Amateur Astronomy for the Visually Impaired (Not Kidding)

No, I’m not making this up.

Check this out:  http://www.giveyoujoy.net/awe/blog/archives/2007/04/you_gotta_be_ki.html

Reliance?

At long last I have enough bandwidth and time on my hands to blog. Time wasn’t really so much of a problem as bandwidth was in the recent past. Thanks to the vagaries of Reliance Broadband, I was left with zero bandwidth when I really needed it. Right now, I’m blogging from my parents’ house further down south in Coimbatore, where I’ve come down for a weekend visit. Such is the sorry state of my affairs that I have to travel five hundred kilometers or so to connect to the internet.

My Father, the most gadget-savvy person of the previous generation in my family, still has the Knoppix 4.0 that I installed on his computer a year or so ago. It still runs fine, and he’s happy to get connected to the ‘net by clicking on a green thing, use Firefox, and disconnect by clicking on a red thing. (Of course, the green and red things are courtesy yours truly – thank goodness for KDE’s letting you associate shell scripts with taskbar buttons :). It’s a strange feeling – I can truthfully brag that my Dad runs Linux! Of course, when I have a kid of my own (s)he’ll (probably) be able to brag that every box at home runs a different kind of Unix. Then again, it’s not quite the same thing. My Dad runs Linux :)

Right now, I’m happy that I’m connected, and fuming at Reliance Broadband. This time when the morons called me up to ask for the cheque (I never understood why they call up to remind folks who always pay their bill on time), I told them to please come down and take their stuff and shove it wherever they found it the most painful and inconvenient. (Not in so many words, of course). I didn’t pay the bill either. Wonder of wonders, an hour or so later, someone from Reliance called me up to try and troubleshoot my connection. I’m just left without an explanation as to why they couldn’t get this done the first time I called them up. Anyway, I’m on the lookout for another ISP in my area… if I get one, I’m gonna switch. I’ve just about had it with Reliance. The bloody thing works just fine as long as it’s up – the moment the connection snaps, you have no idea how many days or weeks it’s gonna take to come back. Their customer service folks are always sorry and apologetic, but nothing more happens! Not until you call ‘em up and tell them to disconnect your connection and/or refuse to pay the bill. It’s not that the internet is a luxury… there are times when I just *had* to work from home, but couldn’t, because the bloody broadband wasn’t up! None of which stops these guys from calling up and bloody demanding payment for their bill! Haven’t they heard about “payment for services rendered”?

Anil, you just lost a good customer.

Post Scriptum
Of course, these kind of things always happen to yours truly. Just like yesterday evening when I saw how clear the skies were here, and how unpolluted by city light they were. Antares was RED, and Jupiter was really, REALLY bright. All of Cygnus was visible, and the cloudy patch of sky where Andromeda was located was CLEAR. And yes, I’d left the bloody telescope back home in cloudy Bangalore. Drat.