A message from your mobile service provider isn’t something to chuckle over – especially if it’s about this month’s bill. My service provider must have, however, thought of spreading some cheer and good humor around with this month’s SMS.

For along with the usual content about billing amount and due date being mailed to my registered ID, there was one line:

Pls check Inbox & if mail is not received, pls check your Spam Box too
Sounds rather desperate, doesn’t it? :-)

Strand Book Festival

If you are one of those who are happiest when they see rows and rows of books at good prices, then you must head to Sunderbai Hall near Churchgate Station this weekend. That’s because the Strand Book Festival is going on there till 10th February. Timings are 10am-8pm.

Don’t lose this chance to stock up your home library :-)

Mahalakshmi Saras 2013

I have never been to a village fair. But I am sure any city-dweller visiting one for the first time would feel the same way I felt when I first set foot in the Bandra reclamation ground where Mahalakshmi Saras 2013 is currently being held.

I have visited these grounds many times in the past – to attend art and craft fairs. But this time the fair was huge. Almost 3 pandals situated next to each other and 5-6 aisles in each one of them – with rows of stalls choc-a-block with food and trinkets. I couldn’t wait to start and if I were any younger, I would have run giggling with delight all the way to the first stall.

The place seemed to have almost everything – cosmetic jewelry like bangles and necklaces (even ethnic one from Kolhapur), purses, shoes, clay pots and pans, paintings, furniture, kurtis and sarees, brassware, lamps, bed sheets and pillow covers, knick-knacks for the household, plant nursery and loads of food item – farsan, chips, sweets (halwa and pedha!), papads, varieties of fragrant rice, pickles, medicinal preparations for almost every malady known to man. There were counters to serve chaat, pani puri and the famous kolhapuri missal. Spanning all these stalls ran a huge food court with stalls serving everything from missal, kolhapuri tambada and pandhara rassa, baingan bharata and mirchi thecha, Agri mutton, Tel poli, Puran poli, crab pakoda and more….

I had hard time deciding what to buy and what not to. It was almost 2 hours by the time I had visited the final stall. Due to prior engagement I couldn’t eat at the food court. But hey, I plan to be there again this weekend – to shop more and to eat all that I can :-)

If there is one thing that can be said about technical problems, it’s this – you get immense satisfaction when you finally crack them. But until then they are pure unadulterated pain in the neck – to put it mildly.

Since yesterday my Team Lead and I have been trying to figure out why our .NET application is not able to connect to the MySql database when we are trying to host it. We have trawled the net to such an extent that there is practically no link left that we have not yet visited. We have followed every suggestion – whether or not that makes sense. We have set the use of dynamic ports. We have tweaked the Firewall. We have used ping, netstat and other assorted networking commands. No use! Frustrated and defeated, we decided to call it a day yesterday.

It is back to the grind today. The way I am going about searching, I should be given a medal for coming up with innovative search parameters. I was thinking of good old Albert Einstein who famously defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

I was on the umpteenth search result when the following line made me stop in my tracks….

I'm new to SQL related matters so please bare with my lack of knowledge and asking a question which has been asked countless times before

And laugh my heart out. Oh Boy! Needless to say, after a good hearty laugh, I was ready to search again!