Vagaries

07:58 pm - A helpful tip & status update

tip: Never join a big company close to the start of summer interns event.
status: I am officially a Noogler now.

12:45 am - The Case of Missing Mails

Last month, most of the packets left at my door by fedex/ups/dhl went missing. I do most of my shopping online and have been receiving
packages at my door all the time. But for all of last month, I'd get a mail notification that  a package has been delivered and when I got
home there won't be anything. Someone surely was stealing our packets!

  As the list of missing things piled up, aj and I decided to put up a hidden cam on our door and monitor all activity when we are away.
  A trip to Fry's made it clear that buying an actual spy camera that could be used in that position wasn't worth it, considering the chance
  of our scheme succeeding being so thin. It would be an utter waste to lose all our packages and a nice extra sum on useless cameras.
  At home, we spent a weekend taking apart my roomie's webcam and making it fit into an unnoticed little corner of a window overlooking
 the main gate. After a night full of design and debates, we finally got the rig all set. We were expecting another packet on Tuesday, so we
 did a dry run of our setup on Monday. Apart from a few glitches that we could easily fix, our setup was ready for the show - recording 6 GB
 of video stream of our door and the way leading up to it.

 As expected, we didn't find any package on returning home. Quick scroll of the video showed the UPS guy tucking  a package under our
 doormat. The next five suspenseful minutes were spent binary searching the video: there/gone/there/gone. And there was the culprit - one
 we (or atleast I suspected all along) - our neighbor's kid who has been hovering around a lot during the summer vacation.  All through the
 plan, we never actually believed that it'll work. But here it  was - our master shot - and we were ecstatic.

 I'll leave out the what-next debate details and the awkward encounter with the parents, and just say that we manage to get all our
 stuff back and the little adventure had a happy ending.

Current Mood: calm

12:34 am - and so it ended ...

Back from rio and back to work. The trip was fun, but 5 days are way too short for all that can be done in rio alone. Definitely a place I am going to visit again. My Aus-NZ trip got canceled this week, so its a good thing that I stuck with my brazil plans. Oh, and no Aus-NZ also means that
some of you will be seeing me in sept-oct in India.

I also made a start towards learning portuguese on this trip. Hopefully it will go better than my previous attempts to learn french and mandarin.

Current Mood: lethargic

02:36 pm - like a log

Apparently there was a small earthquake early in the morning today around 5:30 am. Everyone in the office is talking about it.
4.7 is 2-3 Richters too low to wake me up so early nowadays. The only time I managed to wake up by 6 am recently was to watch Nadal thump Federer
last week. All that to witness the worst game of tennis in recent times :(

reminder to self: shift the miniatures with pointy swords from above the bed.

Current Mood: sleepy

12:27 am - pedometers

I recently restarted the morning jogging routine with my roomie. I was looking at some pedometers to get an idea of how much distance/calories we were putting in. After looking up a few cheap and slightly expensive pedometers, I found a satisfactory software solution with gmap-pedometer. It uses the google map api and adds some simple functionalities.

Here's the route we started with - a block around our apt . I really like this tool. There isn't any useless info, just the basic things I want. And its great to  plan new routes.

For the tech-oriented, check out the Acknowledgement link for some reference material about the site design.

Current Mood: content

02:19 pm - I'm not dead yet ...

.. just that the intersection of my free time and online access has been null.

That changes today, with my new inspirion up and running.

Current Mood: tired

10:02 am - 27 on 27

Its my birthday today and the google folks are celebrating Mozart's b'day w/ their logo.
No sense of priorities !

Had lunch at google office two days back, should have updated them then. But how was I
to know that they would not know! :(

Today is also the b'day of hard disk (no punny jokes please).

Current Mood: disappointed

11:32 am - SimNow

AMD SimNow is muchos fun, especially if you have the full licensed version.

Amazing level of control. Do try sometime.

(
And all those who have not caught up with my life recently:
. all is well in Santa Clara.
. missing friends, meeting some old ones
. missing co-workers, meeting some new ones
. cold is gone, cough is still around
)

Current Mood: working

08:07 am - short update ...

I am *cough*ing myself to death.
Life has been fun otherwise.

Current Mood: sick

10:22 pm - LJ yearly roundup

Three things 'calendar' and 'tags' told me about my lj posts over the last year:

.
Maximum number of posts are in 2nd Quarter (Apr - Jun; 36) and the least are in the
last quarter (Oct - Dec; 9). Its kind of strange cos as I recall there were
many more things happening in the last quarter than the other three.
Lot of things were happening with work and other projects. Then I attended Intel Developer Forum
and had lot of things to talk about - itanium, montecito, compilers, and the ultimate geek contest!
And there was the Kodai trip and several marriages and engagements for close friends. And reunion for
muwee batch and veritas friends. More books, puzzles, and other vague stuff that I never got to post
about. In comparison, the 2nd quarter had one main event - Munnar trip and all other posts were about
poems, puzzles, and vagaries. Another special for 2Q was that my blog had just completed
one year. I never expected it to last that long and the excitement showed up in the number of posts.

.
Most of my posts (according to the tags) were about 'vagaries'. That at least
justifies the blog title.

Other high scoring tags were puzzles, books, and personal.

.
Most of my posts are done on Tuesday and only 10% of my posts happen on weekends. Thats
about right as there is something to talk about at the start of the week and
mondays are just too busy. Also, I didn't spend too much time online on
weekends in 05. That's changing in 06 - starting with this mail.
~

Current Mood: anxious

02:13 pm - Shutdown!

Xmas came and went. And so we are in the last week of the year, which means that we have the regular annual shutdown. neat.

Last year I was slightly unhappy about missing the Pythagonal Goa trip during the shutdown but this time around I aint going anywhere. The first one and a half vacation days have been spent well:

. Many Meetings
- The unoffice kinds. Lots of friends been dropping in and dropping by and running into on the roads and on trains.

. x-boxing
- the usual point-shoot-run routine

. reading:
- Lawrence Watt-Evans' The Misenchanted Sword. A good read.
- Michio Kaku's Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension. Wanted to pick it up from a long time. Finally did.
- and since morning, Steven Pressfield's Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae. Having recently read Frank Miller's 300 makes this one much more interesting.

. TeeVies and Movies:
- My Neighbour Totoro by Miyazaki. cute.
- Charade.
- Everybody Loves Raymond - first season

. Hacking:
- Boching: A complete working program that does nothing and does it while jumping around four different stacks. (Yes, I have a use for it)
- More Xen play

What have you guys been upto?
You in office??

Current Mood: cheerful

11:39 am - Muwaahaahaa

11:01 am - rain, rain, GO away

If you are planning a trip to venice, don't.
Come to Bangalore instead.

Bring your own boat.

Current Mood: annoyed

10:58 am - Education

Old Man Pratchett said once that Education is a bit like getting an embarrasing sexually transmitted disease. It makes you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and you get this strange urge to pass it on.

I did my part of 'the passing on' these past few weeks. The topics were UNIX Internals - System Architecture and Memory Management (yes, again).The audience was good and the material can be found here, here and here. [warning: Evil ppt format. pdfs are not uploaded yet]

For the record, the count of my lectures on linux/hpux/unix has now moved on to double digits.

11:36 am - Input, more Input ...

The new 200GB external hard disk is here!

Works out of the box with both Windows & Linux. Though its better to keep it off while botting Linux, or LVM goes crazy.

All ye keepers of de data, expect a visit from me this weekend (or earlier).

04:06 pm - New Icons !

Used my mobile's camera to take some abstract pics(?) around my desk while waiting for a build to complete.
Followed it up with another session while driving back home.

Updated some of them as my new icons here.

( Abstract Pics )

05:42 pm - The deed is done ...

Finally got my X-box this weekend ... the halo limited edition as in the pic.

Haven't slept much since.

Games I have cooked so far: Grand Theft Auto III (Vice City), Need For Speed Underground 2, Halo 2, Call of Duty - The finest hour, Prince of Persia - Warrior Within, Hitman 3.

02:06 pm - Weirdo Rituals

Friend: Hey, today is my engagement?
M: Engagement as in wedding kind with rings and stuff.
F: yup, very same.
M: Congrats! But what are you doing here then?
F: Oh, that is happening in my hometown.
M: And so I ask, what are you doing here?
F: Oh Oh, the Groom is not required for the ceremony.
M: Huh, what about the Bride?
F: Bride _has_ to be present. How can she not be there man?
M: So how does she do the engaging bit ?

... and the discussion fades out to pulling of legs and seizing of the jugular ...

10:43 am - Horror of Horrors

Looks like I have lost my copy of Good Omens. I went through all the five boxes and both cabinets and it is nowhere to be found :(

I remember lending it to vrigo but also vaguely recollect his returning me a bunch of books day before I left the place.

Any clues people ?

Current Mood: depressed

11:51 am - Great Day yesterday ...

. Managed to get my D/L.
. A long standing deal is finally done.
. Going outta Bangalore this weekend, yay!
. Heard from a very dear friend after a long time.
. My project is finally moving from prototype to production-ready status.
. The route home didn't get flooded :-)

Its a new day today though and a very hectic one.

Current Mood: accomplished