announced the long awaited SDK for iPhone. Looking at the amazing games and enterprise softwares that third party were able to develop in just two weeks I’m convinced that iPhone will be an excellent gaming machine as well as a hit enterprise handheld device. The next release of iPhone firmware version 2.0 due to be released in June will have native Exchange support, Cisco IPSec VPN, remote wipe capabilities, WPA2, and many more…

Here’s a nice iPhone SDK comparison chart by engadget.

Another good news for iPhone users in UK is that BBC has launched iPlayer video on demand service for the iPhone and iPod touch. I just watched the BBC News on my iPhone and it’s just awesome!

I don’t know about other ISPs in UK but I can tell you that Orange is the worst I’ve encountered. I’ve been without the internet at home for 23 days. The broadband stopped working from 23rd of December 2007 (for unknown reasons) until yesterday, but I still don’t know what was the problem. I’ve made more than 10 calls to it’s customer support and they’re clueless about the cause of outage. The call gets redirected to it’s support center in India and the support staff absolutely have no idea about the problem. Every time you call them they’ll tell the same thing: “The case has been escalated and will be solved within 5 working days” and they’ll ask you to follow the Livebox (wireless router) reset procedure. It’s probably one of the worst customer service… no followups, no idea about the problem and the service goes on and off like magic. They sign you up for a 18 to 24 month contract and once you’re hooked who cares…

I’ll probably never join Orange again!

Thanks to the iPhone, I was able to keep up with the personal emails and relatively decent web browsing.

2007 has been an exciting year for me. I moved to a new place, changed jobs and am enjoying new environment, new culture and new opportunities… I’ve made some new friends and the life seems wonderful. I’m very content with what year 2007 has given me, and am looking forward to more challenges, fun, love, peace and spiritual development in 2008.

I would like to take this opportunity to wish all of my readers, friends and family a VERY HAPPY and PROSPEROUS NEW YEAR 2008!

It’s been interesting times for me here in London. Life has taken many turns and I’m enjoying the Journey. Just wanted to let you all know that I’ve joined ShipServ as a System Manager and will be looking after their network, infrastructure and Security.

ShipServ was founded in 1999 and is the world’s leading e-marketplace, helping buyers and sellers to easily find each other, connect cost effectively and trade efficiently. Whether a Supplier wants to attract new customers, a Buyer needs to source new Suppliers or existing purchasing relationships require internet-enabling, ShipServ is unique in helping businesses of all sizes in the areas of web based Commerce, Search and Advertising.

I’m really honored and delighted to accept the new challenge and start this new phase of my career.