26 June 2015

Most hilarious spam I have gotten in some time…

Read the email I got. This is too funny!! This is the response I sent her. Read the spam email before reading the response.

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Dear Dolores,
First of all, I am really impressed with how smart you are. Not too many people with email ids janeczkadesrosiers@yahoo.com would make it easier for their readers by introducing themselves as Dolores. I come from a country of seemingly unendingly long names. We should have thought about that before.

I am glad that you liked my photos. And as you pointed out, there was a strong and reliable man in those pics. However, unlike your conclusion that he was behind the picture, I am pretty sure that he was in front of me – taking those photos, in fact. Although, I am a little confused how those new fangled selfies and selfie-sticks work these days. Maybe you are right.

You fell off the chair? You should have seen how I rolled off the floor!!

I have to say that I was most relieved when you referred to your errr… errr…. those “amazing” things. After the recent legalization of gay marriages, you can only imagine how worried I would have been if I had gotten this from somebody without those errr… errr… “amazing” things!!

I am also glad for you that your other “errr… errr… thing” is “something”. Personal experience has taught me that something is better than nothing.

Finally, regarding something interesting about myself… honestly, I am not that interesting. My first wife in fact called me “quirky”. I consider myself somewhat of a dumb guy. As an example, I cannot still figure out which one of the five guys in your “To” list were you talking to all this time.

Anyways, have a good day..

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BTW, all of you readers, who are worried at my reference of “first wife”, RELAX. I am still married to her. I just don’t have any empirical evidence to conclusively establish that she is the last one. 🙂

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Category: Humor | 15 Comments on Most hilarious spam I have gotten in some time…
21 June 2015

Chalupa run

Summer is here!! We have youngsters and not so youngsters joining us for our run. The youngsters found a convenient place to take rest as the adults were finishing up their runs!!

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Category: Running | LEAVE A COMMENT
20 June 2015

Foiled!!

The idea was to put in a heat run to build endurance. So, at 2
PM, as the thermometer crossed 90 degrees, I hit the trail for a 10K run. Was working up a good sweat when suddenly out of nowhere came these bunch of clouds followed by some sharp showers. All that was left was a thoroughly drenched iPhone and self and near 100 percent humidity!!!

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Category: Running | LEAVE A COMMENT
19 June 2015

An interesting new friend from Verona

My family and friends were all roaming around Verona – ostensibly visiting Juliet’s house and Arena and all that – as I was going from street to street talking to people and whenever possible, downing another glass of Barbera d’Asti. Then a shop caught my attention – it was a fountain pen shop. A very small one at that.

Anyways, I went inside and looked at the pens on display. None of them caught my fancy but I did strike up a conversation with the elderly gentleman sitting there. I asked him if he had any true original Italian fountain pen in a fine tip. I also showed him a picture of the collection I have. It was immediately evident that he did not come across fountain pen dieahards too often.

Before I knew anything, he locked up his shop and took me for a walk to another place – and there was a much bigger fountain pen shop there. He introduced the lady inside as his wife and introduced me to her as a “collector” (first time ever I felt vaguely cool about myself). They sat me down and told me the story of his family over a cup of capuccino.

I got to know how Rudi’s – that was his name – father had applied for a license to open a fountain pen shop in 1939 in Verona. Italy, under Mussolini, was in the middle of the World War that time and it took him a year to get license to open a shop. And he dedicated his rest of his life to making pens and selling them. His son and daughter in law later expanded on that business. They do not make any pens now but sell high end fountain pens. manellapens.it is their website.

He then handed me a book on history of fountain pens from Italy and refused to accept money for that. I did land up adding two more to my collection – an original Delta (which is I think the only real Italian fountain pen company left – it is like the Alfa Romeo in cars) and a MonteVerde (which started in Italy but is now produced in USA also).

Finally, I took a picture of them and promised to stay in touch!!!

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Category: Fountain Pens, Vacations | 6 Comments on An interesting new friend from Verona
16 June 2015

Real life puzzle from Italy

Here is an interesting puzzle that we faced in real life a few days back. We had come back after a beautiful day in Verona and finally we were all ready to retire. Next day we had to leave for Rome early in the morning and that posed a logisitics issue. We had four rooms in our resort – one for our daughters, one for Sunil’s sons and one each for the set of parents. Now the resort we stayed in gave us only one door keycard for every room. Once you entered the room, you had to put in the keycard in a slot next to the door and that triggered the power in the room. Without this, the lights and AC wouldn’t work.

The issue was that while the adults were ready to sleep a little after midnight and wake up early, the kids were notorious for sleeping much later and showing no signs of getting up till 10 am. No amount of knocking on the heavy doors had helped in the past.

The puzzle was how to wake up the kids early next morning. We needed to enter the room. But the keycard was required to be inside – else the power would not work. Thus we could not possibly enter the room.

So, as a first shot, I yanked out the key from the power slot and put in a paper card of the same size. That would not work. I put in a credit card. That would not work either. (If it actually worked, obviosuly, the parents would keep their kids’ room keys with them and use them to enter the kids’ rooms next morning and wake them up). Later I found out from the resort folks that indeed only a hotel card would work for the slots. Apparently the hotel cards had a chip inside (not the magnetic strip) – which is what they programmed when they gave us the keycard. The door cared about the room coding. The slot reader however, did not care how the chip was programmed – it just needed to detect a chip in the card at the right place.

We were way too lazy to come out of the building and walk up across the resort to the lobby to pick up extra cards.

BTW, Sunil had a bright idea that let one parent sleep with one kid that night – which would have worked, but the kids immediately voted the idea down. But we did find an elegant solution.

Can you solve it?

Category: Puzzles, Vacations | 15 Comments on Real life puzzle from Italy