Ravi's Blog

If its a weekend, you are most likely to find me at a spa. I love massages. Especially if its a Thai who is giving the massage. I don’t like the Ayurvedic massage much though i’m Indian and have a background in Kerala, as it is just massage that is done to get all the oil inside your body. Thai massage is something thats done for comfort, and that is what I would expect in a massage.

Ayurvedic massage is done when you lie down on a wooden table, and they pour all sorts of the so called medicated oil over you and move their hands over you as if squeezing the blood out of you, while the Thai massage is done (by pretty Thai girls) on proper massage tables and ohhh yes, that is comfort.

In one of my earlier posts, you might have noticed that I bank with Ubion Bank of India and SBI only and not with the private banks. Well, unfortunately, when I need cash, I have to turn to the private bank ATMs only that are close to my house, and since UBI is already offering free withdrawals from Otherbank ATMs, I usually prefer to withdraw cash from my UBI account.

A few days ago, when I tried to withdraw Rs 5000 from my UBI account thru an ICICI ATM close to my house, the ATM waited for sometime and spat out the card saying that there was a network error. When I fed the card again, I found that Rs 5000 which I had entered previously has been deducted from the account and I have nto received cash.

I have learned about this in an RDBMS paper in college. Money gets deducted from one account and doesnt get transfered to another.

I approached UBI and they said that since ICICI has swollowed my money I should approach ICICI and whe I went to ICICI, as expected, those bastards wont even notice that I am there after I told them my problem.

I spoke to my friend, who has a number of Mesothelioma lawyers for friends, and he told me that if this Rs 5000 doesnt matter much to me, I’d better leave it, since if I go after it, it would take a lot of time to reclaim it, and it will cost 80% of the money, and you can’t claim the expenses from the bank in any case.

Also, he said, there is one principle that you should always follow. Even if the free withdrawal policy has come into effect, always withdraw from Govt. banks from Govt Bank ATMs only. Private Sector banks don’t like Govt Banks much and they create all sorts of trouble for them and make the client work very hard to get back the money so that they could possibly get him as their client saying that their service is not as bad as Govt Banks.

Technology is helpful, but I guess getting back to old fashioned banking when you are at home by visiting the branch for withdrawals should be the best thing to do and use the ATM cards only while travelling.

A place of work is always dirty. You can’t use a coffee table or a dining table that you use at home to work on your laptop or a desktop at your office. The place that would be dirty by default will look more dirty this way. Offices should be furnished with the office furniture that are available in the market or specifically made to order.

And if you are running a home office, you are at the liberty of using your dining table to work on your laptop, but it is always advisable that you use proper computer desks for computers otherwise you will get all sorts of pains in your body.

I have always been on the quest for a better operating system than ubuntu. Ubuntu is real good for desktops, but I just wanted better eye candy. gOS was released last year and at that time it was no wehrenear ubuntu, but right now, gOS3 Gadgets is a real good distro. Got lots of eye candy, looks just like mac, and is hard and storng as ubuntu as its based on hardy.

And I have started using it already, but I am yet to find out how it really is. There cant be any bugs as the core is based on ubuntu, but still I can’t be satisfied untill I see that it is real strong and hard as hardy. I would soon be making a server out of it and would try running sites from the local machine and from the network and do all sorts of torture tests that come to my mind and only then I would be satisfied if its good or not. I dont take people’s words for granted these days, so no review will impress me.

I will be writing a review on this quite soon. By the way, poor people like me should get NC health insurance as the costs of medicines are going up and so are the possiblities of accidents or getting seriously ill. Particularly people who work long hours on computers really need to get insured before the hospitals leave them broke.

I must say, that out of my experience of running a web hosting copany and trying out several control panels by spending money for all that from my own pocket, I have come to the conclusion that linux is the best operating system for budget servers. If you run a bank then you might need solaris and stuff but for basic operations of putting up a decent website online, the best operating system that you could look for to operate the server is Linux. Windows sucks.

And unfortunately to make things easier on a web server you need something that is called a control panel that will maek all sorts of configurations for you. And without the control panel you will have to do all these settings manually and if you would be hositng a lot of websites on the server you would find yourself overloded with the work.

On linux, the best control panel is cpanel. Plesk sucks. There are a lot of open source alternatives, but none have the rich features of cpanel cpanel has got everyhting that you could ever think of.

I recently bought a vps for a small requirement from a provider, and to save about $5 a month, I got hooked up with plesk. And that pissed the hell out of me for the past few months. And a few days ago I moved that site to another vps that I had taken with cpanel, and the site is running excellently with just half of the ram. It appears that plesk was taking up most of the resources in the older server.

And right now after this, I find that I have a lot of spare time, that now I can go myself and print my Halloween invitations.