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This might come in as a big surprise to most of my blog readers. You might wonder, of all things, how can one stay cool, on a frikking IM client? After all, GTalk is nothing but another internet messaging tool like the rest of them out there (Yoohoo, Windows not-so-live etc.) right? Well, you might want to think again. GTalk is different and I’m going to teach you a few cool tricks on GTalk that could make you uber-cool from uber-boring in a jiffy! Ready? Let’s do this.

1. Pick a badass username

This is where all the coolness begins. You ain’t nothing in the G-world if you don’t have a sick username. Don’t pick boring names like reachme12345, emailtime90210 or fungirl2005. I personally knew fungirl2005. It wasn’t fun anymore creating an account every year!  Try something cooler. Something that tells everyone out there how awesome you are. I remember having IDs like LonerInAustin, TostitoLover and KittiesRock.  If you’re a guy, go with names like LifeIsABeach, DramaKing or LoveMahCouch. If you are a chica, something like HeartSugahDad, BootieMama or DonutGal would be the best choices. Never ever use your real name. Believe me, I have gotten into trouble many a times coz of that. I must also mention that zip codes are a straight no-no (makes it easier to locate you).

2. Update your first and last name

A lot of people somehow miss this very basic feature of GTalk. What happens then is, you end up displaying your username to the world and believe me, a lot of us have weird usernames (like the boring ones above). A friend of mine had a username  ’touch_dear’. Now that should get you popular with the ladies huh? His idea behind that ID was, he wanted people to keep in touch with him and also wanted to let them know that they were very dear to him or something like that; you get the drift. So, your first step should be to update your account information. Choose a name that sends a strong message out. I remember having google accounts with names like The Real MacGruber, Furious Loner, Burrito Lovah and Schitt Happins. You will not believe me if I tell you how many friends I have made using those names.

3. Get a cool profile picture

This is extremely important if you want all your friends to talk about you in the G-world. In fact, more important than your username or your first or last name. Like they say, a picture is worth a 1000 blah blah blahs. This is your true identity and you should choose a picture that tells everyone what a beautiful person you are, both inside and out. However, it is also important that it connects well with your username. A few ideas to help you pick one easily.

GUYS

GALS

4. Choose a cool status message/icon

If you never thought about this, now is your chance! Twitter made a fortune just by letting people tell other people what they did every minute of their ‘exciting’ lives. And there are a lot of people out there who are really interested in everything you do, right from what shaving cream you use to chop your beard to how many packs of Frito Lay’s you consume in a day. People who care about you more than you care about yourself. For starters, check out Gul Panag’s Twitter page. Now, I care about her and I seriously wanna know what she ate for lunch, if she drinks diet or regular coke, what is she planning to have for dinner, what does (not) she wear at night, what time does she wake up, how many times does she flush her toilet and a lot of other such important stuff. You might laugh at me if I tell you that the status message is the new status symbol. But trust me since I’m always right. Another one of my fav five Twitterers is Mallika Sherawat. Her account name stands at MallikaLA. Why the LA? She opened her Twitter account in LA dummy! One of the tweets from the sweet seductress was “yes, sir! M indeed veg and proud of it! how do u think I maintain this body figure?“. Now how would I know if she was a vegetarian or not if it were not for her status message? And how would I know whether that was indeed the real reason behind her ‘body figure’ ? So, respect the status. Everybody wants to know what kinda underwear you’re wearing right now. And don’t forget to set it to ‘Busy’ with the red ‘talk to my hand‘ icon. People can be in their underwear and still be busy!

5. Always ‘leave the conversation’

Oh ho ho. I just can’t wait to reveal this G-secret to you. This neat trick can catapult your life in tha G-world overnight. You can thank me later for giving you such valuable piece of advice. When I was new to GTalk, I was like you; naive, innocent and gullible. Then, one fine day, I stumbled upon this cool trick that, all of a sudden, made me look like Antonio Banderas. Eager to know how I did it? Here it goes.

Say you’re talking to a contact on your G-list. He/she types something at you. You type back. And then, immediately, you hit the ‘X’ button on the top. Yes, you close the window. GTalk has this cool little feature that, whenever someone closes their chat window, tells the other person that ‘XYZ has left the conversation‘. That XYZ is you. It is like walking out of a meeting room full of people, without giving two hoots about the rest. Feel it? Feel the energy, the power now? It’s like telling the other person, ‘I have said what I had to, you can go take a hike now.‘  Try it out and let me know the results. You will be a changed man (alright, woman too), I promise.

There are a lot more tricks that I can teach you, however, for that you will need to be at least moderately good at these five. I have put endless hours behind GTalk and it has taken me years to master these techniques. With a lot of practice and hard work, I’m confident that you will be as good as me someday. If you need help with any of the above tricks, please do not hesitate to contact me at LonerInAustin[AT]yahoo.com.

It has been a long long time since I have posted anything substantial. My last post that was not a ‘copy-paste’ was on April 12th where I went on and on about my new Time Warner cable connection! For my next post, I did want to write something more interesting than a stupid cable connection who nobody cared about;  just that the Gods of Procrastination had set their eyes on me for a while now. Before you ask, I do have a long list of excuses for not blogging, ready for you. The long hiatus has partly been due to the recently concluded elections in India, which I had been closely following (unlike the previous ones) and was lucky enough to be a part of too^ (^=opens in a new window). We ran the 100 Thousand campaign for over a month and came out mighty victorious. A few other things kept us ‘busy’ too. We joined a fitness bootcamp at work which was whooping our asses big time, 3-times a week that is. Here is our trainer, Crystal’s blog^  and you can see for yourself what kinda deal we got ourselves into. It has been nothing short of terrific (read terrifying) though. Both myself and K have shed a couple percent off our BMIs. More so K, since I kinda look pretty much the same, no matter how many Tabatas^ I do.

Well, what other lame excuses do I have? Oh yeah, I got a little occupied with my MCTS^ prep as well. I gave my first exam^ on April 25th and thankfully, passed. I still have the second exam, 70-562^ pending, to get the actual certification. I’m not sure when I will finally be prepared for the second one since I have already rescheduled the exam twice by now. There has been a lot of stuff going on at work too. We sent out a major release for www.joe.com^ last month and then I started work on www.lennar.com^.  If we did some cool LINQ on Joe, we got to do tons of nifty jQuery and AJAX on Lennar. There were a lot of painpoints in the project, while being fun and pleasure at the same time. You know the kind when you get whopped by someone and then get to go for a shiatsu massage?   The entire credit for that would go to my huge learning curve with Javascript in general.

A trip to good ole Dallas

To add to all the fun and frolic I bored you with above, I also managed to get a day off from work last week. Yes, a day off! The last time I took a day off was in October of 08. A few more months and K would have buried me alive. For a change, this time I was actually looking forward to my ‘vacation day’. As most of you know, we live in a country called Texas and the country happens to be so huge that, it sort of becomes mandatory to board a flight to visit any place in the neighboring country (United States). However, this time we did not want to mess with all the visa formalities etc. to go to the US, so we decided to stick to Texas and zeroed in on Dallas. Dallas is a 3.5 hour drive from Austin. The drive is not that popular among travel folks nor is the city of Dallas a great tourist destination. Having said that, we still wanted to explore the area and have a good, relaxing time. And relax we did.

We started our trip on Friday evening and reached Dallas by 9.30 or so. Most dining options were out since it was ‘too late’ to eat per American norms! We somehow found an Indian restaurant^ and hurriedly ordered whatever was available at that time. To say the least, it wasn’t one of the best Indian culinary experiences we have had so far (Yelp 1-starrer coming soon).  After finishing our dinner, we headed to our hotel all ready to crash, thanks to a loong Friday filled with craploads of work, a bootcamp and a 4 hour drive. Fortunately, our hotel experience was nowhere close to our Indian meal experience. Just the previous night, we somehow got a pretty sweet deal for The Adolphus^ (pic below).

I must admit, this has been one of the best hotels I have checked into in the US and highly recommend it if you’re in or around Dallas. The next morning, after getting a good night’s rest and waking up all refreshed, we decided to venture out, leaving behind our car though. The Adolphus is located right in the heart of Dallas’ downtown and if you’re in Dallas, there are tons of things you can do in the downtown. Our first stop was The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey^. I highly prescribe all Dallas visitors to stop by this modern marvel. The museum brings in front of your eyes, the entire proceedings of the fateful day that JFK was assassinated. A good three hours were spent at the museum. Then, we started to stroll around the ‘grid^’ checking out the wonderful buildings surrounding the museum. A few pictures below for your viewing pleasure.

Sixth Floor Museum on the left. You can see the 6th floor window from where JFK was shot at. The second pic shows where JFK’s car was (right where the crowd is standing) when the shots were fired.

After wandering around for a good six hours, it was time to get out of the Downtown and explore the burbs. At the same time, I was in no mood to get the car out. We said ‘heck, we gotta experience some American public transport now!’. We took an all-day premium pass at a DART kiosk and off we were within 5 minutes, on-board a rail.

We roamed all over the town changing trains and buses, visiting malls, eating and taking naps. Yes, K took a nap at The Galleria^! At about 7 or so, we ended up being dog-tired and thought it was a much saner option to go back to the hotel than to miss our last train and then get mugged. We had made plans to catch a movie at the Angelika^ but, before that, we wanted to hog on some Indian food; but we were looking for something better than the previous night’s onslaught. You might wonder why most Indians are hell bent upon eating Indian food everywhere they go. There is a reason behind that. You see, in America, the food served at almost every Indian restaurant is, ummm, you know, not that Indian. I’m not kidding. Indian restaurants try too hard to Americanize Indian food and in the process, forget the whole Indian deal there is to Indian food. So every Indian is on a self-imposed quest to find that one Indian restaurant you can eat at and say ‘Mmmm.’ Yours truly has been on a similar quest since 2001.

After driving for a good 30 minutes, we reached a place called Chettinad Palace^ in Plano. It was not a fancy place by any stretch of the imagination. But at the same time, we felt a tad optimistic as we had heard good things about it (and we were hungry too). The food arrived in 15 minutes and I must say, we were quite impressed. It was still not the quintessential Indian-American restaurant we were looking for. Ohh well, something to strive for in life you see. We ate to our heart’s content and headed back to the hotel since the last movie at Angelika had started like 45 minutes ago. No regrets though. The food was awesome, the day was pretty uneventful. Mission accomplished.

The next morning, we went back to some of the places that we had visited the previous day in Downtown, to do some picture-clicking. Why again you ask? Well, the first time around, we forgot to put the batteries in our camera. So no pictures!!! This time, we were ready with the batteries and managed to take some good pix. All the above pix were taken on the second day, just in case you haven’t figured it out by now. After an hour’s worth of pix, we headed back to the hotel, checked out and were ready to hit the burbs again. This was never planned to be an action-packed trip Just a good, relaxing time is all we wanted to have. We were going to Plano again not coz we had started missing Chettinad Palace already but to meet some family friends. They had invited us over when they visited Austin last time and it had been more than two years since then. I told you, Texas was a big country after all!  We went to their place, ate some home-cooked Indian food and chit-chatted for a solid two hours. Needless to say, there weren’t too many things left to do for the day. At around 4PM, we were ready to head back to Austin. K had started to miss Dash and Dash is a handful when left alone for more than 4 hours. It had been more than 48 hours this time.

The drive back to Austin, even though on a boring Interstate^, was nothing short of exciting. There were thunderstorms, rainbows, sunshine and a lot of construction! K clicked some random pictures on the way which eventually turned out to be pretty darn beautiful. Well to appreciate the beauty on some of them, you will have to look past Dash’s saliva on the glass window.

By 7PM Sunday, we were back in Austin. We picked up Dash on our way. He wasn’t too excited to see his parents. Maybe it was more fun at the doggie party he had with his siblings, mom and aunt over the weekend. By the time we reached home and he got to see his toys, he was back to normal; ready to cuddle on the couch. The following day, which happened to be the official ‘vacation day’, was reserved for movies and detoxing (Indian food does that to you). Aah, this is my version of a perfect vacation. I do proudly accept that I’m boring