Spending the weekend over at my sister's place I got a very interesting question - Hey can you teach me C++ since I need to do some programming for some of my financial derivative work - Now I particularly don't like C++ for the sheer number of concepts and sheer number of options to do the same thing in a C like dialect. Personally as a programmer I prefer the simplicity of C and on occasion have had to use shell , sed, awk to get most of my work done. Thanks to my own love of languages and never shirking from writing custom parsers and custom languages for some of my own projects either they be during my time at the university or during the course of my professional career I figured there had to be a better way than getting her senses damaged by the whole thing with segmentation faults, runtime errors, dynamic casting errors . Much easier with an interpreted language.
So I did some googleing to figure out what kind of libraries she needed and for what . I discovered that open source did have some kind of financial libraries and something available for the kind of stuff that she needed and that it had interfaces in languages simpler than C++.
The pain with programming in C / C++ for non-programmers is the steep learning curve with the whole jargon of CS, memory management - the absolute pain of looking up APIs and trying to make sense of doco that makes sense to other computer science programmers but not to programmers who want to do a bit to get their basic tasks done. Exposing APIs in simpler languages like python, ruby etc tries to improve the footprint of users and allows the users to solve the problems they want to rather than worry about other problems not specific to the problem domain. Also playing with an interpreted language rather than a translation system allows for interactivity and quick testing of functions along with development and reduces the pain of setup and attempting to do things differently.
So I am trying to now set up python so that she can get going with simple programming and free her mind off issues related to low level details. The library I am trying to use is quantlib
and see if we can get the relevant exposure in the corresponding languages. I wonder though if there could be a way of generating stuff or link this up with Excel or openoffice so that she can remain with her favourite tool. Interesting stuff for a weekend eh ...
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Saturday, October 13, 2007
Kashid Trip Slideshow.
This is a slideshow of photographs taken at Kashid post the trip to do the river rafting.
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
Left Forward Right back.
Regular readers of this blog would realize that this is quite an odd title . But that's my new mantra today for existence ! Read on.
It was Gandhi Jayanthi and instead of spending time sleeping at home all day doing nothing 11 of us from office decided to do something adventurous beyond fixing compiler bugs, optimization issues, graphics issues, widget and manager worries.
Something adventurous for us was a 380 km drive across Western Maharashtra starting from
Pune -> Mulshi -> Vile -> Sajad -> Sutarvadi -
The drive is exquisite , waters in the dam are full with the copious monsoons this year and the drive through roads nestled by hills of the Sahyadris left one speechless with the beauty and the impunity with which waterfalls sprung from every place. We had a raft to catch and hence I couldn't stop and take photographs there . One should go back over the weekend just to get some cool snaps around sunset especially with those amazing waterfalls just on the road.
The Kundalika River is where we decided to do some such things in life.
So at Sajad it was decided by the powers that be , that we'd end up doing something known as white water rafting on the Kundalika river. This is one of those small rivers fed by dams in the Western Ghats and irrigating the Konkan area. However from where the water is released till the time it reaches downstream there are a number of rapids intermittently created by the flow of the water over such beautiful terran. So it is possible to raft through some of the rapids , there was 1 class 4 rapid that we had to worry about. I was however separated from the rest of the gang as we could fit only 10 people in a boat and went on another boat not so surprisingly filled with more Software Engineers. One of them seemed to be a keen ornithologist and one got to see a Golden Orion and other such exotic birds on the trip downstream .
Rafting seems to be an interesting activity as long as there is enough current to pull you through the rapids. The job of the guide / steer is the most important as he gives orders to the rest of the team - we actually had a crash course in rafting for 20 minutes prior to the actual work and amazingly self preservation has a way with people obeying orders from the guide without any questions asked and practicising with utmost seriousness because of the risks associtated with the sport. I would have usually expected some smart ass to make some wisecracks there but surprisingly the crowd in my boat was rather silent.
The rapids were in increasing order of complexity-it was too bad that I couldn't photograph any of it - there was only space in my hands for a T grip on the paddle and nothing much else. The rowing commands while in a raft seem to actually be pretty simple - Forward , Back, Get Down (Means get into the raft! and not into the water ) and Stop. Pretty efficient state machine if you ask me - however it has interesting combinations like Right Forward and Left Back which means paddlers on the right side of the raft row forward and those on the left row Back. There's a technique to rowing - but its so tiring in still water that one gets really hit with the lack of exercise that epitomizes every software engineer's life.
There was one class 4 rapid John Cary as our guide called it - In all we had the following rapids
The rapids got covered in about 30 minutes of the whole trip down though the remaining time was spent in just floating through with the current till we reached a point downstream where people could swim pretty safely. Yours truly was reminded of a certain incident regarding swimming in the Mulshi Dam where there was a rebirth - so i kept my counsel and decided against getting into the water for a long time. The will was finally broken by the sight of friends of mine who'd never swam before in life swimming merrily in the water and I jumped in promptly to disappear under water for a couple of seconds. I surfaced but it felt as though it was time to call for the lawyer, bequeath my car to my parents, wonder about my tax refunds . Just when one wondered if this was it - the end one realized that he could breathe and got in a few scoops of Oxygen instead of water . This was when the fireworks display inside my head started reducing - and I was able to vaguely make out shapes on what we call Planet Earth. Things got even better, the sun was shining merrily, folks were enjoying their lazy swim in the river , the birds were flying , the vultures disappearing when a pair of hands actually pulled me up using the 2 straps of my life jacket. I didn't know that these things were so strong and pretty well maintained and got back up. I also realized that K my cubicle neighbour wanted to get back at me for all her troubles I had previously caused her in life, by pushing me into the water. Give me land and I am good , push me into water and I am worse than a baby.
In any case after this got done one got to participate in a mini regatta for a couple of kms involving 4 boats. After a spirited race where the left side paddlers in my boat decided not to row in sync with the folks on the right side, we caught up with the leaders who incidentally were my office mates in the other boat. We did give them a tough fight, though ingenious last minute matchfixing by yours truly let us reach second to the final destination.
P.S. This doesn't end here, what's not mentioned is a 1 km climb up a hill with sore legs and hands , resolves of more visits to a gym and the badminton court.
It was Gandhi Jayanthi and instead of spending time sleeping at home all day doing nothing 11 of us from office decided to do something adventurous beyond fixing compiler bugs, optimization issues, graphics issues, widget and manager worries.
Something adventurous for us was a 380 km drive across Western Maharashtra starting from
Pune -> Mulshi -> Vile -> Sajad -> Sutarvadi -
The drive is exquisite , waters in the dam are full with the copious monsoons this year and the drive through roads nestled by hills of the Sahyadris left one speechless with the beauty and the impunity with which waterfalls sprung from every place. We had a raft to catch and hence I couldn't stop and take photographs there . One should go back over the weekend just to get some cool snaps around sunset especially with those amazing waterfalls just on the road.
The Kundalika River is where we decided to do some such things in life.
So at Sajad it was decided by the powers that be , that we'd end up doing something known as white water rafting on the Kundalika river. This is one of those small rivers fed by dams in the Western Ghats and irrigating the Konkan area. However from where the water is released till the time it reaches downstream there are a number of rapids intermittently created by the flow of the water over such beautiful terran. So it is possible to raft through some of the rapids , there was 1 class 4 rapid that we had to worry about. I was however separated from the rest of the gang as we could fit only 10 people in a boat and went on another boat not so surprisingly filled with more Software Engineers. One of them seemed to be a keen ornithologist and one got to see a Golden Orion and other such exotic birds on the trip downstream .
Rafting seems to be an interesting activity as long as there is enough current to pull you through the rapids. The job of the guide / steer is the most important as he gives orders to the rest of the team - we actually had a crash course in rafting for 20 minutes prior to the actual work and amazingly self preservation has a way with people obeying orders from the guide without any questions asked and practicising with utmost seriousness because of the risks associtated with the sport. I would have usually expected some smart ass to make some wisecracks there but surprisingly the crowd in my boat was rather silent.
The rapids were in increasing order of complexity-it was too bad that I couldn't photograph any of it - there was only space in my hands for a T grip on the paddle and nothing much else. The rowing commands while in a raft seem to actually be pretty simple - Forward , Back, Get Down (Means get into the raft! and not into the water ) and Stop. Pretty efficient state machine if you ask me - however it has interesting combinations like Right Forward and Left Back which means paddlers on the right side of the raft row forward and those on the left row Back. There's a technique to rowing - but its so tiring in still water that one gets really hit with the lack of exercise that epitomizes every software engineer's life.
There was one class 4 rapid John Cary as our guide called it - In all we had the following rapids
- Laughing Buddha - The easiest of the lot, we got our real life training sessions here for implicit obedience to the guide.
- Pumphouse - Little more complex - was a series of class 2 rapids , pretty simple in comparison to some of the others but after the serenity of Buddha was an interesting and long drawn affair.
- Morning Headache - It should be renamed to Monday Morning Headache - This was a class 3 rapid that was also managed pretty well. All the while the guide was taking us into the rapids in the best possible way and giving everyone a fair and thorough drenching.
- John Cary - A class 4 rapid. The only place where we had to "Get Down" . Get Down in rafting is to get into a defensive position holding a line that runs around the raft and brace for life and hope that you don't get thrown off. This was v. interesting . There were a number of times when one thought that you'd get hit .
- Rajdhani Express - Am not sure of the class of this rapid though one thought it would be a class 4 rapid. This was long and drawn , the last one but pretty fast and long like the Rajdhani Express.
The rapids got covered in about 30 minutes of the whole trip down though the remaining time was spent in just floating through with the current till we reached a point downstream where people could swim pretty safely. Yours truly was reminded of a certain incident regarding swimming in the Mulshi Dam where there was a rebirth - so i kept my counsel and decided against getting into the water for a long time. The will was finally broken by the sight of friends of mine who'd never swam before in life swimming merrily in the water and I jumped in promptly to disappear under water for a couple of seconds. I surfaced but it felt as though it was time to call for the lawyer, bequeath my car to my parents, wonder about my tax refunds . Just when one wondered if this was it - the end one realized that he could breathe and got in a few scoops of Oxygen instead of water . This was when the fireworks display inside my head started reducing - and I was able to vaguely make out shapes on what we call Planet Earth. Things got even better, the sun was shining merrily, folks were enjoying their lazy swim in the river , the birds were flying , the vultures disappearing when a pair of hands actually pulled me up using the 2 straps of my life jacket. I didn't know that these things were so strong and pretty well maintained and got back up. I also realized that K my cubicle neighbour wanted to get back at me for all her troubles I had previously caused her in life, by pushing me into the water. Give me land and I am good , push me into water and I am worse than a baby.
In any case after this got done one got to participate in a mini regatta for a couple of kms involving 4 boats. After a spirited race where the left side paddlers in my boat decided not to row in sync with the folks on the right side, we caught up with the leaders who incidentally were my office mates in the other boat. We did give them a tough fight, though ingenious last minute matchfixing by yours truly let us reach second to the final destination.
P.S. This doesn't end here, what's not mentioned is a 1 km climb up a hill with sore legs and hands , resolves of more visits to a gym and the badminton court.
Nasik Triambak Shirdi Bombay Shani Shinganapur Panchvati
3 cheers for the roads and the beauty of Western Maharashtra. If anyone would have told me that I could do this in 1 weekend with hardly any effort I wouldn't have believed them . The fact of the matter though is that I've managed to in one fell swoop cover stretches of Western Maharashtra that have been on my wish list for ages now. Its my 9th year in Pune and only now have I managed the trip to Nasik .
Nasik is about 200 km from Pune and boasts of the origin of one of India's mightiest rivers, the Godavari. It derives its name from the Sanskrit word Nasika which means nose. Legend has it that this is close to Panchvati where the nose of Surpanakha the sister of Ravana in the Ramayana had her nose cut by Lakshman . The Godavari or the Ganga Godavari as it is known here flows in a merry stream maintained rather well by the Nasik civic authorities. However I wonder what would happen in Jan or feb when the monsoon rains would have stopped and the dams would no longer remain so full.
The places to visit in Nasik are Panchvati, kala Ram Mandir, Seeta Gupha, Triambak, Godavari Khund. if you are a pilgrimage fanatic then this be the place.
The Seeta Gupha is among the most interesting places to visit. Psychologically this is the place where you realize how much thinner you need to become and the dangers of that last piece of dessert and that one last ice-cream and that one small spoon of sugar in your coffee. Now for the literal story - its a small little cave with idols of Ram, Lakshman and Sita but the approach to it is so small that only one person can enter and that too on their knees or on their haunches. You literally crawl down have your darshan and get back up in a similar undignified position. Thankfully I had a friend to push me down in case one got stuck but then he just had 2 small school going kids who'd have had struggled to pay him the same compliment.
Anyways the story ends with me not having to be pushed out of the cave and making it back safe and sound to write this one.
Nasik is about 200 km from Pune and boasts of the origin of one of India's mightiest rivers, the Godavari. It derives its name from the Sanskrit word Nasika which means nose. Legend has it that this is close to Panchvati where the nose of Surpanakha the sister of Ravana in the Ramayana had her nose cut by Lakshman . The Godavari or the Ganga Godavari as it is known here flows in a merry stream maintained rather well by the Nasik civic authorities. However I wonder what would happen in Jan or feb when the monsoon rains would have stopped and the dams would no longer remain so full.
The places to visit in Nasik are Panchvati, kala Ram Mandir, Seeta Gupha, Triambak, Godavari Khund. if you are a pilgrimage fanatic then this be the place.
The Seeta Gupha is among the most interesting places to visit. Psychologically this is the place where you realize how much thinner you need to become and the dangers of that last piece of dessert and that one last ice-cream and that one small spoon of sugar in your coffee. Now for the literal story - its a small little cave with idols of Ram, Lakshman and Sita but the approach to it is so small that only one person can enter and that too on their knees or on their haunches. You literally crawl down have your darshan and get back up in a similar undignified position. Thankfully I had a friend to push me down in case one got stuck but then he just had 2 small school going kids who'd have had struggled to pay him the same compliment.
Anyways the story ends with me not having to be pushed out of the cave and making it back safe and sound to write this one.
Saturday, September 22, 2007
The Ganesh Festival- Pune's time in the sun.
Its the middle of the Ganesh festival here in Pune and as usual the streets are rocking to Himesh , AR Rehman, Anu Malik and who ever the latest as we say in Hindi "dhinchak dhinchak" music star is . The great Lokmanya Balgangadhar Tilak started this in the late 19th century as a way of national integration , introspection and a way to unite our disparate masses. But now in the name of tradition and culture we are carrying this a bit too far with all the extravagant spending, the extortion in the name of the pandals, loud music from walls of speakers and drunken dancers in the middle of the street even at midnight.
Its fun for some but its definitely not my cup of tea. Ofcourse the pandals by themselves make for fantastic photographs at night but when there are suicides by farmers in the countryside and powercuts and black-outs for nearly 12 hours in the rural areas of Maharashtra it seems quite hypocritical to indulge in such forms of fun.
Having said all that however the amazing energy, the crowds , the sheer joy of watching different plays, acts and themes for the idols of Ganesha is an experience worth having. As usual I suspect I'll be going along with a group of Swedes and explaining the stuff having not done this in ages. Its time to bring on the D50 .
Its fun for some but its definitely not my cup of tea. Ofcourse the pandals by themselves make for fantastic photographs at night but when there are suicides by farmers in the countryside and powercuts and black-outs for nearly 12 hours in the rural areas of Maharashtra it seems quite hypocritical to indulge in such forms of fun.
Having said all that however the amazing energy, the crowds , the sheer joy of watching different plays, acts and themes for the idols of Ganesha is an experience worth having. As usual I suspect I'll be going along with a group of Swedes and explaining the stuff having not done this in ages. Its time to bring on the D50 .
Monday, September 17, 2007
Tosegarh and Thos waterfalls.
[Enter home at 2:00 a.m. on Saturday morning after a long week's work . ]
Roomie : What's up for tomorrow ?
Me: Nothing much - gotta get back to office and work on some cool optimization. What are you upto ?
Roomie: Me am off to Tosegarh, Sajjangarh and the valley of flowers at 5:30 a.m. Wanna come
Me : What the heck - lets go .
And so began an amazing journey worth 250 photographs all shot on my magnifique Nikon D50 . Tosegarh and Sajjangarh are located off Satara in Western Maharashtra on the beautiful 4 laned NH4. Getting there was easy, we'd hired a Scorpio to drive us all the way around . It was interesting though with the driver providing us anecdotes about gruesome accidents on highways and driving at maniacal speeds on narrow mountain roads that I thanked my stars for reaching back to Pune in piece.
Tosegarh is nestled in the hills behind Satara reachable on an amazingly picturesque drive. The monsoons have left the hills with copious amounts of water which comes down in the form of a huge number of waterfalls which end up forming the river Krishna which flows through Andhra and 2tmcft of which reaches Madras through the Krishna water scheme. He he all you madrasis watch out for water that we bathed in yesterday ;) . Getting around in the waterfall is an amazing experience. The water was icecold and was gushing along at a merry pace . Getting inside the water was like getting a full body massage albeit by cold water with 15000 masseurs. The scenery as most parts of Maharashtra in this time of the year was awesome and made for some amazing photos. It sure as hell beat working on a Saturday and made for a nice break .
Roomie : What's up for tomorrow ?
Me: Nothing much - gotta get back to office and work on some cool optimization. What are you upto ?
Roomie: Me am off to Tosegarh, Sajjangarh and the valley of flowers at 5:30 a.m. Wanna come
Me : What the heck - lets go .
And so began an amazing journey worth 250 photographs all shot on my magnifique Nikon D50 . Tosegarh and Sajjangarh are located off Satara in Western Maharashtra on the beautiful 4 laned NH4. Getting there was easy, we'd hired a Scorpio to drive us all the way around . It was interesting though with the driver providing us anecdotes about gruesome accidents on highways and driving at maniacal speeds on narrow mountain roads that I thanked my stars for reaching back to Pune in piece.
Tosegarh is nestled in the hills behind Satara reachable on an amazingly picturesque drive. The monsoons have left the hills with copious amounts of water which comes down in the form of a huge number of waterfalls which end up forming the river Krishna which flows through Andhra and 2tmcft of which reaches Madras through the Krishna water scheme. He he all you madrasis watch out for water that we bathed in yesterday ;) . Getting around in the waterfall is an amazing experience. The water was icecold and was gushing along at a merry pace . Getting inside the water was like getting a full body massage albeit by cold water with 15000 masseurs. The scenery as most parts of Maharashtra in this time of the year was awesome and made for some amazing photos. It sure as hell beat working on a Saturday and made for a nice break .
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Come September
What do we remember September for - Ganesh Chaturthi , Gokulashtami, 9/11 , friend's birthdays , OSIM ?
I would remember September for the Pune Festival associated with the Ganesh Chaturthi. In as much as I hate the noise and the ruckus they create - (after all Ganesha didn't ask for the walls of speakers with Himesh Reshammiya blasting away at the top of his nose (err voice) ) , the grandeur and beauty of some of the pandals make for an amazing walk through the most crowded areas of Pune and excellent photographs.
Its been an interesting week or so. Rediscovered that the College of Engineering has a boat club from where you can get some amazing pictures. I need to cart my camera along the next time I go just to photograph the birds (of the winged variety). Just watching the egrets and the Eagles swoop over the river in an amazingly tranquil environment is rather neat. I have done some work on addressing mode generation for GCC that seems to improve performance a bit . It would be interesting to see the benchmark results that should be out tomorrow.
So September bring it on ....
I would remember September for the Pune Festival associated with the Ganesh Chaturthi. In as much as I hate the noise and the ruckus they create - (after all Ganesha didn't ask for the walls of speakers with Himesh Reshammiya blasting away at the top of his nose (err voice) ) , the grandeur and beauty of some of the pandals make for an amazing walk through the most crowded areas of Pune and excellent photographs.
Its been an interesting week or so. Rediscovered that the College of Engineering has a boat club from where you can get some amazing pictures. I need to cart my camera along the next time I go just to photograph the birds (of the winged variety). Just watching the egrets and the Eagles swoop over the river in an amazingly tranquil environment is rather neat. I have done some work on addressing mode generation for GCC that seems to improve performance a bit . It would be interesting to see the benchmark results that should be out tomorrow.
So September bring it on ....
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Mazes, Traffic Jams and Obstacle courses
Travelling or driving in Bangalore is an amazingly arduous task. Wild horses cannot even drag me to stay in Bangalore. The fact that almost every road in central Bangalore is one way and there is absolutely no way you can make any geographic sense about where you want to go . I had to drive a couple of times across Bangalore and needless to say this was a very different experience. You can't make a mistake in terms of direction and not spend another 20 minutes rectifying it because everything is one way and there are no u-turns available . The circle is possibly a favourite of the road planners in Bangalore - since you keep going around in circles thanks to the one-way's as well as in various junctions . Also the typical rule of thumb according to my friends is 7 minutes per km, so if you need to travel 13-14 km its atleast an hour and a half . The most funny sight though on my trip was this flyover from "Double Road" to Richmond Road which has a signal on top - So you climb up the flyover and drive "American style" (of driving on the right side of the road) for around 500 m and then stop on the top of the flyover to get back into Indian style of driving. For the unimaginative imagine this to be a large X with traffic moving diagonally. Woe betide any learner stuck on the incline in first gear and my sympathies for the car stuck behind.
Driving in each of India's cities is a different art - Bombay is fast , has wide roads , better planned , well co-ordinated and generally very disciplined. Delhi is chaotic but the wide roads are a life saver inspite of indisciplined drivers. Hyderabad is the epitome of lawlessness on the road. People go on the wrong side as though its a right of way. Pune is chaotic too but Hyderabad is possibly the worst traffic I have seen since there is absolutely no logic to driving there as well as wide roads and folks having the most powerful vehicles :) . Bangalore is slow , crawly , confusing and is basically a collection of vehicles that like to imitate the snail. Madras is ok , better disciplined than either of Bangalore or Hyderabad with decent enough roads. However at the end of the day if you can drive here you can drive any obstacle course or navigate through any city in the world with far better co-ordination thanks to manual transmissions in most Indian cars.
Driving in each of India's cities is a different art - Bombay is fast , has wide roads , better planned , well co-ordinated and generally very disciplined. Delhi is chaotic but the wide roads are a life saver inspite of indisciplined drivers. Hyderabad is the epitome of lawlessness on the road. People go on the wrong side as though its a right of way. Pune is chaotic too but Hyderabad is possibly the worst traffic I have seen since there is absolutely no logic to driving there as well as wide roads and folks having the most powerful vehicles :) . Bangalore is slow , crawly , confusing and is basically a collection of vehicles that like to imitate the snail. Madras is ok , better disciplined than either of Bangalore or Hyderabad with decent enough roads. However at the end of the day if you can drive here you can drive any obstacle course or navigate through any city in the world with far better co-ordination thanks to manual transmissions in most Indian cars.
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Bengaloooruu ... Hello World.
In Bangalore this weekend on a whirlwind vacation of sorts. Its good to be in the garden city of Bangalore and as I blog this after a redeye flight to Bangalore, 2 cups of authentic tamilian filter coffee, 1 plate of ven pongal and a trip on the streets one does start feeling the effect of lack of sleep for a week . It has spectacular effects on my eyes, they start turnign totally red, irritated, and then it moves into what I call the migraine zone where every part of your head starts aching with pulsating and shooting pains . Wow ! sounds interesting doesn't it ? Anyways migraine shygraine aside- it looks as though there are a whole bunch of family and friends waiting to be met in Bangalore - a 14 year old nephew and a 4 year old cousin being the more interesting of the lot .
Looking forward for a tyrst with the infamous Bangalore traffic. Morning wasn't too bad but then no one wakes up in this city till 11 , do they ?
Looking forward for a tyrst with the infamous Bangalore traffic. Morning wasn't too bad but then no one wakes up in this city till 11 , do they ?
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Ottawa Sunrise finally
Finally sunrise in Ottawa. A collage of shots from the hotel window showing sunrise on a day that I woke up at 4:30 a.m. and had nothing much to do.. 3 cheers for my D50 and amazing skyline shots ...
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Of television serials and a lazy weekend.
Its been an interesting week . One of my friends P became a father on Thursday and it was an unexpected sight to see him holding the baby when we entered the hospital room to greet the new dad . So now 3 cheers to the big daddy. Ofcourse this leads to a new domain of jokes about the new dad (oops should we say kid) on the block which I'll save for another time.
Spent Friday sick in bed with a sinus attack but later in the evening felt better to run through all the episodes of Heroes to How I met your Mother. One's a sitcom while the other is a supernatural thriller.
Ofcourse being a pretty big fan of sitcoms I managed to finish both seasons of How I met your mother in a couple of marathon sessions neither of which can be said is very good to my health . But as cliches go .. .what the hell, you only live once. I somehow relate to Ted in How I met your mother - too much planning and not doing can never do you any good in any relationship . If there's something to be said or done one's possibly better off saying it or doing it as soon as one gets the thought. Sometimes its good to be impulsive or you just miss the bus or the moment as the case might be. The gang in How I met your mother consists of Robin Sparkles Shebarski, Marshall Eriksen, Lily Aldrin, Ted Mosby and ofcourse the irrepressible Barney "suit up" Stinson. Interesting combinaton of characters and they do make quite a good combination. I can't wait for the 3rd season to get under way. I believe we should be able to see it on Star World in India. Atleast that's what Wikipedia suggests...
Ok thats that .. Nice internet break and now its time for 2 and a half men.,
Spent Friday sick in bed with a sinus attack but later in the evening felt better to run through all the episodes of Heroes to How I met your Mother. One's a sitcom while the other is a supernatural thriller.
Ofcourse being a pretty big fan of sitcoms I managed to finish both seasons of How I met your mother in a couple of marathon sessions neither of which can be said is very good to my health . But as cliches go .. .what the hell, you only live once. I somehow relate to Ted in How I met your mother - too much planning and not doing can never do you any good in any relationship . If there's something to be said or done one's possibly better off saying it or doing it as soon as one gets the thought. Sometimes its good to be impulsive or you just miss the bus or the moment as the case might be. The gang in How I met your mother consists of Robin Sparkles Shebarski, Marshall Eriksen, Lily Aldrin, Ted Mosby and ofcourse the irrepressible Barney "suit up" Stinson. Interesting combinaton of characters and they do make quite a good combination. I can't wait for the 3rd season to get under way. I believe we should be able to see it on Star World in India. Atleast that's what Wikipedia suggests...
Ok thats that .. Nice internet break and now its time for 2 and a half men.,
Thursday, August 16, 2007
chak de india.
Its been 1 hour and 42 minutes into the 61st year of our Independence and I just got back from watching the new SRK movie Chak De India. While watching it at ESquare in the 1030 p.m. show last night there was an event that quite astounded me. In the movie a small clip of our national anthem was played and everyone in that particular hall stood for the duration of the clip. Bowled me over totally. Maybe it was to do with the Independence Day spirit and all the media hype but whatever it was due to that one moment made me think about the probability of a hall full of people actually standing up for a clip of the national anthem out of a population of a billion.
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Of an English Summer...
What an interesting English summer it has been so far. The Indian cricket team pulled off a series win after 21 long years with a bunch of players some of whom would never travel again to play in England. It was very interesting that the man of the match, a certain Mr. Kumble known more for (the absence of huge) leg spin in his bowling, ( but the presence of the top spin and a veritable googly) to receive the award for his batting (the only century by an Indian in the series in the presence of the demi-gods of Indian cricket) .
Its been raining here continuously for the past few weeks and we are quite fortunate to see the sun on a couple of days. Tomorrow is our veritable independence day and yours truly is celebrating in office today listening to patriotic songs and mulling over wearing a dhoti in office. Ofcourse the problem is that wearing a dhoti in office means the risk of indecent exposure (albeit inadvertently) and the fact that the air conditioning would make me feel very cold in my legs. Being from a tropical place which has only 3 seasons (hot hotter and hottest)such impulsive acts are not so good for an old man like me.
Its been raining here continuously for the past few weeks and we are quite fortunate to see the sun on a couple of days. Tomorrow is our veritable independence day and yours truly is celebrating in office today listening to patriotic songs and mulling over wearing a dhoti in office. Ofcourse the problem is that wearing a dhoti in office means the risk of indecent exposure (albeit inadvertently) and the fact that the air conditioning would make me feel very cold in my legs. Being from a tropical place which has only 3 seasons (hot hotter and hottest)such impulsive acts are not so good for an old man like me.
Friday, August 03, 2007
Of Time management and what not.
After the trip last week to Canada, the body clock is still misbehaving and pushed me into a wake-up at 9:30 a.m. and sleep at 3:00 a.m. routine which ends up with me reaching office either having over slept or under slept or at an hour later than what I usually try and maintain (well ,at times :)) .
Time management and splitting time between office work and personal projects is an interesting piece but something one has managed to do well over time . Personal projects on some new topic provides one with an escape mechanism from the drudgery of work or a way of getting out of a problem that one can get stuck on for a long long time . Fixing bugs is also a good way of spending free time and ends up giving the author an extra fillip towards spending some more time in sorting out other bugs of his creation :) .
This is a random posting and do ignore it ....
Time management and splitting time between office work and personal projects is an interesting piece but something one has managed to do well over time . Personal projects on some new topic provides one with an escape mechanism from the drudgery of work or a way of getting out of a problem that one can get stuck on for a long long time . Fixing bugs is also a good way of spending free time and ends up giving the author an extra fillip towards spending some more time in sorting out other bugs of his creation :) .
This is a random posting and do ignore it ....
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Of a Canadian sojourn
Its been an interesting couple of weeks thanks to a sudden trip to Ottawa for the GCC summit and work related activities. It was a good trip to Ottawa, meeting for the first time, names that are so active on a mailing list and figuring out that everyone looks so different from what you expect them to be . Travelling to North America for an Indian Vegetarian is quite a daunting task since vegetarianism has been stretched to include fish and chicken in certain cuisines. However this time was rather interesting as one met an alumnus from my school and also working on compilers. Now take that for a coincidence. Incidentally he had the same teensy weensy problem that I had which was that of being a vegetarian :) So there was company to try and explore cuisine other than that provided by Subway or Starbucks or Tim Hortons ..
There's this Moroccan place in Ottawa that claims to serve the best vegetarian food and they certainly lived up to their expectations. So we survived on whatever they served us as vegetarian - the bread was a cross between an aaapam, a dosa made of Ragi something that tamilians would understand and the side dishes were made of lentils (dal) , sundal (black peas ?) and a chutney that would make the gonghura tear up because of the heat generated :) .
The dinner next day was spent in visiting a place run by Chinmaya Mission in Ottawa a 100% vegetarian joint ! (WOW!) Take that all you carnivores who sneer at vegetarians travelling to any place outside India ! In the middle of all this one managed to attend the lectures that were on at the summit , quite a few interesting ones at that .
Roaming about the malls looking for stuff strangely left me less lighter on the wallet than I expected thanks to the appreciating rupee. I bought a MP3 turn table for my parents, a Wii for the kalculator , a number of small little things here and there which were special requests from folks back in India. Last but not the least one did manage to pick up Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and finish it on the flight from Ottawa to Toronto. Enjoyed this book , she's tied up all the loose ends in this one and almost *everyone* involved in the series so far has a reference . No more school boy stuff but lots of stuff where it gets like the lord of the rings / return of the king . There are many people dead but one death makes all the headlines and that sparks some interesting reactions among people ...
There's this Moroccan place in Ottawa that claims to serve the best vegetarian food and they certainly lived up to their expectations. So we survived on whatever they served us as vegetarian - the bread was a cross between an aaapam, a dosa made of Ragi something that tamilians would understand and the side dishes were made of lentils (dal) , sundal (black peas ?) and a chutney that would make the gonghura tear up because of the heat generated :) .
The dinner next day was spent in visiting a place run by Chinmaya Mission in Ottawa a 100% vegetarian joint ! (WOW!) Take that all you carnivores who sneer at vegetarians travelling to any place outside India ! In the middle of all this one managed to attend the lectures that were on at the summit , quite a few interesting ones at that .
Roaming about the malls looking for stuff strangely left me less lighter on the wallet than I expected thanks to the appreciating rupee. I bought a MP3 turn table for my parents, a Wii for the kalculator , a number of small little things here and there which were special requests from folks back in India. Last but not the least one did manage to pick up Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and finish it on the flight from Ottawa to Toronto. Enjoyed this book , she's tied up all the loose ends in this one and almost *everyone* involved in the series so far has a reference . No more school boy stuff but lots of stuff where it gets like the lord of the rings / return of the king . There are many people dead but one death makes all the headlines and that sparks some interesting reactions among people ...
Monday, July 09, 2007
Pure Magic.
Its been one of those really really good days. The day dawned with me waking up late for my trip to Mahableshwar a hill station about 100 km from Pune. After that what followed was pure entertainment and enjoyment. The drive to Mahableshwar, lunch at Mapro , drive through the clouds, good music , visibility = 0, Humidity = 100% , temperature = very low made the day extremely beautiful. Got a number of photos which I shall upload at some point of time pretty soon.
Once we returned from this long long drive I managed to catch the Federer Nadal match from the 3rd set. For the first time in his life, Nadal seemed to believe that he could beat Federer on grass and actually gave the champ a good marathon for his prize money . The other thing was Federer suddenly gave up in the 4th set where Nadal simply ran him to the ground. The 4th set actually had Federrer rattled and shaken like he had never been before. A couple of hawk eye calls left him non-plussed and irritated. The number of unforced errors went up dramatically in that set too. Finally it all came together in Federer's 3rd service game of the 5th set. It was scrappy, it was dramatic and it was entertaining. Watching Fedex play was like watching a beautiful act of synchronization between limbs, the racket and the ball. It was sheer poetry and it left me incredulous about how he managed to return those serves with so much power and panache !
Once we returned from this long long drive I managed to catch the Federer Nadal match from the 3rd set. For the first time in his life, Nadal seemed to believe that he could beat Federer on grass and actually gave the champ a good marathon for his prize money . The other thing was Federer suddenly gave up in the 4th set where Nadal simply ran him to the ground. The 4th set actually had Federrer rattled and shaken like he had never been before. A couple of hawk eye calls left him non-plussed and irritated. The number of unforced errors went up dramatically in that set too. Finally it all came together in Federer's 3rd service game of the 5th set. It was scrappy, it was dramatic and it was entertaining. Watching Fedex play was like watching a beautiful act of synchronization between limbs, the racket and the ball. It was sheer poetry and it left me incredulous about how he managed to return those serves with so much power and panache !
Thursday, July 05, 2007
Shakespeare and Wodehouse.
As is evident from the title of this blog I am a great fan of Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse. I didn't realize that the bard from Stratford on Avon (Shakespeare for the uninitiated ) also had certain qualities similar . Statements like "That is a custom more observed in the breach than in the obeisance" show his humourous side too .
The particular quote that I was quite impressed with was not one that would tickle your funny bone . I am not sure about how true this is but anyways here goes "God in his infinite wisdom chooses to ignore some of our prayers while we in our ignorance choose to blame him for it. "
This particular piece of prose was conveyed to me by my mom after a particularly interesting day in life when something that I wanted didn't occur. However both of us were pretty curious of the origin of the particular quote , she couldn't remember if it was Hamlet or Macbeth. If there are interested readers who see this , it would be good to know if you have come across this some place on your other literary quests. Quite refreshing and interesting one must say.
The particular quote that I was quite impressed with was not one that would tickle your funny bone . I am not sure about how true this is but anyways here goes "God in his infinite wisdom chooses to ignore some of our prayers while we in our ignorance choose to blame him for it. "
This particular piece of prose was conveyed to me by my mom after a particularly interesting day in life when something that I wanted didn't occur. However both of us were pretty curious of the origin of the particular quote , she couldn't remember if it was Hamlet or Macbeth. If there are interested readers who see this , it would be good to know if you have come across this some place on your other literary quests. Quite refreshing and interesting one must say.
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
Monsoons, rains , near floods and crumbling roads.
Its monsoon time again ! Rains Rains Rains, its grey dark, cold and raining all the time here at Pune. We seem to be breaking all records this year. The last weekend of June was enough to make up the seasons average for the month . The Mutha, Mula, Indrayani , the Pavna and the river on Paud Road are all flowing and are in spate . The net result, roads laid a week before the monsoons started have started disappearing or in the process of developing great big craters .
On a more serious note, its been a long time since I updated my blog . Was busy with helping out in a GCC workshop at IIT Bombay, lots of work at office travelling to Madras and Bombay through out the last month on weekends and one week . Phew its been quite a while .
On a more serious note, its been a long time since I updated my blog . Was busy with helping out in a GCC workshop at IIT Bombay, lots of work at office travelling to Madras and Bombay through out the last month on weekends and one week . Phew its been quite a while .
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Spidey , Anti Spidey ... Spiderman 3
Sometime during this week decided enough was enough and managed to catch up with Spiderman 3 . I was warned by Miss. S that this was going to be a bollywood tear jerker and emotional drama, but went with a notion that it couldn't be as bad as some of the soaps that Bollywood churns out with unfailing regularilty. This is the year when all the so-called heroes cry on screen, James Bond did , and now Spidey also followed suit. (Now thats what is called Bonding with the best. ) It was spectacularly long, 3 bad / misunderstood guys (Anti Spidey, Sandman and the other Monster) , patching up with old friend turned enemy and then watching a friend die. Similarly add in a broken relationship with a girlfriend, fights, a lot of meanness , some gyan and then the good old patch-up at the end. All in all I thought Sam Raimi had gotten to watching Karan Johar while he was in Manhattan shooting the latest Bollywood tear jerker and got influenced suitably.
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Bombay trips and driving around.
Driving down the expressway between Pune and Bombay is among my favourite pastimes . On yet another trip this time to talk to a few folks about compilers and to meet my sister I decided to try the road via Turbhe to the Airoli bridge. However it looks as though the contagion of digging up tar roads and replacing them with concrete roads before the monsoons seems to have also hit our neighbours in the valley. Pune has a long tradition of doing that . This resulted in a driving time of nearly 2:45 min when I could have completed the drive to Mulund in 2:30 min or even lesser. The expressway from Dehu Road to Kalamboli was done in 50 minutes flat with a top speed of 130ks an hour.( However I have received other threats during my trip which pale in comparison to the actual threat in driving down at such speeds).
Driving in Bombay is a pleasure in comparison to Pune iff you restrict yourself to driving on the express highways and the eastern side, large 8-10 lane highways where you can zip at 80-90 kph, smooth roads, quite a number of flyovers etc etc etc.
Driving in Bombay is a pleasure in comparison to Pune iff you restrict yourself to driving on the express highways and the eastern side, large 8-10 lane highways where you can zip at 80-90 kph, smooth roads, quite a number of flyovers etc etc etc.
Friday, May 04, 2007
Customer don't care and congestion free networks.
Its been an eventful week . Had fun on the first few days of the week thanks to a visit by some friends from Bangalore. Decided to back my car into a tree , the tree didn't move despite continued threats and ended up having to change the door of the boot.
Last evening, however was even more spectacular. My phone stopped working claiming that it had an inactive Sim . I tried a number of things like putting this in a cool Blackberry and in that I got an even more helpful error message which claimed my SIM card was rejected. A call to the customer care of one of India's biggest networks followed. For folks who don't know, I have a mobile connection with India's largest congestion free network and one that has had folks like Sachin Tendulkar and AR Rehman signed up as brand ambassadors. It resulted in egg on their faces with a claim that they deactivated my phone by mistake. I was surprised to say the least, having paid all my bills for the last 5 years since when I have this number but was prepared to forgive a technical glitch. After all its software, there are always bugs. There is also the possibility of a human error where someone could have gotten it wrong and gotten a typo.
Guess what happens this morning, A call from Airtel's customer care again checking for feedback happens while I am in the middle of a nice little session playing with trees and forests in gcc. The conversation goes:
CC> Sir did you have a problem with your phone ? Did you have a problem with outgoing calls or incoming calls ?
Me> Yes I had a problem , neither was working . The phone said something very helpful like SIM rejected or SIM Inactive.
CC> But sir its working now na ? I just got through to you .
Me> Thinking that he'd come 3rd in a quiz competition with just him in the fray - Yes but the problem was you deleted the line.
CC> All problems solved now ?
Me> But it took you 5 hours to connect it back.
CC> Have you paid your bills ?
Me> Yes, I have . the last one was paid yesterday.
CC> No problem sir, I will check and make sure your bills are reflected in the system.
Me> Fine please do that .
Narrators Interruption> In the middle of this the congestion free network decides to stop working and the call gets cut. So Me calls him back.
Me> We were talking
CC> No problem sir , I will get back to you.
Me> but have you realized the problem ?
CC> What is the problem ?
Me> Patiently explains again.
CC> You must not have paid the bills, thats why they disconnected.
Me> Go check it . I have paid it for the past 5 years regularly and the last one was also paid. Get off your high horse.
CC> What are you saying ? Am I speaking nonsense or are you ?
Me> You are speaking nonsense.
CC> Who's talking nonsense ?
Me> Dont' have time for this , bye.
Customer Disservice is what they seem to be about here and nothing much else.
Last evening, however was even more spectacular. My phone stopped working claiming that it had an inactive Sim . I tried a number of things like putting this in a cool Blackberry and in that I got an even more helpful error message which claimed my SIM card was rejected. A call to the customer care of one of India's biggest networks followed. For folks who don't know, I have a mobile connection with India's largest congestion free network and one that has had folks like Sachin Tendulkar and AR Rehman signed up as brand ambassadors. It resulted in egg on their faces with a claim that they deactivated my phone by mistake. I was surprised to say the least, having paid all my bills for the last 5 years since when I have this number but was prepared to forgive a technical glitch. After all its software, there are always bugs. There is also the possibility of a human error where someone could have gotten it wrong and gotten a typo.
Guess what happens this morning, A call from Airtel's customer care again checking for feedback happens while I am in the middle of a nice little session playing with trees and forests in gcc. The conversation goes:
CC> Sir did you have a problem with your phone ? Did you have a problem with outgoing calls or incoming calls ?
Me> Yes I had a problem , neither was working . The phone said something very helpful like SIM rejected or SIM Inactive.
CC> But sir its working now na ? I just got through to you .
Me> Thinking that he'd come 3rd in a quiz competition with just him in the fray - Yes but the problem was you deleted the line.
CC> All problems solved now ?
Me> But it took you 5 hours to connect it back.
CC> Have you paid your bills ?
Me> Yes, I have . the last one was paid yesterday.
CC> No problem sir, I will check and make sure your bills are reflected in the system.
Me> Fine please do that .
Narrators Interruption> In the middle of this the congestion free network decides to stop working and the call gets cut. So Me calls him back.
Me> We were talking
CC> No problem sir , I will get back to you.
Me> but have you realized the problem ?
CC> What is the problem ?
Me> Patiently explains again.
CC> You must not have paid the bills, thats why they disconnected.
Me> Go check it . I have paid it for the past 5 years regularly and the last one was also paid. Get off your high horse.
CC> What are you saying ? Am I speaking nonsense or are you ?
Me> You are speaking nonsense.
CC> Who's talking nonsense ?
Me> Dont' have time for this , bye.
Customer Disservice is what they seem to be about here and nothing much else.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Across the pale parabola of joy ...
Achievement of the decade. Procuring a printed copy of Mike and Psmith, the "pre"quel to all the Psmith books by P G Wodehouse was the highlight of the day . I had read it off Project Gutenberg but the joy of having a printed copy is something else. This is the origin of sentences that have given absolute joy to readers over the years . Having tried to lay my hands on this book out of print unsuccessfully since class 9 when I first lay my hands on a work of art by Wodehouse, it was a significant achievement to obtain this at long long last...
To quote one of these as PB mentioned to me .
Mr. Downing was a bowler with a style of his own. He took two short steps, two long steps, gave a jump, took three more short steps and ended with a combination of a step and a jump, during which the ball emerged from behind his back and started on its slow career to the wicket. The whole business had the dignity of an old-fashioned minuet, subtly blended with the careless vigour of a cakewalk. The ball when delivered, was billed to break from leg, but the programme was subject to alterations.
To quote one of these as PB mentioned to me .
Mr. Downing was a bowler with a style of his own. He took two short steps, two long steps, gave a jump, took three more short steps and ended with a combination of a step and a jump, during which the ball emerged from behind his back and started on its slow career to the wicket. The whole business had the dignity of an old-fashioned minuet, subtly blended with the careless vigour of a cakewalk. The ball when delivered, was billed to break from leg, but the programme was subject to alterations.
Indian Summers...
Managed to get to Crossword in the middle of answering an SOS to my sis over what I would term an eventful weekend . It began with a game of cricket on Saturday what folks would call an intra company match to help unearth new talent in our organization to play cricket ... Yours truly was the first person to appear on the ground at 7:30 a.m. which left our captain K rather impressed considering the fact that he's usually had to give me some 30 wake up calls after reaching the ground on a couple of previous occassions.
Inspecting the pitch showed that it was a beauty with the length of the crease so much that some one would be hard pressed to bowl a no ball. I must say I came very close to overstepping but then pulled out of that delivery at the last moment. The moral of the story was that we lost thanks to a typical collapse after a fantastic start . 59 for none after 9 overs became 67 / 4 ... 2 spectacular catches by my particular nemesis P who usually plays a game with a hangover with either a build the previous night with some P0,P1 blocker critical bugs fixed or with sufficient quantities of suspicious liquid jostling in his innards. One of the catches was to get me out , still cannot believe that he managed to take a catch while falling backwards and still managed to pull that one out centimetres above the ground. What hurt me more was losing a bet to one of my friends who still thinks that I can't bat for nuts.
After this we had a few interesting innings from folks who tried running with Ph (Now I have P so I should refer to Ph as Ph. ) involving an interesting sequence where many a time one would find Ph at the same end as the other batsmen... Thanks to our democratic practices we allowed all our players to get a hit but this noble approach enabled us to score just 115 in the allotted 20 overs.
After a short break where we bemoaned global warming and how heated Pune was becoming before we started on the second innings. We had few brief hopes of winning but all that was dashed once the other batsmen batted through. If only we had held on to a couple of catches, 2 tough c&b's off my own bowling and a skier at long on , there was a chance that we might have done something different. However the dudes of the day were Pr and KP (not Kevin Pietersen but another guy who shares a similar outlook to batting) .. Pr was batting well in the 18th over and suddenly went for an ugly reverse hoick which resembled a cross between a pull and a slash .. I was umpiring then and as Pr walked off I couldn't resist questioning the reasoning behind the shot - (we were not too greatly placed ) to which he replied as an excuse that this was the last over. It turned out that he'd been done in by a smart piece of work by the keeper ( a smart alec) and KP who insisted this was the last over despite feeble hints from the square leg umpire. However this makes Pr the dude of the week and pushes him close to the hall of fame which KP currently occupies...
Inspecting the pitch showed that it was a beauty with the length of the crease so much that some one would be hard pressed to bowl a no ball. I must say I came very close to overstepping but then pulled out of that delivery at the last moment. The moral of the story was that we lost thanks to a typical collapse after a fantastic start . 59 for none after 9 overs became 67 / 4 ... 2 spectacular catches by my particular nemesis P who usually plays a game with a hangover with either a build the previous night with some P0,P1 blocker critical bugs fixed or with sufficient quantities of suspicious liquid jostling in his innards. One of the catches was to get me out , still cannot believe that he managed to take a catch while falling backwards and still managed to pull that one out centimetres above the ground. What hurt me more was losing a bet to one of my friends who still thinks that I can't bat for nuts.
After this we had a few interesting innings from folks who tried running with Ph (Now I have P so I should refer to Ph as Ph. ) involving an interesting sequence where many a time one would find Ph at the same end as the other batsmen... Thanks to our democratic practices we allowed all our players to get a hit but this noble approach enabled us to score just 115 in the allotted 20 overs.
After a short break where we bemoaned global warming and how heated Pune was becoming before we started on the second innings. We had few brief hopes of winning but all that was dashed once the other batsmen batted through. If only we had held on to a couple of catches, 2 tough c&b's off my own bowling and a skier at long on , there was a chance that we might have done something different. However the dudes of the day were Pr and KP (not Kevin Pietersen but another guy who shares a similar outlook to batting) .. Pr was batting well in the 18th over and suddenly went for an ugly reverse hoick which resembled a cross between a pull and a slash .. I was umpiring then and as Pr walked off I couldn't resist questioning the reasoning behind the shot - (we were not too greatly placed ) to which he replied as an excuse that this was the last over. It turned out that he'd been done in by a smart piece of work by the keeper ( a smart alec) and KP who insisted this was the last over despite feeble hints from the square leg umpire. However this makes Pr the dude of the week and pushes him close to the hall of fame which KP currently occupies...
Monday, April 09, 2007
Namesake
Gogol Ganguly - whats in a name you may ask , but if you have a name which goes Nikhil Gogol Ganguly I am sure you'd sit up and question the wisdom of your parents choices. Its from a superbly crafted movie called the Namesake which I managed to see with 3 Swedes and my niece M bringing to an end a mixed weekend . The movie is well made and the performances are really good - Tabu and Irfan Khan stand out and so does the kid who plays the role of Gogol in the movie . Almost everyone questions their name at some point of time and wonders if their parents could have done better - However you live with your name and its not too far before you make the same mistake.
Watching Australia play England before dozing off . I hope England does a Bangladesh today :)
Watching Australia play England before dozing off . I hope England does a Bangladesh today :)
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 ...
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 ...
Saturday, April 07, 2007
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 !
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 !
Thursday, March 15, 2007
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.
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.
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
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 !
Monday, February 26, 2007
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.
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
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...
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...
Sunday, February 11, 2007
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 ......
Monday, February 05, 2007
theppamcloseup
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 .
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 .
Friday, February 02, 2007
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.
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.
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Of weekends , south indian movies and games of basketball.
Across the pale parabola of joy
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.
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.
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
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 !
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 !
Sunday, January 21, 2007
LLVM an interesting project.
Across the pale parabola of joy
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.
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.
Monday, January 15, 2007
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.
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.
Monday, January 08, 2007
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. !
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. !
Monday, January 01, 2007
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 !
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 !
Saturday, December 30, 2006
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 .
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 .
Sunday, December 17, 2006
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.
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.
Friday, December 15, 2006
The joys of playing cricket.
Across the pale parabola of joy
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 .
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 .
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Monday, December 04, 2006
Bangalore the city of joys, traffic and pollution
Across the pale parabola of joy
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.
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.
Saturday, November 18, 2006
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.
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.
Thursday, November 16, 2006
Beryl and Edgy - The revenge of the weenie
Across the pale parabola of joy
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.
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. :(
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. :(
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
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 ....
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 ....
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
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.
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.
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
Oor Koothu a.k.a Orkut.
Across the pale parabola of joy
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.
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.
Saturday, September 30, 2006
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 :) .
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 :) .
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
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"
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"
Monday, September 25, 2006
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.
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.
Monday, September 18, 2006
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 ..
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 ..
Friday, September 15, 2006
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 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 !
Saturday, September 09, 2006
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 :))
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 :))
Sunday, September 03, 2006
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.
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.
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.
Saturday, August 12, 2006
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.
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.
Saturday, July 15, 2006
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 !
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 !
Friday, June 30, 2006
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.
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.
Saturday, June 17, 2006
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 .... ...
Sunday, June 11, 2006
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 .
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 .
Wednesday, June 07, 2006
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.
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.
Friday, June 02, 2006
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 !!
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 !!
Monday, May 22, 2006
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.
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.
Thursday, May 18, 2006
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 !
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 !
Sunday, May 14, 2006
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
Friday, May 12, 2006
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.
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".
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".
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
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.
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
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 !
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 !
Sunday, April 16, 2006
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 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 !
Saturday, April 15, 2006
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 !
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 !
Thursday, April 13, 2006
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 !
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
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 !
Saturday, April 08, 2006
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 !
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
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 !
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 !
Monday, February 27, 2006
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 :) .
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 :) .
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
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.
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.
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