Meet thy maker

“Prepare to meet thy maker!”. You must have heard that phrase somewhere (Or at least its less cool, non Dog-Latin equivalent: Prepare to meet your maker). Most likely in one of those terrible Jean Claude Van Damme movies we all bitch about in respectable company but watch in secrecy (and, need it be said, extreme boredom). Well, in any case, what does it really mean? How the hell [pun not intended……. at first :) ] do you prepare for something as weird as that? No, that’s just silly! And I am not going to waste anyone’s time by filling out the rest of this post with step by step advice on doing the same. i.e. nothing like- ‘#42: In front of Him, another layer of deo just won’t cut it. Better break out the soap’. No, this is about small disasters. The things that make you fell you have to prepare to meet your maker. In particular, two that struck me like a large plate of expensive noodles. With meatballs.*

Now, what is a small disaster? ‘Small disaster’! Its almost an oxymoron! Well, a small disaster is something that really, really sucks. It won’t, by definition, matter at all in the long run and it usually doesn’t affect the world at large, just a few people, maybe you and a few friends, who think similar. A small disaster is your favourite book store closing down, Its finding out that the flavour of ice cream you love will no longer be made or that the bookmark you’ve used for twenty seven years will be kitty litter in a few hours. Its the thing that makes you feel that the world’s ending now. When in reality, all you really need to do is look in the mirror (and if your head works anything like mine, laugh your guts out at the sorry figure you see), take a deep breadth and get on with the business of living.

So what happened to me? What could’ve possibly made me write this post? Well, first, you need a lil background. See, I’m what you call a geek (Gee, what was your first clue?). I live by the stylus on my PDA and on the mind-numbing uberness of the interweb. I am also a rather ordered geek (read the post titled ‘The hammer of order’ for more on that). I like my email, tasks, contacts, etc etc to stay in sync. I also need my mobile internet access (I’m the kind of guy who thinks Google-stalking you is easier than just asking you what you do. And did I mention more fun – chances are, someone’s uploaded that old Vegas vid on YouTube!). And I had it all! Airtel’s dirt cheap ‘Mobile Office’ data plan was perfect for me- 75 Rupees a week and I had unlimited net access wherever I went! And then there was the free hosted exchange by the nice people at mail2web. That allowed me to keep everything in sync, let me access anything I wanted from anywhere and was really, really easy to use on my WinMO PDA.

Then they died. The exchange service was the first to go. The mail2web people wanted to upgrade their software to match Microsoft's latest version (Which, according to Bill’s marketing department was just a little bit better than FSM* heaven) and ended up running balls-first into a wall of licence agreements. The result? They couldn’t let the service be free even if they wanted to! (And you thought Gates had idiots working for him before huh?). So they pulled the plug on that nice slice of heaven and decided to charge for the stuff that I’d been enjoying for all of zero. Dealing with that blow wasn’t actually that bad, not compared to what’s happened now, but I digress – my exchange died and all was smote in its ruin. (According to Tolkien that means “things were f**ked up cause it went bust”). So, I dealt with it. I shifted back to the windows live ‘push’ service Microsoft offers for free (and which is nowhere near as good as exchange) and came up with an ad-hock way of backing up and accessing my stuff online: Microsoft’s ‘My Phone’. It took patience, some surgery and a little fiddling around but it seems to work for the large part.

And then Airtel went and decided that a freakin’ duck would make good VP of marketing material (I think they thought a quack would lend them more credibility with the Godman demographic). They went and discontinued the entire mobile office scheme. And replaced it with a charge of 30p for every 50kb transferred. Read those lines and weep ye! 30p for every 50kb! That's bad by the standards they had in biblical times (Imagine John trying to publish to ‘http://bible.blogspot.com’** and running into repeated 404s)!

I’m dealing with that disaster as we speak. I have opera mini set up as my default browser (all tricked out to reduce usage). My email is configured to arrive only at certain hours of the day and It doesn’t download anything but the text. I also have a connection monitor in place that warns me if I use too much. But its hard, I’m dealing with it one day at a time. Wish me luck. Or better yet, wish Airtel luck. I’m going to go after them with stuff covered in cool yellow-and-black hazard signs.

peace….. Unless you work for Airtel

*FSM, noodles, Meatballs etc. I hope you know I’m referring to the church of the flying spaghetti monster.

**I think there is actually a blog by that title. I haven’t seen it and have nothing to do with it.

PS: bout all the weird religion references…. well, I had to tie the post to the title (liked it, didn’t want to change it) somehow right?