Stranded by the road-side

A few days back, when I was getting back home from work, my car suffered a break down. Though I had taken an offbeat road that day, the traffic was nevertheless very high, considering it was the peak hour. With very little knowledge on automobile service/recovery, no proper documentation of road-side assistance/service numbers and when Google searches failed to deliver, I resorted to phone-a-friend as the last option.

Fortunately, this option did work and I got numbers of few vehicle-towing service providers. From the numbers, I ended up calling Allianz roadside assistance, which offered very prompt services. They assured of a pickup in 60 minutes, however they had a strange pre-condition of online payment by the customer before initiating processing. Though demanding an upfront online-only payment from a customer stranded by the roadside didn't sound like a great model, I did manage to make a payment, inspite of running low on mobile battery.

The towing vehicle getting into position, while traffic flows by

Though it appeared by then that I had to just wait it out until the tow truck arrived, things didn't pan out that easily. Having gotten stranded on an off-road, in a drizzling weather and running low on mobile battery, I had to kill time by sitting in the vehicle. Thats when I had to put up with stares from every vehicle or passerby crossing me. And, they were of all kinds - the angry look from people who thought someone had pulled over, blocking traffic on a busy road to just while away time; the occasional sneers from few vehicles; and the genuinely puzzled, curious look from a lot of passengers, who at times paused in their tracks, some even re-traced steps back to my vehicle to give a proper, top-down stare before moving on!

Tried of this routine & unsure on how to respond to the stares, I finally pulled out my laptop and watched a movie. I'm sure this would have doubled the curiosity and furiousness of fellow passengers, but atleast that kept me glued to the screen. And, Backcountry was a movie that matched the mood :) 

The learnings for me from this episode were:

• Spend time learning basics of car issues & recovery, like a first-aid. Perhaps, keep a small printed cheat-sheet handy, to try out basic options before escalating for expert-help
• Keep the numbers of multiple service centres in the locality (I had just the one where I usually get service done, and that had closed for the day), apart from the numbers of towing services

...and perhaps, keep some movies handy to keep yourself engaged!

Celebrating Independence day

Its true that you don't need a ceremonial day to think about your country, rather this should be in your thoughts and actions round the year. Nevertheless, August 15th - the Independence day, such an occasion, however ceremonial it may appear, reinvigorates the patriotism in all of us. 

The fervour with which it is celebrated in various circles of our life adds some new meaning every year - amongst colleagues at work, with neighbours in the residential community, with children at school and at home with family. These celebrations and thoughts, particularly amongst groups of people makes it all the more meaningful and elevates the idea of a nation.

This year, there was an added dimension to this day, since our son who is in the PP-I class had to recite a patriotic song/verse in school. With a lot of googling and behind the scenes coaching, largely by my wife for this Kindergarten performance, we did learn something new! There was also help from a neighbour, Shalini Philip who came up with an original verse as a post-script to the song.

Here is a repeat of Krish's performance, from earlier today, for which, incidentally he had won the first place as well, at school!

When I searched for songs on the net, I couldn't find the lyrics for this song 'Oh my India', though there were couple of amateur videos of renditions by kids. I'm adding it here for completeness:

Oh India, Oh my India

I Love you, Oh my India!

            (Oh India..)

Bay of Bengal, Indian Ocean

Arabian Sea, is near my nation

            (Oh India..)

Great Himalayan Ghats of India

Ganga, Yamuna waters of India

            (Oh India..)

Gandhiji, Nehruji, Swami Vivekananda

Everybody knows them as great Indians

            (Oh India..)

Flight ratings - whats the big deal?

Booking an early morning flight, for business, is always a tricky thing. Depending on your meeting start time (say 10 AM), you'd have to allow room for some buffer beyond the budgeted time, for landing at the airport and taking a taxi to the meeting location. You'd definitely need to allow atleast 45 to 60 minutes buffer time for any delays. 

But what if your flight gets delayed by upto an hour? All your pre-planning and scheduling goes right out of the window. So, thats some more slack time needed. However, the frustrating thing for me is that all this buffer cuts down on 'precious' early morning sleep time. Proper sleep on the day of travel is anyway a rare commodity, since I've found that you need to be up by 4 AM for a 7 AM flight. 

Same is the case with the night return flights. You budget time to get back home at an 'earthly' hour, say by 11 PM. Flight schedule changes and airport traffic congestion easily add up another 60 to 90 minutes.

This brings me to the question. Why don't travel sites show ratings of a flight's past performance? Is it usually on time? How is the service? How is the food quality? This can easily be aggregated from customers, post the travel. Since delays could also be due to airport traffic congestion or other reasons beyond a carrier's control, the feedback on timeliness could be on whether the boarding happened on time.

I'm surprised that none of the airline travel webistes do this today. This is a tried and tested feedback loop in other industries - think cab aggregators like Uber/Ola, hotel booking aggregators like Tripadvisor. In the travel segment, by aggregators like redbus (sample given here). The closest site I could find was flightstats, which is a dedicated website on past flight statistics and has other means of data collection since it doesn't have a customer feedback loop to leverage (see image below).

Simple bus ratings from redbus.in	FlightStats rating summary

Contemplating migration onto a new home

Early 2015 was when I resumed blogging after a long hiatus. A couple of months later, I was already contemplating migrating my blog out of Blogger, maybe onto a new, own site or some new-age platform. But having blogged just over 50 posts across 10 years, and with a largely erratic blogging pattern, I wasn't entirely convinced about the effort-outcome tradeoff.

So, I set myself a target of crossing 100 posts overall and maintaining an average of 4 posts a month (roughly a weekly rhythm), before moving the needle on this thought. Now about 1.5 years later, I have crossed 130 posts and also have hit the targeted monthly post average. And this is something that I'm immensely pleased about with myself! Perhaps, talking now about migration is justified.

Before getting onto options being evaluated, one thing I've been clear about is the migration out of Blogger. The Blogger ecosystem is metaphorically like a once-busy city, now in ruins, and not much left for the people who've chosen to stay back. There are newer avenues that have sprung up, each with its own theme, philosophy. And many of them are welcoming and thriving.

I was earlier more inclined towards a self-hosted site using Wordpress. Medium was a strong alternative as well. The more I read about pros and cons of Self Hosted vs Wordpress vs Medium, the more confusing it got. The cons aside, I've been quite excited about Medium and the way the site has been shaping up over the past 2 years. While it seemed to be a good platform for writing content without worrying about the technical aspects, Medium has gotten better at promoting stories, surfacing content and connecting people. The change is noticeable as I've been consuming several blogs off Medium, over the past months.

The option of using custom domains on Medium has recently been introduced and is seeing good adoption. This seems to offer the best of both worlds and suits most of my immediate needs. So, for now, I seem to be settling around a combination - Own domain name on Feedly.