iPod ships individually from China!

I recently ordered my iPod Mini and was surprised when looking at the shipment tracking details at FedEx. The shipment originated in Shenzhen, China. I knew that lot of manufacturing happens in China for majority of US products, but was surprised that they are being individually shipped. Rather, I expected a bulk shipment to US warehouses.

Why does it do so? It amazes me. I thought this was the costlier option.

The Drift

Recently watched "The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift". It was great. Drift sequences were awesome. It was a good balance of action and storyline. It didn't feel like too much action nor it felt like we are not having action.

DVD features included some real life sequences from real life Drift King Keiichi Tsuchiya. This a new learning experience for me to see how do they do it in real life.

Bollywood in Hollywood

I was watching Inside Man day before yesterday and was pleasantly surprised in its end... There was chhaiyya chhaiyya, a bollywood song and dance number from Dil Se, playing with original music with partial english lyrics thrown in.

I don't think I have seen any other hollywood movie that is using a bollywood number from a bollywood movie keeping original lyrics and music.

Have you?

Too Busy To Blog

Things have been busy and hectic around here. It is so difficult to keep up with Blog in this life.

This is just to say that I'm alive...

Disassembling the external hard drive

Well, it had to happen one day... During last few weeks, ever since I'm back from my US trip - about which I need to write - this backup device of mine is giving me troubles. At 200 GB, it is still my primary backup device and when it starts showing signs of fatigue - it is 3 yr old - it is time to take stock. It has developed a problem of shutting itself off without any apparent reason. The music I'm playing stops and almost always data being transferred gets corrupted. Sometimes, it even refuses to start!

I was pretty annoyed with this. May be it is due to Wii, which I installed right next to it, or may be it is just jealous of a newer and smaller 160 GB pocket drive that I purchased recently, whatever it is, I wanted to dig deeper into the cause of its failure, so I got the screwdrivers and started the process of opening the external casing to see what could be the issue. The casing was hot, and I was surprised to find the hard drive inside too hot to hold. Guess, it could be overheating. I found no visible signs of dust inside but gave it a cleaning nonetheless. It took good 10 minutes to cool down. Looks like these drives are not designed for hot weather of India, or should I say Delhi, as it never gave me any problem in Bangalore. With heavy data transfers, it perhaps is getting too hot and shuts off as a precautionary measure. Air conditioner in my room is not enough to dissipate the heat and the casing design with no fans is proving a big deterrent in the thermal process.

The drive looks at peace now and I need to give it time enough to cool down between heavy activities as a workaround. But it was heartening to learn that it can open and replace the internal hard disk to higher capacity as I need. Next buy, 1 TB disk :)