Nimish's Blog
Flowery Orange Pekoe from the Nilgiris - delicious!
Here's the latest tea added to my collection:  Unfortunately (for me), it's only available as loose leaves, and not bagged in tea bags. However I wanted something unique out of a recent trip to Coonoor, and this looked really nice and was highly recommended by the store close to our hotel. I love this tea - it's got a mild flavor, but is delicious. Makes me want more. I had to get one of the tea infusion strainer kind of things, as otherwise the tea leaves were floating in my cup and coming in the way. The tea comes with the whole leaves dried up, which open up on brewing. Add a pinch or two to a cup, and it expands to what seems like a lot of leaf. I'm yet to try it with milk, I don't know how it's going to taste. Any recommendations? Here are pictures of the estate where this tea is grown: |
My savior during the work day - endless cups of tea
My favorite tea of course is Early grey - with a bit of milk, no sugar, and in a massive cup. At work though, I stay away from teas with milk, and instead just drink endless cups of black/ green/ other teas without milk or sugar. I just opened up a box of "Tetley with LEMON natural flavour" tea - and it's absolutely outstanding. Perfect tea to drink at work, enough tannins/ bite that get the full tea effect, and lovely lemon flavoring to add that flavor. The best part of this box is that the tea bags are individually bagged, meaning longer shelf life.  Now to get back to work - and look forward to more lovely cups of lemon tea. And to deciding on what's my next cuppa going to be :). My work tea collection:  |
ADSL wireless router - Dlink DSL-2750U and it's wireless drops
I use an Airtel home phone and their DSL connection. Airtel provided me with a Beetel ADSL + Wireless router many years ago, and it still does the job, but it seemed slow and clunky. So in September 2012, I ordered my replacement ADSL + Wireless router - and chose the DLink DSL-2750U from Flipkart. This got delivered quickly and I had it up and running in no time. The wireless connection was great (though limited to only 16 wireless clients) and the range/ speed was much better than the older Beetel device. That being said, I noticed occasional wireless drops with this router - every couple of hours, the wireless would reset itself for like a minute, all the wireless clients would get disconnected and the SSID would not be visible, and then a minute or two later, the SSID would appear and all the clients would connect again. This was initially not a big deal, but I decided to escalate to Flipkart technical support. They got back with the standard "Reset the router and try again" response, which I did, but still experienced the network drops. After that, Flipkart and I played phone tag for a couple of days, and ultimately did not connect, so I was past the Flipkart 30 days return period. Fast forward from Sep 2012 to Aug 2013, and I'm still facing the wireless drops every few hours. This was getting irritating by now, especially if I was on a Web conference and sharing my screen, or joining the call via VOIP. And lo and behold - my wife's work was getting interrupted as well, so that drove me to seek out DLink support to find a fix for the issue. A quick search revealed the D-Link website, and also the fact that they had a chat support for my product. I decided to try the chat support; the agent was helpful, but came back with the standard recommendations of "Reset the router" etc. Did all that, tested for a day, and still the same wireless disconnects. Time for my support attempt #2, this time I called the Dlink support center (India toll free #: 18002330000), and spoke with an agent. Fairly courteous, but very worried about wireless interference, and whether that could be causing the drops. Luckily I have a neat app on my phone/ tablet - called the "Wifi analyser", and have used it in the past to find the best channel for my router (and subsequently changed the wifi router to Channel 1). I used it quickly again, and reconfirmed that there was hardly any interference at Channel 1. The agent then forced me to reset my router again, and was on the phone helping me to reconfigure it. He insisted that I change my SSID, leave the channel as default (auto), and so on. When I told him I've done this in the past, he assured me they have to go through the standard debugging steps, and if it does not work out, they'll process a replacement. Hung up, tried the router for a day, and faced the same wireless drop issue again. Time for my support attempt #3, again chose the phone route. Fresh agent, but "discovered" they have a new firmware update released in July 2013, and insisted that I try this firmware update. He said he would email the new firmware, which he did immediately. Interesting that D-Link is using sendspace to send their official firmware, and not the standard HTTP or FTP based support site on Dlink.co.in! I downloaded and installed the firmware, only to find that the software version number had not changed. It was now time for support attempt #4 - this time to confirm if the firmware was indeed new as the version number was the same. The agent confirmed that "Dlink has not changed the version number, but you have the new firmware version if you can see USB storage support showing up" - which it was. Trying the new firmware for a day or two now, and if it does not work out, then time for call #5 to Dlink! In summary:
Cheers Nimish |
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