Aditi's kitchen: Veggie Burger Patties

Aditi's kitchen: Veggie Burger Patties: Burgers are a hit with both kids and adults. Great option to make for a game day party or fix a quick dinner. Try out this simple Veggie Bu...

Jay's First Jump at Phoenix Area Skydiving!

Aditi's kitchen: Beetroot cutlet

Aditi's kitchen: Beetroot cutlet: So excited to choose my Ma's recipe for my very first blog post! Love you Mom. I know what you are thinking.....cutlets made of beet r...

Hikes around bay area I have done

Yosemite

  a) Upper yosemite falls

b) Lower yosemite falls

c) Vernel falls

d) Mirror lake

Mt. Diablo

a) Northern gate

b) Southern gate

Mission Peak

California the beautiful

This blog is for all those California visitors and residents interested in visiting great places in California.


1) Point Lobos
2) Monterey
3) Half Moon bay
4) Yosemite
5) Lake Tahoe
6) Big Sur
7) Santa Cruz
8) Orange County
9) San Diego
10) LA
11) San Francisco Downtown
12) San Francisco Golden Gate
13) Sal Salito
14) Pigeon Point
15) Point Reyes
16) Pfiefer beach
17) Alcatraz

From windows to mac - I feel converted

I have worked on Microsoft software and operating systems since I was 12 (19 years). I have always been of the opinion that they have the simplest interface, easy to use applications and one of the best office use toolset like word and excel. Doing some more thinking on the subject I think this stems from the fact that we always had windows and other microsoft products in my school and college. 

In my new job @360 Vantage the leadership decided to give me a mac machine and asked me to try it out. I must say I had my apprehensions. How quickly can I learn to edit stuff here? How would I know the new shortcuts? How do I manage my documents.

With some help from apple.com and colleagues out here I must it was a piece of cake. I was up and running I should say in a day or so. I may not be a master of the same yet but I am getting there. 

Following are some pros and cons for a mac.

CONS

1) Enterprise acceptance - Mac and its software have little enterprise acceptance. So we being an IT services firm always get artifacts from clients in office/microsoft formats which we later have to convert or have to use virtualization to open.

2) Software adoptability - For IT developers not all development IDEs and studios are available in a MAC. We personally faced this issues for visual studio and cast iron ETL development tools. We again had to use parallels for use the tools in a virtualized environment.

3) Office for mac - This software is in no way similar to the office 2010 tools and its product line. Also it does not have outlook 2010 or projects as well. All in all not easy to use and has an extremely steep learning curve for people trained on office for windows.

PROS

1) Ease of use. - Mac has an amazing form factor which is good to eyes and ways in use. Amazing set of shortcuts on the key board.

2) Accessories - tools like blue tooth/wire less key boards and magic mouse is one more example why apple looks forward to make people's life easier

3) Speed - My last windows machine used to take 12 minutes to load. My current MAC takes 12 seconds for the same. It just amazing how a hard boot takes less then a 15 seconds to load.

4) Native iphone and itunes integration - As a user of iphone and ipod, itunes is much more faster and does not take a lot of memory at all

5) Zero crash. - I am yet to suffer from a crash or hang up in this environment which coming from windows world is simply unbelievable

6) Multi touch and ease of navigation - The track pad on macbooks is exactly like the touch ipad/iPhone like devices, multi touch, zoom in zoom out works very well too.

There are many such points and I will keep on updating this blog as I think of some. All in all I think I will be converted to a mac junky by the end of this quarter and I plan to stay there for a while.

And then came the iPad. As a new cool toy it really blows me away. Its small, its functional and it works as a work time tool more then the iphone.


Some cool features are 
1) All iphones work as is.
2) Office documents work
3) Keyboard is pretty huge and can be used as a normal keyboard.
4) You directly present from the iPad by connecting to a projector.
5) Reading newspapers and books is awesome.

Comfort Inn Midtown West - NewYork - Manhattan

Sad story...bad experience...will never use it again...

We arrived to the hotel as per schedule around 1:30 pm in the noon of Friday 09/04/09. We were told the room is not available and we will get it later. So we checked in our luggage went to do our sight seeing and came back at around 1:00 AM in night. The counter lady tells us ohh a pipe leakage has happened so we have to move you to a hotel diagonally opposite to us - the GEM hotel and tomorrow you will have to come back as they do not have a room for tomorrow. We did not say a word and stayed in the other hotel. The next day morning we again took all our stuff and went back to comfort inn and checkedin our luggage at the counter again. When we returned that night at around 1:00AM the lady at the counter tells us the room is under maintenance and we will have to go to Brooklyn downtown to stay (at 2:00 AM in the night). Please note that we were not called by the hotel management at any time during the day or night. How can you expect a customer to go from Manhattan to Brooklyn at 2:00 AM in the night. We tried to call the manager (V K Macvava) repeatedly but he would not pick up the call. The management says as we had got a deal in $200 they will not pay anymore for us to stay near by. Worst they tried to shift us to Holiday Inn and they would not honor the walk through letter by comfort inn.

Finally with some help from Ayaana (counter lady) we could find a hotel Alex at 3:00 am in the night for which she said she does not have any right to book a room even if it was $235 a night- which was mere 35$ extra than what we were paying already for the comfort inn room. So we had to pay from our pockets for the same. Worse, the lady did not even pay for the taxi fare!!

We have been charged for the hotel GEM for $235.99 while our deal was at 199.99. If not reversed soon i will dispute the charges on my cc. We did not even get a receipt for this from the hotel

We never got to stay in the hotel. This is absolutely unacceptable. I would give a -ve on customer service as well. We should have been called before hand if the rooms were not right and we should have been accomodated in another hotel near by free of cost.

We want our money back period (235 for GEM and 235 for Alex) for all the trauma we faced in this mess. Unless done we will blog about this occurrence and give extremely bad reviews on comfort inn and hotels.com on this one. Please do not expect us to use you guys again if we do not get a reply on this in the next day. I really want to see how good customer service does comfort inn and hotels.com have now.