A Credit Card....Finally!!!

Perseverance does pay. Learning the lesson did indeed take some persistence on my part. A few days back I finally managed to get myself a credit card on my tenth attempt. That's right. The tenth attempt! This again after a lot of phone calls and a million other hassles during which my documents were misplaced and I had to go through the entire process all over again. But then when I saw the package from Citibank waiting for me at the company reception counter I was finally relieved to say the least. Heck, atleast the buggers had given me a gold card.

I guess people who've heard about my experience with credit card applications would have sympathzied with me. Alas...this still remains one of the biggest mysteries of the 21st century. To have applied for and been rejected nine times would have been beyond anyone's wildest imagination. In fact I was beginning to wonder If they had taken me for the local Al Qaeda agent in Bangalore. If that was the case then there was plenty more to worry about. For instance I could have been whisked away while on my morning walk to the office, charged under some obscure section of the TADA/POTA or something of the sort and unceremoniously thrown into one of those shady dungeon-like places. Well, looks like I dont have anything of that sort to worry about. At least I'd like to think of it that way.

Actually, it seems like my friend Vaidya has much more cause to be concerned about. The poor guy' s visa application was returned to him for the secound time, on account of him having been born in the Emirates, or so I believe. Moreover he's even had his citibank account terminated because of the receipt of large sums of money from abroad. ( A cheque from his dad it seems). To be honest my problems pale in comparison with his. Anyway here's wishing him all the best with his visa and everything else.

Hurray! I won an iPod!

Yeah...I actually did! There was this TI Developers Conference which was going on in NIMHANS convention center here in Bangalore. Few of us from the company decided to pay it a visit on Thursday.

Right at the entrance was a stall by a company called TES electronics, one of TI's many partners. It was Harsh who drew my attention to the fact that they had some sort of a Q&A form which was being used for a lucky dip. Luckily there were just four questions, mostly about TI's new Da Vinci platform, and most importantly they were all MCQs. Well...I had nothing to lose really. So I casually filled up my form and dropped it into the box, not even bothering to find out what was on offer.

The conference as such was not all that great. This is some sort of a forum where TI and its allied companies (including Ittiam) display some of their latest products. The first item that actually caught my attention was the Slingbox, a product by SlingMedia. This is a device that allows the user to stream media from his TV set at home to his PC/laptop anywhere in the world over the internet. They had now come out with a new version called the Slingbox pro which was capable of streaming HD content. The best part of it was the demo where they showed some TV content being received on a mobile phone. The slingbox seems to be doing really well in the US, a fact that has been confirmed by many gadget sites. Quite a great achievement for a company whose entire design team is based in Bangalore. Later on I happened to meet Bull (Shubhamsh) who is a part of the very same team.

Anyway, it was on the next day while I was in the office that I get a call from Ameya who was attending the conference informing me that I had won the prize. Well...I got to admit it, this came as quite a surprise to me. Based on my previous experiece with lucky draws (think I might have won a Reynolds pen or two) I wasn't really expecting to win anything of note in the next 100 years or so. I now had to go and attend this official ceremony where some of the big shots from TI would be giving away the prizes. Sadly I had to drag my poor friend Viswa along with me since I did not have any means of transport. Later on, in the evening I happened to attend this play called 'The Confessions' which was part of this entire Thespo competition/festival that was taking place in Rangashankara. The play was pretty decent considering that it was an amateur troupe, but the story was a little bit of a drag.

Got back home pretty late that night and tried loading some songs into the iPod (a 2GB nano). Got to admit that Stevie J and the folks at Apple didn't really put user-friendliness up at the top of their agenda. Took me a good half an hour atleast to figure out how to load the songs into the pod. But then of course, I ain't complaining. The sound quality was pretty good. (as expected from Apple I guess)

By the way if you have any time to kill please feel free to try out this sports quiz.