Hitchhiking on HGTG!

I have been listening to Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy audio book for the past few days. It is the second time I am listening to the BBC Radio phonic work-shop's rendering of the much adored work of Douglas Adams. The sophisticated comedy and imagination without bounds in the writing of Adams coupled with high quality voice of the BBC artists makes listening a delight. Especially during such times as washing clothes!

Here is a snippet from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

"This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much all of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy."

Much ado about growing up!

Recently I was thinking of writing an article about the transition from being a student to that of a working man/woman. One thing that occurred to my mind instantly was the image of a car coming to a stand still making screeching noise. Following was an odd vision of a bird perching on the tree and gradually spreading its legs as roots in to the rooted tree!

Not to scare you away with deep philosophical overtones of these images, I will cut it short. People who seem very fluid and floating starts or prepares to sink in, settle down and spread out roots.

I mentioned this rather serious thought to draw your attention to a rather silly thing of me getting a post paid mobile connection from Vodafone. I was a pre pay Tata Docomo customer. Along with the awesome Gprs and expensive call rates pre pay connection provided me with pretenses when I forget to call up people or message or just cut loose from a boring talk. "Sorry I had no balance" card was my diplomatic immunity! No one dared to contest that.

Now I have to give up that provision. Also should go with it is the habit of constantly monitoring the balance in my account. Mature people are expected to suffer shocks only at the end of the month, when bills arrive!

Another abrupt change is the obligation to pay for every single petty message you sent. Texting is not a working man's cup of tea. If you want to pay heed to your girl friend's nascent nagging of her mobile inbox not filling up in recent days, you have to empty out your pocket :)

There are solutions to this problem. Vodafone provides two sms packs worth 30 and 80 respectively. For the former pay you will get on a whole 350 messages for a single month and later frees your worries and allows you to text non-stop with 200 sms maximum limit per day.

With many of my friends preferring textual conversation to the vocal one, I opted for the 80 rupee pack. Meanwhile I was toying with way2sms to send messages. I came to know later about a non-market android app through which you can send messages. The pretty thing about the app was that you could access all of your mobile contacts. This app served the purpose for a while but soon I came to know that it took more than ten hours for the messages to reach the destination. Eventhough it is much faster than post office delivery system, justice delayed is justice denied! I breathed an air of relief when vodafone broke the shackles on my phone.

That's it for now. Please do have a look at my kannada blog here. I did some revamping there.