Happy Birthday Mom!

Oh yeah, that cake tastes so yummy. I always avoid sweet edibles, but guess what?; I am eating a big piece of cake.

My mom went to sleep at 00:10. May be she was sad thinking that I must’ve forgot her birthday. She probably didn’t remember that the wall clock was running 15 minutes fast. So we had a 5 minute mission; as soon as mom turned off her room light, my gf sneaked into the house (she was standing at the door with the cake). We quickly arranged the chair, table with cake and candles. By this time, my gf’s mom gave a call.
I woke up my mom and handed over the phone telling that someone called for her.
She wondered who! (still believing that we don’t remember her birthday). With puzzled voice she said “Hello” and the next second she was smiling.

I left to the other room before she started talking to my gf’s mom, only to return after the call was over. Here’s our conversation after that:
me: Who was it mom?
mom: Your gf’s mom. She wished me.
me: Wished!!! Is it your birthday?
mom:
me: OK. If it’s your birthday please come to the hall room.

This left my mom totally confused. I took her to the hall where we had switched off the lights. The first thing she could see was the dazzling lights of candles on her birthday cake. She then noticed my gf standing in the dark, that made her go all smiles.
We celebrated the cake and hmm I just finished gobbling up the last bit of it.
We didn’t know mom had bought some kit-kat chocolates for us; funny thing we had also bought kit-kat for her

I may be leaving for khammam by today evening; I wish I could stay but I guess it can’t be avoided.

/dev/null party and the amazing gift!

2 meetings is all what I did yesterday. It’s one of those `almost nothing productive` days.

The kdegames meeting ended at around 02:30 and I must’ve fallen asleep early, may be around 03:30.
The next meet was at 11:00, Subway Begumpet. Expected attendees: neenaoffline, vimzard, shriphani, punchagan and me.
I turned out almost 1 hour late. Why? Pushed my bike for more than 2kms. It almost slipped my mind that my bike was already running on reserve.
Anyway we did nothing at the party but just eat. Punchagan didn’t turn up for the meet; good for him. We didn’t find a good use for our laptops too; why did we bring them at all? Even the wi-fi at subway was down.
So well, the party is now officially named `/dev/null` party.

When I came back home, I got a call from country vacations trying to explain me that I have won an amazing gift..er. 3 gifts actually. If I remember it right, they said One kitchen utility product, holiday sponsor of INR 25,000 to Goa and a card to spend on anything for a day. They were throwing a party at Amrutha castle and invited me to come and collect my gifts. Supposedly I have won this so called gifts due to a lucky draw coupon which was dropped at Exhibition grounds.
I wondered when I did so? Its been ages since I’ve attended an exhibition!

I asked my mom whether she had dropped any such coupon. The answer was “No”. I wonder where they got my landline number from. If no one filled any such coupon, how do they even have my numbers and name? And moreover she insisted that we come and collect the gift.
I also called the Amrutha castle’s reception and they confirmed that country vacations were indeed having a party next day evening.

So, its true. I have won a gift for a non-existing coupon! Anyway, tomorrow when they call me again, I will tell them that it doesn’t belong to me.

Mom’s the best.

11 May this time it is, second sunday. Doesn’t strike you yet? It’s mother’s day and it’s gone already (atleast here in India).

So well, I hope people didn’t forget to wish their mom.
At least I didn’t, and we (gf & I) packed neat surprises for our moms’.
We purchased gifts two days in advance and ordered for cake on 10th. The cake was sneaked into my gf’s fridge and it lay there unnoticed until the clock struck 00:00 (digital life)

We woke up our moms’ at midnight to celebrate mother’s day. They were taken by complete surprise; they must have thought we forgot about it. Who wouldn’t? We showed no signs of remembering it throughout the day.
Gift’s were presented before celebrating the cake and what should I say, I guess we made the opposite choices of gifts. It’s up to them, if they want to exchange their gifts now.
Everyone was drowsy and we decided to continue celebrations in the morning.

I found out that mom had to go to office this Sunday. That was so heartbreaking. Nevertheless, when she returned in the evening, we ordered food from a Chinese restaurant. Thanks to my gf’s overestimation of our eating capacity, we all were full by the time we could complete only half the food.
I overate (may be due to good taste) and heck I have a belly now that looks almost like a near delivery pregnancy. Worry not, I will not be wished on mother’s day next year; heavy food just takes some time to digest.

New shortcut costs me

This is how I was feeling yesterday >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Wondering why? Because I missed my train; thanks to the auto-driver’s newly found so called short cut route, takes over an hour to travel 16kms with more than 6 traffic signals to get me boiling angry.
Another auto-driver brings me back in 28 minutes flat via normal route.
Well, this is like paying to miss the train. Especially when travel rates of auto are soaring high in Chennai.
Plus I couldn’t cancel my ticket; not even partial refund (It was booked under tatkaal scheme).

I cannot take a train today; I don’t want to miss my first KDE Games Developer meeting. The next best deal I got was on tuesday-April 8. Thanks to Srihari and also his girlfriend for the lift.

I wanted to reach home on Sunday morning and finish building KDE4; feeling sad now.
That would have enabled me experience some PyKDE extensions before the meeting; now I guess I’ll have to just sit shut up during the meet.

Hoping for things to turn out well.

Days @ Chennai

I safely reached my base from chennai on 4th Mar.

It was fun at chennai and I feel it is worth writing a blog-post about my experiences.
First, thanks to Sup3rkiddo and his parents for letting me hangout at their place. Special thanks to his mom for the iddiyapam (right spell?) stand.

After this, a kick to sup3rkiddo for not showing me Trisha’s house.

First two days were spent at 5G; thanks to sup3rkiddo for accompanying me.
Carte Blanche was in air, sup3rkiddo and I hopped away to it. We met pavi and some geeks from CollabNet; I bugged them with questions, but it was nice to meet them.
As I wrote here, I did manage to surprise thyagarajan. He had no clue that I’d be meeting him at Carte Blanche

Pavi showed me NRCFOSS office and we called it a day.

Next day was more fun filled, we (thyagu, sup3rkiddo, pavi, krish) raced to Marina beach. Call it half mukt.in team, we missed koolhead17, jeevan_ullas, shriphani and others.

Here’s an adventure story -

Thyagu, sup3rkiddo and pavi jumped into the water and bravely
fished out this sting ray. I pestered them not to behave savage, but
who listens.

Psst.. I am bluffing, this is catch of beach fishermen.

It was fun to stand waist-deep in water ( my waist deep = sup3rkiddo’s knee deep), especially with the evening waves trying to knock us down. Thyagu didn’t jump in though. As for pavi, he kept pushing us in to water; he has no effect on sup3rkiddo. He succeeded to make me slip after about 10 attempts, he fell down in 9. So you can guess his strength

Soon, there should be more pics coming in from thyagu of our beach fun.

I guess I should also thank people who tolerated my `worse than naive` tamil skills.
And thanks to all chennai people who drive safely; I observed that they have very good traffic sense, they donot cross the line at traffic-signals, they align themselves at signals, they don’t rush through. Hope people here have something to learn from them.

I’d be looking forward to visit chennai again.

The long awaited train journey!

Sitting at my window seat, I booted the laptop, set my wallpaper to black, launched vi on a transparent virtual console; wondering what this is all about?
This is about my train journey (after 7 long years) and this time it is from secunderabad - chennai, deviating from my default route secunderabad - howrah.

Probably the next thing on your mind is, why is this guy going to chennai at all?
Well, for various reasons including carte blanche at mit, enjoying my holiday, meeting some geeks who regularly hang out at #linux-india at freenode, surprise visit to a friend, who has been a great support during mukt.in ‘07, to devilisly eat dozens of idlis’ or dosas’ (I eat anything that moves).

It was fun in the train, points here:
1. People do not switch off the lights for the upper berth passengers, even on request.
2. The food still sucks.
3. Funniest of all, girls in the train use cleansers, soaps and what not to keep their face glowing; they did it thrice within 12 hours. If you’d want to argue with me saying that they are being hygienic, I’d say hygienic savvy people should brush their teeth when they wake up before they gulp packets and packets of bourbon biscuits.

Packing for any journey has been my weakness, I forget almost half of my important things and old habits die hard. I did forget them this time too; some magic that they were already packed up for me - thanks to my mom.

The train is expected to reach chennai central within 30 minutes. So, I should be packing up; shutting down. Will write later
I missed to post this yesterday!

Higher Caste != Better Programmer

I spent my last week in Guntur, as a .Net and C# tutor for one of the top engineering colleges in Andhra Pradesh.
It was a blast time with my room-mates or co-tutors, but things got to my nerves whenever I entered that college.

The trainees were students of 4th year, and most of them lacked basics of computer engineering. Keeps me wondering whether the faculty failed to deliver or is it the students fault.
Some lacked common sense.
Some of them didn’t understand simplest of the errors being shown by visual studio IDE, while some do not know to close the xml tags that they began with.

To my horror, this college is famous for its caste discrimination.
We grouped the students into 3 per project basis and left the decision of team leader to them. Call it a cult; all the team leaders were of the caste that is believed to be higher in that region.
Well, this was not the end of it. They believe that they are superior to anyone, and one such hilarious case:
A super-intellect higher caste team leader was not able to figure out how to write the abstract of his project.
I explained him all modules of the project and asked him to pen them down. After 4 days, he asks me “Where on google can I find an abstract?”
There is a serious side to this. One of his team members was a non-higher caste guy and he was not allowed to write the abstract, even if he could have done it flat in a day.
The so-called higher caste members of the team do not discuss or share ideas with the other guys/girls of the team.

I’ve even heard that one of the members did bring this issue to the Head of Department, for which she was scolded. Guess what? The HoD belongs to higher caste.

Another important thing to note, these people ‘earned’ placements in giants like Infy, TCS, etc.,

People do not realise that castes’ are created by people, not GOD, not nature. The very sense of humanity is dying. Some people enjoy this power of being able to discriminate and probably there is no one to stop it!

Lets look at the technical trauma I’ve been through:
1. I was amid hundreds of windowsXP machines.
2. IRC, Orkut is blocked.
3. Anything with words chat, games,.. is blocked. This includes google search with words like Internet Relay Chat or XMPP chat server.
4. Debian/ubuntu repo downloads are blocked.
5. Poor students have never heard of ‘bug’ in software.
6. I was not allowed to use my cellphone or laptop in the college bus.
7. I was not successful in using the college projector. i810switch package had problems on my laptop.

Things that made me happy there:
1. The proxy server is redhat enterprise linux.
2. One student uses linux (out of the whole 4th year computer science and IT group)
3. A batch of 3 students have completed their project on COIN (Collaborative Open Innovation Network) using php and MySQL.
4. That I didn’t join formal education for my engineering in any such college.

Lucky me; my assignment there was only for a week, which is done and I am back to my base.