Category: Work Life

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Work Life Worldly Matters

On Bandhs and Strikes

I’ve started taking a liking for these, actually. A peaceful morning. Devoid of most traffic on the roads – except for buses. And because of that, the buses get a chance to run on time, too!

In other news, Babylon 5 is a good show. Vishnu recommended that I watch this show and I’m liking it a lot. In one of the episodes, there’s this surveyor who takes contracts to survey planets for various purposes and ends up at a mysterious place called Sigma 957. Suddenly, Sakai (the surveyor)’s ship encounters something never heard of before. Not in the database. Her ship loses almost all its power and leaves her exposed to a lone death – until the troops G’kar had sent for came to her rescue. G’kar had earlier warned her not to go there stating that it was a mysterious place and that Sakai would be better off not going there.

When Sakai returns and tells G’kar of what had happened:

Catherine Sakai: While I was out there, I saw something. What was it?
G’Kar: [pointing to a nearby flower] What is this?
[Upon closer inspection, an insect is visible.]
Catherine: An ant.
G’Kar: “Ant”!
Catherine: So much gets shipped up from Earth on commercial transports, it’s hard to keep them out.
[As Catherine is talking, G’Kar carefully picks up the ant.]
G’Kar: I have just picked it up on the tip of my glove. If I put it down again and it asks another ant, “What was that?”, how would it explain? There are things in the universe billions of years older than either of our races. They are vast, timeless. And if they are aware of us at all, it is as little more than ants…and we have as much chance of communicating with them as an ant has with us. We know. We’ve tried. And we’ve learned we can either stay out from underfoot, or be stepped on.
Catherine: That’s it? That’s all you know?
G’Kar: Yes. They are a mystery. And I am both terrified and reassured to know that there are still wonders in the universe…that we have not yet explained everything. Whatever they are, Ms. Sakai, they walk near Sigma 957. They must walk there alone.

And here we are. Calling out for a national bundh because of a petrol-price hike. And me enjoying the peace due to it.

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Personal Work Life Worldly Matters

Updates as of 3rd Sep, ’09

On Independence Day

Time. Remember not to complain about it.

On August 15th, Terence drew something really interesting during the painting competition that was organised at our office. It was a view of our hands: the left one holding a dice and the right one holding an hourglass. I don’t quite remember the complete explanation he gave about his poster, but part of it went like this: The dice represents randomness in life and the hourglass, time. And taking chances at the right time is what we have in our hands. A simple, yet powerful message. Additional points for being wise enough to be able to distinguish between what you can do and what you can’t.

Let’s not talk about my poster.

I’m not sure how this is other dog loving countries across the world, but certain observations which I’ve made in the past few months are:

1. Most rich dog owners do not own Indian breeds – but mostly non-native breeds.

2. Far too many stray dogs.

Questions:

1. Do the other dog loving countries tend to not own their own native breeds and, say, prefer Indian breeds?

2. Are there just as many stray dogs in such countries?

Other, possibly related questions:

1. What’s with the recent trend of blonde dancers in Bollywood *cough* dance sequences?

2. What’s with the sudden influx of all the fugly Indian counterparts of North American style reality shows on TV?

3. Why am I even writing about such things on my blog?

Other

Bought a bunch of popular science books (Richard Dawkins and Roger Penrose). Yes, I’m not really a reader but I’d love to pick up the habbit. On a related note: due to poor internets at home and office, I’m hereby bankrupt in the Anime department. There are shows I’d love to watch. I guess I’ll have to wait for better times.

Bad news

My kittie was killed by three dogs on 14th night – the night before the Independence day. It had hardly lived for twenty days in our house. My mom, sis and I are dearly missing him. Oh, and, those three dogs were stray dogs. They’re currently employed as watch dogs by immigrant masons who’re illegally staying in the same locality where we are.

Kitten

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Home Personal Travel Work Life

Updates as of 23rd July, ’09

It’s been a long time since my long post and unsurpisingly, I’ve hardly had anyone enquire about my blogging status – barring a workmate who told me I should continue blogging. I was going to anyway. It’s just that the sweet pleasures of having a 1Gbps internet connection isn’t available anymore.

I landed in Bengaluru on 2nd June. For about a two weeks there was no internet. I looked into the various options that were available – the usual ADSL connections from BSNL, Airtel, TATA or the CDMA datacards from TATA, Reliance. I signed up for TATA’s ADSL and after getting a demo on TATA’s Photon+ (CDMA datacard), I decided to cancel the ADSL connection and go with Photon+. Pros: Good speeds for the price, cons: no scheme with unlimited downloads available.

Anyway. On 18th Jun Tirupam and I left Bengaluru for Thrissur. The occasion being Vishnu’s marriage! It was good to see familiar faces in a setting such as this. Lalit, Mitesh, Ankit: it was good to see you all again. Thrissur, as a place, wasn’t half as bad. Kerala as a state seems to be gifted with plenty of natural resources – the greenery, water, weather. Given such naturally endowed excesses, it probably makes the society somewhat mature and financially pretty well off compared to the neighbouring state – Tamil Nadu – which continues to be a large exporter of ground-level labourers (I realise that it’s not that simple, but, yes, Keralites are lucky).

Moving back to Bengaluru now, I’m still identity-less. My College’s I-card has expired, and more importantly is of no use here. I have no driving license yet. No PAN card or any of those fancy things yet. Recently, Nilekani has taken up a role in the Indian government to work on an nationwide ID card for all. I wish him all the luck and I hope I get one soon. I’ve even postponed buying that TATA DoCoMo SIM for that!

Oh, and, I’ve started working in a Free Software company now. I’ve still got a long way to go before I shed my lazy lifestyle that I had so gotten used to in college. Work needs to be done.

Lately, my blog posts have become less technical. Those Howtos and whinefests have seen a decline. I’m hoping to fix that soon as I can. I’ve been looking at how Kerberos, LDAP and ejabberd are expected to work together and since it’s taken me more than a week I think it deserves a blog post. Well, Kerberos is optional at the moment, but it’s something I’m hoping to understand why and where it’d be useful. Makes me miss Gentoo now – where I’d know exactly what’s changing. dpkg-reconfigure, although friendly, does things and assumes certain defaults which I have no idea if they’re sane or not. More on that later.

Work place is a really cool place. I had an image of cubicles and serious faces but this is kind of homely and somewhat relaxed. We even play some football on the rooftop once in a while. I miss some good folks whom I spent a lot of time with during the last few months at college – Settem, Basit, and co. and Shanks.

Last Saturday, I caught up with Tirupam and we went to visit UB City. It’s a fabulous, albeit affluent, supermall. We looked around, window shopping mostly and settled with having a close-to-authentic pizza at an Italian restaurant up there. As it turned dark, some live music lightened up the place. It’s good to see Bengaluru getting more and more musical.

A couple of days before that meet, I was looking for a music store that dealt with double bass. Lucky me. There was a place right behind my work place. Unlucky me. It costs quite a bit (he quoted 16K – which by international standards is very cheap and probably not even worth it; but I’m just a beginner – and I told him that I’d be back when I had the money). I’m having trouble deciding if I should go with a modern bass guitar or with a somewhat large and bulky double bass. Bengaluru is kind of crowded too, moving around with such a thing, in a bus, would be interesting, if not dangerous. Oh, and boo at all the affluent folk who travel alone in their cars on every-busy streets of the city.

Must get back to work.