Posts tagged india
HowTo: Buy Wii points online from India
Aug 5th
Though Nintendo hasn’t officially launched Wii yet in India, the number of Wiis in India *is* increasing. 3 of my friends, who returned from US last week, bought Wii 
I don’t know how they got hold of one, as it is in extremely high demand over there now!
One of the initial problems you’d face trying to setup the Wii in India is the power converter. You *cannot* plugin Wii directly in to one of our power sockets, it will just burn! Unless you want to do the burn-in (!?) test with your Wii, I suggest you go out and buy a 220-110v power adapter (stepdown). It is available in many wattages, for Wii a 50W or 100W should suffice.
The only other thing you’d find a bit problematic is buying Wii points. Mine is a US Wii, so whenever I try buying Wii points online, it asks for a credit card along with the US address / Zip code blah blah…this one can be real irritating! Don’t lose heart though. There is a simple/effective method (Based on this post). The trick is to find a region which accepts Indian credit cards with out asking too many questions The region found by the original poster is Brazil.
How to buy Wii points from India (Thanks to StringFellow):
- Change your Wii country to Brazil. You will find this option in Wii Settings section. Wii will now ask you to confirm the user agreement for the new region. Do press ACCEPT here, else you will get an error later when accessing the Woo shop.
- Go to Wii Shop. If you already have “My Nintendo” account at Nintendo.com linked to your Wii shop account, Wii will warn you that the link will be broken. Don’t worry about this message. You can set this up again later.
- Once in, click on the “Add Wii points”. Enter your CC number, name, expiry date and CVV. In the next screen enter any random Brazilian postal code. I used Brazilian Discovery Channel postal code. You can find more of these postal codes in Google.
That’s all, it should work! I bought USD30 worth of Wii points and it worked flawlessly. Once you have the points, you can reset your Wii country to USA (if yours is a US Wii like mine) and reconnect the Wii Shop login with your Nintendo.com login.
What to do with the Wii points?
You can buy Wii Channels, Virtual Console games or WiiWare games online from the Wii shop, using the Wii points. I strongly suggest you buy Wii Internet (Opera) channel. It costs only 500points (USD5.0) and it is worth it. Quickly checking the Orkut, sitting in the couch is bliss, I tell you
Oregon, here I come!
May 2nd
I will be visiting Portland (Oregon) for 5 weeks, starting WW19. This being a very short trip, I can’t hope to explore OR fully. Anyway, I did a quick search to get a list of must-see spots. Filtering the “normal” stuff apart, I am planning to at least cover the following places: Do let me know if you have any suggestions or I am missing something interesting.
Oregon Symphony (http://www.orsymphony.org/)
The Oregon Symphony is one of Portland’s great cultural attractions, performing over 120 concerts annually at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall from September through June.
The Portland Saturday Market
To see Portland in it’s artsy element, visitors should experience this large open-air arts and crafts market, offering tons of music, art of all kinds, and great food. The Portland Saturday Market is open Saturdays and Sundays, March through December.
Sternwheeler Riverboat Tours
The Sternwheeler Riverboat Tours offer fun, relaxing cruises through either the scenic Columbia River Gorge (June through September) or the beautiful Williamette River (October through June) on an authentic triple-decker sternwheeler.
Heceta Head
Heceta Head is home to many points of interest, most notably the Heceta Head Lighthouse, which is one of the most photographed beacons in the US.
And of course, my favorite:
Oaks Park (http://www.oakspark.com/thrillrides.html)
This amusement park is near Portland. I am not sure if this is the best one around, but am sure I will make it to at least one amusement park, even if I had to miss all the other places .
Switched to 1Mbps Airtel Unlimited DSL
Apr 19th
When BSNL came up with the 2Mbps and 1Mbps plan, most of my friends who had Airtel 256Kbps line, jumped on to the BSNL bandwagon. I didn’t, for the simple reason that BSNL came with a data transfer limit! That is, only the first 1.25GB or so is free every month and after that you pay per MB. Ridiculous! Since I have had some bad experiences earlier with my 512Kbps/1.5GB-limit Airtel plan, I decided to stay away from all these and stick to my good old 256Kbps *unlimited*. Soon after that, Airtel upgraded me to 512Kbps unlimited, which I took with out much thinking. Now, after 1 year, Airtel offered (again!) to upgrade me to 1Mbps unlimited!!
The total amount comes to 2,222INR/month. Only today the 1Mbps plan got activated. Look at the following picture to see my new 1Mbps in action, downloading MinGW at 128KBps Worth every penny (or paisa…whatever!!)
2008 Top 20 Billionaires: What do they do with so much money?
Mar 8th
Warren Buffett overtook Bill Gates and that Mexican fellow to become the world’s richest person. His net worth is at $62 billion USD.
Pop quiz: Do you know how many zeroes are there in a billion??
Interview with Vishwanathan Anand – IBN Live videos
Dec 26th
Recently CNN-IBN ran an interview with Chess world champion Vishwanathan Anand (Vishy). I didn’t catch this on TV, but ,thanks to IBN-Live, found them in their site.
The show is split in to 5 parts. Click on the following links to open them in a new window. The site needs no registration to view the videos, so enjoy!
[Spoiler] Harry potter and the deathly hallows
Jul 19th
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I am a big fan of Harry potter (HP)! I got hooked in to pottermania around 2001, since then I have collected all original HP books (all thoroughly earmarked) + audio books (US Version – Jim Dale) + first 4 HP movie DVDs. Like every other HP fan, I went ahead and booked the final installment – Harry potter and the deathly hallows – around June beginning. Indiaplaza provided an excellent offer, which I haven’t seen beaten by any of the other Indian stores yet.  My wife was like – “eh!? why did you spend Rs650 on a kids book?!”, what could I tell her? Certain things are better left unanswered, right?!
As all muggles know, the book is going to come out this Saturday 12.01am. Only two more days to go, yayyy!! This time around, the publishers have really beefed up the security, but still some goof ups did happen and couple of copies leaked out (Check out these torrents:  Complete text of the book, all pages (photographed) )
BTW, I noticed yesterday that the HP5 (Order of phoenix) movie was uploaded in Google Videos, couldn’t find it today though! Should be in Veoh or Youtube…check it out and let me know if you find a valid link 
Though I was determined not to read any of the spoilers this time, today morning I gave in to the temptation and read the initial reviews of the final book here and here. Not much leaked there, compared to the more interesting spoilers in this page, telling us who dies when and other things!
I checked my order status in Indiaplaza and was pleasantly surprised to see the status as “ReadyToShip“. C’mon guys, what are you waiting for? Why not do a DeepDiscount and send me the copy today itself?! 
Bangalore KempKids – Be careful of the dogs
May 1st
My brother visited me last weekend. On saturday, I took them to Kemp Kids (a.k.a Kempfort) in Airport road. Kempkids is actually a good-enough place to kill a couple of hours, but personally I would leave my wallet in home before going there. They quote exorbitant prices for everything! They have these furry animals (a golden bear-like dog, a spotted dog, a “king-kong” rabbit) at the entrance, amusing kids. I am sure if I had been a kid, I’d have loved to shake hands with them myself.
No doubt these characters are a big hit with the children. But, they are equally irritating to the adults. They try to act smart with ladies, especially of the attractive kind. Once I saw the person wearing the small spotted dog costume, hiding behind the front gate and scaring the kids – a good prank, I’d say, but the person was doing this to the ladies (note that, he didn’t try this on any of the males entering Kempkids), that too with an extra josh, freely touching them. Two of the six girls/ladies he scared, gave him a nice scolding before moving on. The others I am sure would have felt the same rage, but probably covered it up behind an embarassing smile.
I am not sure if Kempkids has any rules/guidelines for these cartoon characters, but if they don’t have them in place yet, its high time they did something about this.
The great “Indian” attitude!
Feb 23rd
This happened during my Chennai visit. When we landed in Chennai, as there were no gates available immediately, we had to wait for ~5 minutes. There was this person sitting 3 rows in front of me, along with his wife and a kid, who also stood up to collect his things. When it took sometime for the aero bridge to be attached, he started murmuring. He had an obvious US accent, looked like some one from the Northern part of India. Couple of minutes later, his tone had become loud.
“What is happening? Why are they taking so long?”, his wife asked.
“C’mon dear, this is not Ontario. This is India”, he said, with the sarcasm turned a notch up! This really irked me. But the next statement was the icing on the cake.
“I thought things would have changed. They are the same and will never change over here”
When we stepped out in to the waiting lounge, I introduced myself to him and asked him casually about his native place in India.
“I am from [so &so place] in Punjab. I have been in Toronto for 1.5years now!!”, he said proudly.
1.5years?? He was out of India for just over an year and already he has started passing comments over how India won’t improve? What do we do with these kinda people around!?
[tags]chennai, india, attitude[/tags]
