How to -

As expected, it’s a pretty simple upgrade process, you won’t have to do anything other than saying “yes” when it asks if you want to upgrade to Android 2.2.

You will receive a notification when the update is available over your network which asks “A system update to Android 2.2 (Froyo)” is available. Please download and install the following important update.” This update is around 90 MB in size.

I would recommend downloading this update via a wifi connection due to size of the update. You can decline the update and try updating later when you are connected to a wifi network by navigating to Settings > About Phone > System Software Updates. If you haven’t yet received the update, Vodafone has released the Android 2.2 update in India for HTC Desire and it should be available to you shortly. If you cannot wait any longer to get the Android 2.2 update then you would want to consider unbranding your phone.

If you are wondering why there is a delay between Google releasing Android 2.2 and the update actually being available to you or why Vodafone would release the Android OS update and not Google? It is because Google create the software, HTC then adds their Sense UI to it and then the mobile operators add their branding to it which is why it takes so long.

The update is initially downloaded to the micro SD card in your phone. Then the update is installed and applied to your phone. You don’t need 90 MB of space free on your phone memory as the update is downloaded to your memory card and then installed. You don’t need to free up phone memory or uninstall applications before updating. I had merely 30 MB space left in my phone memory when I downloaded and installed the update and faced no issues.

Once the download is complete the update prompts you to install the update. You will not be able to use the phone during the update installation i.e. you cannot make or receive calls during the update. The phone is shutdown, the update is installed and then the phone reboots. If everything went fine then a pop up is displayed which says “Congratulations your phone has been updated successfully to version x.xx.xxx.x”. Don’t worry if this number is not 2.2 as this is not the version of Android but the version number of the software build.

After the update you can navigate to Settings > About Phone > Software information to see your updated Android OS version number.

Android System Upgrade

What’s new –

There are some very interesting upgrades available in Android 2.2. Some of the changes I noticed are–

1. Wifi tethering.
2. Portable hot spots – These two are brilliant. I love them.
3. Move applications to SD card.
4. Flash not installed but Flash Player 10.1 can be downloaded from the Android market.
5. Blue tooth voice dialing – I haven’t tried this yet.
6. Cloud to device messaging – You can download applications that enable you to do this. For e.g. Chrome to phone.
7. It boasts about the Dalvik VM, a Just In Time compiler which is supposed to make any computation 2 to 5 times faster than Android 2.1
8. Video recording at 720p.
9. Multi language stock keyboard.
10. An app sharing icon showed up on my phone. I wasn’t able to send some apk files over Bluetooth, perhaps now I can transfer.
11. A cool flash light application from HTC showed up. I liked that.

There are many other minor changes. You can find all the new user features, platform technologies, developer services and APIs here.

What’s not good -

Well there are a few features that I personally didn’t like about Android 2.2.

1. Move applications to SD card – yes, this is a feature but you cannot move applications to the SD card unless the application is developed to be installed on the SD card. So, that means most of your applications will continue to stay on your phone memory.
2. Task killer cannot be used as the ability to kill an application from another is removed in Froyo.
3. I didn’t find any difference in the much talked about Camera interface and the zoom gesture to check out lots of pictures.
4. An inconvenience, I don’t see it being talked about at all but I kind of find it annoying. The keyboard layout is changed a little bit for e.g. the positioning of “:”. As I am used the older layout of the keyboard, it’s annoying and it will take a little getting used to.

My final word, I love it.

I fished around looking for more information about account suspension and how to contest one. I was clueless why my account was suspended because according to twitter's how to contest a suspension guide I should have received a mail reasoning the suspension but I hadn’t received any such mail. I knew for a fact that I don’t spam. I don’t use my twitter account for any unlawful. I then stumbled upon the Twitter rule list. I ran through to see if I had broken any of Twitter’s rules. Well, that made me feel like I was in school – Beware, You don’t follow our rules, and you will be expelled.

Within two days the support ticket was resolved. My account was un-suspended and I also was given a reason this time around. My account was suspended because it supposedly demonstrated abusive behavior that indicated I had signed up for prohibited third party services. I was also asked to be careful in the future not to give my username and password to potentially abusive sites, as these sites may make automated posts to my account and cause account suspension. I checked for the third party applications that I had provided access to and there were only two such applications – Twitpic and mgeekmobi (I must have given this the permission while using Dolphin browser on Android). I don’t know if these applications were responsible for Twitter to suspect, but for now I revoked their access.

You can check the applications you have provided access to at the Twitter connections page and revoke privileges of any third party applications that are posting unauthorized updates to your account. I was also urged to change my password as they suspected it could be compromised and I obeyed. You can never be too careful.

Now, am back on twitter. - @Pavanred.

I had walk about tickets to the GP – street circuits sell you tickets that allow you to walk around the track and watch the race from wherever you want in other words you don’t have a seat. These tickets were more souvenirs than just GP passes.

Race Day: I was with my friends and we reached the Marina Bay street circuit right after lunch. There were a few other races that were going on when we went in. Well, that set the tone of the evening and also gave an essence of what to expect. It was loud, unabated pure engine noise and I was overwhelmed already. There were Porsche, BMW races going on. We were then walking around the track looking for good spots, slow corners and high speed straights from where I would like to watch the F1 cars go by.

We found a lot of vintage cars parked in the arena as well. It was all too good already but just then it got better.

The night fell, it grew darker and the entire circuit was lit up by artificial lights. It was awesome, brilliant. We were all set and anxious for the race to start and a while later all the drivers did a lap in the vintage cars we had found earlier and the crowd went ballistic. And the live commentary on the loud speakers all over the race track just made it better.

We had picked a spot by then to watch the start of the race – we were standing just before turn 10. I had studied the circuit before I left for Singapore actually and it was a good spot as cars would come down the straight at about 240 KM/H and would slow down to about 130 KM/H going into turn 11. And in addition to that there was a huge screen that was showing the race live so that meant I wouldn’t miss the racing happening everywhere else other than turn 10.
Right across where we were standing was the old Supreme Court (If I remember right), it was a magnificent building and it looked more like a palace under all the race lighting. Well, the city's skyscrapers in the back drop looked marvelous as well. The drivers did the warm up lap and I just realized how much faster and louder F1 cars were compared to other races I saw earlier that evening. The drivers did their warm up lap and it was all set to start the race.

The 5 red lights went off and the race began. We could see the race start on the huge live screen. The cars approached us and there it was the entire pack of 22 F1 cars one behind the other, revving ferociously past us before we could blink. The First lap from my camera..

I was just awe struck. That is when I got a real sense of how much more a F1 race is than what we see on television. The cars are loud, no I mean LOUD. If you are close enough to the track then you can faintly smell the burning rubber. There is a loud cracking sound when the F1 car brakes, as though something broke off and surprisingly this sound is not picked up by microphones – Neither have I ever heard it on TV nor did my camera pick it up when I filmed it. You watch closely, you can see the brake discs of these cars are glowing red hot. Honestly, I was just amazed at looking at the cars zoom by in front of me, for the first few laps I didn’t even bother keeping track of who was leading the race.

These two pictures were captured by my freind Ajayram. He was on the F1 trip along with me and by these pictures anyone would have guessed, he is a photographer. If you look closely you can see the brake discs of the Ferrari glowing red hot.

We then kept moving, we first walked through the park to what I was told is the Esplanade drive. This is long straight where the cars touch up to 280 KM/H. On this stretch I swear, if you blink, you miss the car.

We then walked straight down to turn 15. This is a turn where the cars brake from around 280 KM/H to about 85 KM/H. If that is not spectacular enough, they turn and then go revving full throttle all the way from second gear.

This is the part I can’t explain. I will tell you how loud it gets here – all this while I was saying it was loud and I was enjoying every decibel of it but at this point I put on the ear plugs because I was pretty sure that if I hadn’t I would perhaps go deaf. Watch this; I am sure the video doesn’t do justice. Nevertheless listen to the engine roar.

We then took the MRT subway underneath the race track to go to turn 8 and turn 7. Turn 8 is where the car goes closest to you. It’s almost like if you reach over the railing you might touch it.

I didn’t get to do two things though, which I had planned or rather hoped to do. First, eh… I wanted to see a F1 crash - well that didn’t happen. Second, to walk on the circuit after the race and perhaps collect some race debris souvenirs but turns out the walk about ticket doesn't allow you to walk on the track after the race is over.

The race eventually came to an end, Lewis Hamilton won. I wasn’t supporting him but I really didn’t care. I had just lived one of the best nights of my life. I was overwhelmed. Even after everything, the race, long night, after I got back I couldn’t sleep. Every time I closed my eyes I would hear a F1 car. It might sound funny, but its true and I loved it, every bit of it. I also made up my mind that I would visit and watch many more F1 GPs to come.

Teenagers doing drugs, people in depression, people crazy about money and driven by greed, depression due to material loss, failure, lack of love – all these are the results of the systematic pre complied thought process loaded into the people’s minds right from their childhoods. The more appropriate word for this would be today’s so called ‘education’.
All these problems arise due to our so called sophisticated form of education. These methods and practices just defy logic. For instance, the way children are brainwashed in the name of education. Fairytales – these stories hamper the thought process right from the beginning. The first stories that the children listen to and comprehend paint a picture with shades of black and white and also always portray a ‘lived happily ever after’ ending. The real world is everything but black and white. Every person displays shades of grey; every person is good and bad, because there is no good and no bad. Good and bad are definitive only when they are subject to a reference. There are no happy endings rather there are no endings. We shadow the real world and showcase an ideal nonexistent world. The children learn, believe and trust these only to grow up and learn that the real world is everything but this.

Educational institutions enforce uniforms to help the children not notice and help them overcome the social and economic disparities amongst each other. But, this too is the exact opposite of what the reality is. They learn that everyone is equal and get to the real world only to learn the huge social and economic disparity they have to live with. So then coming to terms with it is a very huge challenge.
If there was no offloading of opinions, such as doing drugs is bad on to the children the way we do. Teenagers are lured into drugs, but don’t you think that this is just because there are swarms of people, books, magazines, movies, web pages etc saying do not do drugs. If something is prohibited so evidently, it is obvious that this would drive curiosity. Ever wondered why there could be so many other drugs which are a lot more addictive in nature and available legally in the drug stores but people stick to the illegal drugs. Why should anyone risk so much when they can get many other addictive drugs legally. It’s just that we forced everyone to be curious about a few drugs. If we hadn’t given any idea then they would have tired and/or perhaps just had their own opinion about drugs and I am pretty sure then we would have a lot fewer addicts around.

Every movie you watch, every book you read, ever song you listen to is going to describe an abstract idea of an eternal love story where everyone is going to find a special person who will be perfect for each other. But, this is where the system sets the bar so high, sets the expectations so high that anything different will result in disappointment and eventually into disbelief and depression. Had no baked idea been given to anyone, they would embrace life as it comes and would have loved every moment of it.

I had heard this joke a while ago – “being good and thinking the world will be good to you is like hoping the lion won’t eat you because you are a vegetarian”. The real world does not follow the rules of karma or what goes around comes around. Life is just a set of random events with no pattern but we feel comfortable to conveniently find a parameter that can define these random events – luck. So, if you are not lucky then no matter how good or bad you are, you will be screwed over and over again. There is no divine intervention which restores the balance of good and bad.

Divinity, oh hell! This is by far, the biggest of them all. Hadn’t no idea been given to the people there would have been confident people walking around who had legitimate opinions which they arrive by thinking on their own. There would be people who believe that any life situation is under their control. But, we had to put down the entire theory of God and his/her existence. Thus making people dependent, complacent and forcing them to place their belief in an alter ego instead of themselves. Also, Making people less responsible for themselves.

Just take my word, stop feeding opinions and your beliefs to other people, especially children. Encourage original thought because in today’s world it’s very scarce. Let people think and decide for themselves instead of undermining everyone’s capabilities and enforcing rules. Which would just make a majority of them only rebellious? Why does the governance underestimate the people so much and think that people require constant parenting. If we look deeper, the problem is the parenting. Stop feeding thoughts. Let people think. Think on your own. Like George Carlin says – A lot of bullshit’s coming your way. Detect and avoid it...

If you don’t agree with me, well that’s good, you are thinking on your own