A Makeover

New Lucky Restaurant, Colaba, Mumbai

ravitej7 — Wed, 19 May 2010 05:04:29 +0000

This being my first review on the restaurants in Mumbai that I have tried, I will try to follow the general tradition of reviewing and commenting.New Lucky Restaurant is the first restaurant that I come across as I leave Navy Nagar and enter Colaba market and hence I chose this as the starting place for my reviews.

Price : Expensive

What we had : Two starters : one veg and another non-veg, rice noodles along with prawn main course. One Iced Peach Tea, One Strawberry mocktail and another mixed fruit mocktail. (Billed at nearly 1400-1500 for 3)

The place is rather small and not so easy to locate (and probably a new one too!) even though it’s not in any by-lane, and hence I guess are the really few hits on Google. The place serves Thai cuisine, well at least the menu seemed so.

We ordered for a Tofu starter along with another Chicken starter followed by a main course consisting of Rice Noodles along with a Prawn side dish. Actually, I don’t remember any names now as it had been quite a few months since I have been to this place and it was not a very pleasant experience though I would say the food is passable in taste but quite small in quantity for the price tag attached.

Tofu was good, esp. it was not burnt; which I did have to suffer twice before. The chicken starter was the best of the lot and was properly marinated and cooked which the Prawns in the main course suffered from as they were partly raw even though they were fried. Well actually, the main course had Rice Noodles which we though had chicken. After we finished the Noodles we were expecting the chicken to arrive and were a bit surprised to realize that it indeed had chicken. So, then I came to realize that it indeed had the flavor of chicken. Well, that’s for the chicken noodles . This is not a highly recommended item from my behalf. Do try their regular main course rice which is supposedly better.

Iced peach tea came as a saviour from the main course. It was the best of the Iced peach tea that I had till that time in Mumbai. Though the rest two did not look appetizing (or should I say rather flamboyant for something that consisted of standard strawberry ice cream put in a mixer and served in a tall glass!). So recommendations on the drinks side consists of only Iced peach tea and nothing else.

Overall, the place can be rated passable. If you are bored of other places, then it’s worth a try at least for the menu. Service is quite slow for a place that had only us dining at that time.

How to name it?

ravitej7 — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 06:49:19 +0000

Hmm … come to think of it, it’s quite surprising that I don’t blog often as I don’t have a lot of work hanging over my head. Well, probably it’s more because I have very less to speak about rather than trying to find free time.

Firstly, I broke my New year resolution (it took a record breaking 122 days to break!) and installed Arch Linux with KDEmod. Well, Arch felt the same, the good old sprighty little elegant thing . But, KDE came as a surprise to me as I was seriously unhappy after using KDE4.1 on ubuntu when it initially released. This build is quite smooth and fast and I find it a decent change from my LXDE on Debian. And, above all this Lenny seems to coexist for the first time with KDE happily as I have not yet seen my gpu temperatures soar.

Geeky part aside, the number of improvements that have been happening this year are quite significant when compared to my usual kind of static life. I finally completed my 16 course long graduate school coursework and am for the first time working full-time on physics that I find interesting and not something I am forced to do. Apart from this, I have become a regular player and have been pursuing my badminton avidly though to reach a level that I would call good, it might take the duration of my phd . Next plan is to buy an Armotec racket (doesn’t that sound like a pro?!)
Spam, I did! But, I still miss CMI and it’s awesome sense of spamming and I do not mean the fall of quality after “some” people left the place! Above all these, I miss the terrace of Hrishikesh apts. Well, it’s a fact that of all the things that had happened in cmi, these are the memories that I remember most vividly. These are the times that I don’t need to force myself to remember, but rather I have to force myself to forget temporarily so that I can get a few hours of sleep at night if I were to ever walk onto the terrace of any building (that sounds quite unlike me !). vra still is the best

After all the pleasantries, there are a couple of problematic issues also. Well, that’s obvious. I have not yet been able to get over that fact that “certain-section-of-Indian-population” are hypocrites (i guess whoever got whom i am talking about will agree with me!). (This does have an extension which I prefer not to mention!)

Finally, I have started the work on tabulating the restaurants that I have been to in Chennai and in mUmbai. So, hopefully, I can get all that up here soon!

Avatar – Review

ravitej7 — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 05:04:02 +0000

Well … there are just three words to describe the movie and for the first time IMAX actually made me feel the full throttle of what it means to “LIVE THE EXPERIENCE.” Well, the story is not a lot more than what the pre-release trailer told us. But, Cameroon captivates us either way and shows once again what it means to be a trendsetter.
This is one 3D movie where there are hardly any instances where you are kept awake using the element of surprise. You are part of the movie, a neutral observer watching things unfold in Pandora. It’s just like what Harry Potter must have felt when he used Riddle’s Diary.
I would have loved it even more if the screening would have been on the dome than the huge screen, which is nevertheless awesome. So, one thing that I can say is that if there’s some movie that you shouldn’t miss watching in an IMAX, this is it! It’s worth every rupee that you spend on it and probably much more; otherwise why do you think we would go all the way from Colaba to Wadala which is approximately 20+ km to watch it .

This year’s resolution

ravitej7 — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 12:09:03 +0000

Well .. as usual I started the year with the resolution that I will try not to waste time making up a resolution (believe me, this is quite handy!). But, as luck would have it, I made a resolution under 12 hours of this resolution without breaking the resolution, as the new resolution that I made was an impulse.

As usual, due to my love for linux, I thought it would be a nice idea to have KDE 4.3 on Lenny on lenny (where Lenny is the current name of my laptop that is running debian lenny .. quite creative, ain’t it? ). And hence i got KDE 4.3 up on time, but then was fixing up few issues that were cropping up after I included the testing repositories. Even then, life was not all dark. And then, I really don’t remember which .conf file i edited in sleep at around 3:00 am, the gui went kaput. The next morning I tried getting it up and backtracked the bash history, but to no avail. Well, that’s done for! As, I have lenny’s repository handy on my DVD’s I thought I will reinstall lenny with LXDE and then install KDE4.3 directly from testing repositories. But, when I logged into LXDE, I was surprised. It struck me rather cool and just what I wanted a minimalist yet stylish and fast desktop environment with no useless appliKations loaded and believe me excepting for the sage installation, my / without my home folder is smaller than my home folder with all the programs that I regularly use. Then, I made the resolution, not to shift towards KDE in 2010 and over that not to tax Lenny with 6 or 7 re-installations of linux per year. :D That does make quite a few people around me breathe easy as I won’t bug them with “what’s new with the newer installation” stuff . (last year’s installations include – jaunty, karmic,lenny*2,gentoo, slack .. i liked slack the best, but i think i will take some time to move over from debian to slack and probably with a intermission with arch once again )

Lagging Behind

ravitej7 — Sat, 23 May 2009 14:37:16 +0000

Of late, my movie intake has gone done quite low along with the food. The latter I was sick of and the former, I am yet to find a reason other than telling that I am trying pretty hard to get myself to work (failing miserably though!). So, it might seem that I am passing my time in compelling myself to get to work, well, I am doing rather useful work like doing assignments and sitting up 24 hours for a Numerical methods exam and the latest being giving an exam in Solid State Physics exam for 6 hours with a lunch break in between. Trust me, to do all this you need to build a lot of patience, and that’s what the rest of time I am meditating upon. This I do by sitting and staring at the same page of the book for 2 hours, inclusive of a coffee break.

And because of all the afore mentioned causes, my hard drive has quite a few movies left unwatched which include Umberto D, The Spy who came in from the Cold, Zulu, Point Blank, etc. and quite a few books too. Actually, all the books that I bought this semester are pending which would amount to nearly 7, considering my estimates are decent.

With all this hectic schedule and more unofficially official work, I am looking forward to the next weekend when I will be free for the next two months from my long-continuing struggle with course work.

There was at least one good news for this semester and that is I will finally be shifting from Wadala … no more travelling everyday …

Almost an year down the lane

ravitej7 — Tue, 19 May 2009 05:22:16 +0000

It feels like ten years since i have joined here. And ten years is a long time. Indeed, i feel i am finally getting into the groove of sending things into the log books quite effectively which are looked into when the moment arrives(usually a few hours before any submission). And above all this, i have reached my all-time high when it comes to the concept of exams … i am giving up even before starting

i guess i will effectively be institutionalized soon. i can feel that it has begun as i have stopped caring about the capitalization(?) of ”i”.

But, what I effectively need is food for my body .. lacking chocolate, lacking decent cheese, and above all lacking home-food for over 5 months. Here, we are over-fed with food for the soul(mind?), that it gets quite repugnant after a while … well, they do expect us to finish nearly 8-9 books in 4 months, and guess what’s my count ! ?… (i managed more than one at least )

Apart from this … i seriuosly don’t get the point of Nvidia Tesla .. i think i would prefer to buy GTX 280M or ATi Hd4870 and use CUDA or ATi Stream i guess to get nearly same performance … of if people fund me, we can even get Xeon of Opteron …. but forget about clusters … i haven’t yet lost my interest in acquring a Phenom II X4 …

I guess i don’t have time for anything mentioned above though. Now, have to go back to my relentless effort in trying to study for my solid state physics exam(this is a minimum of one book, if you don’t want to study the suggested bookso n special topics .. other wise 2.5 ) …

Wish me luck for my next two weeks

Nakhid Revisited

ravitej7 — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 22:19:24 +0000

Been quite sometime since I wrote a post. Well, though that this would at least ease my frustration of the work that’s not working.

Last Saturday I went to Nakhind to trek for the second time after I joined here. This time it was more unconventional, rather thrilling and of course a highly required physical activity that I required.

The unconventional elements are completely attributed to Amaresh and company. The paramount issues that occured due to the inconsequential choice of a near-random path with the only goal seemingly being the peak had it’s thrills and perils.

Even after all this I did not manage to reach the peak (I guess I was abt 20 mts away from the peak ). Hopefully, at least i will achieve this peak when I go there the next time(if ever there is going to be one).

http://picasaweb.google.com/ravitej7/NakhindTrek170109?authkey=ByxzGMiSOdU&feat=directlink

(sorry, for not editing the uploads. there are too many self-shots which i guess i should remove.)

Vista …. as usual

ravitej7 — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 00:51:19 +0000

Vista seems to enjoy gobbling up space it is currently using up around 25GB of my C: which is almost nothing but the OS ..! I think it is not meant for lower mortals like me to understand why I require a whole cache of all dll’s and all the junk even if they are outdated. The winsxs(Windows Side by Side) folder is currently occupying 8GB.

I think windows should stop helping people about how to manage space. It’s not that I am running out of space, but it’s just the realization that I am running an OS that uses 1GB RAM to run, 20GB of hard disk space for installting itself. Comparing this to my Arch, RAM usage (usual) about 185MB other than the NVIDIA and 3.7GB(mainly because of emacs and openoffice … other wise it was about 2.9GB) of current installed size.

I am again in a quandary as to whether i should remove vista from my laptop or not !

Arch Linux

ravitej7 — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 04:56:51 +0000

I finally shifted my OS after my 2 month old thought that I should change. I dumped ubuntu and gentoo and moved to this, the “Arch Linux”. Well, the installtion was a bit long as I forgot the specification of my wireless card and few other stuff. I was lucky to have SLAX on my pendrive to fix them up. After what I thought I finally got the OS running, in the aim to delete a folder that I made unnecessarily in /etc/; I did $rm -rf /etc/ .And, yeah I had to redo the whole thing again… thoug this time, I finished it all in few hours.

That’s for my installation. Now, coming to why I finalised on Arch were the number of good reviews of a 32-bit OS that I found about Arch on forums. I discarded my idea of 64-bit after a shot usage of hardy. Everything was fine, except that the memory usage and temperatures at which it runs is high. It’s not that I had a problem with memory, I am well-off with it. But, it just that I did not feel any improvement in performence.

Arch performs very well and is not bloated. It’s not bloated because it installs only the base. Over that, I found a considerable performance improvement from my hardy32-bit. I still don’t know how this happens. Well, bottomline is that I am not going to change from it for at least two years, I guess.

www.cmi.ac.in/~ravitej/hardinfo_report.html … this has few benchmarks done by the “hardinfo”, at the end of the page.

Nothing Unusual

ravitej7 — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 04:45:05 +0000

Be it as it may, my life seems to be getting from boring to uninteresting. Life at CMI, was actually something I liked, it’s mostly a compact and a closed community. Mind you I am not emotional as I write this post. It’s just that I am tired and uninterested in writing about anything else.

Life here, seems to made of classes, travel, assignements and exams. (:P) .. I agree that this not something that’s really that different in any student’s life. But, what if profs even after finding that you day is just 6 hours long(excluding few hours of sleep , travel, classes, etc.) and keep piling assignments. Be they as may be, I still don’t get the point why I have to sit for three hours and give an exam, I feel I am less of a reseach student than what felt before. It seems life follows a sinusoidal path and seems to have rational winding numbers and most of the times non-orientable too (:P).

I feel I am revisiting my life during my 11th and 12th when I was enrolled for an IIT entrance. Well, this might actually be worse.