Nimish Batra, The Life and Times of

1. Procrastination will kill you.
   1. It may be due to a fear of the unknown
   2. Or maybe because of a fear of failure/demotivation
   3. Laziness/lack of positive motivation
2. Indecisiveness is a friend of procrastination
3. Making hasty decisions will kill you
   1. in Soviet Russia, you lay haste to waste.

Anywhu. Lessons from house search.

1. Brokers are avoidable middlemen.
2. Everyone in the process has money on their mind.
3. Never take people on their word, unless you’ve had chance to test them before.
4. A good roommate in a crummy room is better than a crummy roommate in a good room. But a good roommate in a good room is best.
   1. Corollary: A random roommate in a good room is a more selling USP than a good roommate in a crummy room.
5. If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again.
6. If at first you don’t succeed, you should learn to pack things both faster and more compactly.
7. Make sure all shiftings are planned about a week in advance and you have a playbook. It helps.
8. Two people during moving > one person.
9. Always have decent transport arranged for at least an hour before departure.
10. A good night’s sleep is both necessary and missing until everything is done.
11. Everything is done only after everything is done.

That’s that then… see you later with more gory details…

12:07 am June 4th, 2009 | Category: Life, Nimish, Rant, bangalore, news | Comments (3)

Sorry for all this delay in posting another installment of my latest meanderings into deep but charted waters of life…

But there has been some turmoil, including but not limited to

• Unforeseen issues in the project
• My roommate quitting the company to pursue an MBA
• As a consequence I’m leaving this current apartment on Sunday after the month’s notice expires… without having a house to move into.
• I’ve transferred both domains to Namecheap (coupon: SWITCH2NC) and it looks very good, my host is still eWG.
• Started a football website which immediately stalled (see #1 above)
• Scaled back quizzing (surprisingly for the same reason as 2007) and blogging (which you must have noticed; see #1) activities.
• Stopped (see #1), but restarted playing football - now the intra-company(Bangalore offices)-inter-business-unit competition is again starting, and unlike last year, I’m in the squad of 11 (7 on the field + 4 subs - last year I was #14 or so). I’m substitute keeper/forward. I’ve never kept goal before in a ‘proper’ setting, so this’ll be fun.
• Everybody says I’m losing weight. Am I really? Or was I always thin and people forgot that part? Who can tell… who can tell…
• I went into a Beatles discovery phase during tough times (see #1)
• The future is making me apprehensive again (See #1 and #3 mainly)
• My reading habit is down but not out
• But my browsing habit is almost dead, so I don’t know what’s been up with the world in the last few weeks
• I installed Windows 7 (this blogpost is from a Windows 7 Ultimate Evaluation Copy).

But here’s the thing. I think I’ll be okay as long as

1. I believe that Everything Will Work Out Fine
2. I can become calmer and delay any reflex action to any stimuli long enough so that I can see more of the picture, but not so long that an opportunity is missed
3. I can see more of the bigger picture and hence feel safer in knowledge
4. I get less of a chance to pour old whine into new bottles

I love the rain, and the rainy season has just about begun.

11:50 pm May 29th, 2009 | Category: Football, Life, Nimish, Rant, news | Comments (2)

See I have this very domain (nb42.com) expiring next month, which will auto-renew in 8 days’ time. It’s attached to a hosting plan. I have another domain (nimishbatra.com) which is essentially useless because of eWebGuru (my registrar+host) having a one-domain-per-hosting-account rule.

What I want to do is shift to a new registrar and host.

My requirements are simple.

nimishbatra.com should be the blog and nothing else, while nb42.com/blog should redirect to it. nb42.com I want to keep as a testing ground for apps.

Currently eWG has “parked domains” (but no facility for “addon domains”) where I can redirect nimishbatra.com to nb42.com/blog, but it’s not a transparent redirect. So nimishbatra.com/about turns into nb42.com/blog/about - which is quite thoroughly useless and waste of a domain if you ask me. I believe this missing thing is called “domain forwarding” and I shouldn’t be looking at paying extra for it.

What I’ve been thinking of doing is
1. Get a free account at x10hosting and register domains from an independent registrar and use here.
or
2. Find an ultra reliable reg+host, get the full package from them (i.e. 2 domains transferred and the ability to host both from a single package).
or
3. Use this for my blog and go to 1/2 for hosting the apps etc.

So what should I go for?

Domain registrars I’ve been looking at.
1. Back to eWebGuru.
2. NetLynx is ICANN accredited.
3. GoDaddy is famous.
4. Saw this cheap thing on a Google ad.
5. I came across this… I remember having heard of them - good or bad, can’t say.
6. Someone once said IndiaLinks is good?
7. There is eNom or Moniker - apparently highly rated, but I can’t see their rates anywhere.
8. Another famous brand would be NameCheap.

… help?

2:44 pm March 13th, 2009 | Category: domain, help, website | Comments (11)

…is not this one.

I had it all in my mind. But it slipped out of my mind in the last hour I’ve spent struggling with phone/USB/GPRS issues trying to get and stay online. Anyway.

I come home from work daily, a bit happier these days than earlier. I think it’s the weather. But in truth… I know it’s The Unkown Known!

Yes. Something in my subconscious has clicked into gear. The sackful-worth of critical decisions that I needed to take have, I suspect been decided in the back of my head. And the next time I need to do something about them, they shall reveal themselves to me, I believe.

It’ll be a surprise to me as well as the others, my decisiveness. It’s nice to know that you’re not the only one surprised in a good way.

This weekend there is quizzing, football, book shopping and other cultural activities. See youon the other side.

BTW: My #2 pick band now is Keane. Coldplay hath been replaced.

Also: Liverpool’s 5-0 aggregate thrashing of Real Madrid is grabbing all the headlines, and here’s to a happy happy PL run in - may we pick up 30 points from here on in!

I’ve grown to strongly hate the service level provided by my current web host, so I’ll be ripping it up in amonth or so. Expect more rampant changes then.

See ya.

11:01 pm March 11th, 2009 | Category: Football, Life, Liverpool FC, Nimish | Comments (1)

Hello.

It may not be on the order of “After years of waiting…” but yes, I admit I have been tardy in updating. My apologies.

More »

11:06 pm February 16th, 2009 | Tags: books, computer, electronics, Football, gadgets, hardware, Internet, Life, liverpool, news, Quiz, stuff, update | Category: Life | Comments (6)

Hello.

It has been a lazy Saturday. I slept off at 2am, and awoke at 2pm - 12 hour sleep. No breafast. And as it turned out, no lunch, either.

This laptop’s battery is almost gone, so I made about 1 hour worth of phone calls. It’s in warranty - I just wanted to visit a repair shop and get them to do something to the backup time (20 minutes of battery?).

Somehow I connected to Compaq’s official support - and now they’ve requisitioned a spare battery which I can go and pick up at the repair place next week! I was a bit scared of giving up this laptop to the repair guys anyways.

After which, I went shopping and bought a fortnight’s worth of biscuits and a week’s worth of fruit. The strawberries look red and are sour, by the way.

Also got a Imported From Italy Universal Remote. Sucks, Cheap though - just about works. I’ll be trying to use it on the laptop. Hopefully it’ll work.

Lunch was a very light snack, from McDonald’s. :’(

I’ve got dinner to eat now. Bye.

9:49 pm January 31st, 2009 | Category: Life, Rant | Comments (3)

(Since Aamir Khan is releasing has released (I wrote this over a month ago and posted it unedited apparently :|) a Rs 45-cr remake of the Rs 8.5-cr Tamil remake Ghajini of the $4.5-mn Memento - compare the relative budgets to the biggest movies in their segments to be amazed)

Here we go…

So… you wake up. And… you’re… walking. Dark Tunnel. Walking forward. You are unable to turn back and see where you were coming from. There’s barely enough light as it is, and you can’t see your own hand in front of your eyes.

But you continue, and the tunnel is dark. So you try to think where you were coming from. But try as you might, the fog won’t lift, and you can’t remember anything.

But… there’s a light up ahead, and it’s getting closer. And you’re excited so you start running. And it gets closer, faster. So you run harder, arms pumping, heart thumping around in your chest like a clockwork headless chicken on a trampoline, and the light approaches even faster. You suddenly want to try and think where you were headed to, and that again, is fog. But then you realise the light is coming too fast, and you slow down. But the light keeps coming faster. Your hands involuntarily release the earmuffs you don’t remember putting on, and just as it hits you, you realise that a train is a very hard object to be hit by.

As a few microseconds later the shock begins, you also realise you should have waited at the station, and not walk around in train tunnels.

You idiot.

And that’s when you wake up.

If it’s a dream sequence.

11:26 pm January 28th, 2009 | Category: Uncategorized | Comments (2)

Dear Everyone I know, and Everyone I don’t know

I wish you have a happy 2009 - even when, on the Second day of January, it ceases to be new.

With much regards,
Me.

PS: Thanks for filling all my inboxes/inboxen. Unless I don’t like you. In which case consider yourself not thanked.

Try this link from the past as well.

6:07 pm December 31st, 2008 | Category: Uncategorized | Comments (2)

From the Wikipedia entry for the episode Raisins (S7 Ep14).

Butters starts to withdraw from life like Stan does. He goes outside and cries in the rain. Seeing Butters cry, the Goth kids invite him to join their clique. Butters replies “Yeah… And I’m sad! But at the same time I’m really happy that something can make me feel that sad… It’s like… It makes me feel alive, y’know? It makes me feel human. The only way I could feel this sad now, is if I felt somethin’ really good before, so I have to take the bad with the good. So I guess what I’m feelin’ is, like a beautiful sadness… I guess that sounds stupid… Besides, I’d rather be a crying little pussy than a faggy goth kid”. Stan agrees with Butters, saying one of Cartman’s famous lines, “Screw you guys, I’m going home.” He then leaves the Goth kids as well.

Well. I am home. I will leave for Bangalore in another day and a half…

12:59 pm December 27th, 2008 | Category: Life, Rant, South Park, bangalore, delhi, home, random, stuff, trip | Leave a comment