Reliance India Call Experience

I have been using Reliance India Call for almost a year now. I used the free 15-minute call offered by Reliance in August of 2004 and immediately signed up for for the service in September. As long as I know, all of my family member uses this service to call their relatives in India. My extended family members have abandoned the use of traditional phone cards for the Reliance India Call.

Reliance offers two kinds of service: prepaid and pay-later service. If you use the first option you have to pay first and as you use the minutes, dollars are subtracted from your account based on the usage. The second service charges you every month based on the time you used to call India. I believe there is a monthly charge for using the pay-later service.

As far as call quality goes, I think this service is the best service you can get for spending 12.9 cents per minute. I have used other cards before, but I never had a better call quality.

What are your experiences with Reliance India Call? Leave a comment below and let me and everyone else know. Do you use any other service or calling card? Which card do you use? Do you make VOIP calls to India? How are the charges for VOIP calls compare to Reliance India Call?

Like Cricket, Love Baseball

Are you from England, Australia, India, or Pakistan? Do you like cricket? Did you used to watch and play cricket while you were in your native country? If you are currently living in United States, and if you have made an effort to learn the game of baseball, then what are your impressions of baseball?

I love baseball.

I used to die for cricket when I was in India. I used to watch entire test matches on TV regardless India was playing or not. After coming to United States, I started to learn baseball by watching it on TV. It took about 2-3 months to learn the game, but after that time I just fell in love with the game. Cricket seems boring and slow to me now.

I recommend that, if you have not already done so, try to learn some basic aspects of the baseball. I can say with confidence that if you liked cricket, you will love baseball.

Blogger Toolbar For Microsoft Word

Blogger recently announced a toolbar for Microsoft word. Many bloggers use Microsoft Word to create documents and then copy and paste into blogger to publish it. With this, Blogger Toolbar for Microsoft Word, publishing Microsoft Word documents will be very easy. I have already installed the toolbar and using it to post my writings.

There are a couple of things not supported by this toolbar: images and tables. I cannot post this document through blogger toolbar because it contains an image. The image itself shows the error message I got when I tried to post a document with a table in it.

Indian Aviation Industry

From the latest buzz coming out of India, it sounds like that the Indian Aviation Industry is growing by leaps and bounds. If we want to set aside a moment as a “big bang” for the expansion of the “Indian Aviation Universe” than we can set the last day of the Paris Air Show of the 2005 as the moment. On that day, Indian Aviation Industry came to life with bountiful airplane orders for Boeing and Airbus. Boeing and Airbus now considers India as a prime market for many years to come. I am sure that both airplane manufacturers will deploy their marketing and sales team in India to outsell each other in coming months.

Here is the order summary:

• A new startup airline called Indigo ordered 100 planes from Airbus.
• Jet Airways split its order and bought planes from Boeing and Airbus.
• Kingfisher added five jumbo A380s to its fleet. (It will be interesting to see where Kingfisher airline flies these planes. Major airport infrastructure overhaul may be needed to land this aircraft.)
• A few months earlier Air India ordered about 50 planes from Boeing.

Carnival of Personal Finance

Carnival of Personal Finance is a collection of the entries of the personal finance articles from various financial sites. Good insightful information can be found on these carnivals. Please check it out or bookmark this page to visit the carnivals later.

Date	Carnival Location
June 20	Consumerism Commentary
June 27	Blueprint for Financial Prosperity
July 5	AllThingsFinancial
July 11	Smart Money Daily
July 18	I Will Teach You To Be Rich
July 25	Free Money Finance
August 1	In Cash Flow We Trust
August 8	Consumerism Commentary
August 15	Blueprint for Financial Prosperity

Search Engine Blogs

Google, Yahoo and MSN Search blogs link to each other. Check for yourself by clicking on the links below.

• Google Blog
• Yahoo Search Blog
• MSN Search Weblog

Did search engine spam and scrapper sites brought them together?

Customs At Ahmedabad Airport

Is Customs at Ahmedabad Airport bad? It depends; on your expectations of how it will go. Prepare for the worst and you will roll through without any problems. If you expect it to go as easy as the US customs then you will be disappointed.

I went to Ahmedabad from USA twice in the last year. I flew Air-India both times. Before I landed, I geared up my mind to expect the worst behavior from the staff at the airport. To my surprise, I found less haggling with the customs proceedings now than before. It may have to do with the time my plane reached the airport. Both times, I landed at 3 o’clock at night and got my customs done between 4 and 5 in the morning. If you are flying Air-India, then your plane might also land at the Ahmedabad airport at 3 o'clock at the night. The airport staff must have been tired by then.

After landing, they put us on a bus and the bus drove us to the “terminal”. The bags started to twirl on the tiny belt in a few minutes. I took my belongings and went to the x-ray machine to get them checked. There was an employee of the airport who was putting the luggage from the cart into the x-ray machine for the passengers. He wanted to get some money from me. I said no. He came back to load my trolley again once my luggage came through the x-ray machine. He again pleaded with me for some money. I told him that I do not have any rupees. He insisted for a few dollars. I just rolled out of the airport with my trolley ignoring him. That’s it. It was easy.

What was your experience at Ahmedabad airport? Did you fly Air-India when you went to Ahmedabad? Tell me about it by adding a comment below.

Using Technorati for Product Reviews

Do you do a Technorati search before buying a product? People usually do Google, Yahoo or MSN search for product information. These search engines return the online retailers as the top results most of the time. If you want to know the opinions of other people who have already bought the product in concern than I believe a Technorati search is the best bet. If you want to know what a Jane Doe or John Doe is thinking about a product or what kind of experiences he or she is having with the product than searching blogs is the easiest way to find out product reviews. With Technorati, you bypass the retailer websites and go directly to the opinions/reviews.

Google Sitemap Accepts Atom Feed From Blogger Blogs

Google accepts Atom feed from blogger as sitemap xml. Today, I submitted Atom feed of this blog to the Google Sitemaps. To my surprise, after 3 hours I got an OK message in the sitemap tool. Looks like Google has accepted this feed and may have crawled the website today. I will keep a close eye on the cache dates of my site and post if Google crawls the site in the next couple of days.

I am expecting a deep crawl this time around. I hope all my individual pages get crawled and indexed so they can appear in the search engine results page.

Last year, Google came up with rel=”nofollow” tag to counter the increasing amount of link spamming done by bloggers. Now, Google needs webmasters to point out the pages it needs to crawl. There is also a speculation floating around that Google is using humans to evaluate the search results. What is going on? Is Algorithm is not doing its job correctly? Are Google engineers losing the battle against black hat SEO tactics? Time will tell.

Anyways, news of the day is that Google Sitemaps accept the Atom feeds from the blogger blogs hosted at blogspot.com.

Blogger Blogs And Search Engine Rankings

Does blogger blogs ever rank well on the search engines? I have seen many blogs show up on the search engine results page, but most of those blogs are hosted on the personal web sites. I have also noticed that these blogs are created using Wordpress, Movable Type or Typepad. The blog you are currently reading is on blogger and I hardly get any visitors from Google or Yahoo. Searching the Google with my blog’s title brings my blog at the bottom of the first page, but not all of the post pages are individually indexed in Google. I can see the URL of the individual post pages in the Google results page but I don't see any title or description of the page, which indicates that Google knows about these pages and it has spidered the pages but somehow decided not to index them.

If you do site:discretelife.blogspot.com in google, it brings up all the pages in my site. But, many of these pages are listed URL only. No title and description is shown on the search engine results page. Only a few pages are listed with their respective title and description. If this continues for a long time, then it is worthless. The title only pages have less chance of getting visitors from search engines.

It may be that Google applies some kind of ranking penalty to the free blogs hosted at blogger. This makes me wonder that if I ever want to put up high quality, researched articles on the web than blogger is not the right choice for me. I should buy my own domain name and host my blog on my own web hosting account.

Blog XML Feeds Are Bad For Your Blog

• If you publish high quality, thoroughly researched articles in a blog then publishing XML feed is bad!
• If you want your site to disappear from the Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines then do not publish your content through the feed!!

What are you talking about? The XML, RSS, and Atom are the new buzzwords of the year and these things are hot. Why are you saying they are bad?

This is bad because when you publish your site in XML format, other people can scrap and copy your content, and make money of your hard work.

There are hundreds and hundreds of scrapper sites out there whose webmasters find XML feeds from various blogs, and display that entire original content without any regard to copyright laws. They put Google Adsense ads around these content and make the buck easy way. Some scrappers are so bad that they don’t even put the link to the original site from their copycat site.

One other thing concerns me here is the “Duplicate Content Penalty” imposed by Google and possible other search engines. When the bots of different search engines crawl the web, they also notice the number of sites with the identical content. If these bots find the same identical content on more than one site it may apply ranking penalty to the sites in question. This will bring the search engine ranking down for the original blog, and search engine traffic will slowly dissipate reducing the total number of visitor to the blog. See, the search engine bots do not know which site is original and which site is copycat.

So, what a publisher can do to protect his or her original content?
Well, there are not a lot of things someone can do. Entirely stopping the feed publishing is an option, but I guess not the smartest one. I believe, the XML feed should only consist of the partial content; the title of the post and a little snippet of the post. I believe the snippet should be less than 100 characters or first couple of sentences.

The scrappers can still come to your blog and copy and paste your content to their sites, but at least they are not getting free lunch with XML feeds.

Sandy Point State Park

I visited Sandy Point State Park on Chesapeake Bay last weekend. I thoroughly enjoyed my one-day visit to the “beach”. The Sandy Point State Park is located on the western end of the bay bridge, which connects the eastern shore of the Maryland to the “main” Maryland. Going eastbound towards bridge on Route 50, the park is the last exit before the bay bridge.

The main attraction of the park is the mini beach it contains on the shore of Chesapeake Bay. The beach is about a mile long. As the name suggests the beach is mostly “sandy” with some “stoney” patches mixed in. There are areas for swimming and fishing designated and separated from each other. The park also has boat-launching ramps. I saw many people launching their private boats in the Chesapeake Bay from these ramps. Rowboats and motorboats are also available for renting from within the park. There are benches and tables scattered throughout the park for dining purposes.

The atmosphere was family friendly at the Sandy Point State Park. There were lots of families with children enjoying the summer sun and a dip in the beach.

I liked the park a lot and will be visiting many times in the future.

Air-India is expanding rapidly

Air-India has just announced that it will start a daily service from India to Los Angeles. There will be seven weekly flights; 3 from Delhi, and 4 from Mumbai. The flights will do a stopover at Frankfurt, Germany and will not require a change of aircraft for passengers. Air-India also announced that it is trying to start a daily service to Chicago as well.

After establishing daily service to Chicago, Air-India will have daily services to four US destinations: New York (JFK), Newark (EWR), Los Angeles (LAX), Chicago (ORD).

Trip to Ahmedabad, India

I just came back from my journey to Ahmedabad, India from Washington DC. I chose to fly Air-India from Newark Liberty International Airport. From Washington DC to Newark, I flew Continental Airlines. I will be posting details of this brief (8 days long) journey very soon. Stay tuned.

MSN Search Ignoring Blogger Blogspot Sites?

I think so. I searched for the follwing term in Yahoo, Google and MSN search engines.

"blogspot.com"

MSN returned only 697,515 results for the term. Google came up with 4,170,000 sites contianing term "blogspot.com". Yahoo found the maximum number of results with 38,000,000.

Microsoft is at it again. It looks like that MSN Search is ignoring the sites run by rival companies. Blogger is owned by Google and it looks like MSN Search is not indexing these blogs as much as the rival search engines do. I can find my blog http://discretelife.blogspot.com/ on Yahoo and Google, but my blog is nowhere to be seen on MSN Search. What is going on? What happened to the idea of indexing the "information on the web" regardless the source of the information?

Dell Inspiron 8600

When I bought my dell inspiron 8600 laptop last month, it did not came with the "best" display setup for the screen. I have WSXGA+ screen and it came with 1680x1050 native resolution set by dell. Well, that was almost unreadable. I reduced the screen resolution to 1280x800 and used it for almost 3-4 weeks. It still felt odd every time I fired up my laptop.

Finally, yesterday I realized that there is 1280x768 option available. I promptly moved the cursor left and tested that resolution. It felt perfect with 96 dpi text settings.

This is great. Anyone who have 15.4 inch WSXGA+ widescreen should try 1280x768 resolution. This is the ideal resolution. I am loving my laptop now.

From USA to Ahmedabad

I finally bought my india bound tickets from the travel agent today. I opted to go with Air India from Newark Liberty International Airport to Ahmedabad. This flight will take me to Paris first, then Mumbai and finally land at Ahmedabad. I will fly Continental Airline from Washington DC to Newark.

I finally decided on this option after reading some dreadful experiences of other people on the internet. The following links will take you to some of these experiences and you let me know if you would try to go to Mumbai again. I am sure many Ahmedabad bound passengers now prefer Air India flights because there is no need to do customs in Mumbai. These passengers can get their customs done at Ahmedabad. There is less harrassments by airport staff at Ahmedabad compared to Mumbai airport.

• Mumbai Airport Experiences
• Some More Mumbai Airport Experiences
• Sleeping at Mumbai Airport (Some people dare try this!!)
• Mumbai Airport Blog
• Mumbai Travel Info

Here are the advantages of travelling Air India from USA for Ahmedabad passengers:

• You check in your luggage at your city and pick up your luggage at Ahmedabad. There is no hassle with the luggage at Newark or Mumbai. I will check in my luggage at Reagan National Airport (DCA) and collect my luggage at Ahmedabad.
• There is no terminal or airport change at Mumbai airport. They just let you out of the airplane and into the terminal for an hour while they clean the airplane for next journey. They promptly let you back in. Going from international terminal to domestic terminal in Mumbai with your luggage at 2 am could be a big hassle and risky.
• Coming back you check in my luggage at Ahmedabad and get it back at Newark. At Newark, you promptly give that luggage back to employees working at the "connecting flights" section. They will send you luggage at your final destination. In my case, Reagan National Airport in Washington DC.
• Travelling Air India is not bad now as it used to be. They are trying very hard to improve the service.
• From Newark it takes only 17-18 hours to get to Ahmedabad. If you live in New York area and want to go to Ahmedabad, this is the best option.
• For desi movie fans, you get to watch 2 desi movies in this 18 hours.
• The airplane Air India uses is Boeing 747 all the way to Ahmedabad. Four Jet engines on the plane makes me feel safer up in the air.

United States to Ahmedabad

I want to go to Ahmedabad from Washington DC and currently evaluating various options available to me. My home is very close to all three airports in the Washington DC area and I can fly from any one of them. These airports are: Washington Dulles International Airport (IAD), Reagan National Airport (DCA), and Baltimore-Washington International Airport (BWI). Let me point out that there are no direct flights to Ahmedabad (the seventh largest city in India with population of about 5 million) from any of these airports, which is very bad because many Indians living in USA come from or around the city of Ahmedabad.

The best option available to me is flying Air India from Newark. There is a flight from Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR) to Ahmedabad every day. Well, this flight does not go directly to Ahmedabad. It actually goes to Paris (Charles De Gaulle Airport - CDG) first, then Bombay (BOM) and finally lands at Ahmedabad (AMD). I first have to go to Newark from Washington DC, which I can do by flying Continental Airlines from DC area. I like this option because it is the most convenient one. The convenience comes in the form of less hassle with the luggage. My luggage gets checked in at the DC area airport and I collect my luggage back at Ahmedabad airport. I don't touch my luggage before Ahmedabad. There is no terminal change at Paris. The plane lands at Paris for refueling and cleaning. The total stay at Paris is about 2 hours. There is change of aircraft at Bombay in this option, but it also takes about 2 hours. All in all, it takes about 18 hours to go from Newark to Ahmedabad, which is great. The plane used in this journey is Boeing 747-400 ER, which I like because it is a big plane and it makes me feel safe.

The second option is to fly from any of the DC airports to Mumbai and use any domestic Indian carrier to go to Ahmedabad. There are flights from British Airways, Air France, NorthWest, KLM, Lufthansa, and Delta which take you from DC area airports to Mumbai. The plus for these flights is that I do not have to go to Newark to catch the India bound flight. The minus of these option is that almost all of these carriers reach Mumbai late at night. At that time I must switch airport in Mumbai, that is, go from international airport to domestic airport to go to Ahmedabad. I have to carry my luggage by myself. I have heard horror stories from some people about switching airports in Mumbai at night. One person said to me that his taxi cab driver at Mumbai was drunk at night and was driving the taxi erratically. This is scary stuff. If I have a relative’s help in switching the airport then I would consider this second option, otherwise the first option looks good to me.

The third option is to go from DC area airports to New Delhi and then get Ahmedabad bound flight from Delhi. This options is not any better than the second option and does not provide any extra comfort in the process.

After evaluating all the options, I have concluded that the first option is the best option as of now. Some might argue that the service provided by Air India is not good and the staff in Air India is not courteous. I would have to disagree with this assertion. Many people are giving good reviews to Air India now. Air India has finally realized the value of good service and they are improving passenger experience in their flights.

Finally, a wish. There needs to be a Air India flight from New York to Ahmedabad. I would love that. If Air India doesn’t want to terminate a flight at Ahmedabad then it is fine, but Air India should at least have one flight every day that goes to Ahmedabad first and then to Mumbai, not vice versa. All Mumbai bound flights fly over Ahmedabad en route to Mumbai. Why not land at Ahmedabad first and unload all Gujarat bound passengers and then go to Mumbai.

Reliance IndiaCall

The calling procedure for dialing a call through reliance india call is a mystery to me. I live in US and dial 1-866-373-5426. After that a voice tells me the following: "Welcome to reliance. Please dial the number you wish to dial with the conuntry code 91. It is not required to dial the international access number."

How is this possible? Isn’t is true that when someone in US wants to dial an international number, 001 must be dialed first. How does reliance gets away without dialing 001 before 91. Do they have a direct physical line to India? When I dial the above 866 number, does my call go through some private reliance-owned network to Ahmedabad?

I have tried many calling cards so far, and never had the call quality as good as reliance’s. They are doing something right. The prices are not the lowest, but their calling plan does not have any gimmicks and fees.

Ahmedabad Airport

I don’t have any source for this, but I read somewhere that there are about 2.5 Million people living in USA of Indian origin. That is, 2.5 Million people who were born in India or are children or grandchildren of the people who were born in India.

A lot these 2.5 Million people visit India each year. Plus, India is a booming economy now. Many many foreigners visit India for business reasons.

Today, it is very inconvenient to fly to India, especially for the people who live in United States. It takes 2 days to get there. If I start my travel on a typical Air-India flight from New York to Mumbai on Monday, I will get to Mumbai on Wednesday. The airline options available to fly there is feeble. The restriction put upon foreign and domestic airlines by Indian government is choking off a potentially healthy tourism business for many Indian cities.

Many many people of Indian origin in USA come from the state of Gujarat in India. The city of Ahmedabad is the biggest city in Gujarat and many of these Indians in USA call Ahmedabad home. Still, to this day, there is no direct flight to Ahmedabad from United States. It is not that the airport at Ahmedabad is inadequate. That airport is good enough for a Boeing 747-400 to land and take off. I believe, only Air-India is allowed to go there, no foreign airliner has ever gone to Ahmedabad. All foreign flights; british airways, air france, KLM, Lufthansa; must go to Mumbai and unload all the Ahmedabad bound passenger to domestic Indian carriers.

This creates unnecessary hassles for the passengers, who fly over Ahmedabad en route to Mumbai and then come back to Ahmedabad on a domestic Indian carrier. Whenever the Ahmedabad airport opens up to foreign carriers, a flood of Indians will fly to India, more and often.

I am looking forward to that day, eagerly.