The Volvo B7R that I was traveling in from Chandigarh to Delhi stalled very close to Delhi after a 300 minutes nonstop run. The driver started fiddling with the dash and out of curiosity I looked at the dash to see what he was doing and man was I surprised... I had a fair idea of the Volvo B7R dash as in my earlier travels, I used to check the speedo to see how fast these buses go (and trust me, these mean machines have a nice top speed)




This one had a lot more controls crammed into the Dash with a neat LCD screen in the center. A red triangle with "Stop" was flashing continuously and the LCD screen indicated "____ belt wear predicted". And as predicted, when the driver opened the engine boot, one of the belt's had slipped.

I believe the new buses have an integrated Engine management system (EMS2) which take data from several sensors on the engine with scope for diagnosis and fault tracing which was what I saw. Now, if only the semi literate Indian drivers knew how to read the these dash messages!

I also started noticing new multi-axle Volvos on the Mumbai roads...
...and road travel has just got a little better.

12:30 in the night, new city, you take a cab, tell a destination and start feeling the driver is taking a lot of time to reach the destination. You suspect that he is taking you around with an aim to fleece you. What do you do? iPhone to the rescue.


A route map, distance and average time taken with a rough idea of where you are. Its just what you want in such a situation.

I was planning a tour of Punjab to visit the Bharti Wal*Mart stores, an account which I now handle for my company, to get to know the ground realities. Was going to do a road trip - Chandigarh > Amritsar > Kapurthala > Jalandhar > Ludhiana > Patiala/Karnal > Ambala. Accordingly, was on my way to Amritsar last night. And at 7:30 PM as soon as I reached Phagwara bypass I saw a few people blocking the highway and setting a few tires on fire on the road to block the traffic. What I thought to be a small protest on the road is now a full blown sectarian clash. Here are the
news results on the incident.

25/5/09: - 10:34 PM: Finally found the layout I liked. Will take time to edit it to my liking. But it will do for the time being with the postings.

2/5/09: - 8:52 PM: In the process of updating the layout to my taste. The page layout will be erratic for a while.

Its funny the number of times I have been logged out today while reading my subscribed feeds on Google Reader.

A similar problem was reported on Dec 22, '08 on Google Groups. More on this later.

I was reading a feed on the financial crisis and the need for US to maintain world confidence... And right below the feed was an advertisement for LK Advani as PM?

Now this is new! A little researching showed that he threw his online campaign open by launching his website and blog on Novermber 08. What I noticed is the heavy use of Google AdSense network by him and words like fundraising, economy, economic confidence are being used by him. Infact, in a matter of minutes, I spotted him on atleasts 3 of my regular feeds (Indian Stock Research (word-economy), Tech feed (word-fundraiser) and business (word-economic confidence).

What's interesting is that these ads don't feature the "Ads by Google" text though they are being shown by Google. I think this oversight by Google is a heavy mistake.

I believe Google opened a dedicated political ad sales office, with 25 staffers, in Washington DC sometime in Jan this year.

"You can geotarget as finely as a zip code, so almost to within a mile or so radius of where the voter is. If you want to reach a voter in New Hampshire it means you're not wasting media spend on users in Vermont who can't vote. Refine it even more if you just want to reach women by running on sites like MarthaStewart.com," said Peter Greenberger, head of elections and issue advocacy at Google's Washington office.

I wonder if Google has any such advocacy group in India? And also think that Google should not allow its adwords & adsense technology for use for any political campaigning in India.

update Feb 04, 09: A few other words taken up by him..."bad to worse", "vision", "United States", "blog","case","founder","justice","prospect". BTW, I started noticing his add's on a lot of articles on 'twitter'. More on this later