Schloß Schönbrunn

The Schönbrunn is the first place to be visited while in Vienna, It is the summer residence of the habsburg dynasty.

Hofburg palace

Hofburg is the winter residence of the habsburg dynasty. The picture gallery here now has a collection of various austrian, italian and other europian style paintings. There is also an exhibition of egyptian and roman antiques.

In Vienna

Reached Vienna after 12 hours journey. It is the first time I am flying but my other two friends, Ram and Rajesh, accompanying me had already flown several times so I was very comfortable and had no difficulties. Started from home at 0030 IST. The flight, Emirates, to Dubai was at 0415 IST. All the formalities were completed smoothly. The emigration officer forgot to stamp the passport but we found that out before the security check and got it stamped. "The 101 dalmatians" kept me hooked up to the TV well for a major part of the 4hrs journey. We took some photos at the Dubai airport and boarded the connecting flight to Vienna.


It was a 6 hrs journey from Dubai to Vienna which was completed without any events. We landed on time at 1310 local time(GMT+1hr).We took a Taxi to the hotel at Wiener Straße and took rest the whole evening.

Google - Beyond searching

I am an ardent Google fan. It has been lovely watching Mr. Google grow from being a search engine to a multifaceted personality. Google has become a part of my life and every day I eagerly watch out for a new google idea. Google, gmail, google groups, google alerts, google personal home, google search history, google maps, blogger, google suggest, and many more.

Today, this post has really shown the world, where Google stands now.
tag: {google}

Up and working

Finally the PC is up and working today but not without problems. The service engineer came in the morning with a PCI ethernet card. The motherboard which was previously given as replacement had problems in connectivity. This wasn't the first time i am getting a replacement board. Right from the begining I am facing problems with this board. This one is the third.

My main reason for staying with this board is because of its fairly good linux compatibility. This one is a gigabyte GAK8VM800 motherboard based on the via K8VM800 chipset. It has a VT6420 SATA raid controller, via 82xx audio controller, Realtec 8139 on board ethernet, and via 82xx USB controller - all of which are well supported in linux. The only downside is the onboard S3 unichrome graphics controller which doesn't have linux drivers yet but the vesa drivers serves me very well for my non-graphics intensive work.
tag: {hardware} {experience} {linux}

Shattered plans

Beside other things, my plans to develop a zero configuration and easy to use wiki was severely affected due to the said problem in the earlier post.

Other thing being affected is my commitment to regularly post on this blog.
tag: {plans}

Disaster has struck

It was july 17, I turned on the PC and was reading mails, suddenly it stopped responding. Restarted it only to find it wouldn't boot. Called the Xeroxtronics helpdesk the next day. The service engineers took the Motherboard and the processor on 19th for diagnosis. The doubt was on the motherboard which had problems earlier also and was fixed. Last time they took the mother board for a repair it was almost a month before they returned it to me. This time I didn't want the same response and requested them to fix the problem at the earliest. But to my despair, this time too the response wasn't any different. Its more than 20 days now and still no information when the pc will be restored. I have made more than 15 calls now. Whenever I call, the response is the same, "Sir, innum rendu naal-la unga motherboard redyagidum", all those promised dates passed but the motherboard wasn't restored. Some days passed and they started a new story, that a new motherboard will be restored. This was to reach me last week but it didn't. When I called them last saturday the status was that the problem was not in the motherboard but with the processor, They promised to restore the pc by this tuesday. But this too didn't happen. When I called up, they had no reply. Only thing they can say is "romba, romba sorry sir(very, very sorry sir)". When I called them today, They have promised to restore it by tomorrow.

I am currently not using this pc for any critical jobs. But i had some plans for this month and this totally irresponsible behaviour of these people at Xeroxtronics had shattered them all. It's not the long delay but the lack of commitment is what makes me tighten my fists.
tag: {experience} {consumer}