Fooled my Nokia N95!

My N95 has a wonderful inbuilt GPS receiver but since the time I have been using the phone (approx. 14 months), I never cared about it, partly because I was in India for 6 months of that time where GPS is like, non-existent. After coming here too, I never paid the attention it deserved. Yesterday, I just gave it a shot. I learnt that the GPS works well but for it to actually navigate somebody from source to destination, you have to buy a subscription from Nokia (around $150/year) plus the data charges (GPRS). This is a totally waste of money. One gets a good quality dedicated GPS device for 100 bucks.

Hence, I decided to search the web for some more information about using it for free. I tried a number of things but could not crack Nokia maps. It just worked like a location pointer and information book which we can even find online.

However, I struck upon a forum which talked about somebody using 3rd party GPS application on N95. I immdiately changed my search phrase and discovered that Garmin, Tom-Tom that are the top GPS device companies have similar applications for smartphones too.

And I wasted no time in finding a torrent for the same :) Downloaded it, cracked it on my phone (with lots of hiccups though)...and voila! Got a full fledged GPS device in my phone itself! I spent almost all day for that and finally managed to crack it...Now I don't have to pay a single penny to either Nokia or my cellular operator (for GPRS). because it works like a normal GPS - uses the in-built receiver to get real-time data from the satellites. Man I am so happy!

Although there are some applications like Google Maps Mobile, MGMaps and some others but they all require a data plan activated to get real time data from the internet but not using satellites. This worked like a charm!

P.S. I hope nobody from Nokia or Garmin reads this :P

Erratic weather of Texas...

A post dedicated to this great phenomenon was long awaited. But it could not have come at a better time. It's the spring season here and unbelievably, on the same day, sometimes, we have to flick the swith of the central temperature control device to either the left or the right - heater or AC. Don't believe me? See the snapshot...I took it on Feb 27, 2009. The difference between the maximum and minimum temperatures is almost 50 deg. Fahrenheit (around 28 deg. celcius).

Man, it's just too much...2 days ago, it was quite hot at bedtime, so I switched on the AC and by morning I was shivering and had to rush in the hallway to switch on the heater because outside the temperature had dropped by almost 45 deg. Fahrenheit! 

Has anyone in India ever experienced this...Temperature reaching 35-40 deg Celcius during the day and dropping to 7-12 Celcius during the night?

Moreover, you can never tell when it's gonna rain here...It can pour anytime during the year.

There's a saying here "If you think you know today's weather in Texas, just wait for another 5 minutes and see if that holds true"...

I love talking in a professional setting, and people love to hear me too :)

Well, today I had an important presentation in one of my courses 'Corporate Information Planning'. We (a team of 4) were given a case and we had to present/propose a solution as IT consultants to the company in the case. We had worked pretty hard over the weekend to prepare for today, having prepared reports, powerpoint presentations (which was awesome too).
And now was the time for us to actually present it to an audience. 3 team-mates did their part and I took over from approx. 70% of the presentation till the conclusion.
Being born in a family of good speakers certainly helps a lot (I think I had mentioned this in some earlier post too, don't remember which one). And I am always confident of leaving a mark on the audience whenever I speak. There have been a number of occasions where audiences have been amazed by my presentations.

Public speaking is not all about talking, it has a number of other things attached to it. No one likes to just listen to somebody blabbering in the same monotone, looking tensed, stammering, fiddling around while talking, looking only to 1 person, leaning against something, etc. (Hehehe...I haven't attending any public speaking course though, so don't think I am trying to teach something). I always put myself in the audience before I speak - Would I like to listen to presenters having the above characteristics for 30 minutes at a stretch? Certainly not.

The presentation concluded smoothly and I was happy that I did a good job. But my elation was doubled when after the second group presented, the professor called me to the center of the classroom and told the audience "This is how a presentation should be given. Chintan was so calm, composed, clear and had a good posture, professional dress-up and he was not 'caulky' (wonder what that means though!)". I was happy that I was recognized in front of the whole class. Especially by a professor so senior as him.

Well, this just reasserts my belief that I can talk really well with people - I just wan't people who are close to me, to understand that. Because in my diurnal life, I don't talk a lot with everybody. I only talk openly to people with whom I share a particular comfort zone. Hence people misunderstand me saying things like "He is reserved, he is introvert" which is not true!!!. If that would have been the case, I wouldn't have made so many (yes a lot) good contacts in my school, diploma college, engineering college, work, etc. and everywhere people (young or old) have respected me for my ethics, my way of interacting and my nature. I can assure that in 99 out of a 100 times, nobody can talk anything bad about me behind my back.

Just to give another instance of the same, in my 1 year of work at Accenture, I shared a great professional relationship with all the teams in my project, even from other projects too. Also, until I worked there, I had hardly seen anybody being given a farewell like what was given to me. Being a new entrant in the industry, it is very difficult to shine bright so soon in the eyes of the pros. However, I can say that I achieved a lot in a short period of time - both due to my hard work/abilities and also due to my way of handling relationships with different people aptly.

This post is not a pompous song of all the good that I feel I am, but it's just something that I want my close-ones to understand, because it's no use to achieve a lot outside when you are not understood completely in the inside. Hence I am putting my feeling into words...