Of This and That

Along with purchase of new cars, Govt has made it mandatory to issue FASTag sticker. The idea is to shift more and more people to use these automatic toll payment tags, then having to wait in long queues on the highways. All that is fine, but if only things work so smoothly 😏. When a buy a new car, the dealer goes ahead and registers it with FASTag. In my case it was ICICI FASTag. While it is the vehicle registration number that should be fed in their system, but since the new car hasn't yet been to RTO for passing and registration, it hasn't got the registration number. So the dealer, instead, uses the VIN/Chassis no. It is then my (owner's) responsibility to get this updated. So I logged into the ICICI FASTag system and logged a service request asking for vehicle number updation. For many days, nothing happened. About 2 weeks later someone from the call center called and said that I need to login again, raise a new service request, specifically for the vehicle numbe

The Swaminarayan Hindu Temples were started by Swaminarayan, as part of his Swaminarayan sampraday and promote his philosophy of belief in God and idol worship. The most known and fascinating attribute of any Swaminarayan temple is the architecture, and in many cases, the overall construction spread across acres of land. These temples are not just in India but are found worldwide . We recently visited the one in Pune at Narhe and true to its name, this one is also beautifully made. If coming from Mumbai side, after your cross Warje and the Sinhgadh road, you take the Katraj bypass going towards Bengaluru. Continue for about 2 kms and take the side road. This road is narrow and that means traffic could build up here. This road eventually crosses over the highway on the other side, taking right to the Swaminarayan temple. You do need to go right and then left, towards the parking, which is huge. That said, there is bound to be additional rush on weekends and festivals, so you may

I have earlier shared detailed experience with regards my passport renewal here . Now it was time for my daughter's passport renewal. She is yet to be 18, and hence is a minor as yet. Few years back, for minors, there was no need to take an appointment at a passport seva kendra (PSK), but it seems now that is not the case. Appointment is mandatory, and being minor, one of the parents needs to accompany the child.  The process is similar to what i have shared in my case. Login into the passport website, download the form, fill the PDF, validate and then upload. We had some constraints with regards when we could visit the PSK, as daughter is in XII and cannot miss school that easily now. So I kept a tab on the next date available for the appointment.  Once I found a comfortable date, i went ahead in the portal for the payment. Interestingly, before making the payment, the site shows the next available date and one could hence decide to go ahead and make payment and book a slot

If you are using Azure Virtual Machines (VMs), you have an option of using Azure Reserved Instance (RI) VMs instead. Microsoft (MS) claims these can help save up to 72% of your spend. While this may be true on the surface, but it will be good to get a deeper view to understand what benefits you really stand to make, if at all. Yes, using reserved instances, doesn’t automatically means cost saving. It is hence important to understand how this works and plan accordingly to get the right kind of benefit. I will try and point out  key things to keep in mind when planning and using RIs. The reservation cost that is paid upfront, covers the cost of running the reserved VM instance. If you are using additional software on it like Linux or Windows OS, or SQL Database, then these are charged on regular rates as per their consumption units. If a reserved VM consumes more than reserved hours, then the additional hours are charged on regular VM pay-as-you-go rates. You can read up more about

The other day, we were at a restaurant having lunch and there was another family sitting near by, who had this cute little daughter. She must be around 4-5 yrs old. Was happily eating and once done started to generally walk around the place.  She came and stood by our table for a min to see what we were eating, then went to roam around the restaurant and event stepped outside, all the while mingling with the staff at the place. Surprisingly, during this entire duration (of maybe about 10-15 min), the parents were busy eating and chatting and never looked up to see where their daughter was. Fortunately the staff was good and they only kept getting the girl back inside. Some were playfully chatting with her and would get too close to her (it would have made my uncomfortable had it been my daughter).  Me and wife were talking about given the sorry state of affair these days, how could these parents be so callous with such little regard to their daughter's safety. Multiple times

A few days back I had heard about the Android Oreo update finally being rolled out in India for Moto G5S Plus. I immediately went to the System Updates to check for it, but there was none :-(. But the news did say that it is being rolled out in phases. So it was wait and watch.  Today morning I say the System Update notification and I immediately started the download. Took a few hours, given the size of the download was a little over 1 GB. The installation was to take about 30 min, as per the message, but it really took just about 10 min and it was done.   On restart the things that were immediately noticeable are Icons within grouped box seemed to have become bigger in size Notification circles indicating that there are some unread items, now appear along with app icons Color theme changes and top notification panel has bigger icons and more spaced out  The picture in picture worked like a charm with Google Maps, but didn't work as expected with YouTube (seems one needs