Big Bazaar Nightmare

Not sure why, but Big Bazaar (Mumbai – Bombay Central – City Mall) has around 10 check out lanes, but i have never seen more than 4 in action. This caused a huge problem on Sunday, when buying my groceries took 10 minutes and finishing checkout took 30 mins. They could not move any more slow there (i think it was new staff) and to compound the problem, they could not figure out how to accept a gift certificate the person in front of me had.

It was an absolute nightmare and they need to hire a competent floor manager and create a customer grievance counter too.

So far they have lost me as a customer. I am going to go to Reliance Fresh, which seems to have a better staff.

- Signing Out Vikram Jhaveri

Absolute Waste of an Hour

Today i was stuck in traffic of 90mins, for a drive that should have taken 15mins. The reason?

New Era School in Mumbai, was upgrading not only its facilities, but also its curriculum, which is a good thing. The bad thing, rather than planning it, they simply rushed through it, which resulted in all current students being relocated.

So the parents protested, on the streets, disrupting traffic, because they decided it was okay. I personally felt they should have been thrown behind bars for a few hours for disrupting civil peace. However we are an extremely tolerant society and did not.

One has to think though, what were the parents thinking? Does the general public care about the time they just lost, or about a school they do not care about. What were the parents and children getting? Curses or Pity?

It was complete chaos and a lot of people lost close to 5 good hours. Luckily i just lost an hour. However hope that all those parents that created so much trouble and pain for others, should be forced to have to send their children to the relocated school just for that.

By, Vikram Jhaveri

Hard Finding a Formal Children's Watch – With a Leather Strap

Here is to finding a children's watch, an easy task by no means.

How hard can it be?

Well why don't you try. Walk into a store and you will find all kinds of watches, however all these watches are plastic watches with plastic straps. In fact, they are kind of kiddy too. I tried so many stores at the mall and even in specialty watch stores.

On the verge of giving up. I found the watch at an online store called Amazon. These watches are made by a company called Titan, around $20 are very classy and have leather straps.

If anyone is like me searching for a kiddy watch with a leather strap. Thank me cause i saved you a lot of time.

- Vikram Jhaveri

Comparing Different Resume (CV) Searching Sites – View of a Entrepreneur

Well i needed to hire fresher's for a new project i was starting. I googled India and resume services. I quickly found the top 3 sites, Naukri.com, TimesJobs.com and MonsterIndia.com

First lets compare how fast we can be set up. Naukri.com had an almost instant setup. I paid via HDFC netbanking and i was up and running in 1min. MonsterIndia took an entire day to get me up and running, in their defense i signed up on a Sunday. TimesJobs on the other hand, took 2 days to get me running.

Costs:

Naukri.com was the most expensive. I did not even bother to buy their database services, too expensive. I would advice them to have something cheaper that was a 24hr. pass. 

MonsterIndia.com has a good package. 2 listing and 7 day database access for an affordable price.

TimesJobs had a decent package too, 3 print AD listings and 3 online ads and 1 day database access.

Things to note: Timesjobs Print AD’s would not work in over 4 computers i tried at home and work. In 3 different browsers and they kept blaming it on me. Finally the CS was kind enough to take my AD over email and manually enter it.

Results:

Naukri.com – The matching emails had relevant emails to show candidates key skills and location. Once i figured out the system, i got pretty good matches.

TimesJobs – They have the worst matching system. Got lots of spam, but not just from my city, from all over India. Their database access must be outdated too, i contacted over 200 candidates and not even 2 responded back.

MonsterIndia – They have a keyword completion tool. I highly recommend using this. Once i figured it out, 60% of resumes were matched correctly. Their DB must be outdated too, again contacted loads of peoples and not even 10% got back.

 

I ended up getting all my employees from Monster India and Naukri in the end. DB access was worthless and only posting online ads was the best way to go. In fact if you read this, it will save you loads of money.

If i had to choose between MonsterIndia and Naukri, i would give the vote hands down to Naukri.com

Serious Dell Mini 9 Bios Upgrade Bug/Flaw Problem that will Brick your system

So you get your Dell Mini and find out that it has Bios A00 on it and the newest one is A05. So like me, you will want the latest version too. I put in the windows firmware on my USB flash drive and plugged it into the computer, i then decided to run the bios update from the floppy drive to make sure that the version was out dated. It was, so i clicked cancel and my computer started beeping and hung up. This is a bug dell has, even if you click cancel, the bios starts to auto update. I thought it was windows crashing and not the bios update, so i tried to shut the computer, when nothing worked, i pulled the battery out.

Now when i press the power button, the power light came on, but there was a blank screen. Nothing else. The system was bricked. Dell support was no help.

After days of searching i found the solution. You will need a External Floppy Drive for this to work.

Here is the fix:

1st: Get a USB Floppy (I don't know if you can use a USBKey but a floppy worked for me)

2nd: Go to http://mydellmini.com/forum/possible-experimental-bios-to-address-video-memory-p11787.html and download the file named 268076.exe.zip

3rd: Unzip the file and run the 268076.exe to create your boot floppy
4th: Get the most recent Dell bios Rom file from the dell support site.
5th: Rename it to "BIOS.WPH" and copy it to your new boot floppy (Overwrite the one currently there)
6th: On the mini...Connect USB floppy drive and insert disk
7th: Unplug the power, Hold fn+b and plug power back in, 2 lights should flicker (Watch, they flicker fast)
8th: If the machine does not power on at this point hit power
9th: Walk away.... The system should start accessing the floppy drive and you really need to walk away.
10th: The Floppy will stop reading but still do not touch, it will eventually reboot itself (10 - 15 minutes in my case)

On reboot there will be a checksum error press F1 NOT F2 and let the bios run at least one time, it will figure it all out.
And you should be fixed.

Dell needs to fix this problem. It is serious.

Updates to Dell Mini 9

If you have the base model of the Dell mini like me. Have no fear. I will teach you all i know.

1. Windows 7 – Too big to install on a 4GB SSD. Just Forget it. I vlited to almost nothing.

2. Windows XP – Size is small enough to fit. However without an external CD/DVD Drive, forget it. It will take too long to figure it out.

3. Windows Vista – Now we are talking. This fit in exactly 3GB Space. Leaving me 500MB to play with. Keep in mind that Dell only gives you 3.5GB/4.0GB space to use.

 

To install Vista

Required:

• USB Flash Drive (4GB+)
• Microsoft OS Disk (Vista / Windows 7)
• A computer running Vista / Windows 7

Step 1: Format the Drive
The steps here are to use the command line to format the disk properly using the diskpart utility. [Be warned: this will erase everything on your drive. Be careful.]

1. Plug in your USB Flash Drive
2. Open a command prompt as administrator (Right click on Start > All Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt and select “Run as administrator”
3. Find the drive number of your USB Drive by typing the following into the Command Prompt window:
   diskpart
   list disk
   The number of your USB drive will listed. You’ll need this for the next step.  I’ll assume that the USB flash drive is disk 1.
4. Format the drive by typing the next instructions into the same window. Replace the number “1” with the number of your disk below.
   select disk 1
   clean
   create partition primary
   select partition 1
   active
   format fs=NTFS
   assign
   exit
   When that is done you’ll have a formatted USB flash drive ready to be made bootable.

Step 2: Make the Drive Bootable 
Next we’ll use the bootsect utility that comes on the Vista or Windows 7 disk to make the flash drive bootable.  In the same command window that you were using in Step 1:

1. Insert your Windows Vista / 7 DVD into your drive.
2. Change directory to the DVD’s boot directory where bootsect lives:
   d:
   cd d:\boot
3. Use bootsect to set the USB as a bootable NTFS drive prepared for a Vista/7 image. I’m assuming that your USB flash drive has been labeled disk G:\ by the computer:
   bootsect /nt60 g:
4. You can now close the command prompt window, we’re done here.

Step 3: Copy the installation DVD to the USB drive
I went to Mininova.com and downloaded a Vista Ultimate Extreme install disk that worked for me. Download was around 1.3GB and install was 3GB. Best pain free method ever.

Step 4: Set your BIOS to boot from USB
This is where you’re on your own since every computer is different. Most BIOS’s allow you to hit a key at boot and select a boot option.

Finally getting this Blog up and running…

Took me a while. Close to two years. That’s when i registered this domain name for Blogging, however i never got around to it. Finally today it is all set up and ready to go. I have a few posts that i planned to post way back, so am going to have a few new ones at one go. Then hopefully i can sustain it with a few posts a day. I basically plan to post whatever is on my mind here. Nothing specific, just some new idea i have or a task i accomplish. So lets see how it sounds and how it all goes from there on.