iBlog: Nishit Shah

Its been more than 2 years since I have been shopping regularly online, it was around 2-4 times a month earlier and now its almost 5-7 times. I do most of my regular transactions online, like paying monthly mobile/ electricity bills at Visa Bill Pay, incase I am going out of station, I buy airline tickets at IXIGO,  or train tickets at IRCTC, concert tickets for Iron Maiden show at TicketPro, Tata Sky recharge vouchers, etc and recently purchased Indian Premier League tickets for the match between Mumbai Indians and Deccan Chargers at Kyazoonga using the credit card. I don’t mind spending the extra 25-40 bucks they charge for courier. It is more convenient and saves a lot of time. And when it comes to paying credit card bills, its simple to transfer money through netbanking. Damn, I relay too much on the net and feel really handicapped in case its not accessible even for a couple of days.

I read a lot of books and boast of decent enough collection that can be called as a small library. At the last count I have around 187 odd books including the technical reference material. For the past year and half or so, I have bought almost all of my books at Indiaplaza. If I come across any good book I just add it to my wish list at Indiaplaza and once the wish list is big enough or if I have finished reading all the books from my library, I add them to my cart and order them. Not only there is 22% off on most of the books, the books get delivered in just a couple of days at my place. Also, the collection of books that they have is much better than the one at my neighborhood book store. I am very much impressed with their customer service though there have been only a couple of instances where I need to bother them, else, everything has been smooth so far. I bet its one of the best shopping portals in India.

Puppet is an open source configuration management tool. It is written in Ruby. Being a System Administrator, one of the aspects of my job is to find out the tedious tasks which are done frequently and automate them. Automation is usually done using BASH, Perl, Python scripts but they have their limitations. Puppet is a very powerful tool and it is capable of automating nearly every aspect of a system administrator’s job, from user management, to software installation, to even configuring server services such as FTP and LDAP. Pulling Strings with Puppet: Configuration Management Made Easy is the first book to introduce the powerful Puppet system administration tool. Thanks to prompt action by the librarian at office, this book was in my hand in no time! Author James Turnbull guides through Puppet’s key features, installation and configuration of the software, creation of automated Puppet tasks, known as recipes, and even creating reporting solutions and ways to extend Puppet as per our requirements. I have just started with this book and am very impressed with the way the author has explained each and everything about puppet’s installation and configuration. Since Puppet is written in Ruby and its recipes have a Ruby like syntax, I am getting my hands dirty a bit on Ruby first. I am not much of a programmer and do hardly any coding. However, I heard a lot about how cool Ruby is during the recent BarCampPune4 and I was able to understand most of the stuff from the session on Ruby by Sidu Ponnappa. Its been just a day since I have started with it and find it interesting already. So, as one thing leads to another, I hope by March end I am well versed with Ruby and and have implemented Puppet to automate a set of servers

Strand Book Stall is one of the most famous shop for every bibliophile in Bombay . It has biannual sale of upto 80% off every Jan & Oct. I always keep aside 1K for good books every month. I am a regular at Strand and its sale is one thing at I look forward to just for the gr8 bargains. I reached a bit late at the venue and could get buy only few of them as it was closing time. Hope to go there again b4 it ends. A small pic of the books that I bought.

Its not often that I pick up a book only after reading its title. Its just the name and the summary on the back cover that prompted me to buy this book. This book is a memoir by Michael Gates Gill of is riches to rags journey from a high-level advertising executive with JWT to a barista (refers to one who has acquired some level of expertise in the preparation of espresso-based coffee drinks) at Starbucks.

The story is about Mike who is a Yale Graduate and is working with JWT for more than two decades. He has it all, money, fame, family and then suddenly one day his life turns haywire when he is fired from his job. So, at 63 he is between the devil and the deep blue sea. He is unemployed, his family life is ruined, has an unexpected newborn and if that was not all, a not so serious ear tumor. Its very difficult to make ends meet for him as his new business fails to trigger. Surprisingly his life changes again when he accidentally lands up with a job in one of the Starbucks cafe where he used to sit and enjoy his lattes.

An interesting Sunday afternoon read. Personally I liked the book except for the parts where he talks about how good his previous life was.

PS: Check out the ads created by JWT . Some are really cool ! If you are like me who like creative thinking

A movie starring Tom Hanks is being made from this book. Watch out for that !

I guess this is the first book related to medical issues that I have picked up. I had seen this book for a while at Crosswords but never bothered to buy it. On Friday I was looking for bestsellers online and came across this book again. What prompted me to buy this was its complete title Survival of The Sickest : A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease After checking the reviews at Amazon, I was sure that I wanted this on my shelf. So, I bought this book and completed the whole of this weekend in one sitting. This book is a genuine page turner.

Survival of the Sickest is a book by Dr. Sharon Moalem in which he explains why we have deadly genetic diseases. He argues that some of those “bad genes” which cause diabetes for example, helped our ancestors survive at some point in our evolutionary history. Knowing the environment where those genes were beneficial to our survival, may help to deal with the disease.This is one of those books that is a delightful read, educating, interesting, and entertaining. The author puts forth his theories that many modern diseases are variations of evolutionary traits that were held by our ancestors that enabled them to survive the ice age and bubonic plague. He goes on to describe how viruses cause certain behavior in their carriers to help the viruses survival. The common cold leaves you well enough to stay moving and go to work so you can spread the virus to others, while the parasitic malaria wants you immobile and in bed because mosquitos can continue to carry it even better with you immobile.
This book added that layer of understanding to my knowledge. Had never thought about anything like this.

Wanna read something new. Try this .. worth reading !

I have been reading a lot of books these days but have hardly blogged about them lately, either because I was too busy to update my blog or its just too lazy to do that. I have a habit of reading atleast a book a week since my school days and this is one habit that I am proud of ! I have earlier written about my bookshelf and my online bookshelf.

So, from now on I will make sure that I blog about the books that I read every week. This post is just to create some pressure so that I blog about it.

Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found is a narrative nonfiction book by Suketu Mehta. This book is extremely fascinating and its a must read for anyone who likes Bombay and wants to understand it in a much better way

BOMBAY is a claustrophobe’s nightmare. Over 18 million inhabitants are crammed into its 169 square miles, and in parts of the city the population density exceeds a million per square mile. Soon Bombay (now renamed Mumbai) will have more people than all of Australia. Mehta wandered its streets, with his ‘laptop in a green backpack,’ and pursued everything that, he writes, had made him ‘curious as a child’: ‘cops, gangsters, painted women, movie stars, people who give up the world.’

Its about Bombay what Suketu Mehta’s has seen. I have spent most part of my life living on this Island but never knew so much about it as described in this book. Its about Bombay that we have never seen or dealt with, the Bombay underworld, the 1993 Bombay blasts, Bollywood ( skipped this part on Bollywood. Not Interested !!), Bal Thackrey and of course Vadapav.

Undoubtedly one of the most important books ever written on Bombay. It is brave and insightful, one man’s love affair with a ruined city. In these pages, densely packed with facts, observations, vignettes and insights, he brings the city alive with love, longing and sadness in a way never accomplished.

To sum it up I can say that this book it kind of a remarkable documentary of life in India’s largest city.

Its amusing for me that I have read most part of this book out of Bombay while traveling !

Again, a must read for every Bombayite ..eeks I still don’t like calling it Mumbai.