South Africa do an India .

by losing to Bangladesh - So the win against India wasn't a fluke - the match wasn't fixed and all that to all those losers who went around burning the effigies . Greg Chappell's gone but Dravid stays on. Its been a while since I have been delighted by someone losing and I was backing Bangladesh all the way yesterday .

The last few days have seen a lot of noise and chirp about Indian cricket and the way its the system which sucks and our players who are treated as demi-gods when the team wins and then worse than dirt if they lose. Its possibly to do with our psyche and as my mom's grandmom would say with an old Tamil proverb "Veccha Kudumi Saracha Mottai" .which means that either we are all punks with waist long hair or with a completely shaven pate that resembles more the MCG with lights on... Some balance guys or we'll never achieve anything ...

Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

I went to the new Landmark store that's opened here in Pune to see if I could pick up a copy of Mike and Psmith that I had ordered a couple of months back . However discovering that it wasn't available promptly picked up Colin Forbes' 34th and last thriller. Colin Forbes is an author that I have read since class 9 and I usually manage to pick up one of his books either when I am travelling or haven't read anything interesting in a while.

The central character in all his novels is the head of the British Secret Service or the SIS as it is called Tweed. Tweed spends most of his time looking out for the Brits and saving the world and Britain from total destruction . His enemies in the time of the cold war were the Russians and the Eastern Europeans who morphed once into the Al Qaida . However his favourite enemies in recent times were huge conglomerations lead by rogue industrialists. There's a familiar pattern to Mr. Tweed's madness and there is a method too! Hence the weird title in the honor of Mr. Tweed .!

Rest in peace Mr. Forbes - I shall have to go searching for a new Tweed pretty soon !

Marching towards a century

It was the ides of March when I started writing this particular post.I now see that the blog is approaching the century mark . 5 posts to go and I should be hitting a century here not to mention other places where I have hit centuries before . Certainly my high school maths teacher would be hopeful !

I had a brief and wacked out trip to the silicon valley for a bunch of meetings and conferences. Returning to India meant that I was jet-lagged on return rather than during the trip. The return journey got me back through a very fogged out Hong Kong and I spent the time curled in the large airport doing nothing much but hogging and reading.

Post that I managed to force myself to drive the 590 odd km between Pune and Hyderabad to meet an old friend A . Now A is an HR professional and for the first time in life I ended up in a room where a person from a non-HR background was in a minority. Must say that it was a unique experience and not hearing too much HResque was worth the time. I thought that it had become a part of their common speak , but then P , A's wife is another non-HR entity and that saved the day for me. Anyways I am raving and writing crap, so let me stop here for today.

The valley and eclipsecon.

In the valley - ostensibly the mecca for all software developers for some meetings I managed to find time to attend eclipsecon and listen to Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert . The stories he put together regarding why some of his cartoons never made it past editors also made for Dilbertish episodes. IMO there's Dilbertism in any and every organization that exists on Planet Earth and more so increasingly in India given our requirement that everyone becomes a manager . We all seem to contribute to a chain of actions that don't seem to result in anything useful but a set of meetings. As one of my former customers used to say about some of his other customers A & B. If A and B needed to do a project to tie shoe laces , they would need 467 meetings across a year with every tom dick and harry who thought himself or herself (now we have to be equal oppurtunity ! ) to be useful to the cause to talk about a plan, a contingency plan, risks , accuracy of estimates from engineering before 1 day of engineering could be done to tie their shoelaces !

Progress....

Blogging this technically after the weekend and feeling generally bored about Monday mornings . Spent the weekend catching up on some movies which was a good way of spending the whole of Saturday night. Watched Blood Diamond , Crash , Mistress of Spices, Walk the line , Dor and what not . After a long time stayed up till 7 in the morning. However the result of that activity is that I slept through the whole day getting up only for meals and more sleep . Listening to the music of Pachai Kili Muthucharam streaming over the internet on totem on ubuntu . Now thats really progress as far as Linux goes. It used to be a pain to get sound working - you needed to know myriads of options and what not to get it working - alsa - oss and some other black magic . Currently its just a simple install and everything works like magic. Now now like my uncle says that a computer is useless unless it makes food for him , I wouldn't be surprised that very soon we should have a linux powered robot which doubles up as a cook . The day such a product is made - I'll gift it to him.

Comfortably Numb"ed"....

The Sunday was spent in driving down to Bombay for the big Roger Waters - Dark Side of the Moon concert. Wow! it really was worth every picometre covered in the drive . The concert started bang on time and finished on time too. In the middle was all the fun - quadsonic sound, flying pigs, a number of taunts at the war(s) in Iraq and above all fantastic music. It was worth every single second spent there and every single drop of sweat spent in standing in a huge crowd which was bent on crushing every person standing ...

By the time he got to the Dark Side of the Moon the crowd was totally primed and roaring. Shine on you crazy diamond was received with absolute adulation and then once the band finished playing the Dark Side of the moon . they disappeared ...........only to make you feel cheated ... Then they reappeared to play the all time classics - Brick in the wall, Vera , Another Brick in the wall leaving the audience comfortably numbed...

The unexpected vacation draws to a close.

Hardly expected that I wouldn't be hacking into GCC despite sitting in the city of sweat (Madras) but then it turned out into an unexpected vacation . Here on a private visit for some functions in the family it turned out to be a lot of work in terms of running around , meeting relatives getting some decent photographs, visiting a village our so called ancestral village of Vengalathur . It was certainly a hectic trip. Today looks much better as I have to pay my yearly visit to Landmark and hopefully obtain a few books. Ah Monday Morning approaches and with it a flight at 5:30 in the morning back to what is home these days. Long week lined up but then ......

theppamcloseup

DSC_0680
Originally uploaded by ramana.r.

The actual theppam close up . This was shot from nearly 50 meters away with a whole bunch of folks standing between me and the theppam. Its the closest shot I could get to the theppam.

The theppams or the floats of Madras

Across the pale parabola of joy

The weekend has been spent in the city of sweat (Madras) and in the middle of all the rituals and festivities I found the time to go and see the Theppam (Float) festival on Saturday in Mylapore (Madras) .

This was organized for the first time in nearly 2 or 3 decades because of the simple reason that there was never enough water in the Mylapore tank for such events. Some stunning photos were as usual the order of the day - Links will be available tomorrow as I upload some of the pics - The advantage of carrying the D50 is that the policemen on duty here mistook me for a Press Photographer and allowed me full access. Some of the panoramic photos make for very nice viewing.

Other than today I need to get back to hacking GCC and finishing a patch that is long long and long overdue ! Its just not working and proves how much of a pain backporting patches can be .

Elections our experiment with Democracy !

Across the pale parabola of joy

Indeed our experiment with democracy leads to very interesting sights. This morning I was running to catch a train that would hopefully get me to Bombay in time when I ran into a huge traffic jam which enabled me to move nearly 400m in 45 min. Finally getting irritated I got out of the rick to walk the remaining 4 km. to the station lugging a suitcase and the customary uniform of the laptop, the nikon D50 and a smaller bag !

The reason for this was the result of the civic poll that was getting announced this morning near the Pune Municipal corporation . Our leaders were so busy getting elected that they forgot the very purpose for which they were getting elected - serve the people. They served the people well by indulging in squallid vote-grubbing exercises, providing free crap to people and forgetting to remember the fact that folks needed to travel. There was an ambulance stuck behind my rick and there was *nothing* that could be done to free it. There were half a dozen traffic cops who incidentally should get rid of their uniforms and go drown in the Mutha or the Mula which ever is dirtier (Mutha and Mula are the 2 rivers in the city of Pune which I inhabit) . The cops did nothing to free the roads of marauding crowds who had parked bikes and two wheelers on all the footpaths enabling the zillions of onlookers to spill on to the streets causing utter chaos, irritation and a n utter waste of time.


Its a miracle that the public didn't beat them up today. I was ready to jump into the melee if and when it started. What a waste of time , fuel and energy and irritation . Have a couple of interesting pictures which I'll put up once I have my set up going.

Of weekends , south indian movies and games of basketball.

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A movie (Guru), a game of basketball - sleep and good South Indian food is a valid weekend - Somehow have to drag myself out of bed in the morning tomorrow to either go down to Karla / Baja caves or drive down to Panhala to get some decent photographs. In any case I have a trip planned for next week down to Madras via Bombay which gives the chance to get more pictures. A highlight of the coming trip is a chance to visit the old village from where our ancestors are supposed to have migrated to the cities . Its a small village near Madras - maybe around 100 km. and can be visited in a day . Don't expect to be able to take too many photographs there but can atleast attempt.

Noses to the grindstone

Across the pale parabola of joy: "BlogT"

Its been a crazy couple of days at work looking at various things as is usually my ambit :) . Finally finally fixed a major piece of work in GCC . Hopefully now we should have some more improvements in the code generated for a particular piece of GCC that I am hacking on . This coming weekend is a long weekend for all of us ! 26th of January beckons and is good to be off for the whole weekend. However getting even with work is also important considering the amount of backlog that has accumulated over time .

My li'l sister managed to achieve quite a few interesting things like becoming the 10800'th global risk practitioner to be certified by the GARP ( Global Association of Risk Practioners ) . Everyone but her was sure that she'd crack it and as is usually the case with the boss - such things happen .

Nose back to the grindstone eh !

LLVM an interesting project.

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Spent most of my Sunday looking at an open source project and reading up on inter-procedural analysis a bit closer . It's called LLVM and looks rather neat. It gained an ARM port from Apple which fuels my speculation that the iphone is going to have ARM in it and Apple is doing some serious optimization at an interprocedural level using LLVM. But again one never knows really !

I tried getting it to build but it looks as though there are some huge API changes which have broken things just when I decided to take on a weekend project ! Its interesting that one can now think of interprocedural optimizations ... I'd love to lay my hands on that at some point of time.

Some cricket finally.

Across the pale parabola of joy At the place where I work we finally decided that we wanted to play a game of cricket and ended up challenging another company to a friendly game of tennis ball cricket ! Not too bad - we actually managed to get 3 games in the week among ourselves and had to get to a point of choosing a 11 which is a commendable achievement at the place where I work.

The day dawned rather decently and as usual I managed to get to office in time - I was the 5th guy or so in office so it wasn't too bad. We managed to reach the ground to find it totally occupied and jam packed . After a rather interesting wait we managed to throw out a couple of committed cricket teams out of the ground and started our game. Thankfully I didn't have to call the toss having lost all the tosses so far this week and left the responsiblity to A our esteemed captain fresh from a stint at the nets at the Oval. We won the toss and promptly chose the best thing to do on a typically dusty pitch - bat. We batted rather decently, gave a couple of chances and ended up with 112 / 3 in 16 overs - not bad considering our feeling that our batting wasn't up to the mark. We then managed to bowl the opposition out for around 80 runs in 15 overs with yours truly bowling what seems to be a very long 4 over spell on the trot which left me feeling as old as every minute of my existence on planet earth( nearly 14716800 at the end of the year! ). Parts of my body that I didn't know that existed are aching and its with that happy feeling that I am posting this and dozing off to sleep.

Sunset enroute to Bhimashankar.

dsc_0571
Originally uploaded by ramana.r.

From the previous post a sunset pic !

Wanderlust.

Across the pale parabola of joy

After 2 weekends sitting at home taking care of a chest congestion, it was time to break free and run off away to some place. Wandering took me on to the re-done Pune - Nasik road via Chakan. Its 4 lane until Rajguru-nagar after which it turns 2 lane - It reminded me of the Nagar - Shirdi road which is quite picturesque being in the middle of a canopy of trees. It was quite a drive, though only 128 km from Pune I did it one way in 4 hours thanks to a variety of breaks for some stunning photography . The other reason for such wanderlust is utilizing the 1GB SD card in my Nikon D50 DSLR and attempting some photographs.

Bhimashankar is about 128 km from Pune, take the Pune Nasik highway and turn off near Manchar village. You'll get to the Dimbe dam a large dam on the Bhima river from where its around 35 km. That stretch is among the worst in the whole travel otherwise its quite a beautiful drive along wheat fields, paddy fields and some brick kilns here and there. Since I spent more time in driving I ended up in Bhimashankar around 7:30 p.m.- there's a small temple for a jyotirlinga of Lord Shiva. This is supposed to be among 12 swayambhu Shiva temples in India. However because of its religious significance I didn't want to antagonize anyone by taking photographs of the temple by itself.

Left Bhimashankar around 8:20 p.m. and reached home by around 11 p.m. a drive of around 2:30 min. In the process of driving back I managed to make my car fly by going too far to the left trying to avoid a rampaging Indicab and ended up hitting a stone on the front left wheel ! There was a sound , a minute of flight and then an interesting landing. Its left my wheel in a bit of shambles.

The year seems to be the year of long weekends which will only serve to encourage me on more photographic expeditions around Western Maharashtra - some of the places that I want to visit include Raigad - the capital of Shivaji, Kolhapur to see anything of the wide Krishna river and the Panhala fort , Nasik to see Triambak and the origins of the Godavari . All this in the trusty new WagonR with or without company. !

Hello World !

Across the pale parabola of joy

2007 it is eh ? The day dawns as splendidly as ever with me expunging more and more of fluids which have ended up collecting in my sinuses.

Watched a couple of malayalam flicks over the weekend . Its interesting to note that they are slowly moving towards the Tamil masala flicks also - they are getting there.

Today's another lazy day - Possibly will end up sleeping all day to get rid of my bug !

The year endeth and a new one is born

Across the pale parabola of joy

The year 2006 draws to a close finally. It looks as though I'll be celebrating the new year sitting at home with a rather virulent attack of the flu / sinusitis. Its a miracle that the body can produce so much fluid out of the face especially with a reduced intake of fluids :P .

Other than feeling miserable, taking Woosterish concoctions of Jeeves fame trying to restore my mucous tissues to normalcy there and feeling generally as miserable as only a cold can leave you, there is nothing much to write about .


The other event of the week has been the amazing drubbing of the poms by the Australians down under - 3 days for a single test match and defeating them by an innings after having won the test series by 3-0 .

The biggest event of the day though is the execution of Saddam Hussain in Iraq - It would be interesting to see the kinds of reactions to this .

Ah sundays !

Across the pale parabola of joy

and watching India play well in a test match in South Africa was a refreshing change over the weekend. The English batsmen have learnt how to play Shane Warne, with Ian Bell actually coming down the track to him a couple of things. Makes you wonder sometimes if you are high on something or in a blue funk over the weekend. Then you pinch yourself and the muscles are still stiff from the game of cricket the other day then you realize that you aren't dreaming :) and all this is for real.

You still think that you are dreaming when South Africa are 84 all out in their first innings - now chasing 400 odd by playing hop step and jump to Sreesanth and VRV Singh and even to the odd cricket ball from one Saurabh "Prince of Kolkata" Ganguly. It was good seeing Sreesanth dish back and not take nonsense from Andre Nel who thinks he can sledge his wickets. The beauty was in the celebration which made you laugh so much and must have really helped us get under the South African skin.

Mickey Arthur ( the coach of South Africa) last heard was asking for the curator of a dust bowl from India to help even the odds for the match at Kingsmead. Bring 'em on.

The joys of playing cricket.

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Ah, the back's stiff - the shoulder's hurt, and the body feels stiff . Just proves that whatever you do in a gym and how much ever you climb Hanuman Tekdi - a game of cricket can still be a tough task . The fun factor is so much better - actually got to bowling on a pretty bad pitch and got some decent balls in. Now batting was another story - got bowled off the first ball and then run out in the second match backing up too far.

It was a typical match played in parallel to another match which was being played by the Royal Club of Nepal in honour of all the Nepali employees in the city of Pune and fielders from one match happily walked across the pitch of the other when the bowler was just about to start his runup . Reminded one of the times on the hallowed turfs of RKMVC ( for the uninitiated thats RKM Vivekananda College where one spent many hours of his wild undergraduate days improving his vocabulary in Tamil and playing the game of cricket. !) and the grounds of MRC. Though our MRC ground has turned into a posh apartment complex and robbed us of many days of fun .

Sunset in Vancouver

Sunset in Vancouver
Originally uploaded by ramana.r.

This the photo finally.

Bangalore the city of joys, traffic and pollution

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Any trip to Bangalore a city of many sobriquets gives a vision of the future for Pune. Ostensibly on a private trip I realized how much similar Pune was to Bangalore in the lack of public transport, road infrastructure, traffic congestions .. Log jams well the very definition is in Bangalore. Thank god we are still some way away from being Bangalored !

Other than the trip over the weekend and the last 2 days of last week it was good to talk to a couple of old friends and figure out what they were upto in the grand old profession of being a geek for hire.

James "Bollywood" Bond.

Across the pale parabola of joy

One fine day - Let the team bond with James Bond was the mission of our new management in the company I work at :). So what do we do , we went for the opening day festivities associated with the new James Bond movie (Casino Royale ) .. We could always afford the tickets earlier, no one really pushed us to go see a movie together earlier !

The movie by itself wasn't all that bad though it was quite Bollywoodish . MIA were Q and MoneyPenny though there was a subtle reference to her in the movie. It wasn't a typical Bond movie though Daniel Craig reminds one of Boris Becker - The usual ingredients were there but missing was a usual noisy Bond exit. Somehow Pierce Brosnan and Sean Connery really are the good James Bond's ...

Daniel Craig tries but he still has a way to go .. But then this is the prequel to all the other Bond movies, so maybe he'll be more suave and the complete package next time.

Worth a watch though.

Beryl and Edgy - The revenge of the weenie

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Wobbly windows on your Intel 82865G card... You must be joking was the polite answer at work by the rookie geek at work 4-6 months back when the XGL / Compiz mania hit the geeks at the place I work . The more macho answers ranged from asking me to grow up or drink something stronger than ethanol.

Today I have the cube, wobbly windows AIGLX working on my Desktop with the following.

root@numenor:/home/ramana# lspci | grep Graphics
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82865G Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 02)

And how long did this take me .
Time for an aptitude dist-upgrade to edgy eft
Time for google to find out install instructions for beryl

Figured that AIGLX was already there in edgy. So bye bye XGL .
aptitude install beryl emerald

$>beryl-manager ... .

And now the cube rotates !

You can see it here

Darn! STill can't get xine to play the movie across the edges of the cube. :(

Giving Thanks !

Across the pale parabola of joy

Thanksgiving approaches and this means freedom from calls with customers on a Friday evening. ! Not that I am going to do much about it. I'd possibly be sitting and watching TV at home or doing some other very interesting task like playing with my computer ! Ah no this year round it means that I get a chance to play with my new D50 that I nearly broke !! On a relatively divergent note I saw a beautiful lens today 80 / 400 zoom got some real good pics with it from within a house. The good part is its worth around 20k first hand and I am getting an old lens for nearly 13K which isn't all that bad.. But to use it I need to get out of office more in the evenings .. Thanks to Benjamin Franklin for Daylight Savings which makes this task even tougher for yours truly ....

Some joys at work !

Across the pale parabola of joy

Spent some time in the last couple of days reviewing some documents in addition to the usual GCC hackery that I do as a day job. However today I discovered a new piece of open source software called Frysk that allows you to monitor and debug multi-processor, multi-threaded applications .

The old head maintainer of GDB has moved over to work on this project and some of the screenshots look real good. If folks want to look at it its available at http://sources.redhat.com/frysk. How effective it will be only time will tell.

Oor Koothu a.k.a Orkut.

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It has been reliably learnt from informed sources that Orkut is derived from the Tamil Phrase (Oor Koothu) which literally means Gossip in the Town . It appears to be the latest craze among Software Engineers in the list of "Most Useful Things to do betwen long builds"... Thank God for slow C++ compilers which tend to get slower with every release :) .. Now we understand why Compile time increases irrespective of whether run time decreases or size of the binary generated decreases. :), the GCC maintainers need more time on orkut.

Last heard activists from Amnesty International were working towards removing such recreational sites and creating a Generational Activistic Zoological site which goes by a strange acronym called GAZZAG.

P.S. Orkut is actually named after its Turkish name of people of people to meet. The TamilNadu govt. suspects that Turkish is also derived from Tamil and hence might make Istanbul the next destination for the Tamil Conference for the improvement of Tamil.

Noise pollution

An excuse is all it takes for people to create noise in Pune. It was the Ganesh festival, before which was Janmashtami and now its Navratri. So the celebration is for the devis but it ends up creating such a huge noise pollution that things are totally screwed up . This week they started playing songs all in the main throughfares of Pune causing huge traffic jams which resulted in me taking a 3 hour drive home on Thursday . Its faster to get to Bombay :).
Finally found the time today to get a large number of photos organized and put up online. Phew its such an exercise of patience. Anyways have to take some more good pics soon :) .

Gandhigiri and the story of sequels.

Across the pale parabola of joy

Morning it is on a lazy Tuesday. Have to get into work but am down again with a bug - not the software one but more the viral kinds. I managed to get to watch Lage Raho Munnabhai with the family on Sunday . This possibly is the first case where I have enjoyed the sequel better than the original. A nearly 3 hour movie and not once did I feel it dragging anywhere ! Really a good job. Arshad Warsi again takes the cake in this with what will be an immortal dialogue - 225 kidnapping kiye 260 logon ki haddiyaan todey lekin ek baar sorry bola aur andar kar diya mujhey.

The beauty of the movie for me was the way in which Gandhiji's ideals have been conveyed to the public in the typical tapori language of the average Joe in Bombay. The situations portrayed are all typical to what a lot of Indians face in their day to day existence, right from the son who loses his father's money in the stock market, to the old pensioner who needs to bribe a corrupt babu for getting a signature to receive a paltry pension from the state.The differentiation between the idol worship that we do for Gandhi by naming more areas, streets and setup statues of Gandhiji in every single park and the ideals of Gandhi are the things to be noted.

Thats possibly the reason that so many of us identify so closely with this movie. I am not convinced that Satyagraha will work always , maybe the process is more deterministic I don't know but it did work some 60 years back when we won our freedom. There are already stories in the newspapers of people starting clubs in Pune to follow Gandhigiri . Dadagiri is what usually works on the mean streets of India but maybe maybe after 58 years since Gandhiji was killed there's a chance that his ideals might again gain more relevance and credo among a generation of Indians which is become increasingly materialistic and thinks of his ideals as being irrelevant .

Best of luck to Mr.Kareer the municipal commissioner of Pune, who's the latest target of Gandhigiri with respect to the abysmal state of roads in Pune. To paraphrase the Times - "In India we drive on the left of the road, In Pune we drive on whats left of the road"

Pot Pourri`

Across the pale parabola of joy

Bombay or Mumbai as it is called today is such a huge melting pot for all Indians. You can find people from all over India over here - the taxi drivers from UP / Bihar , the merchants from Gujarat ,the stock brokers from Maharashtra and the general white collar employee from Tamilnadu. This is the 4th weekend away from home, travelling all the time. 1 weekend in Pune followed by 1 in Chennai-Frankfurt-Vancouver,the next in Vancouver and now in Mumbai to meet the parents despite a fever and the horrendous jet lag. The next weekend will find me again in Mumbai and 2 weeks later I need to be in Madras for a wedding .This is serious travel :) . Interesting eh.

Anyways enough of the rant on travelling ,I must say that I enjoy it while I do it and watch all the different people travelling . The trip back from Vancouver last week was interesting in its own right. Vancouver to Frankfurt had a large number of European and North American folk with a number of people of origin in the orient and yours truly representing one of 2 people from the Indian subcontinent. I was seated in an inner seat with an Italian on one side and a German couple on the other side . Interesting people to travel with. The Italian could not believe that anyone could be such a
strong practising vegetarian that he didn't touch beef or bacon. He was extolling the way strangely in which airline beef was served and going into some graphic detail.

I tried listening patiently but after a point decided New York Nagaram , the latest AR Rehman hit was worth listening to in comparison to a discourse on the essence of being a non vegetarian.

Getting off at Frankfurt to take a connecting flight
lead me in a bus across an Air India air plane. Interested readers would note that I have a healthy disrespect for Air India, but that day I must say that I was quite glad to see something Indian and the sight of Air India actually made me happy for the first time.

Finally after the regular duty of buying duty free chocolates I made my way towards the departure gate for my flight back to Bombay. And look what do I find ... More Indians , more people trying to jump the line and making a total ass of themselves in the line on the plane.

But boy was I glad to see some more fellow Indians despite them behaving the only way we really can .

The reassuring sight of the Times of India before boarding the plane was worth it. If in India I don't give it more than a cursory glance but that day I was so starved of news that I read it cover to cover.

Hmmm music.

Across the pale parabola of joy

Other than the joys of dropping your new D50 the day after buying it and creating a nice big hole in it , stress testing the Nikon really works :) ...Played with the soft-float madness for ARM for sometime . Its really a bunch of crap really especially with 3.3.2 . Someone I knew wanted libc built with soft float and it turned out to be a mess worse than I expected.


Spent last nightwatching Jillendru oru kaathal .Interesting movie and some of the songs are rather good. New york Nagaram finally brings back the Rehman of old and his singing has come up leaps and bounds. Its about a guy singing about his loneliness in New York- please note : it seems to be whatever Bollywood can do Kollywood can too . Finally the hero ends up in New York ..

Hmmm interesting ..

A weekend that was and will be.

Across the pale parabola of joy

A weekend that was amazing and that promises to be interesting .. Last Sunday M and Z managed to make me bike nearly 27 km all around Coquitlam. It was further from where I got to and I surprised myself by being able to bike that far.

Got some good shots on the old analog camera and will develop them some time. The next set of things I did this week is managing to acquire for myself a new Nikon D50 camera . The digital SLR is good , gets good photos and I can connect it to Ubuntu and it treats it like USB mass storage. Nothing I need to do . Transferred the photos and voila !

A weekend in Vancouver ...

Across the pale parabola of joy

Finally the weekend arrives albeit 12 hours later than India. It feels odd to be in a place where you wake up when everyone back home is going to sleep or winding down for the day . Finally got used to the idea that it could be close to dusk and the time could be 6:20 a.m. on your notebook (well my notebook still runs on Indian time) :) . Everything is opposite to back home inclusive of the brakes on the bikes, the right brake is the back one and the left one is the front brake. Well everyone can say we in India are exactly opposite.

The first 2 days were spent in just recovering from jet lag and getting better from there on. The temperature is 25 in the day and 10 at night. Early mornings are so cold that if you are out of the house you can see frost coming out of your mouth ..

Managed to half bike and half walk all the way to a place called Rocky Point in a place called Port Moody . It took me nearly 2 hours and managed to exercise my camera finally and that works ! Long needed exercise with just a long walk and a bit of biking.

P.S. If the weekend starts 12 hours later it ends 12 hours later too ... Now thats a thought to bear :))

9500 metres above the sky..

Across the pale parabola of joy

Sitting 9500 metres above the sky this is an interesting blog before the battery runs out in my notebook . Having utilized a larger amount of my battery time until now nothing much is left but to be left to the devices provided by Lufthansa for all sorts of entertainment :) . Ended up chatting with my cousin while up here in the sky which is good fun.

Achtung Bitte.

Across the pale parabola of joy

Sitting in Fraport (Frankfurt airport) since sometime in the morning german time and catching up with email is quite interesting. The best part has been the ease with which trusty ol' zirakzigil works with Ubuntu Dapper to get the best access point , but paying so much money is kind of interesting. Anyways its in the credit card and we'll catch it sometime..... The thing that hits you is the change in language and despite the efforts to have announcements in English its funny to make out stuff which is written in Yes Prime Minister, (wok upztairzz , take ze train for zerminal B ) . I can now understand the sentiments of poor travellers who visit our country with its Tamil announcements down south, or Hindi announcements up north and the havoc differences in accents make... Was sorely tempted to buy an ipod but decided against it on grounds of fiscal soundness. :) .

So sitting down getting my laptop charged and will then end up boarding the aircraft in the next few minutes or so.

Out of hibernation...

Across the pale parabola of joy


Its been quite crazy the past few weeks getting everything organized and the first weekend since I got posession of a brand new Wagon R . If you want to see it here it is on the Maruti site . The car is awesome despite Maruti and is a testimony to Suzuki's engineering successes ! Fitted it promptly with a Kenwood stereo and Blaupunkt speakers ... The resultant effect is quite worth every penny spent....

Parents are here and looking forward to a trip to Bombay sometime tomorrow. ! Its been good getting good South Indian breakfast and dinner, something that has been missing for quite some time.

If only....

Across the pale parabola of joy

Well the title of this post is rather strange and it comes after a couple of interesting weeks in life. The highs of France reaching the finals, the lows of Zizou being red carded out in the finals ... The lows of not checking stuff before talking to a client and the highs of generating code that run at 184% the cycle count of an earlier release. The scare of 7 bombs in the city of dreams where your sister resides and being unable to reach her on phone ... Phew its been a roller coaster ride to say the least! Ok - now thats the understatement of my life :) .

Ended the week with a re-run of the classic movie You've got mail and realized the disruptive power of the internet. However though not everyone is a Joe F-o-x and you don't run into a Kathleen Kelly everyday though the mind boggles at such a possibility. What would any one do under such a situation ! What would I do ... And yes it all happens only in movies ! But then some of them are a true indicator of possibilities in real life aren't they !

Rain Rain come soon.

Across the pale parabola of joy


The rains are here now in full swing. The Indian Meterological Department after a month of wrong predictions about the monsoon hitting on time has finally got it right by predicting bright sunny weather when it actually is grey , dark and totally dreary. The rains are here and have started washing away the top of every single decent road in Pune. Its good that yours truly has managed to sell his car and is on the verge of a new car. Well however second and third thoughts are peeking up about the purchase of a car at this point of time. Rumour has it that the PMC has commissioned more contractors to make sure that the work started by the rains is completed by huge telecom operators, contractors and the PMC itself. For those who don't know what the PMC is , its the Pune Municipal Corporation.

Sheer brilliance

Spent yesterday evening watching the Netherlands Ivory Coast match . Boy ! what a match it was. Total attacking football from both sides , though it was punctuated by quite a few ridiculous refereeing decisions during the match . There should have been a penalty given in favour of Ivory Coast, play acting by Bommel and Van de Saar should have not resulted in cards for Kone and Drogba . . Anyways that was that. Inspired by this bit of play yours truly decided to go play some basketball after nearly 4-5 months today . Got totally killed in the process. Metacarpal bones that I didn't know were present got exercised, a poor guy walked right into my 6 feet nearly 90 kilo frame (there I go giving my weight away ! ) and came away worse for the wear. He literally bounced off me , was funny to watch but not for the parties concerned in the incident.

Otherwise nothing noteworthy to note . Yet another weekend slideth in and is half way out .... ...

Goal !!!

Across the pale parabola of joy


Its been quite a weekend . Punctuated with food , sleep and all the sporting events. The World Cup for soccer began on Friday and is one of the things that a lot of people have been looking forward to. The second test match between India and West Indies began in St. Lucia and Virender Sehwag's pyrotechnics made up for the lack of pyrotechnics yet in the World Cup . He made 99 of 75 balls and took 21 runs off a Dwayne Bravo over. Was too sleepy to watch Argentina take on Ivory Coast late last night though it was interesting to watch Beckham bend it and Carlos end it in the England - Paraguay match. Later Sweden couldn't overcome their opening match blues against minnows Trinidad and Tobago. Today was good as one watches Arjen Robben star in a Dutch win Serbia and Montenegro . 3 matches in a day would be too much of an overdose .

Back in the land of the monsoon

Across the pale parabola of joy

Ah, its a relief to be back. One week is all that it takes for the weather to change from hot dry and extremely tiring to cool pleasant and windy . Yes folks the south west monsoon seems to be here, though it isn't raining that much yet here in Pune but the weather is very much better. It did rain in Madras on Saturday night but it was punctuated with a huge power cut that stretched the night.

Work is good, normal small fires doused with no real effort . Have a rough bug still to solve which should take up this week.

Vacation bluezzz

Across the pale parabola of joy

Vacation and as usual I am in the city of the sweat. Attended a couple of weddings , a Tambrahm American Maapillai (son-in-law) engagement and then a week of R&R (rest , recuperation!) and clearing up the house which is getting a much needed coat of paint .

Attending the weddings was a bit of a nightmare with quite a few aged R's trying to get yours truly hitched up . It was easy to escape pointing fingers at my sis S and my cousin C . The high point of the wedding was being able to play with my 4 month old nephew A and his twin sister A , yeah they are both A's and getting my shirts chewed off in the process. The other nice part was meeting up with all cousins some old and well known and the others new and met for the first time. It was quite interesting to meet a 70 year old lady who claimed to be my cousin. We are one huge happy Tambrahm family paraphrasing Tom Hanks in You've got mail .

The other few days were spent in visiting a Tahsildar's office for handling some red tape, clearing off old books and getting rid of as many of my old books as possible and looking at old correspondence with the aged R's . I have actually spent a week with minimum interference on the wide wide internet and not responding to many official emails !Now thats an achievement !!

Saar coolie

Across the pale parabola of joy

The weekend was spent in travelling down to Bombay yet again and acting as a porter and a driver for my sis ! Acted like a responsible elder brother for once and surprised the aged R located down south in Madras. Returned to Pune later in the evening. These day trips are getting interesting and I am figuring out stuff about my Zen and handling it is improving. Its doing good by giving me 19 to a litre and allowing me to travel from Kothrud to Kurla in 2:15 min. Not bad at all I'd say . Ofcourse there are certain well-wishers who'd flay me alive for driving like that including a certain reader who's a regular off RSS feeds from this blog.

Of Catalan Devils and the Gunners

Across the pale parabola of joy

Sitting at home and being able to finish off quite a few issues with work and then to be able to sit back and relax at home in a dark room listening to Floyd was one of the cheap thrills in life . Was up late last night hacking on the monster that the GNU tools are and having fun at that and watching Barcelona come up trumps against Arsenal. Was a pity that Thierry Henri could not finish off the catalan devils but with Arsenal leading 1-0 at half time i thought half the battle was won. It was remarkable the way Barca came back to trump the Gunners from London. Now looking forward to the big thing , the event of this year would be the World Cup which is just around the corner. Parts of Pune don't have ESPN because of issues between the cable operators and ESPN in terms of license fees . My cable subscriber does though provide ESPN so its alright to now look forward to an invasion from friends who can't get to see ESPN in their areas.

Life though is good otherwise but sitting alone at home is slowly losing its charm , and being a compiler geek enables your social life to be a total zero with the result that friends you thought were bosom buddies think that you no longer exist !

A walk on the hills.

It was a good day today. Spent a lot of time in working on some estimates for a project and finished them just a few minutes back. Spent 2 hours in the day meeting up with a friend and later in the evening met a gaggle of friends from my college days.It was good fun especially walking up and down the hill behind Fergie and sitting and catching up on old times. I hadn't done this in the past 6 years so it was worth the climb and must have cost me a few cms off my waistline. .. But it was not to be a peaceful ending. I discovered that I need to drive down later during the day whenever I get some much wanted sleep to Bombay to help Shark figure out some new places. So rough day , week month ahead. Now I start counting days off for my vacation :) . Its now 13 days away . Yahoo.. But as with all vacations, I know I am going to end up writing proposals for projects. :P

Telugu and Gulute

Why are Gults called Gults ?

I have asked so many people this and the most popular answer according to us Tambrahms is that gult is a derivative from the word gulute which is the reverse of the syllables from the word te-lu-gu . I have heard an extension of this which might be rude to all the gults who read this and a good friend of mine, whose name is that of a calculator will murder me for this.

Apparently in the Rayalaseema district the rural folk keep a tokri full of puli rice and gongura (one of *the* hottest pickles that this country has the honour of producing and someting that all gults need to catch up on when they are back in homeland ) which they get up and have first thing in the morning without doing anything else. The next thing they do is to take a shower , walk out on the road , finish your work and on the way use either a twig or a toothpaste to brush. So the day's 3 major tasks are done in the wrong order hence the word te-lu-gu is reversed as gu-lu-te and gult is a short form for that.


I should mention here that this is hearsay and could very well be a tamilians rant against our fellow Indians slightly north of t-nadu.

Of Right Hands and Left Toe Nails

Whats the relation between the right hand and the left toe nail ? Other than using it to clean the dirt or remove the toe nail , there isn't much relation right ? With the result that the right hand and left toe nail don't communicate and end up not knowing each others capabilities.


Its a thing that you expect with bureaucracies as eulogised in the immortal Yes Prime Minister. A minister in the EU had a portfolio to pay French farmers to grow excess wheat, while a German minister in the next building paid German farmers to destroy excess wheat. A story that repeats itself in today's software world time and time again . The moral is the same, the context is different. Its no longer wheat, its u "boot".

Traffic road rage and what not.

Driving down today back from office saw an interesting sight. A bike cut across a car and there emerged a missile which I later recognized as a coffee day plastic cup .( Disclaimer: It was not yours truly :)) Road rage seems to have reached its heights now. Other than that got the car decked up a bit and fixed a few things . Setup a CD player . Now better music while driving.

Sultans of Swing !

Who would that be now ? The latest kid on that list would be Irfan Pathan who seems to end up getting a wicket with his first over . Or would it be Richard Hadlee ... or would it be Kapil Dev India's only all rounder for ages now. Would it be Sir Alec Bedser ? Or the great Pakistani bowler Wasim Akhram , someone that a lot of Indians grudgingly admire. I still remember that one over in Sachins test that he bowled to Rahul Dravid. 5 balls to which the Wall had no answer going this way and that ending up with the last ball breaching the wall and clipping the top of the off stump.

Ok why such a post ? As you can guess I got bored of looking at bugs for the day and spent some time listening to Dire Straits rendition of the song with the same title. The good thing will be to set up my router tomorrow if and when Iqara delivers it and finishing work on my loop bug ! I seem to be bug squashing only loop bugs or bugs that end me in being in loops !

The weekend away .

The news is that I finally got my broadband and cable modem connection @ home from Iqara on Saturday. Now in the motions of securing my Desktop as well as setting up stuff on it. Moved up the desktop from unstable Breezy to Dapper . Now I truly run ubuntu. Its fast , decent and good fun . The speeds were so good that since I had to go to Shirdi overnight and return on Sunday afternoon, I set up a download of the entire Dapper package repository. Timing this gave me a time of nearly 100MB an hour , the whole set of packages got downloaded in 5 hours. Now thats super cool !

The other event in life was travelling to Shirdi and Shani Shringanapur overnight to get some piety into life . The village of Shani Shringanapur is amazing. Till this day and age , no house in that village has a door or windows. Well not even toilets and bathrooms have doors and windows. Its supposed to be a "swayambhu" as far as the idol goes and is supposed to be good to visit if you are having a rough time on account of Mr. Shaniswara !

The new year that was.

Apparently today was a major major day. It was Tamil New Years day , Vishu (The mallu new year day) , Bihu (Assamese New Year) and Dr Ambedkars bday . With the result that there was enough food at home to make sure I worked from home. Well there was vada and paayaasam ( kheer for all ye Northies!) , then rice sambaar, rasam and curds . Not to forget the papad also made.

However the traffic was even more terrible, thought that with the firang masters enjoying Easter Weekend it would be cool on the roads but on the contrary got stuck in a traffic gridlock that ran for nearly 2-1/2 kms. This was a stretch that I usually zip around at 60-80 kph , today I did this in nearly 40 minutes. Terrrible. And why was this ? There was a procession. Whats this city going to ?

Now they have floodlit golf in the Pune golf course. What they forget is the fact that we have powercuts for 3 hours everyday while ppl can enjoy golf !

Ground hog day

The day before the Tamil New Year. Never realized it so much until today when I spent time in cleaning up some bugs in a super expensive super testing suite provided by some folk out of Europe in the 4.1.1 port that I am doing for a wireless soft modem DSP . Also managed to grind out one more bug out of the earlier 3.4.5 version that we have running now. :) .. So can breathe easy tomorrow and start looking at slightly more interesting stuff like why dhrystones are slow !

A method to madness

Life is quite excellent these days. At the end of the day driving is such a pain that one enjoys working from home. When you do that you enjoy the heat in Pune where temperatures are now touching 40 degrees. I pity the English team thats playing cricket now in India and specially in the dusty bowls of Bihar and UP. In such a situation what can one do but relax in a pool in the evenings after the heat goes down. Its awesome in the pool to cool down after a long days work . The only reason to reach office is to sit under the AC to cool down ! Add 3 hours of power cuts daily at home its such a pain to get anything done sitting at home ! When will this great state get some sense and decide to build some power plants !

What a waste !

Tough long day today . Got back home early enough , but can't sleep now . Traffic in Pune is getting really terrible with the amount of vehicles. Took me an hour and a half to get from the airport to home . I estimated it to be half the time. My clients should not hear this or they wouldn't trust the estimates I made with my Software Projects;) . In any case when we reached home , the lights were off. Its amusing to see that people in Pune can play Golf at night when the rest of the city sweats and faints under the heat . There isn't enough electricity for Small and Medium Enterprises to do work , they need to idle for atleast 3 hours a day , but the blasted golfers need to play golf between 5 p.m. and 10 p.m. when there is peak demand for electricity . What a waste and what misplaced priorities as a nation. No wonder Maharashtra is going the Bihar way !

What a waste !

Tough long day today . Got back home early enough , but can't sleep now . Traffic in Pune is getting really terrible with the amount of vehicles. Took me an hour and a half to get from the airport to home . I estimated it to be half the time. My clients should not hear this or they wouldn't trust the estimates I made with my Software Projects;) . In any case when we reached home , the lights were off. Its amusing to see that people in Pune can play Golf at night when the rest of the city sweats and faints under the heat . There isn't enough electricity for Small and Medium Enterprises to do work , they need to idle for atleast 3 hours a day , but the blasted golfers need to play golf between 5 p.m. and 10 p.m. when there is peak demand for electricity . What a waste and what misplaced priorities as a nation. No wonder Maharashtra is going the Bihar way !

Wake up Kumbhakarna

Ah , Here we are again..New day , new slate ! Time to wake up and blog again. Life has so moved on ... .Summer's here and the heat is oppressive. ! Did 3 trips to bbay since my last one. Was good driving on the eway at 140 - 150 yesterday. Did the drive back from bbay to pune in 2hours flat ! Now that was some heck of a drive . Now figured out 3 routes out of bbay to drive back. One the traditional , chembur -> mankhurd -> panvel route , the second eastern express way -> airoli -> panvel and the final to take the airoli->belapur -> panvel route which is a much better road and skips kharghar.

Spending more time hacking gcc, got a few bugs which are interesting... I hope the new age cells unite and make up for all the existing pains in this world. ! This will be clearer in the next few days !

Bombay and back ..

Across the pale parabola of joy
Drove down to Bombay and back over the weekend and indulged in some serious retail therapy in additions to the joys of driving my car on the express way. Did the onward trip in 2.5 hours and the return in 2 hours and 17 min inspite of a 10 minute petrol cum phone break on the expressway . Driving in Bombay over the weekend was also good fun , with me managing an average speed of nearly 60-70 kph on the Pu Dru Mahamarg ( Its the eastern express highway ) , the highpoint being that on the way back from( Mulund to Chunnabatti , we needed to turn into Nehru Nagar turning near Kurla ) we didn't stop at a single signal . Wow !! The distance of nearly 16 km done in under 18 min. Wow !! Try that in Pune... I travel less in Pune (14 km to office from home) daily and it takes a good 30-45 minutes depending on the time I get out of home :) .

Also caught up with Rang De Basanti again on Sunday and managed to visit my old prof at IIT Powaii. Enjoyable trip overall :) .

The Delhi Metro and Akshardham

2 of the modern Indian places of wonder are Akshardham in Delhi and the Delhi Metro . For the first time in the history of modern India Delhi has organized neat public transport which is dependable, punctual , neat, modern and one that puts Delhiites in a queue :) . Wow ! Travelled on it to get to Ritesh's place over the weekend and getting there from Civil Lines was darned easy . Just buy a ticket, change over at CP and get onto the blue line. Rocking I say . Also train timings between the Yellow and Blue Lines are perfectly synchronized that you can get off a train walk to the next platform and you get into the other train . Wow ! Clockwork and punctuality did you say :) .

The other miracle was ofcourse Akshardham. Having seen some teasing pictures of this on the web I wanted to see it in person, again one can say that the pictures don't give you an imagination of the experience. Again wow , does this exist in India along with the hooligans in Puri , the touts in Kapali temple in Madras or the cheats at the Taj in Agra. You have organized entry, security checks that would do our airports to shame, organization and pipelining to the very best in terms of scheduling for resource utilization. There is a huge temple or meditation centre formed in the name of Swami Narain with sculptures in marble that make you wonder if such art was possible again in India, art and sculpture equivalent to the grand old chola days and something that might be equivalent to Mahabalipuram or Hampi. Also the audio video show was very well organized and a boat ride through the mythical Saraswati river and with information the vedic period etc. Yeah it does bring out the poet in one self but so be it :) ....

Again another time to bid adieu to Delhi though I would have loved to have met a few more of its temporary inhabitants whom one may consider friend.

Bollywood and Linux Asia

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Resurrection ?

Resurrection for zirakzigil, my laptop. After a hurried flight down to Madras due to the untimely demise of my grandpa ( a great man) who is to some extent responsible for me being the kind of hu"man" that I am , I discovered that I had suffered another bereavement, that of my laptop hard drive being slowly eaten up by bad blocks . Other than a couple of things being lost, nothing much since most of it was backed up in office spent the whole of Friday in resurrecting my laptop installing ubuntu and possibly setting up a mirroring system with another usb hdd that I acquired in the past. Also in this I must give due credit to IBM who got me a new hard disk in no time whatsoever.

A tale of 2 minute hands.

A clock in Bristol , UK has 2 minute hands. Why may I ask ? Apparently there exists a Bristol standard time which is 10 minutes behind London . http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/info/bristol-time.htm. That certainly calls for multiple minute hands in a lot of clocks here in India. Very very interesting and truly brit thing to do . I am pretty sure us Indians would also do the same thing considering all that we have inherited from them :)

The deep end can be fun.

Its been a good weekend. Slept most of it thanks to a drill of 2 hours in the pool on Saturday . The deep end usually has been a lot of fun as far as my work has always been concerned, but saturday was literally spent in the deep end of the pool . The feeling of floating with just a tube supporting the many tubes around your waist ;) was real good fun. Cycling across the pool, figuring out how to keep breathing and kicking in turn to get the breast stroke right was also rather good fun.The good part of this whole exercise has been that for a week I have successfully managed to do some physical activity to stretch the parts of the body that I had kind of forgotten totally about for a week in continuum. (Mom are you reading this ?? ) Well I certainly hope so :) ..

Anyways thats that... Sunday is over, spent the evening watching Munna Bhai MBBS a rip off on Patch Adams though Boman Irani, Sanjay Dutt and Arshad Warsi as Circuit were awesome and spent the whole time laughing my head off. Tomorrow's Monday and the day beckons. ...

Hello World 2006

Hello World 2006. The first post in the new year and it has to be a hello world :) . Spent the New Year weekend playing Monopoly which was a classic game replete with diabolical strategies, mergers & acquisitions, meeting threats to the existence in the game. Wow ! it was a blast. Also spent some time watching the extended edition of The Lord of the Rings (ROTK) on a friends HDTV . That was also awesome.

The other things I did was to catch up on 3 crappy Tamil movies, one great Tamil movie by a new director called Cheran who seems to come up with one hit after another. This one was called Thavamai Thavamirundhu and Raj Kiran and Cheran himself essayed among their best performances. I expect this should win some more awards. It really was well made. The other thing I did on the last day of last year was to enroll in a swimming course. Right now learning how to kick in water, and float so that Mulshi (circa 2003) does not repeat itself. :)

Other than that, the same old work in a new year . Nose to the grindstone ....

Rang De Basanti et al.

A trip to the city that never sleeps in India (Bombay) aka Mumbai is never without events. Left Pune on Sunday around 12 hoping to reach Kandivili by 6 p.m. We reached Powaii around 4 and like the enthusiastic rabbit decided to take a break and headed towards the Mocha in Hiranandani to restore our tissues after the drive down the express way. Was pleasantly surprised at my own navigational skills and sense of direction.

After suitable refreshments and procuring a copy of the latest Aamir Khan movie (Rang De Basanti) decided to leave Hiranandani at 5 hoping to reach Kandivili by 6. We ended up there at 7:30 p.m. a distance of nearly 25 km in 2-1/2 hours while we had done nearly twice that in the same time. As I have blogged earlier every trip reinforces a belief in me . Never visit Bombay, if you have to exit at the earliest . Never stay in Bombay too... Too much traffic, too many people. Yuck... It left me with a bad sinus and a bad stomach. Ended up sleeping through monday with that only to get in late into office.

Monday Mornings.

Spent Monday curled up with Muchnick , Advanced Compiler Design and stealing out once an hour to catch the match on the TV . Finally checked on the way out and saw Bhajji bowl an awesome spell 4-14 in 8 overs till I last saw it. Bhajji literally blew the dhajjias out of the Lankans... Also down under there was a new dual centurion Brad Hodge who made a good 203.

Then drove into office because I had a telecon and some meetings to attend. Good day to study compilers :) ...

Also talking to the project kids. Looks good ATM.

TGIF

Is it the time to say TGIF ..... Yeah I guess so . One of the readers of this blog did comment about the increased frequency of posts, I am sure that the reader would have had a RSS feed set up on his fancy handheld device knowing his geek value.


The reason for the increased posts appears to be time to kill before a call or some other work at the appointed hour. Finished Angels and Demons overnight during the week being unable to sleep . Its quite a don't put me down once you pick me up book ... Well written and gripping in comparison to some other books from him.... DaVinci Code was good and so was this. I somehow didn't enjoy Digital Fortress all that much.

The weekend beckons and so does the project group and one PG Wodehouse. Psmith Omnibus is kept at home just for the purpose of a good cuppa coffee and curling in the chair ..

Squashing bugs. ...

Well the house seems to have an army of bugs, so you can say that I am back to what I do best ,squashing bugs !! Pest control and Fumigation is the only resort and even that seems to have no effect. Soon the bugs shall become the camels and we the Arabs and hence get pushed out.T

Started on Dan Brown's latest book , Angels and Demons the precursor to the Da Vinci code late last night.

Across the pale parabola of the clouds.

Flew back in and could see sunlight after ages after being in a damp squib really . The stay was good and a good time pass. Ended up sleeping through the flight back and now have a couple of telecons to work out .Aargh I hate staying up late waiting for a telecon to happen . The other thing that I have done over the past week is discover a lot of old friends and new on Orkut. Hmm interesting.

Other than that the weekend was spent in reading up on the antics of Galahad and Freddie Threepwood as well as a Wilbur Smith novel (Elephant Song) . Tried reading Anthem by Ayn Rand but dozed off through it.

One good thought though at the end of it all. Back to work moron ...

Autos , Madras and small change... Chillarai Pasanga

Got up in the morning after I realized that my ticket back was not yet booked. So went out to a local travel agent to book my ticket back to Pune and hence had to travel by a rick.. As is evident from earlier posts I really hate travelling in autos in Madras since you need to haggle all the while. Well it is no better than Palika Bazaar Delhi or haggling for Alu Pyaaz ... Ended up getting a decent deal only to find that the rick as is the case with every rick that I have had the oppurtunity of engaging during the week did not have change ! No auto rick driver carries change for a 100 ever... Its quite funny that everyone says the same thing.. sir, first boni sir (means first customer) or saar romba late aaidichu... or ippo thaan petrol pottaen.

The average tamilian would be loath to part with any change if asked by a stranger for precisely the same reason. What do I do when I need to haggle with the rickshaw chap... So people who visit Madras BEWARE carry all your money in denominations of 10 and heaven forbid you need to change a 500 or a 1000 rupee note.

Phanoos appears !!

Phanoos draws closer and its drizzling.. Really dull boring day . Had to go out someplace for a presentation of sorts and its really gray skies, a dull drizzle and what not. Ended up returning in the rains and now am stuck at home. Kind of boring now not knowing what to do in the evening. Want to go out some place , might in some time go down to Spencer and just walk around. Tomorrow is another day and hopefully there should not be too much rain :(

From Baaz to Phanoos.

Thought I landed into Baaz and would take off before Phanoos, but strangely work keeps me back in Madras. Have a couple of meetings to finish off today, gonna run off after that. The weather outside looks awesome for cricket. Cloudy, a slight breeze and a very slight drizzle. So it seems Phanoos is here ! Since I am here till Monday would be caught truly in Phanoos. Anyways A has left for Lagos so it leaves one slightly bored though R & S would be good to meet up with over the weekend. C should also be free over the weekend and ofcourse there is the old homestead, parents will be glad to feed me over the weekend.

Thinking back , this reminds me of 94 / 95 when a slew of cyclones hit Chennai , it was good bcoz we got plenty of leave from school . After all I was in one of those schools that would declare leave if it drizzled ... and ended up making paper boats to run from the streams that flowed in the old homestead and just outside.

So if I drown or something Phanoos it.

Spencer Time

Across the pale parabola of joy

Off I go to spencer plaza in the evening , one of the oldest malls in the city ostensibly to look at stuff and meet a couple of friends including R, V's sister with whom I went shopping some time back in Pune . It should be good fun to roam around Madras by the day considering I don't have any calls today and get back to coding later at night . Have a couple of tasks pending for tonight which should be finished.

Mornings, Coffee and Broadcom chips

Spent a lot of time last night trying to get a few builds going and thinking about all that I was doing in life. All of us, so called geeks as I was so firmly referred to the other day end up in front of the machine at 2 in the morning and at 8 in the morning as I sit down and post this. The balance of life and work does not exist for any of us, and the worst part is that none of us geeks pay attention or bother about it since work gives us an exhiliration that very few of other things gives us.

The sheer kick in getting a piece of code working was what drove me last night to do some cool hackery to get a disassembler up for a trivial piece of hw even though we could have lived with it not happening.

The other motivation for spending so much time online or on the comp atleast for this trip seems to be the amazing piece of hardware which seems to be the cheapo ADSL modem . Its awesomely fast, has a Broadcom chip which is possibly as powerful as the K2 in the desktop we have in the old homestead. Don't worry am not posting this from that, but from zirakzigil which is atleast 4 times more powerful.

The other cool thing is that I am trying to register for LinuxAsia and talk about GCC et al over there. Figuring out the right topic and getting an abstract up and going is a tough task , but I ought to finish it today . The flip side is that I will have to be in Delhi and might miss A's engagement which I had planned on attending. Could always fly down, thats an option. The conference site is here .

Nothing much else happening here, though I have a couple of hours of driving around Madras with R who promised to scare the death out of me in a repeat of the driving skills show that I had put on for R's visit to Pune.

Mornings, Coffee and Broadcom chips

Spent a lot of time last night trying to get a few builds going and thinking about all that I was doing in life. All of us, so called geeks as I was so firmly referred to the other day end up in front of the machine at 2 in the morning and at 8 in the morning as I sit down and post this. The balance of life and work does not exist for any of us, and the worst part is that none of us geeks pay attention or bother about it since work gives us an exhiliration that very few of other things gives us.

The sheer kick in getting a piece of code working was what drove me last night to do some cool hackery to get a disassembler up for a trivial piece of hw even though we could have lived with it not happening.

The other motivation for spending so much time online or on the comp atleast for this trip seems to be the amazing piece of hardware which seems to be the cheapo ADSL modem . Its awesomely fast, has a Broadcom chip which is possibly as powerful as the K2 in the desktop we have in the old homestead. Don't worry am not posting this from that, but from zirakzigil which is atleast 4 times more powerful.

The other cool thing is that I am trying to register for LinuxAsia and talk about GCC et al over there. Figuring out the right topic and getting an abstract up and going is a tough task , but I ought to finish it today . The flip side is that I will have to be in Delhi and might miss A's engagement which I had planned on attending. Could always fly down, thats an option. The conference site is here .

Nothing much else happening here, though I have a couple of hours of driving around Madras with R who promised to scare the death out of me in a repeat of the driving skills show that I had put on for R's visit to Pune.

A smile can go a million miles.

The other reason for me to be in Madras today seems to be for my grandpa , he is over 90 and quiet ill bed-ridden after a stroke. For the first time in my 20 odd years, haven't spoken to him or rather heard his voice.It is quite heart-wrenching to see him like this but my day was made today . After we spent half an hour with this cool new physiotherapist who came over and put him up in a plastic chair and cushioned him with atleast 5 pillows he suddenly woke up from his daze and gave me a million dollar smile which seemed to say where did you come from ?

Its been 3 days here and today was the first genuine smile. Makes up for all the remote work that I need to do this week , though I would have loved to have been back in Pune tomorrow.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire were the reason my cousin C and I decided to take a trip to Mayajaal considering that all the bridges inside the city were full with Karunanidhi and Jayalalitha appearing and waving to crowds which were gathered around the slums near the river which was overflowing . Also we could not figure out if any other theatre had this running.

So off we went to Mayajaal and figured out we were 5 minutes late for the 2 p.m show and 2-1/2 hours early for the next show. Ended up spending time bowling and chatting about nothing else. Was good fun , C finally losing by 2 points with 2 continuous strike throughs and me messing up a few. It certainly was good fun.

The movie was good really worth the wait. . Really well made and sticks close to the book. The visualization with the dragons is good, Mad Eye Moody was awesome, Dumbledore good . The plot was good , though sometimes after having read the book you felt , oh well where is this episode. The best scene for me was Malfoy turning into a ferret, though the final duel with Voldemort was also worth the watch .

Anyways go see it and enjoy it.

The Adayaru Flows .....

Flew straight into tropical storm Baaz. Our folk have started naming the storms and cyclones like their American counterparts . It certainly was the most turbulent flight in Kingfisher, though my debut flight. Its been a couple of interesting days. Reached home late on Friday night, after getting a cab to drive me through sheets of water which threatened to engulf us in a stretch between Park Sheraton and the turn off to Greenways Road.

Later reached home to find ankle deep water languishing outside, a little more and we would have had water in the ground floor of the old homestead. But as usual it was good to be home again and talk to everyone at home.

Saturday was spent in the function at home with the vaadiyar filling up the house with a lot of smoke . Evening saw me go out to Trader's inn with A and P . It was good fun and saw me in full form after a long time . Finally met someone with whom I could talk EPL and talk about Chelsea , Man U . Wow ! Trader's was good, good fun after a long time and gorged really on all the food at offer. It was good especially the pizza which was not the traditional pizza hut fare . The pasta excellent, the Danish Blue Cheese awesome . Filled myself with a lot of salad, pasta , a bit of pizza et al .. Was good fun ...

After spending the night at A's place was back home in the morning, more about the Harry Potter viewing in the next post following up .

A Delhi Trip and what not.

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Back from the National Capital through the crime capital (Bombay) after attending D's wedding. D is a good old friend of mine who was getting married after a long courtship and doing the convincing act with his parents. Met up with N and A, good old friends and also watched yet another bachelor bite the dust.Driving in Delhi was good fun , good wide roads, the Delhi Metro rocks ... Took it twice travelling from Mami's place in Civil lines to CP in 12 minutes a journey which would comfortably take 30 min. by road.

Also drove back in from Bombay last night was good. Read a good post about Ambi Mamas leading the pack of TAMBRAM relatives .Reminded me of all of Pattis relatives back home .
Available < a href ="http://www.bosey.co.in/2005/05/ambi-mama-is-leading-brahmin-relative.html"> here

Off to the national capital

Finally a break . Flying off to the national capital tomorrow for D's marriage. Looks good ATM and do some timepass meeting up with a couple of friends.

Other than that work this week has been quite a bitch with meetings, documentation ,conversations with monkeys and investigating redundant pieces of code generated.

Deccan Gymkhana and Basketball.

The weekend was good, spent saturday sleeping till late afternoon after which I woke up to go practice some basketball for the great tournament debut. Well, yes folk yesterday there was a great cheer around the greater Deccan area, with a lot of festivities: I had made my basketball debut in the hallowed environs of the great Deccan Gymkhana. We managed to beat our opponents 24-8 or something like that out of which yours truly scored a spectacular 0 . Well , you might ask what was I doing, in between trying to regain my breath from running and jumping and blocking I was attempting to understand this wonderful game of jumping running which leaves you out of breath and makes you realize that the tyre around your waist has graduated from that of a cycle into a 10 ton truck .

The next game is on for later this evening . Need to finish off a few things and then run off to the court. Sounds good eh !

Pune , shopping and Asingam

Pune , shopping and asingam. It was good fun roaming around with a couple of friends , cracking useless sad jokes and generally being useless and non productive for a day . The Asingam refers to a friend who considers herself = to Asin the new tamil hearthrob , who we very promptly equated to Asin(gam) adding a gam to make her Asingam . No complaints about Asin though ;-) before people start suing me for slander.

Spent the weekend playing basket ball (hear hear first time since class 9) and watching a cool vijay movie called Sivakasi. Good fun .

Other than that nothing much else. Monday beckoned and I responded by debugging at home. Later ran out to Barrista to surface online , respond to emails from work (BSNL where art thou ? ) and then grab some coffee.

Chennai btw the least polluted city.

Atleast that ! one might exclaim . Well the roads exist and are in good condition , pollution levels are lower, the girls are looking prettier, the confidence level is rising, 60% of the auto travel in 2 weeks happened with 0 haggling. (its a moot point that the remainder ended up in misery for the rick guy getting the short end of the stick from my rather long and easily excitable mouth. ) but wtf is not raining and wtf is there no water to bathe. !

Yeah folks they forgot that water is an essential resource down there. The water we get is either brackish from the borewell or bad from the corporation. One needs to use the handpump in the old homestead to get a bucket of water to bathe !! and everywhere else the borewell water is so brackish that you can only use it for flushing the loo. !! Well this is a bloody rant at the end of a very long long day ! So whoever be the minimal readers bear with this poor soul.

Lots of good work happening in office. Thankfully will be off to the land of Wodehouse the coming weekend for a week and will get a chance to see Long John Silver and hopefully Big Ben :-)

Nothing much otherwise.

Zirakzigil and an R50E

Across the pale parabola of joy

Wonder about the connection . ? Well thats what I named my cool R50e laptop today. Zirak what you might ask. Well Gondor , Numenor, Lothlorien, Mordor were all taken in office. I also have control over Arnor, Gondor and Numenor , various machines that I have had the right to name.

Zirakzigil is where Gandalf finally killed the Balrog from Lord of the Rings. So Zirakzigil it is. It was the best name in the LOTR that I could find and the most unique one at that .

Laundry Management , Disaster Management and the great government of Maharashtra

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Rain Rain go away, come again another day . We want to dry our clothes.

Ha , the great rains. Half the city is flooded, infrastructure down the drain, driving is good fun equivalent to rally driving and the good chief minister was at the receiving end from an irate public over the weekend.

Yesterday was spent in shifting parts of my house in the middle of incessant rains, an idiotic cable operator who managed to overturn my television trying to disconnect me at my old apartment and give me a new connection at my new apartment.

The good thing about the new apartment is that there is a health club next door, a number of eating joints to take care of a poor famished software engineer and the company of a couple of good friends . Other than that watching the rivers flow at a level that leaves them just below the roads in the streams that we call rivers was good and left me thinking.

Heard on mirchi that they closed a couple of bridges near aundh and that all the rivers we know are flowing to the brim . Wah Wah ! More like this and we should be flooded soon. It isn't any better down at the financial hub of India , the corporation apparently took a couple of days because the CM declared a holiday for government instituitions for precisely the corporation to do some work atleast. Looking at this one thinks about the tsunami down south and the amount of time that was spent in getting the place back up and running. Some more thought needs to go in. Disaster management exists only on paper and the moment something unprecedented occurs most of these guys hide behind this.

The roads in Pune have simply disappeared, they have been replaced with craters, currently the main throughfares need to be avoided, the inner roads are ten times better . I lost count of the number of craters that my poor zen went through today at around 689 at which point I was more worried about getting through a traffic jam .

The great Pune craters.

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One week you are away, the rain washes away the roads. I must confess that it has been rather a pain trying to figure out where the roads end and the craters begin and vice versa since last night. Every single patch that was applied on the roads has disappeared totally and replaced with a crater or a series of craters. Add to it the misery of not finding petrol at night when you reach after sleeping all the way , priceless...

Death where is thy sting. !

The Pune Madras Shuttle.

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Ha, the Pune Madras shuttle service has begun. Came down here ostensibly for a surgery for me mum, but the surgery got postponed due to sugar levels. Any case nothing much lost, sitting and hacking . Got a couple of patches up and sent them for testing anyways. Went out to eat in Giorgios last night with A. We decided to split the cheque and thought about pulling a fast one. Both of us had expired cards. We asked for a pair of scissors, cello tape , cut them up stuck them together and gave it to the waiter telling him that we were going dutch. Expression on face : priceless :-)) ... The most outrageous thing we have ever done. Ofcourse we paid up later . Anyways this has been a nice trip since I did manage to get some work done also .

Pune and 20 degrees of temperature.

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Cool outside ,but work keeps ones collar sweaty. So its no different fro m Madras till I go back again next week.

Trying to spend time at work getting things sorted out , some interviews and what not. Read the papers on the GCC summit available here .

Compilers seem to be pretty hot these days. Some of the C++ extensions that are proposed are rather cool and look like a lot of cool work inside GCC . The other interesting paper was Linux running on the cell and the GCC / GDB port for this. The GDB port plans to implement a single session debug solution which is something that I looked at in the past with some heterogenous multicore chips. Hmmm. something that could have been.

Anyways thats the rant about work . There really seems to be no time to look at anything else these days. The next thing to wind up before I run away for 2 weeks is a set of evals.

Remember a quote "Death where is thy sting ......."

Surviving Madras.

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The last few hours of my vacation and I blog this from the Barrista on Nungambakkam High Road using a Wireless hotspot. I run Ubuntu on my thinkpad (no windoze yet) and boy does the thing work seamlessly. Setting up the connection was so effortless. All I had to do was to fire up network-admin and choose the corresponding service provider and things just worked. All I needed to do in addition was to buy a prepaid card for 50 bucks and then you have it, my day is done. Coffee , wifi access and Air conditioning all that you need to survive Madras, all available .

Spent some time rummaging through the older Landmark store at Gemini close to this place, the listening posts have all disappeared, dont know why , so ended up not buying any music though I managed to buy my share of music earlier this week at Music World.


Hmm things certainly have changed down here. The MRTS (Mass Rapid Transit System) works finally . People are not fraid to flaunt whatever, the noise levels in Barrista certainly give coffee day in Pune a good run for its money, wireless access points to boot and what not. Its a resurgent Madras and am proud about my acronym today (themadrasi) . If it were only not for the weather this place rocks....

Some other survival tips in Madras
Do haggle with the autorickshaw driver
Don't agree for the first price with the rickshaw feller. (they expect you to bargain, so give them that pleasure . )
Do drink a lot of water. (H2O for all ye chemistry buffs)
Don't drink too much coffee .
Do make sure you have air conditioning everywhere. ( too bad the autos don't yet have airconditioning. )
Do get out early .
Do visit spencer plaza or Barrista on NH road.
Do take a siesta.
Dont take a bus.

Madras, A sweaty break.

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Woh, 42 degrees and counting. Walk out of a cold shower and then you start being covered in your own sweat at the end of 5 minutes. Considering my sedentary lifestyle back @ Pune, Madras might just be the place to be to lose weight by just dummy sweating. Spent the day tying up some loose ends, finish my courier seva for a friend and then meet up with a couple of old buddies later in the evening. The other great thing is that I am using a AMD K6 500 with Windoze 98 and can't use my brand new thinkpad since the usb adsl that touchtel provides does not have linux drivers. I have to get to the bottom of this.Maybe I should get online from a cyber cafe and use aptitude :-)... Never underestimate the power of debian / ubuntu.

Movies , movies more movies.

Spending the weekend catching up with movies that were missed , watching them. Saw a few new ones like O Brother Where art thou, finally caught up with Million Dollar Baby and saw Ram Gopal Verma's latest offering D Company. Though not directed by the man himself. it still pales in comparison to his earlier offerings like Satya or Company. The good part is Hooda's quiet no nonsense attitude as D and acting , but the additional story around is a little bit too quiet. One rather funny technique was the emphasis on not having proper dialogues between the protogamists and just putting a prologue and epilogue around each dialogue. At some points it resembled a documentary on the underworld. But otherwise its ok to watch and enjoy if you want a break.

The second movie I ended up seeing was Million Dollar Baby. It deserves all the accolades and all the oscars that it received. Clint Eastwood is awesome as a reluctant old fashioned and reticent trainer trying to help Hillary Swank with becoming a boxing champ and in the process getting over his own inadequadicies as a manager. The story is narrated from the point of view of Morgan Freeman as a has been boxing champ who lost his eyes and ended up as a cleaner in the gym that Clint Eastwood runs.

Now to watch O Brother Where ar't though and all the other movies I have missed.



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Of Life, nephews and good ol' relatives.

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The weekend arrived in its usual lazy self. Spent Saturday running around conducting exams at the univ, meeting up with a couple of old friends and getting my car checked on its usual Saturday morning date with the mechanic. Ended up in office checking mails looking at code and going out for lunch at McDs . Dinner was with my nephew and niece who left the choice of the place of culinary delight to me. In as much as food was a consideration, a close enough parking location was a bigger consideration and managed to find a nice watering hole at Mayurs on East Street. Saturday evening in Pune , hmmm traffic is worse and driving was made infinitely easier by driving around in my cousins palio rather than my smaller zen. The morning arrived and with it a nephew , niece and a pint sized dynamo from Hyderabad. I have always maintained that nieces are easier to deal with primarily because they don't ask too many intelligent questions and are satisfied with nice things like food. However 10 year old boys are a different story. This pint sized 10 year old was no exception. Apart from proceeding to tear apart every single adult in the family he went on to have some serious fun in life at the expense of every single adult.

Then one discovered the only way to silence him .Put him in the front seat of any car, turn on the AC and drive on the streets of Pune. The bumps and the rather jolly rollicking and the soft purr of the engine act as an amazing lullaby on this young feller and put him off to sleep. So the weekend spent on family duties and playing the genial uncle. !

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Of Kashid, Pi and life in a hammock

It was a thursday when I got the call about going to the west coast on one of the virgin beaches dotting the Arabian Sea. The plan was to leave Pune early in the morning towards Kashid , a tiny hamlet of 820 people between Alibaug and Murud-Janjira on the west coast of Maharashtra.

The Geography.

Kashid is between Alibag a small town on the west coast of India / Maharashtra and Murud , whose claim to fame is the presence of a fort in the sea, Jal-Jazeera , built in 1140 A.D. a.k.a. Janjira in popular slang. Kashid has a lovely beach with palm trees and hammocks slung by the owners of small stalls that are the only signs of commercialization.

How to get there.

From Pune . Take the express highway to Mumbai, take the exit off Khandala and go towards Penn. From Penn take the road to Alibag and at the entry to Alibag take a left towards Rohas and Nagvas village . After a point you would cross a bridge (the landmark is Vikram Ispat) and then take a right turn towards Murud . Travel for approx. 30 km towards Revas village.The road winds through the Western Ghats parallel to the Arabian sea affording a large number of scenic spots. Finally after a climb you hurtle down a valley where the beach appears all of a sudden with a beautiful grove of palm and coconut trees with some stalls appearing on the right. This would be Kashid beach .

Boarding and Lodging.
One of the major revenues seems to be tourism and there are a number of small resorts dotting the main road to Murud, the road on which you reach Kashid. There are a couple of expensive beach resorts with costs upto 5k per couple or there are these small hotels / cottages including one in which we stayed during our trip. The beach resorts require booking in advance, in fact booking in advance might be a good idea. We were lucky in obtaining a cottage in one of the many resorts available. Sea food is apparently very good, with the non-veggies in our group going ga-ga about the idea of living on sea food, yours truly however being a pure "eggie" ended up with daal and rice and other vegetarian substitutes which by themselvers were very good.


Whats the big deal about the beach anyways ?
Quiet , peaceful and an amazing getaway from the hustle and bustle of civilization. Life without noise, junk food , television , mobile phones was brilliant ( though my sources tell me that a big cellular company is planning on destroying the peace by getting a mobile tower in place. ). Having been used to the dirt and grime with the Marina beach in Madras finding a beach where one could actually relax was phenomenal. The hammocks are strung in the middle of trees affording shade even during the hottest part of the day, combined with a cool sea breeze makes life extremely relaxing and enables one to laze away. I spent close to a day in a hammock reading a book, sleeping , eating and doing nothing much else. This in the middle of an extremely torrid Indian Summer.

The water is also amazing and extremely clean . The group of people that I went with spent most of their hours on the beach only in the water , whilst me being the lazy bum on the beach entered the water only a couple of hours before we left for Pune. Nice solid sleep left me spent on a Monday morning saying "death where is thy sting" and groaning about driving through crazy city traffic .

The Mark Knopfler Concert.

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Bombay the city which is always on its wheels and one city which yours truly detests to the extent possible forced its company upon me thanks to hosting the Mark Knopfler concert. The trip was worth it for just the concert. Went to the concert with my cousin K , his wife L and a friend M. The time taken to get to the end of the express way from Pune to Bombay was equal to the time we spent in getting to a place called Tikujenewadi in Thane (a suburb of the megapolis Bombay) . The drive to the concert took another good hour on the Pu.Dru.Mahamarg ( Purva Drut Mahamarg , the Eastern Expressway ) on which M gave a demo of his car driving skills which was equivalent to the consummate biker in Pune's maddening traffic. Thankfully we don't have too many Ms driving cars in Pune.

At the end of this reached the concert and for once there were speakers worth their salt with pretty good sound effects and for once, a concert started bang on time. No other bands playing , no one else playing before the great man , no other music to adulterate the magical sounds from his guitar which made your fingers ache for the exquisite music. Starting with the Walk of Life ,
singles from Philadelphia,Sultans of Swing, Tunnel of Love , Romeo and Juliet, he belted out some really amazing music which left one thinking about how such music could get out of the 4 strings on a guitar.

The concert ended in 2 hours but it left one clamouring for more such music. Drove back home in the wee hours of the morning and seriously considered driving down to Bangalore to attend the repeat concert. (Obviously didnt :-(( ).

He rocks !

Across the pale parabola of joy

Across the pale parabola of joy

Back to where we belong. Well its been a while and have been busy with release cycles, driving my new car down to Lonavla and back and so on and so forth.
Also spend sometime in getting some cool research done in gdb. Nothing much else otherwise with work....Keeps one occupied and busy and bored too (well sometimes). On the other side sitting in office one gets to hear amazing statements like "Let me wear my specs and listen to you "