Uncategorized

Lazy weekend

It was a rather lazy weekend.. but got to attend two parties at some friends houses. Today afternoon, went to Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba to try out some tapas. Highly reccomend the Chicken Paella at this restaurant. It was a bit on the pricey end, but the atmosphere was rather casual and laid back. Love places like this.

Here is a shot of me enjoying a good pint of english ale with my friend Sri.

And the Chicago Bears are on a rampage :). Looks like 2005 is going to be a good year for the Chicago sports fans..

Go BEARS!!!!

November 13, 2005 by Food Fun Travel Uncategorized

MSFT Windows : Offer Remote Assistance

My team uses the “Remote Assistance” functionality offered in Windows XP pretty extensively. One of the problems with the tool for the tech support personnel is that there is no easy shortcut to “offer” remote assistance. One has to launch remote assistance, search for “offer assistance” and then click on the link that shows up. Sounds easy, but if you are doing it 20 times a day, gets rather irritating :)..

Here is a trick to bypass the search.. Right click on your desktop and go to “New” –> “Shortcut”. Enter “hcp://CN=Microsoft%20Corporation,L=Redmond,S=Washington,C=US/Remote%20Assistance/Escalation/Unsolicited/Unsolicitedrcui.htm” (without qoutes “”) into the location of the item box and hit next. Choose a name for the shortcut and click on Finish.

Double click on the shortcut and voila.. instant access to offering remote assistance :).

November 11, 2005 by Networking Technology Uncategorized Windows

Passport photos for $0.29

All of us had to take a passport picture, sometime or the other. Usually you would go into a general pharmacy and get a picture taken for ~$8. The stores usually take a digital picture, print out 6 pictures and give you only 2!!!. Instead you can take your own digital picture, use the photo kiosks and print out 6 passport pictures for $0.29 :).. Kudos to cheapness!!

November 11, 2005 by Photography Uncategorized

Public Speaking

I had to do a presentation today at work in front of a relatively large group (~50). It was received relatively well, but this is one area I would really like to improve on. No matter what you do, one is never prepared for the anxiety and excitement for public speeches. Couple of notes that helped me

1) Prepare for the meeting. Unless you are a Bill Clinton, you need to have some notes :).
2) Run a practise session. Helps to review the first step and also time your presentation.
3) Don’t go into details!!!
4) And speak LOUDLY and c-l-e-a-r-l-y. The first part is an issue for me :).

November 10, 2005 by Rantings Uncategorized

Microsoft related site

Looks like today is going to be a day of “Cool Sites” posts :). Here is a site maintained by Daniel Petri containing all sorts of MSFT articles. Daniel writes a lot of articles about issues that admins run into on a daily basis and he has some great practicle advice. Highly recommend visiting it regulary.

November 9, 2005 by Technology Uncategorized Web Windows

DNS Tools

Good site to do DNS queries from an independant node on the Internet. I use it a lot at work to check if DNS records have been updated. The site also has good tools to check on BGP, WHOIS etc.

November 9, 2005 by Networking Technology Uncategorized Web

2005 Half Marathon

It’s been a while since I updated the site :). Wanted to give some updates on my running accomplishments for 2005. After finishing last years Lasalle Marathon, I thought that I could train on my own this year. BIG MISTAKE!! :). Unless you are really (and I mean REALLY) motivated, it is very difficult to train alone for a marathon. So my training was pretty bad this year. I did manage to finish the marathon though. Only 30 minutes longer than last year :).

Here is a picture from the 2005 Chicago Half Marathon, I ran as part of my training

2005 Chicago Half Marathon
November 9, 2005 by Fun Running Sports Uncategorized

Excel : Import tables from web pages

Ran into a bit of a tough nut the other day. One of my colleagues was trying to gather data from a HTML page and run some reports. He could scrape the page and copy the data into Excel, but any operations he tried on the data errored out. He tried every trick in the book (change format of columns etc) but it didn’t help.

A bit of googling and found this new cool function in Excel 2003.

Go to “Data –> Import External Data –> New Web Query” in Excel and you check on this new cool method.

“F1” in Excel rules :)..

November 9, 2005 by Technology Uncategorized Web Windows

IPSec – What is it??

This is a great write up by Stephen Friedl about the IPSec suite of protocols. Highly recommend reading it.

On a side note, I finally updated the Blogging software on the site. Have been getting a lot of “blogspam” from the entries on this site. It is just amazing how far the spammers go to NOT get their message :).

November 8, 2005 by Networking Technology Uncategorized Web