micro:When will India's Public Work Departments take ownership of water quality like this.

The PWDs currenlty do tests like these, but I have never seen a notice or warning being posted like this one.

PS: Interestingly, I found this letter dated 22 Oct. 1872, mentioning Trimulgherry, a place very close to my house.

http://books.google.com/books?id=F_gIAAAAQAAJ&lpg=PA411&ots=mZAnaqiTnQ&dq=secunderabad%20public%20works%20dept%20water%20supply&pg=PA411#v=onepage

micro: I love the classic bollywood songs played on Kalighat Radio; been listening to it for about 2 months : http://cast2.serverhostingcenter.com/start/anikumar/

How to remove your credit card details from Skype

I bought a subscription on Skype using my credit card. I wanted to use it only for one month, but to my surprise they charged me at the end of subscription period (that's why they call it "subscription", duh :)

So I now wanted to get my card details off of Skype so that they cannot charge me in the next cycle. Looked simple.

Go to https://secure.skype.com/account/ then to "Payment Settings" then to "Payment methods" and cancel the card.

The problem was, my card was attached to my subscription, and Skype wanted me to cancel my subscription before it would allow me to delete the card details. The problem with that was that I was afraid that my current subscription's balance minutes would vanish if I did that. Maybe I was worrying too much, but I did not want to take a chance.

So I went to the subscription settings, and changed my payment method from my credit card to "Skype Credit". And voila, I can now delete my credit card from Skype.

I have put in a reminder for myself that at the end of current subscription period, I should go and cancel the subscription, so that it doesn't eat into my Skype Credit (if I ever did buy that).

How to cancel an Amazon order

I placed an order on Amazon and I wanted to cancel it a few  minutes later (wanted to reorder using the Amazon Store Card). You are allowed to cancel the order from the order details page, but probably since I chose Amazon Prime shipping option, the option to cancel the order vanished after a few minutes.

After trying different tricks for about an hour, I ended up canceling the order this way.

.) Google for 'Amazon Customer Care Phone Number'

.) I got the following link: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?ie=UTF8&nodeId=518316

.) Choose 'Your Orders', and choose the order you wish to cancel.

Try to describe the problem in some detail, and then click on 'Chat'. It will launch a live chat session with an Amazon associate and they can help you cancel your order.

Now, getting back to place the order again with a different card.

Update: the direct link seems to be this: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/contact-us/general-questions.html

Too many tabs

Just a post to show how I procrastinate :)

I have this habit of keeping too many tabs open in Firefox, just so that I can read them later.

This 51 is much less than 80+ tabs that I once had open in Firefox. I open mutiple windows too sometimes to keep a few tabs grouped.

I have "Tab Mix Plus"and QuickRestart add-ons installed for situations where I have to reastart Firefox when it starts eating too much memory.

"Too many tabs" is one of the reasons I have been unable to try out Chrome for some time. It is missing multiline tab-bar feature, and tabs headers become too small after about 15 or so open tabs.

I do like Chrome's approach with "too many tabs" situation though. It seems that it frees the memory related to display objects of a tab after some time it has remained inactive; this keeps overall memory consumption of Chrome lower at the cost of some time taken to display things when that tab is opened again.

Spider Solitaire: First deck stack in 13 moves

Screenshot of when I was able to finish one stack in Spider Solitaire in just 13 moves. The minimum no. of moves required is 12, but I thing 13 is quite close.

Here's a screenshot from a minesweeper session when I think I got pretty lucky.
















And this one is where I was stuck the longest (there were others too) but I couldn't make an intelligent guess about this one! Can you? Give it a shot. Which cell would you have clicked next?