Palani's day out

Jam & chapathi

2008-09-24T18:02:00.000-04:00

Two days ago, When trying to get ready for dinner, i was checking out the various options i had. It is not that we have many varieties available every time. In the recent weeks, we started cooking 4 or 5 dishes during Sunday afternoon so that we don't have to cook during the week. Hence during the start of the week and in particular on a Monday, I have the luxury of selecting which one to eat. I decided to have frozen chapathi but the subji was the confusing part. I had potato fry that i had for lunch, or the pudina chutney that i with bread in the morning or else a cauliflower fry. I don't want to repeat what i had during the day and also not in the mood to have the cauliflower fry. So while i was searching in the refridgerator for something that will go with the chapathi, my eyes fell on the pinapple jam and then my mind didn't hover for anything else. I know with what i can eat the chapathi and and i was kind of thrilled because it has been so many, many years that i had chapathi with jam.

People can wonder whats special about it? When i was a kid I used to love the combination of Jam with anything and everything that is edible. I will always try to have jam with whatever possible thing my mom used to make. Of course she will let me have jam only when there is no other alternative or if i behave very good. But most of the time i get away with jam at the least for partial meal during dinner time. Besides the usual bread & jam, I used to have jam with fresh hot idlis, its flat companion the dosas or the plain rotis & chapathis. Those times, you won't get as many varieties in jam as now a days in India. It used to be always the Mixed Jam and i can still remember the translucent reddish pink color. I think kissan was the brand that was available during those times. I have even had jam with curd rice few times if i had the urge to have jam during the afternoons... I know you won't beleive but its just me! Jam was like peanut butter and jelly to the kids who grow up in America.

Deva - Telugu movie

2008-09-10T16:27:00.010-04:00

We saw couple of kuppa movies over the weekend. One was 'Ayutham Seivom' and the other a Telugu movie dubbed in Tamil called 'Deva'. The latter came as a second movie to the 'Dum Dum Dum' dvd. Since 'D' desperately wanted to see a new Tamil movie and 'Ayutham Seivom' was the reasonable one that was available out of all the kuppai movies, i rented that one. 'Dum Dum Dum' is a classic and one of my personal favorite. Since it had been a very long time, i also rented it. Along with it came the second kuppa movie.

I am not very good movie reviews as i wrote long time ago in this post. But i can find a bad one from a given list of movies. The above two belong to the bad movie category. I am dead againgt watching a Telugu movie or a dubbed version in general but this one had Chiranjeevi and Boomika in the lead roles along with another bollywood actress. Thought about checking the reviews of this 'deva movie' but surprisingly didn't find anything about the movie at all. There were few websites that had review for this movie but they were mentioning surya/asin and pointing to the movie 'vel'. Since i have seen 'vel', i know these websites were erroneously doing some review or there was some confusion in the film name in the past. Anyway, without any review i started watching the movie having little hope that the movie will be reasonable at the least bacause of the starcast.

The interesting issue about these two equally bad movies after watching them was that i felt that the Telugu one was better than the Tamil one. Both of the movies had one thing in common. You will be surprised by the cheap acting(actually no acting at all except Chiranjeevi who was better than everyone else), absurd story and an sensless movie making in general. I think the main reason was that my expectation for the Telugu movie was so low that i liked the movie even thought it ended as usual like a typical Telugu movie (two heroines for the hero irrespective of any logic)

Role reversal

2008-09-01T22:43:00.001-04:00

From the day i got my driving license till this weekend, i was the one who drove my car for the most part on any given day. Only during long trips, few of my friends or my brother would drive my car for some time. In the recent days, 'D' was test driving as part of her driver's license learning cycle. She got her license two weeks ago in her first attempt. Even then i was the one who drove the most part over the past two weeks(after having two drivers in our house). This pride that i had for so many years changed today because of some stupid rule of our local DMV.

My current license expired yesterday and i went to our local DMV office last week to renew it. One thing that i heard from friends as well as by experience first hand with DMV office earlier is that their requirements of odd documents vary invariantly across the different locations. Not the least to mention the wait time in these offices even if you go there before they open up their doors to the public. Also, the way they interpret their instruction/rules vary to a greater extent. They sent me back 3 times for insufficent documents and on the last visit they mentioned that i will not be able to renew the license before the expiry. My friend who was in the same boat as me few months ago was able to get his license renewed at his local DMV office. So in essence, i have to let the license expire and then go to the stupid DMV office the next day and apply for license renewal. Since September 1st is labor day, i had to go to the DMV office tomorrow.

Today 'D' is the one who drove to all the places(friend's place, temple, grocery & food). The full day I have to adorn the passenger seat with my presence! This was a different feeling all together. Not that i haven't been as a passenger in a car. Many a times, i find myself enjoying the passenger seat when friends drive their car because of the fun part you have while chatting with your friends irrespective of the traffic conditions and other related driver stress! But the idea of not having a license to drive creeped me out the entire day.

Tiramisu - revisited

2008-06-28T17:46:00.001-04:00

If you love Tiramisu particularly from Olive gardens and if you are like me who goes to Olive Gardens just for eating Tiramisu, you are lucky if there is a Whole foods nearby your place. Just stop by Whole Foods to get a delicious Tiramisu at their bakery. They are made fresh in their bakery and taste exactly the same as Olive gardens. The extra kick is that you get almost three times the size of what you have in Olive gardens but for the same price. We didn't find any difference between whole foods and the olive gardens tiramisu. They look exactly the same in texture, softness and of course the delicious heavenly taste!

Tiramisu is one of very few desserts that 'D' like very much. That is the main reason for us to get tiramisu now a days very often from whole foods. Though i like to devour the whole thing in a matter of seconds, i only take a minuscule portion because of my health conscious attitude. To make adjustments for this minuscule tiramisu, i decided to forgo one of my other high calorie favorite "Starbucks caramal frappuccino with a vanilla shot" that i drink(venti size) every once in a while!

Some of my friends told me that Traders joe also sells very good tiramisu. I need to get my hands on it but 'D' is so fond of whole foods tiramisu that she is not letting me buy from Traders joe even once just for the sake of checking its taste... Here is a picture of the whole foods tiramisu before we pounced on it. Salt and pepper shaker is on the background just for giving a rough idea about the size of the tiramisu in the image.

Xubuntu - Startup troubles

2008-06-18T22:28:00.001-04:00

Browsing the Internet was not much of a difference when you move out from Windows OS. Thanks to Firefox. The real trouble started when i wanted to play music and watch movies. I opened up the synaptic package manager and searching on the software repository resulted in many music players. It is not as simple as in windows where i download Winamp in a new system and then forget about music player till i buy the next computer. I have to check the reviews on the Internet to decide on which one to try out. Later i should get comfortable with it and finally decide to stick with one. But that's the fun part right!

I did some research and finally decided on ''mplayer". When i marked that software for download and applied the changes in the synaptic package manager, the real trouble started. I don't remember the error message now but when i searched on the Internet, there were many references about it. I started trying out the solutions one by one and finally one that involved changing some configuration spec for the Ubuntu start up module worked. I have to open up the shell prompt and type in the commands the old style.

I was able to play mp3 but mplayer didn't work for streaming video from the Internet. 'D' needs that capability to listen to her lectures from the school website. Then i had to install another player and few other audio/video codecs. Finally everything worked as expected but the GUI for these players were not as sophisticated as the Windows equivalent. But that's the price one has to pay for using free open source software utilities that doesn't has large user community.

Synaptic package manager, Thunar file Manager and many other regular things were new but most of them were within a quick learning curve. It is just a matter of few days before i get used to the new environment and settings of Ubuntu. I have to get myself out of the Windows way of using a regular computer system! But i'm already missing alt+tabs, print screens and few other Windows generic functions but hey, i think this is a good start for someone who is switching from the Windows platform the first time...

back to back movies

2008-06-10T10:38:00.007-04:00

It is nothing new to me. I have seen two movies at a stretch during my college days many times and if i remember correctly a few times even when i was in school itself. Last Sunday we watched "Kannamuchi Ennada" followed by 'Rhythm". We started watching the first movie around 7.00 PM and finished both the movies around 1.00 in the night. This qualifies for a back to back movies and its something very normal to me(like watching one movie over the weekend) But for 'D', its the first ever back to back movie in her lifetime!

'D' is someone who can watch a movie in multiple sittings. I know few people like that. A college friend of mine will always browse Internet while watching a movie. I will not even blink for more than a second while watching a movie. Thats me! Once i had a roommate who will finish up a Tamil movie in 5 days. He will watch the movie for 30 minutes while having dinner daily. After he is done with the food, he will simply turn off the TV and do something else. For them, watching movies in DVDs is a kind of relaxing entertainment at their convenience. I have always wondered about the mindset of those people. It is like doing injustice to the entire set of people behind the movie :) How could they stop watching a movie in the midway?

I belong to the antithesis of that notion. To me when a movie starts, there should be nothing over the entire time that will be a disturbance even for a second. The rule applies for all types of movie (excellent ones, all good ones, most of the mediocre ones and few bad ones). But nowadays there are movies that are really bad and pathetic that i don't rent them at all. Because if i rent them and start watching them, then i got to finish them up. At the most i will fast forward but will never even think of wandering to other rooms when the TV is on!

I usually don't pick up phone calls even if i see the movie for the umpteenth time. The same rule applies if i have to pause the movie in case of a loo break or any other important thing. On the other hand, 'D' belongs to the other category. She will the watch the movie for few minutes, then go and do some work at the kitchen(Even if i insist on stopping the movie, she will say thats OK) and later join for the remaining of the movie. Thats total disrespect to a movie in my language :)

But over the last weekend, i have successfully pulled her out of the other category. She didn't like the first movie that much but enjoyed the latter. But the main thing is, she watched two movies back to back! One of many things a marriage could do to a person :)

random phrases

2008-05-31T09:28:00.004-04:00

I came across these two phrases last week. I heard them from different people at different situations but both were intriguing to me. They were unrelated but i felt compelled to write about them just like that. One was "placebo effect". I don't remember the actual context but my brother mentioned it while we were having a discussion over the memorial day weekend. In layman terms, if you have headache you may think that a cup of coffee will fix it. Even though medically the caffeine may help you out, the good feeling and the belief you have on the coffee as the remedy acts as a catalyst to make you feel better quickly. That's called as the "placebo effect". Though i have come across the general meaning of the phrase over the years such as feel good factor or terms such as " everything is in your mind" or attitude/belief to a certain extent while taking medication, i was surprised that there is a proper term "placebo effect" for this phenomena and it is a widely researched topic for many decades in the scientific community. On the Internet, one will find many interesting accounts of how this phenomena is studied/ researched the help of various clinical trials.

Placebo effect - "The placebo effect is the measurable, observable, or felt improvement in health or behavior not attributable to a medication or treatment that has been administered."

The other one was "canary in a coal mine". When my colleague was getting ready to get out of work, she said that she was like the "canary in the coal mine" to people who still stays at work after she leaves. She is the one who leaves works as the last person generally. I know that the phrase was something close to a warning. I was like whats that??? and she went on for few minutes about the short life of a canary in a coal mine. I told her that i will leave immediately along with her as i don't want to stay after the canary :)

Canary in a coal mine - "Life for an actual canary in a coal mine could be described in three words - short but meaningful. Early coal mines did not feature ventilation systems, so miners would routinely bring a caged canary into new coal seams. Canaries are especially sensitive to methane and carbon monoxide, which made them ideal for detecting any dangerous gas build-ups. As long as the canary in a coal mine kept singing, the miners knew their air supply was safe. A dead canary in a coal mine signaled an immediate evacuation."

Soaring gas bills

2008-05-28T21:47:00.000-04:00

I payed $54 when i filled my car last week. That was the first time i had to shell out more than $50 for filling my Accord. I guess it will be like this from now on and i have to be even prepared for the worse looking at the current oil scenario! It used to be $1.70 a gallon when i bought my car in 2004. I know all of us can relate to some time period and about the cost of gas at that time. To me, i started noticing it when i got my first car in 2004. Now its around $4 and since my average miles/month have increased rapidly compared to 2004, i am paying at the gas station each time what i used to pay for a month earlier! Sad to mention that i need to fill up my Accord once a week.

My only consolation is that i don't owe a Mustang or a SUV. I am hearing lot of stories from friends who have these gas guzzlers about the money they spend for gasoline every time. It could come to $100 easily or may be around @125 for filling up a SUV soon. Thats bad news for all the people who owe a gas guzzler or planning to buy one. For those who have one, nothing is going to change on the SUV's mileage to offset for the rise in gas price. With its already low mileage, everyone will think twice before buying a new/old SUV these days.

In the recent days, i avidly monitored the gas prices wherever i see them while i drive around. The hike in gas price was gradually moving up and i first saw the premium gas hitting the $4 some weeks ago. Then it was the middle one and this week it was the regular gas crossing the $4 milestone. Is this a milestone?? Not for me or for most of the public except for few executives who have stock options in the oil companies! I was planning to put a graph showing the gas price over time. But nothing interesting there. People will sigh looking at the graph and moreover it will be shocking to many of us if it had a forecast for the future gas price. Instead of that, i settled with the below funny image.

I know that people in Europe pay roughly $8 for a gallon of gas. But now, in USA people are feeling the pinch on the gas bills and it ain't going anywhere soon! It will take some time for the normal public to come to terms with the $4 a gallon price but that time, the gas prices would have jumped to hit the next milestone ($5 a gallon)...

comcast website - user login/password

2008-05-26T12:28:00.000-04:00

I have been having lot of issues with my utility services in one way or another recently. My electric utility(Dominion Virginia Power) issued a new account number to my place(we didn't move or modify anything with the previous account) for whatever reason and they didn't inform us nor they did transfer the balance from the previous account. Only the earlier month, i had to pay much more than the actual bill since they didn't do the bills properly. Now, the balance credit is hanging nowhere and even after 3/4 customer service calls nothing has changed.

The next issue was with Verizon land line service. I called them up to setup the phone service with a promotional offer that i received through post and surprisingly it was a simple, direct 5 minute job. I shouldn't rant about the 12 minute wait time to get to speak with a person(as it was in the evening, i called up through my cell phone, switched on the speaker and was doing my browsing while waiting). The trouble started when i had to reschedule my appointment for their technicians to come and start up the phone service at my condo. I was literally transferred 8 or 9 times and still didn't get a chance to talk to a right person. I was so annoyed and furious that i shouted during the latter part of the call. It was a jungle out there and everybody was forwarding to the next one providing some nonsense as excuses. At one stage, i was asking them to cancel the service and for that too, i had to talk to the next person! If i have to write all the excuses that they provided, it will be a separate post of its own. i have to admit that 1 or 2 customer representatives were kind and polite but they were not able to help out my situation. Finally, the last one assured that someone will call me the next day and i am still waiting. Probably they will call my Verizon land line itself for its own service setup :)

Luckily the next day while at work, the technician called and told me that service setup has been completed. After talking with her, i found out that they don't have to do anything inside our condo! No need for us to be at home. That was the reason we were trying to reschedule since we will not be at home. So much for Verizon's worthless customer service. She was apologizing for the trouble but i was happy that the ordeal is over. If not, i have to call Verizon's ineffectual customer service one more time to reschedule the setup time!!!

Today, while having lunch i remembered that i didn't pay my Comcast cable bill for a long time. So, i thought i will check up the account balance through their website. Usually the user name and password would have been saved in the browser's memory and with one click, i will be inside the account management service. For some reason login details were empty in the Comcast homepage. I started typing my user name with the usual ease as it would be either my gmail or the older yahoo email id. But, I felt something strange and different when i typed the password. Oh Boy! I saw my password in the screen as the way i typed on the keyboard. Instead of the '****' my password was there as clear legible texts similar to my user name!

If you didn't click the image, here is another close up picture of the goof up. This is not a photo shop or some other imaging trick! I didn't want to login with my user name and password like this into the Comcast website. Decided to try the website some other time. Hope they fix the issue soon. Nowadays there are innumerable number of phishing scams and other security vulnerabilities even if you are careful with your regular Internet browsing. With my recent track record for the utility services, i don't want to open up another issue paving way for a mind boggling customer service experience...

gmail, endless wait and progress bar

2008-05-20T17:16:00.002-04:00

As far as i remember from the starting days of gmail, it loads up very fast(I have never tried it in a dial-up connection though!). In the recent days gmail will load up slow few times and i thought Google would fix this issue by throwing in more computing power and many of their extra clever algorithms that they utilize for their other ventures. Later i noticed that even though how much they try to do at their end, mostly it depends on the user settings for the gmail account and the Internet connection.

If i have my default view to show up 100 messages, it is a lot of data to load up on the web page and it takes time depending on my Internet connectivity and available computer resources. Then i saw the progress bar during the waiting time after i typed in gmail.com and before the in-box got loaded. Also, this intermittent page has an option for you to load up the html view of your account in case if you are annoyed with the delay! That was a nice improvement compared to the previous setup in which i have to look at the browser's status bar which won't provide you with any useful information or any other options! Only thing that we can do is to refresh the page. It doesn't do anything sexy. Just start the wheel again, not from what it got till that time but from the beginning!

So, a progress bar was a step towards the right direction. The progress bar didn't have any eye catchy design or special effects. It is a simple, basic, clean and easy to load up User Interface object that will do its job efficiently. It fits the bill for a Google design. Similar to their homepage which attracted the masses during the time when yahoo was the search king with its cluttered outlook. Last weekend i noticed few times that the progress bar was getting itself into a infinite loops and my inbox never showed up at all. Thanks to the html view option, I was able to look up my mails. Should have been a small bug somewhere in the code but i was surprised that it didn't show up in their testing modules. If i had done something like that at my work, i am sure that there will be a mail with an 'ALL CAPS SUBJECT LINE' sitting in my inbox :)

Strangers - Part 2

2008-04-25T10:56:00.015-04:00

D boarded the bus as usual last Thursday for her two classes. Nothing special in one class but she had to do a presentation of her term paper on the other. She still had to do the last minute check up for the term paper before the final submission. She was banking on the bus trip for the last review of the term paper. After sitting comfortably on a window seat in the middle of the bus she hoped for the next seat to be empty so that she won't have any disturbances during her review. When D looked around there were not many people in the bus. Just then she noticed a formally dressed Indian girl at the entrance having trouble paying for the bus ticket. There was also a guy behind her in the steps trying to help her out. D later found out that the guy was the girl's spouse and he was there to make sure that she got into the bus without any hassles!

After getting the ticket, the girl started walking inside the bus looking for any familiar face as she was searching for a seat. There were few Asian in the bus but i think she was looking for anyone from her own country, if possible her state better if it could be from her town and great if it is from her part of the town :) She is from South India and it is not a surprise that she figured out D was also from her state or otherwise from Tamil Nadu.

D smiled at her and thought of opening up her folder when the girl innocently asked her first question.

Stranger: Are you going to DC?
D: No.

Stranger: Can you tell me when the bus reaches falls church metro?
D: Yes. (D weakly smiled at her and was turning her head towards the window when )

Stranger : How many stops to reach falls church metro?
D : next one is falls church metro.

Stranger : Are you working?
D : No

Stranger : Are you gc?
D : What??

Stranger : Are you GeeCee?
D : i don't know what you are asking?

Stranger : Green Card?
D :No. (nobody will be a green card jeez...)

Stranger : Are you studying?
D : yes

Stranger : So you Student visa
D :No. came here in H4. now studying

Stranger : When did you come?
D : last year

Stranger : Where is your husband working?
D : Same area (not bothering to give correct answers)

Stranger : How long is he in this area?
D : few years.

Stranger : Where do you stay?
D : Ashburn

Stranger : Townhouse or single family
D :a condo

Stranger : When you get down at the stop, can you tell me where i should board the train?
D :yes (do i have anything else in life more important that than!)

That was the last of the salvo of questions thrown at D during that bus trip and D had almost forgotten or didn't even get a chance to review her term paper. D lost track of many other questions that were not of significant nature. In between these questions, she told her side of the story for few of the questions. where she lived? when she moved? why is she going in that bus and other trivial details. But this is insane amount of questions in a short time, particularly the type of questions to ask a stranger in a bus. Probably these people can carry a questionnaire with all the questions and ask everybody to fill it up when they meet anyone anywhere...

Strangers - Part 1

2008-04-24T00:16:00.006-04:00

When i meet people for the first time in any social gathering, I can cope up with the regular introduction and simple chats revolving around work, dwelling place, traffic weather etc. In general, i feel comfortable with strangers only after meeting many times. Then they won't be strangers any more :) Only when i am 100% comfortable, i will open up my mind and then there is no stopping from there. My current set of friends will tell that the above statement is itself a over statement. I find this complete ease only with a select set of people, to date (My friends circle from GCT, and later a few friends from UFL...)

Hence i feel completely annoyed if people ask too many questions during a first meet up, be it a party or a temple or a bus. There are few people, who think that they can ask any question to you once they talk to you. Most of the time they will start with a simple introduction and then later it will be like filling a questionnaire. They will ask all kinds of questions starting from work, company, family, kids and many other personal ones. I try to be polite but after a stage, i simply don't show any interest and will cut the conversation quickly.

D has been using the bus service twice a week to go to school this semester. Many times she will have interesting anecdotes about her travel and the strangers she meet in the bus. She takes her bus from "Herndon park & ride" location to West Falls church metro station. Total travel time is roughly 15 minutes and there is no bus stops between these locations. I am going to write about one of her interesting anecdotes in the next post. Have you ever thought about how many questions a stranger could ask you in a bus? Wait for the next post...

Puthandu nal vazhthukall

2008-04-13T12:06:00.011-04:00

I didn't know that the Tamil new year was moved to Jan 14th till last week. I found about this stupidity while browsing some random blog. When I asked my mom over the phone yesterday, she got pretty much irritated and vented her anger & disappointment over the DMK government and particularly Karunanidhi. If people are ranked based on their tolerance to things they don't like or approve of, trust me, my mom will be the topper in that list! On a personal note, my birthday falls on April 14th and usually Tamil New Year will be on the same date. Sometimes the Tamil New year is off by a day based on the Tamil calender. So i am much more annoyed by this changeover that has no reasons or logic behind it.

Only in our country, politicians can come up with absurd bills, make them as laws and get kudos for having the guts to make changes to these dumb useless stuffs. I think the government has ordered all the special pujas and other new year related things to be stopped in temples and other government offices. My mom was mentioning that only in gazettes and in government offices all these new regulations were enforced. I am also hearing from many friends and other blogs that the general public were all celebrating the Tamil New year and most of them feel that the DMK government's decision to change the Tamil New year as a hastily made useless move. Anyway, i am sure that the general public will continue to celebrate Chitirai 1st(around April 14th) as Tamil New year instead of Thai 1st(around Jan 15) in the many many years to come.

Puthandu nal vazhthukall

I enjoyed the following quote about this senseless move...
“I suspect that those who endorsed the government’s renaming quest must all be DMK supporters. If this government can do this, it can also announce new names for all the 12 months after Periyar, Anna, Stalin, Azhagiri, Kanimozhi and so on,” - political commentator Cho S. Ramaswamy.

Band of Brothers

2008-04-01T11:05:00.010-04:00

Watched "Battle of the Bulge" and "Von Ryan's Express" over the weekend. I like war movies more than the usual action ones. Thanks to Netflix recommendation or else i wouldn't have found out these ones. I have added few more world war movies to the movie queue and will be watching them soon. Last weekend was reminiscent of a particular weekend during my childhood days almost 18 years ago when i watched for the first time few world war classics(The Guns of Navarone, The Great Escape,The Dirty Dozen) . I remember enjoying those films that time and my penchant for war movies is still the same even now.

The nice thing about Netflix recommendations is that it helps anyone to easily find out movies of any particular genre(add the reviews and a rating for the movie based on one's preference and rental history) and i just cannot resist adding them to the queue. I have 140 movies currently! Recently added Band of Brothers(acclaimed 10-part television World War II miniseries) based on Netflix recommendations. This has very good reviews in amazon, rotten tomatoes, imdb and many other places in the Internet. I am a die hard fan of war movies and i need more of it. Not just 100 minutes of a war story. I want to watch many many episodes of a captivating war story and i think "Band of Brothers" will fit the bill perfectly.

Am planning to watch them during the summer. The only reason that makes me to go slow on watching this series is the sheer volume of episodes. It will be very difficult for me to get going with other things if i start watching this one. I will be hopelessly hooked on to the TV and this will have repercussions on many other aspects of life! I am seriously hoping to watch these episodes over a period of time. Don't try to come to conclusion that the dvds will be sitting in my home for months. Usually for TV series like these ones, i will start with 1 dvd and finish all the three at a stretch! Not more than that since i have signed up with Netflix for "3 at a time rental". Within 2 weeks the entire series would be gone :) This is what happened when we started watching "24 series". That was a different ball game because both of us were obsessed about it. That is a rarity considering D is not bothered about movies or any other TV episodes 98% of the time! I cannot expect that to repeat and thats the reason i mentioned about "repercussions on many other aspects of life" earlier :)

Xubuntu

2008-03-29T23:00:00.001-04:00

After browsing through craigslist for a couple of weeks, I got a decent desktop for $75. It is a 1 GHz P3 machine with 512MB RAM, 20 GB hard drive, 17" flat screen CRT and had Windows 2000 on it. I also got a Windows 98 installation CD along with the system. So if anyway i crash the system trying to play with it, i can always switch back to windows 98 and live happily ever after. To me, Windows 98 is a awesome OS for just a Internet box. I started downloading live CDs of various Ubuntu distros and was trying them on my PC. I didn't find any perceptible difference in performance between Xubuntu, Kubuntu & Ubuntu from running from the CD drive. I was not able to run any fancy, visual eye candy desktop stuff of Ubuntu since they were restricted from a Live CD. After doing some research and reading from other user reviews, i decided that Xubuntu will be a better bet for my PC. Xubuntu is a light weight distro well suited for machines such as mine.

One thing that surprised me was that Windows 2000 was really very fast. My browsing experience was comparable or sometimes even better than my laptop(two year old dell XP machine, 1.6 Ghz Centrino, 1.2 GB RAM). I think 512 mb RAM was a higher end specification for Windows 2000 because of its low memory imprint compared to the current available ones. Earlier, i thought of removing windows and having Xubuntu alone. Since i only have a Windows 98 install CD, if i remove Windows 2000, then thats it. I have to rely only on Win 98 then. So decided to have both Windows 2000 & Xubuntu together. Though most of the time Xubuntu is the one that i work with, i felt there is nothing wrong in leaving the Windows 2000 as such. I like the way they name the Ubuntu release versions. Latest stable release is called "Gutsy Gibbon", the next one is "Hardy Heron", previous ones were "Dapper Drake", "Feisty Fawn" to name a few! I went ahead and installed Xubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) as a dual boot OS. The installation was a easy breeze and i partitioned the hard drive equally between Windows & Xubuntu.

Balloons

2008-03-27T15:00:00.002-04:00

I have had balloons in my childhood days which will shrink in a day or two at the most. When i got balloons(helium filled ones) for divya's birthday, those ones shrunk the same day itself! Same stories from many kids and also from parents who have little ones.... All the above sentences are normal there is no need to write about it. But then why this post?? Because there are always few exceptions for everything in life and the above lines were just to create a buildup for whats going to follow up below!

This is a picture that i took few weeks ago. A good collection of huge balloons. Do you know when i got these balloons? Way back in Sep'07. Yeah, thats right. 6 months ago and they are still almost close to what they were at that time. These balloons are not something special. They are the regular ones you find in party city or any other similar store. whats the catch then? The only difference between this balloon collection and the regular ones is that i blew these balloons. For some things, you don't have any answers. Its simply like that.

When my brother's friend was visiting us during Thanksgiving holidays, she was asking about the balloons casually. When i told her that they are there from September, she was wondering what did i blew them with? My earnest answer was "With love" :)

RIP - Raghuvaran

2008-03-19T10:41:00.007-04:00

I came across the sad news about Raghuvaran during my usual blog hopping today. Though i am a ardent fan of movies, I am not a great person when it comes to movie reviews. Even with that limited knowledge, I can vouch that he is one of the best actors the Tamil movie industry has had over a long time. In this blog you can find few lines about his famous roles in Tamil movies. He was the ultimate "psycho" villain of Tamil cinema. The "i know" scene from Puriyadha pudhir was the epitome of his career. I remember watching that movie as a small kid. I vaguely remember that there was a contest that time in TV for getting the the correct number of times he yelled the famous phrase...

Though i don't know him personally, i feel sad for the Tamil cinema for its loss of a accomplished actor. I remember that in many movies, even though i and my friends wouldn't have liked the movie, we would have talked about Raghuvaran's role and the way he blends graciously into his character effortlessly. May his soul rest in peace.

Windows -> Open Source

2008-03-13T12:26:00.006-04:00

After divya started going to school full time, both of us were vying for the laptop many a time and since i needed just for browsing (read as blogs, news and other random sites), i had to settle with something else. Usually i will end up reading books or watching movies. When we decided to buy a second computer, we were figuring out whether we needed a laptop or a desktop. The variables that we had in our mind was cost, mobility and the actual need(how much are we going to use the second one).

But i had something else also. I was thinking whether we will go with a windows OS or any other Linux flavors. My work environment is also Windows and all i know is Windows related software product. Now, that the open source is in a resurgent phase, i want to hop in and just explore without causing much trouble to my existing setup. One more reason, i wanted to switch over to something else other than Windows is the availability of day to day application through the browser. Earlier, with Windows, we could use all the word, excel, powerpoint products at ease. With the advent of Google DOCS, all my day to day use was taken care and the browser makes the file access independent of the operating system. Though OpenOffice was available and i had it in my laptop for few days, it was very slow and i was not very happy with it. Finally, i don't want to spend huge amount of $$$ for my minuscule usage.

Not to mention that these Windows applications consume whatever resource it could get its hand on. The demand for memory, Internet bandwidth, CPU processor speed, video graphics card and hard drive and all the related resources grows each day. After few months of your purchase, your latest product becomes obsolete and that i can understand as part of growth. But, Windows makes the machine to look like some crap from 50 or 60s and will dump the system as a slow Internet box with its ever increasing need for resources. I have been wanting for a long time to take Windows out and install Linux on my laptop. I wanted to explore whats out there in the world sans Windows.

The only thing that was holding me was that there is no backup if something goes wrong. If the laptop is broke which may happen lot of times since i will be a novice Linux user, then there will be nothing else; Not even for browsing the Internet to determine the possible reasons for the issue and then try to fix them. But with Linux on a second computer, i can always have Internet access. Then, no pressure on me if i broke the computer when i start to explore the other side of Windows!

Lake Anna state park - campgrounds review

2008-03-13T12:22:00.003-04:00

We are getting ready for our next camping trip and the review on this camp site was long due. We went to this campgrounds during the end of last summer. The tent site was huge and they were not stacked like the previous campgrounds. Since this is a state park, i think they don't have concerns about real estate issues. All the tent sites have space for parking multiple cars or a car and a medium size boat. Since the campgrounds is nearby lake Anna, most of the campers had a boat parked along with their vehicles.

There is a very small store in the office. They sell wood/starters and couple of other things. Thats it. There is nothing more in the office. The nearest shop was around 10 miles from the camp ground. The office opens in the morning and closes at 6.00. There is also a on site guy who stays in the camp grounds all time. If you need any assistance or need to get done something in the after hours, you need to contact him. The restrooms were a lot better than the previous campground and they were clean and of good size.

Each tent site had a small grilling place, the usual fire ring and a picnic table. This camp site was what we expected when we camped last time; Huge site, good distance between adjacent sites, a very good location surrounded by woods on all sides and a neat restroom. We would like to go to camping grounds like this one. The previous one was crowded and more suited to a family. This one is more suited for a relaxing, serene weekend camping outing. You have to come well prepared to these kinds of campgrounds since it is difficult to buy stuff later. But that was not the case with the previous campgrounds. Details about Lake Anna state park could be found here.

Leap year & Silly things

2008-03-05T12:14:00.007-05:00

If i didn't write a post today(05 March), then i got to wait for an year to write in the same date(of course, the next year). Thats not the case for 29 February since you got to wait four years. I don't know whether i will be still blogging that time. But i wrote a post on 29th Feb' 08 without thinking about these inane stuffs. Silly of me but am happy now that i did post on 29th Feb and don't have to wait for another leap year!

One may wonder why the heck am i having a separate post for this kind of a puerile piece of writing... But, that is me and i can write whatever i want in my blog :) When i searched for silly things, i got the following link at Amazon and it has 4.5 stars for review also. Then i thought this post is well worth to be a separate one and mentioned as a silly thing!!!

Work emails

2008-02-29T11:05:00.007-05:00

Today was a typical Friday, where i was doing my routine work waiting impatiently for the clock to hit the 5.00 pm marker. I don't give my work id to friends and hence emails at work are always work related. So there is no fun at all to check the in-box for new emails. On the contrary, whenever i check-in my code to the main code base, i will sit anxiously and pray to GOD to not get any email about my code check-in. Then, there are those similar mail from others about their code check-ins and nothing to worry about it. Then there are the crucial ones from your manager and other higher ups. These may be emails about your previous code/bugs/fixes or anything related about newer modules/discussions or deadlines/reports etc... The priority of these crucial emails depend on from whom i get these ones and who are all on the 'CC' list. If it is something that relates to a bug in your code/module, then the day goes off getting it fixed! The email will then make you think more about the issue, how you missed the bug in the first case and how this is going to impact your work over the long run to mention few things on a major bug...

Then there are occasional ones about greetings/wishes and other semi random stuffs(donations, girl scouts cookie etc...). One email that i really look forward every year is about our annual bonus from our CEO and my annual review from HR :)

Finally, there are emails that make your day a easy one. These emails generally are funny and usually you get 1 or 2 more funnier replies from others. These emails will lead to few water cooler conversations and in some cases long discussions... There was such a email today and it lightened the mood for most of the developers. This came from one of our senior tech guy and the subject of the email itself made me to sit upright and look through the message. This email was sent to our developer groups and wasn't about anything related to software!
----------------------------------------------------
To: tech@.....
subject: Your mother doesn't work here.
Training sessions are available for those of you unable to figure out how to refill the Toilet Paper dispenser in the west wing men's room.I have posted a sign-up sheet outside my office to schedule a training session.Training is expected to take less than 5 minutes, but some apparently will have more difficulty.
Regards,
YYYY
----------------------------------------------------

ICICI bank - toll free number

2008-02-22T11:30:00.005-05:00

I created a account in ICICI's NRI services for sending money to India. I had some questions about some of their transfer modes and i thought i will talk to a CSR through their toll free number(1 866 ICICI 4U). When i dialed the number, i thought i will get the usual greetings and the long delays. But i didn't even wait after i heard few of their voice prompts. It was so hilarious that i started laughing out loud. Good that i have a room for myself in my work or else others would have wondered what happened suddenly for me to laugh like that...

The first greetings that you hear after you call their toll free number is ICICI's caption or something like that. That was normal. The next two are the funny ones.

If you have a existing relationship with ICICI bank, press one
To begin a new relationship, press two

Come on, Oh god. do people have to start a new relationship with ICICI for each of their questions? Could anybody guess how many people would have had 'relationships' with ICICI bank? Who in the world would anyway approve this kind of funny, ridiculous voice prompts? This is not a small village cooperative bank? ICICI is a huge, well known commercial bank. I am sure this is a oversight but though not a critical issue, this is an example of stupidity to the core!
After this fun stuff, I just emailed my questions. Now waiting for their reply. hope it is not as funny as their telephone voice prompts...

Pink - follow up

2008-02-21T11:18:00.006-05:00

This is a follow up to the post about THE PINK color :) It is not that i am against pink, i like to see & relate pink with the females in general but only to a certain extent... i got this lovely small Starbucks travel coffee mug for divya for valentine's day. don't ask me whether thats the only thing i got for the valentine's day! i gave her a red rose and myself as every other day :)

We got two travel coffee mugs some time back after we started driving to work early morning in the weekdays. We were looking for a small coffee mug for divya but didn't get small enough as she wanted. So, we picked up the smallest that we got and she was OK with that. The one i picked up at Starbucks was smaller than what we have and it was a perfectly made gal's coffee mug. Haven't you not still guessed about what I'm going to write... if not, its a pity since i gave up so some much information about the pink color in the above lines. It was a transparent white, stylish coffee tumbler that had a pink cover and a general pink theme all over the tumbler. It has many tiny heart shape design around the tumbler and they were all pink & looked really cute.

Today, i came to work very early and since the regular coffee mugs were not washed, she insisted that i take the new one. I was a little hesitant but i agreed whats the big deal. I am going to have it only in the car and going to finish up the coffee before i reach work. But, when i reached work there was considerable amount of coffee left in the tumbler. I looked up again very carefully at the tumbler and i didn't have the guts to take the coffee tumbler inside the work place:) At the same time, i don't want to miss the remaining coffee. What a terrible situation to start the day! funny right... Finally, I got out of the car after sitting two more minutes to finish up the coffee!

Valentine's day - pink

2008-02-14T17:28:00.004-05:00

Google docs homepage changed to a all out 'pink' theme for valentine's day. I have seen their homepage logo change for most of the major holidays/religious events. But this is the first time, google docs is going for a makeover. I use google docs for almost everything and i cannot take this much pink for a day. May be gals will love this but surely the other half won't :) I know this is kind of a user theme setup and will disappear tomorrow but GOD! its too PINK for me... toolbars, menus, headers and even the small box thats used to expand all the stuff under it are all in different shades of PINK. On the other hand, i am waiting for them to bring the theme option for the google doc users. I very much like the igoogle theme and it would be great if they bring up the same to google docs. then i can have everything the way i need(much like windows desktop theme) instead of seeing the same interface everywhere.

(too much pink!)

Daily commute

2008-02-08T16:02:00.001-05:00

Till last week, i always feel bad for people whose daily commute is more than an hour. From the time(around 3 yrs) i started working, I have been living close to my workplace and my daily commute was usually around 20 to 25 mts. Though i change apartment every year, i made sure that my commute was less than 10 mts one way. The reason for the lesser commute time is the availability of many apartments near my work. Also the main thing was, i was single and didn't own a house.

One of the last two things changed last year. Since my wife didn't work, i really didn't have any reason to move. She got admission in Virgina Tech this semester and started going to school since last week. I have seen many females who come in dependent visa are restricted to a narrow selection of community colleges and one or two good ones. Or else their option would be to go to schools that are within 2/3 hour drivable range. Then, they have to live at the school campus during the week and then meet up over the weekend. We were lucky to have a very good school nearby our place.

Since she is yet to drive by herself, i am doing the chauffeur job for her almost daily. Some days i have to travel more than an hour in the morning as well as evening, but other days it would be mostly in the morning since she will take a bus in the evening. Her part time job is at a different location than her school and both of them(they are 6 miles apart) are roughly 20 miles from our place. Since her classes are spread out throughout the week, we ended up with this kind of stretched travel schedule. Though few of her classes are streamed online, those professors have few points for class participation and we don't want to miss them!

We had initially thought the 3 classes may end up in 2 days or a max of 3 and she could work 20 hours the remaining two full days in a week. But, now she has classes on 4 days of a week and we got to squeeze her work in between this schedule. We are hoping and will be really happy if the class schedules are a little flexible and favorable to us in the coming semesters. Starting with this, i am going to write 2/3 posts about driving/traffic in general and my personal rants about annoying drivers...

Chocolates

2008-02-01T10:23:00.000-05:00

Though i have been a avid enthusiast for chocolates since the time i could remember, it had been quite a long time since i bought and tried out a new chocolate. That was until last week. When i went to pick up divya from Virginia Tech, i had few minutes at my disposal and i was wondering thoughtlessly inside the small bookstore. I was not looking for anything specific but browsing through their hokie merchandise. Then, there was this small rack near the billing counter that had all the usual snacks such as chips, cakes, chocolates, gums etc...

The chocolate cover and the wordings on it caught my attention. I have seen/eaten different kinds of chocolates from all around the world from a very small age and i have never seen one like this before.To name a few... Toblerones, Ferrero rochers, dessert naughts and different kinds of European Truffles, many varieties of gourmet chocolate delights; I had the luxury of eating all these kinds of chocolates not now or 2/3 years back but roughly around 15 yrs ago. Thanks to my uncle and other family siblings who had a good knowledge of fine, tasty good chocolates and also brought them in huge quantities when visiting India.

Then, i thought may be these are cheap quality chocolates from local manufacturers. But no, they were not locally made. These chocolates are produced by Bloomsberry & co, a New Zealand company. Out of the many fancy ones, I got the "Emergency chocolate' since it had been a very long time and i need to buy one chocolate to eat/live :) After putting a piece of the chocolate in my mouth, i found out that i had bought a dark chocolate. I always like the sweet ones and whenever i get a chance to trade a chocolate with my brother or father, i will give them my share of the dark chocolate for the regular one. But surprisingly, i liked this particular dark chocolate and it was very good. As soon as i finished the whole bar, i immediately went to brush my teeth.... if you had seen my previous post, you will know the reason!

for people like me who didn't buy chocolates for a very long time

for those who try to stop eating chocolates....

perfect for chocolate lovers

Dentist appointment

2007-12-19T18:14:00.000-05:00

The previous post about scrabble revolved around my dentist appointment. Then i thought that the dental appointment itself needs a separate post. I did four fillings over the last two weeks. Four of my wisdom tooth were extracted during this summer. Since all the wisdom tooth didn't have any complexity, the extraction process was straight forward and simple. That itself, made me to think more about maintaining dental health issues. If i step back a year, then i had to mention about the two sittings that i needed during last year summer to fix some kind of gum problem. Thats the dental history that i have to carry forward to the next year!

It is not that i didn't do anything till now for a better dental health. I have been brushing twice almost daily and flossing 2 to 3 days in a week over the past 2 years. I got to increase the frequency and do it regularly without any longs breaks in the future. I believe that everything in the world happens for a reason. With that logic, this post also should need a reason :) One reason was the pain and discomfort i encountered in the dentist's office last week. Add to that, the story of root canal treatments from my wife and mother. Both had root canal on one of their teeth this year and my dad is currently in the middle of his root canal process. I know that root canal is the next step if filling is not sufficient and i strongly hope to avoid the painful long root canal process in the near future!

Scrabble

2007-12-17T17:02:00.000-05:00

Place: Dental clinic
Date: Monday
Time: Afternoon, during lunch break from work.
Reason: To do fillings for the bad ones!
History: Done few filling the previous week

Now to the story:
I was sitting down comfortably on the chair waiting for the dentist to start her work. Since i did few fillings the previous week, i was not looking for any surprises. I know what the dentist will do and was waiting patiently for her to come inside the room, look at the computer for today's work and she will start with her work after exchanging some pleasantries. Just in front of the chair, on the wall is a 36" x 24" poster that has the following words on the top.
"For a whiter, brighter smile, You have always dreamed of!"
The poster has a black background and closeup view of the faces of few people. The people in the poster were a good representation of all kinds of the major human races. White, Black, Oriental, Blond etc... One thing common about all of them was their flashy, beautiful smile. As any normal guy, my eyes stayed a bit longer to analyze the details of the fairer sex than the others.

After spending a few minutes on the picture [since i got to do justice to the proverb "A picture is worth a thousand words" -:)], i looked at the words on the poster. When i saw the wordings, instantly i tried to break the words into "word inside a word" format like below.
"For a whiter, brighter smile, You have always dreamed of!"
A seasoned scrabble player will know what i mean now. After spending lot of time playing scrabble, whenever i see some bold words or sentences, without giving a second thought, my mind races to decode the words in terms of points scored on a scrabble board or try to dissect the bigger words into smaller ones which could be of use in the future! For the scrabble newbies, if someone keeps a word like "right", then the other person could add "b" to make it "bright" or "b,e,r" to form "brighter".

our usual scrabble setup

Snow

2007-12-11T17:19:00.000-05:00

Picture of a deserted picnic table

The first snowfall of this winter was during the middle of last week. The previous day, I was excited and was checking few times through the windows for snowfall till i went to bed. I wondered whether the snow will cheat the forecasters and show up a day earlier than predicted. But, it turned out to be a obedient child in the clutches of the weatherman! Though I was not surprised, the child in me couldn't wait longer to see the natural glittering white carpet of snow covering everything available to its reach.

Anybody ready to swim in the pool :)

In the morning, the first thing after i put on my glasses, i looked through the window blinds to view the snow covered neighborhood. There it was; Snow, all around the place reflecting off the light rays in every possible direction, thus making the sun appear brighter than the usual days... After feasting my eyes on the snow, i started getting ready for work. When i got out of the house, i didn't forget to take the small snow shovel! Thats the way to start a day after snowfall :)

Staunton/Verona KOA Campgrounds review

2007-11-30T14:09:00.000-05:00

We camped at the Staunton/Verona KOA Campgrounds for a couple of days during the peak summer of this year. As usual, after going through lot of reviews I selected this particular one for many reasons. We liked many features and didn't like few others. The camping store has most of the necessary items in case if we forget to bring anything. The campground staffs are a bunch of nice people and they make sure that everybody is properly accommodated. The restroom and bathrooms were clean and as a whole the place was a well maintained, tidy campground.

The tent sites are very closely located like a pack of sardines. The tent sites are arranged in such a fashion that each tent side is surrounded by parked cars. On one side of the tent would be one's own car and the other side will have the next tent's parked car. The picnic table and the grill is on the back of the tent location and one's own car parking. Since we went on a peak summer weekend, all the tent sites were occupied and the campground was crowded. It was not bad but not what we expected.

The website mentions a lot of fun activities at the campgrounds but we didn't try any of it. One thing that we felt as if it was over blown out of proportions is the location of the campground on a river bank and beside a small water falls. The website even mentioned about water tubing and other water sports. What we found was a water stream and a small but decent waterfalls. In the night we were able to hear the sound of the waterfalls since our site was very close to the stream.

There was a small makeshift shop selling drinks and other local pastries. The ice tea they made was awesome and i think we would have drank many liters of ice tea over the whole weekend. It turned out to be a nice place if i have to rate the overall experience. There were lot of activities for the kids and i think it is a perfect place for a family camping outing.

The Swamp, Go gators

2007-11-28T18:34:00.000-05:00

I never thought i will watch the Florida-FSU game live. But thats what happened last week. I though i wouldn't be watching the game even in TV since i will be in Florida for the thanksgiving vacation, busy in a theme park or in the beach. To be in the swamp and to watch a college football rivalry game is a awesome experience. We had planned to go to Universal Studios on Saturday, but were tired from visiting the Islands of Adventure on the previous day. So we changed our plans and started driving out to Gainesville in the morning.

My wife was amazed at the number of people in the campus on a weekend. Hordes of people swarm the campus/stadium on any given game day. People have parked their cars at every nook and corner of the parking lots, side of the roads, over the grass lawn and on any possible parking location. One could witness groups and groups of people everywhere in small, big gatherings doing nothing but partying, chatting, eating/drinking and the kids playing all around with football & skates. One could see many different kinds of canopies, tables, grills, stoves over the lawns in these groups. But the only common thing in this huge outdoor festive gala is the orange & blue shade. One could name anything here and i am sure that it will have either both or one of the color on it. This is a game day in the gator nation!

I have seen many of these game days when i was a student few years back. When i got a student season ticket pass, I saw few football matches in the swamp from the student section. The tickets were $7 bucks for the students that time. But last week, i didn't have any tickets and we roamed around the stadium looking for a pair of tickets for the game. After a good 30 minutes, we got a pair of tickets for $200 bucks! Thats almost thrice the normal price. People were ready to shell out more money than us even there. But the gal who sold the ticket was very nice and she said that we were the first to approach her and she was planning to sell the tickets for $100 each. By chance, that was our budget also. We were sitting very close to the end zone and the game was lot of fun! It was not a close game at all to begin with. But, no one thought it will be a lopsided victory for the gators. But with Tebow as the gun slinger, anything is possible for the Florida gators. A separate post is a must if i need to write how much i enjoyed watching the game. And i ain't a good sports writer. so there will be no such post :)

GO GATORS

Learn new words, Give free rice

2007-11-15T19:02:00.001-05:00

I have been visiting this site and playing the word game almost daily since i came across this site two weeks ago. The website looks neats, the green paddy fields in the background is very pleasant to the eyes and the interface is very user friendly and simple. They have a huge database of words, since i didn't encounter the same word twice over the two weeks. Today, I noticed that the user has the option to store the vocabulary level and the total number of rice grains donated. There is no user/login id but the website stores the required information for each computer.

I really like the business model of this idea. All the people who are part of it gets their fair share of reward. The users who play the word game will improve their vocabulary as well as have the satisfaction of helping feed someone in a third world country. I play almost daily for few minutes till i get 300 or 400 rice grains in the bowl. The amount of rice grains from a single user on a day may not be sufficient to feed a full meal to someone but, the total number of rice grains donated each day is growing briskly and has reached a overwhelming 187 million as of yesterday. Check for the daily totals and the entire amount of rice grains donated up to date here.

The website gets the money from the advertisers who display their advertisements on the website. The website doesn't show the advertisements all around the place. Instead they are shown on the bottom as small boxes without disturbing the overall ambiance. The amount of rice donated is directly proportional to the time the users spend on the website playing the word game. As the number of users and the active play time increases, the time the advertisements getting exposed to the public increases. This increases the value of the advertisements and hence more money for donating free rice to the needy.

The rice is donated through United Nations World Food Program. This improves the trustworthiness of the distribution channel, the website and the people behind the whole idea. If this idea/program had been publicized through a small non-profit organization, i would have still played the game, but would have been wondering about the efficiency of the distribution network. Earlier, it used to be 10 grains of rice/word, but now it is 20 grains of rice/word. I came across this website during my regular blog hopping and i am seeing a lot of reference to this site in the Internet. I sincerely hope and wish that this unique model for charity combined with great publicity will attract a lot of new people everyday to play the word game thus contributing to the noble cause of eradicating hunger out from our world.

Diwali - Festival of lights

2007-11-14T14:33:00.001-05:00

This diwali was different to me than the recent years in many aspects. First thing first, i am not single anymore. The first main Hindu festival that I & my wife celebrated together as a family was this Diwali. She made Gulab Jamoon the previous day and Masala cheeyam on the morning of Diwali. Those two were the Diwali sweet/snack at our home. We took shower very early in the morning, dressed up in new clothes, drove to temple and had our grand breakfast(idli, sambar, masala cheeyam, chutney & Jamoon). The only thing that i missed was fun with fire crackers. Back home in India in our family, we used to light fire crackers after getting dressed up and before going to temple.

This diwali brought back the memories of the good old ones to my mind. The recent years after coming to USA, Diwali has been "yet another day" since we don't have anything special on that day. The first Diwali in USA, being a student away from family and in a different country, i missed the festive celebrations and all the others things such as the sweets, new clothes, TV programs, watching new movies in theaters etc... But the second year, kind of knew what to expect for a Diwali and things were OK.

After joining work, it's been a little better. From nothing special, it changed to weekend parties or social gatherings and i also get to see at the least a new Tamil movie. Since the current place has lot of Indian crowd, one or two new Diwali Tamil movies are usually screened in the nearby theater over the Diwali weekend. Finally, this year add home made sweets/snacks and from now on, i guess i will be looking forward eagerly to Diwali like my childhood days.

Airline ticket

2007-10-31T10:40:00.001-04:00

I recently purchased airline tickets for our Orlando trip during Thanksgiving vacation. That time, I saved the 'ticket cost matrix' from United Airlines in my computer, so that later i could put my two cents about the airline industry's crazy, irrational ticket strategy in the blog. Below is the airline ticket matrix for various category of seats for a round trip ticket from Washington to Orlando during Nov' 07.

To begin with, any lay man could find out that the ticket costs in the above case is really absurd, illogical and doesn't match to any level of sensible pricing strategy. If you look at the first column, the price of a nonstop flight is less than a 1-stop itinerary. How could this be? Few reasons that immediately come to my mind are the different kinds of pricing promotions that constantly change over time, different methodologies in classifying the airports to various segments/zones followed by the airlines and the search algorithm used to execute the user query. One may not understand the nuts and bolts of the particular search algorithm and the airline pricing strategy but I am sure no one will pass over a cheaper nonstop flight to a expensive multi-stop one. Only one situation in which a user would be reserving a expensive multi-stop itinerary would be due to favorable flight timings.

Let us get the search algorithm out of the equation by comparing the price of different category of tickets of a same flight in the above itinerary. First class ticket is more than 10 times the economy one. I have never flown first class and hence i don't know the extra perks, leg room that you enjoy in a first class. But as a ordinary man one thing i know is, if a product is "x" dollars, the premium version of it will be 4 or 5 times "x". I don't know how much different is a airline ticket than this simple example, but i am pretty sure that this ticketing strategy is obsolete. I am sure if they lower the difference of the first class, more people will fly in it throughout the year.

Then the most funny one on the above cost matrix is the difference between the economy class and the refundable economy class. If you look at these cost for the nonstop flight (first row), the refundable is 10 times than the normal economy class. Here, we are not talking about extra leg room or the perks associated with first class, the only difference is that you get a full refund if anyone cancels the refundable economy class. If anyone cancels the normal economy class ticket, the airlines usually issue a credit coupon for the money that you got to use buying a ticket in the same airlines within a year. I don't think any sane guy will pay a premium of 10 times the normal cost to get a refundable economy ticket!

I know it will be very difficult for a search algorithm to come up with a correct list of itinerary/cost and eliminate the other close ones, but something like the above scenarios should be investigated and scrutinized by the respective marketing/sales/IT division.

Fall colors

2007-10-23T14:02:00.000-04:00

This is a apt time for a post about fall colors. This is the right time of the year to talk about fall colors in any party. In these parties one could surely hear many discussion about how fall colors will be better as we go north from DC area and that the best colors could be seen in Vermont only. That being said, we are going to Skyline drive to see fall colors this Saturday. I was thrilled to go to the skyline drive, the first time when i moved to this region three years ago. The different shades of yellow, brown and sometimes red in a single tree or the diverse blend of these colors together in a bunch of trees makes the fall colors a appealing visual delight to the eyes.
Seeing fall colors is a awesome experience, the first time. It is not something to look forward as a repeating attraction every year. After the first time, i decided not to drive more than an hour to see fall colors. One of my friend flew from Florida just to see the fall colors last year. So, i took him to a nearby place to see fall colors. This year, i thought i can skip the fall colors drive. But, NO. I have to take my wife to see the fall colors since this will be her first time. It is not that i am complaining, but its kind of boring nowadays.
I am one of those guys who believe that there are lot of places in and around everyone's home/work that has beautiful colors (assuming you live/work in one of the area where you could see fall colors). The only thing is that you got to notice them while driving around those nearby places! If one searches on the Internet, there will be plenty of beautiful, awesome pictures of fall colors. I have posted few fall color pictures that i took last year.

Water - a short story

2007-10-14T23:41:00.001-04:00

A short story on my part for Blog action day.

It was Sunday night and he went inside the bathroom to shave his 2 day stubble so that he will be ready for the next week. He turned the washbasin faucet open and splashed his face with the cold water. Then he changed the water temperature to mild hot by adjusting the hot/cold water knobs. After applying the shaving gel, he started shaving with the MACH 3 razor slowly. He didn't bother to stop the water or reduce its speed. Every time when he shaves, he will notice the receding hairline on his fore head. He will think about doing something to try to stop the hair loss. But, thats something he had in his mind for a long time and he knows that it will remain as such even longer. By this time, he become comfortable with the sound of water gushing out of the faucet.

It was pitch dark for a couple of seconds suddenly, due to a power flicker. He was kind of surprised; He looked around the bathroom to check whether everything was normal. He has never seen a power outage in USA from the time he moved to this country five years back. During those two seconds, when it was pitch dark, he felt as if the sound of gushing water got magnified many folds. The sound of water reminded him about a conversation that he had in his friend's place, two weeks ago. Their kid, a cute seven year old was brushing her teeth in the night while everybody else was chatting in the living room. When he found out that she didn't turn the water off while brushing, he chided her for wasting water. Then he mentioned how these kids doesn't know the importance of water, since they don't know the concept of water drought having lived here from birth.

Now, the thought that he was wasting water made him feel guilty. He remembered how he shaved in the past during his college days in his home country . He will use at the most 3 or 4 cups of water for shaving. That is how his father still shaves even now. All this thought about how he advised the small girl, when he himself was wasting water having known the significance of water, made him feel even bad. Then he decided that from now on, though he cannot go back to that level of water usage, he will not waste water but instead try to conserve water where ever he could. To start with, he went to the kitchen to pick up a plastic bowl.

Blog action day

2007-10-13T10:04:00.001-04:00

Last week, I came across this blog in one of my regular blog reads. I was looking at the endless list of blogs participating in this topic and wondered about the different kinds of posts thats going to be published about this issue on a single day. Is there any way to measure the number of regular readers for these list of blogs? Is there any way to find out the impact of these posts? I don't know. But i wanted to be part of this blog action day since it is about our environment. For my part, i can remember long discussions with friends about the do's and don't for a better sustainable environment.

I like ideas like this which tries to gather/assemble information from the general public and distribute them back as an interesting, attractive stuff. Long time back, i uploaded a picture on my blog for Self Portrait Challenge. The other one that interested me was post secret. I didn't post anything till now! It is not that i don't have any secrets but the thought of revealing them even anonymously freaks me out. Hence, when i came across this blog, i decided to write something about the environment.

Poker - again

2007-09-28T11:15:00.000-04:00

Everyone dreams to get the above set of cards since it is the best hand in poker and nothing can beat it. Do u know what is the probability to get such a hand? one in 2.6 million times roughly! I have only seen this hand in movies... The next best thing is 4 of a kind(say for example, 4 kings). The odds of getting a 4 of a kind is one in 4165 times. After playing for many many times, i have seen very few of them(single digits) and i got one last weekend!

Now a days, we play poker regularly on Friday nights from 8.30 pm to 1.00 pm. This has been going for the past 7 weeks! The poker group has become a closed one. Its been the same gang over the few weeks! During the week, now, there is always something fun to look forward for the weekend. Poker on Friday, football on Saturday/Sundays. This helps me to remain focussed over the weekdays!

The way we play poker has been changing constantly over the days. During the initial 2/3 weeks, we didn't know few intricate poker rules. Once we mastered all the rules, then it was all about the various poker strategies. When to scare the opponents, how much chips needed to scare others, when to lure them into the game, when is a good time to bluff, when to fold/pack off, how long could a player should try to keep others in the game and finally the analysis for almost every game and what changed during the course of the game, the player's luck factor in general for the day and there are many other things that i could write about the poker nights. I can remember endless, lively discussions revolving around these poker strategies. There is no thing as best answer to any of these situations and any good solution boils down to that particular game, the set of players and the stakes at hand.

Now a days, its mostly the game and game alone. All the above things are there, but we don't discuss much about them since everybody knows what to expect out of these to a certain extent. Still, the permutation of the cards combined with the game stakes, your hand and the other players in any particular game makes poker a interesting, unpredictable game. If the game is so unpredictable, then why the heck are we hooked to the game?

Poker Gods

2007-09-25T12:49:00.000-04:00

Do you think that a pocket rocket(a pair of A's) is a good hand to start in poker? Poker players usually die to get this starting hand since this is the best at that moment. Nothing can beat this. But that may not be the same once you go to the next stage of the game. If you ask for opinion about this set of cards from any seasoned poker player, it would be something in the line of this phrase "It is a nice set of perfect cards but might not be the winning hand at the end of the game". That should be the mindset one should have while playing with a such hand. If not, then one should learn to get to that level.

A (2 and a 7) is considered as a worst starting hand in poker. But that too, depending upon your time could be the best hand in any game. So there is nothing like outright good or bad hand in poker. Its always the probability what you can expect out of your cards in any given game. If you add stakes in the pot and the nature of the players who are playing in that particular game, it adds two more diverse dimensions to the capricious poker game.

The game scenario changes almost all of the time during any poker game and thats what makes the game interesting and challenging. The unpredictable nature of the game combined with the ability of the player to control the game through betting makes this game highly dynamic and complex. One should have the blessings of the poker gods to win any poker game! whether it is a pocket rocket or a (2 & 7) :) I think i picked up the term "poker gods" from watching one of the poker tournament in TV. But its very true that you should have the blessings of the poker god to win any game. Like any other god, you cannot get anything you want with just the blessings, you got to do what you go to do and the god's blessings will make sure that you succeed!

poker face

2007-09-20T18:34:00.001-04:00

Even if u didn't play poker , you would have heard or come across this term. True to its meaning, if Leonarda Da Vinci were to draw a picture of Monalisa playing poker in this century, the above one(Monalisa, a set of coolers, enigmatic expression that will mystify/baffle anybody in the world) would be hanging in all the world famous galleries! This is a artwork by Waldemar Swierzy and the picture is taken from here. That is how a perfect poker face should be, with no emotions at all. There can be some kind of expression few cases, but it should strictly be part of a grand plan to deceive/mislead other players!

I am a huge fan for watching poker tournaments in TV. I don't follow up with their TV timings or any particular tournament etc. But whenever it pops up on TV, i will watch it with the same level of enthusiasm as i am playing in that game. I like the part where they show the players cards as if we are opening up the cards, the commentaries, the statistics and probability for each players success after the turn of cards and the drama surrounding the poker table in each and every round. During those times, i notice lot of good & bad poker faces and particularly the expressionless poker champions. I have noticed lot of people in these poker tournaments wearing coolers to make it difficult for other players to find out anything from your expressions. Whatever the case, One has to be a king of deception if he has to win with a bad hand.

Poker chips

2007-09-20T11:54:00.000-04:00

The quality of the chips makes a huge difference during any poker game. The way they stack up together, the sound the chips make when they hit each other, the colorful, bright designs and the chips itself may not be obvious for the first time poker player, but as you play more you will know what i mean. After i played poker few times, I know that i need to have one poker set of my own. As usual, i did my usual browsing of reviews for different kinds of poker chips and finally decided to buy the above one. Everything is same except for the chip colors. my chip set has equal number of colors(100 chips in each color). These are 11.5 g chips with a metal insert that closely matches the real casino chips. There are chips lighter than this (5, 7, 10 g each) made with plastic and you will throw them after you start playing the game more than couple of times. Then there are superior, heavier chips made of clay that almost feels like a casino chips. But they are very expensive for a regular home game. I have played with different types of chips and to be honest, the one that i have is the best bet for a home poker game/party.

Before i bought this, we were all playing with the lighter chips. Everybody liked this kind of chip and from then afterwards who ever bought chips got one of this kind! Because of the shape/look of box, they use to call me 'sniper' during those earlier days. I don't remember where i got the poker chip set, but i am sure i got it for a very good price($30 bucks). I am very certain, i would have used the chips 10 times its value and i believe that this poker set was one of my best purchase :) Still, it is as good as a new piece except for some wear & tears in a very few chips. These wear & tears are also not noticeable to a normal person. I may not miss them since i play often and has a special bonding with it!

Poker

2007-09-18T10:43:00.000-04:00

Velvet Painting of Dogs Playing a Poker Game

Almost two years ago, i have never even heard of the name of this game. But now, i got hooked up to this awesome game so much that i play Poker at the least once a week in the past few months. Earlier, i used to play the regular card games such as bank, donkey, bluff, ass, rummy, literature. "Bank" was a game that i played at a very early age. Literature was one i played many times during college days. I have also played few times games such as 3-cards, bridge & 21. All of these games may be called by various names in different regions. Strictly speaking, my parents doesn't allow cards inside our home. When i was studying, i was playing cards in a friend's home or a relative place. But after coming to USA, there is no restriction in my place! Generally speaking, i didn't play cards very often if i left the last two years in my calculation.

The more we got to play poker, the more we got thirsty for the game :) Initially we played for $2 to $3 with 2 cents a chip. Now, it has gone to $10 per head and the chips to 5 cents. Poker without money doesn't make sense. Players won't value their chip and hence one cannot expect a rational game. I know playing cards with money is a taboo back in India, even some places here. But it all depends on with what perspective one looks at this. If i go to a movie, it is going to cost me $25 (2 tickets + snacks) and i get 2 hrs worth of entertainment. With that into consideration, $20 for few hours of mind blowing fun with a nice group of friends is something i don't mind. Whatever the case, you win or lose, money shouldn't be on the back of your mind at the end of the day. Thats what matters in a nutshell.

Usually we play 4 to 5 hours at a stretch now a days. Earlier it used to be more than with a short break for snacks. Now we have toned down all those extra stuff and it is game and only game alone! I play with a regular set of friends and there are always few people who just try their luck and doesn't turn afterwards. When we started out, the regular players were around 4 and now there are around 6 players. I somehow always think that a group of 6 to 8 is a ideal setting for a poker game. Less than that i can manage (played a lot of games with a total of 4 or 5 players) but more than that, it is too much confusion in the table.

"Velvet Painting of Dogs Playing a Poker Game" picture taken from here

Summer -> Fall -> Winter

2007-09-17T10:21:00.000-04:00

(About the picture: A snowman that we made last winter in Poconos resort!)

Last weekend was the first weekend during which a lot of things changed with due respects to this post title. Gone are those days where one can go out at anytime during a day in a shorts and a small tee. When we went out for shopping on Saturday night, i got to put the heater instead of AC on the car. We replaced our thin summer bed spread with the thick comforter. We switched the thermostat settings in the condo from cooler to heater... These are all things that happened in this weekend even though we are not officially into the winter. Fall is the right term for the current weather even though we are yet to see the prime of the fall season categorized by the fall colors. There are hardly any color change here at my place. So to speak of, i guess this is a period where summer's gone and fall is getting ready at its own pace.

But then, lot of things changed in my perspective. It all started on Saturday evening. After watching the college football game throughout the whole afternoon/evening, i decided to take a short break outside. When i opened the patio door and stepped out, a cool breeze hit my face and it was keenly noticeable. At that moment, i realized the good times of summer that i had over the past few weeks. Late evening snacks sitting outside the La Madeleine bakery, our camping trip, casual chats sitting outside our patio during the weekends anytime of the day and lastly this moment and the chillness around my skin...

While talking to my cousin during the weekend, when the conversation moved over weather conditions, i mentioned about the cold weather and he was like this "come on dude, do u think this is cold" since he is living somewhere remotely north in Canada! To him, this may be a good weather during this period. But if i talk to a friend living down in South Florida, he will be on the other side of the spectrum when compared to my cousin... Whatever the case, to me it is slightly cold when compared to the recent hot summer days... I may be over reacting a bit now, but I cannot hide from the winter thats going to come in a few weeks time. I hope that i get accustomed to the cold weather quickly and without further whining :)

Tiramisu

2007-08-17T17:18:00.000-04:00

I had my first Tiramisu in a Olive Gardens(OG) restaurant in Gainesville, FL when i was studying as a graduate student in UFL. Wikipedia has quite a few interesting stories about the origin of tiramisu... From that instant till now, I have been an ardent fan of this heavenly Italian desert and will remain as one forever. One of my very good friend, KB suggested about this in OG and the white chip macadamia nut cookies in Subway. Being a student going to OG was not a regular thing during those days. Though it was not far away from my apartment, i didn't have a car at that time. I also felt it was expensive and i would have gone may be 4 or 5 times during my whole student life. Our usual eat out is the nearby Chinese all-u-can-eat bufffet! The subway cookies were affordable and i used to have them always whenever i go to subway. But when i tasted the tiramisu for the first time, i know that i will eat it more often in the days to come. The creamy custard over the espresso soaked small bread sticks with a thin film of espresso on the top is a delight to savor.

After i went to work, OG became one of my favorite places to have food. One time I remember that I and my friend had food in a restaurant nearby OG and for dessert alone we went to OG. The waiter there was kind of looking at us like some weirdos but what the heck, i wanted a tiramisu that day and I had it! I have tried tiramisu in other Italian places but i didn't like them as at OG. My brother who is a food connoisseur, mentioned that tiramisu from California pizza kitchen(CPK) is even better than OG. For a long time i was waiting for a chance to visit CPK so that i can try the tiramisu there. These are the things that i get to remember when i think about the wonderful tiramisu.

Finally, i got a chance to visit CPK last weekend when i went to Baltimore harbor to visit the Baltimore aquarium. I was more interested in the dessert than the main food. I was waiting there impatiently like a small kid and my curiosity was at the peak when we ordered for the dessert and sitting there chatting casually. When it arrived, i noticed that the tiramisu was not dry. It was moist and it had sweet cream over it.

(A picture of CPK's Tiramisu)

I took a piece ( grabbed a piece is the correct way of telling) and put it in my mouth for the taste buds to relish on it. I explored slowly the sweet coffee mixed cream/bread taste in each and every bite and i felt that the they have done a very good job. But it is no way close to the tiramisu of Olive gardens!

Independence day

2007-08-15T18:21:00.001-04:00

Today I was looking through the blogs that i regularly visit to check what the bloggers have to say about India's 60th independence day. The bloggers in my blog-hoping list are the regulars that i visit if i get bored or just have few minutes to relax. Most of these bloggers are regular in updating their blogs and write about quite a variety of subjects. I like to read movie, book reviews, travelog's and many more stuff that they usually ponder upon. If i have to categorize them according to nationality, then its mostly Indians except for few. Some are singles, some married and some with kids.

I saw many of them write atleast one post about Rajini/Sivaji movie when the movie was released. I too wrote one post about the movie, being a diehard fan of Rajini. I thought many would have updated their blog with a post related to Indian Independence day by today. But only one had written a short story subtly touching the independence day subject. I don't want to say that i was disappointed, but i thought since these guys write about many things they would have written something about our independence day which is a very important day for our country. Even Google had a post just for the sake of it on its official blog. That made me to write this post today even though i didn't have time to write an elaborate one. At the least, i will have an post about independence day on 15th August!

bomb blasts

2007-08-08T12:25:00.001-04:00

Recent news about various high profile cases that has been on trial for a long time in Indian courts such as the 1993 Mumbai blasts, 1998 Coimbatore blasts has increased my belief on Indian judiciary system. If u have read one of my earlier rants, you will know what i mean. Thought it took us many many years to get a verdict for the above trials, I am very happy that justice has been served finally to the people who were behind these terrorist acts. I truly empathize with the families of the victims because now they can come to terms that justice prevails in this country even though delayed.

I don't remember the Mumbai blasts since i was a small kid and also not in Mumbai at that time. But, I was in Coimbatore studying in GCT during the 1998 serial bomb blasts and i know how nervous we were all at that time. I still remember that day. It was a Saturday and during that time, the college film committee used to screen a movie every Saturday. So, we were all watching the movie in the college auditorium and suddenly there was a slide/announcement about the blasts and asking us to remain safely inside the campus. Later, you could see students waiting in public PCO booths to call and inform their parents about their safety and well being. I, my friends and many others in our college were all lucky to be inside the college campus during that time of the weekend because that is the prime time for every student to roam around freely anywhere. That was the closest that i ever came nearby a terrorist attack and that itself had shook me quite a bit...

Movie reviews

2007-08-02T16:57:00.000-04:00

When someone asks me about a movie, generally my answer is 'its OK, good or bad". Though watching movies is my first choice in my entertainment list, i am very poor reviewing them or following through a discussion that involves movies. I am a 'average joe' when comes to reviewing movies. On the other hand, i enjoy all kinds of regular movies and loves any kind of commercial successful movie. I am on one end of a spectrum while there are people on the other side like my brother and a few other friends/bloggers who enjoy different kinds of movies that are not necessarily mainstream. They will look deep into the movie making process, have the ability to identify with the stuff the director wants to put forth, enjoy different kinds of movie genres( for instance sad depressing story line is one i hate the most. But believe me these guys will say that the director has done a good job if we look at the that particular movie in that way), the way the story unfolds and lot of many other intricate movie attributes. I on the other side won't take tragedy as a good ending in any movie. I will be an avid listener when those guys open up their vast knowledge of movies to review/analyze movies as good ones or bash them as bad ones.

I remember reading reviews of tamil movies in kumudam/vikatan magazines way long back (when i was in high school). They have the number rating system and i will try to remember the movie that got the highest review but used to forget them always. Now there are movie reviews everywhere on the net. Some of the websites that provide reviews will just tell the story of the movie. I hate those kinds of reviews. I like to read reviews written by few bloggers that i have in my blog hoping bookmark and then yahoo movies reviews for any movie in general. Reviews should not tell the story but should give a glimpse of the story, plus and minus points of the movie, any special part that has to get mentioned, comparisons with previous movies from the same crew and the overall gist and a unbiased rating at the end.

This is also what i expect in a movie discussion among friends but again, i will be a good listener as always. I can only remember the hero and most importantly the female leads in any movies. Other than that, all other details such as directors, movie production houses, cinematographers, music directors have always been Greek and Latin to me. I can remember these stuff for very few highly successful movies. If i count these kinds of movies, the number won't even touch two digits!

Unpublished blog posts

2007-07-31T09:12:00.000-04:00

I have few unpublished blog posts that sits as drafts in my blogger dashboard for a very long time. When i leave a post for uncompleted for a newer one, then it is very hard to finish it up. I generally lose interest on that post and later totally forget about it. if i need to complete it, then i got to read up the earlier part, think about what i wanted to write at that time or what i have till then and thereafter continue with the same trend to complete it.

Writing a new post is easier and more interesting than trying to finish up a old one unless the old one is something that i really like to write. I remember finishing up coke & car post after almost an year. I started the post sometime during the summer of 2006 and later finished it up on the April of this year! Though i didn't write many posts during the above period, i finished up the post since i really wanted to write about it.

Here are the titles of few posts that are sitting as drafts currently
Whirlpool jet
Akshaya Tritiya
how is married life?
Palani's day out
blog hopping...
shifting to a new place

I am sure i will finish at least one in the above list. The post "married life" will have various versions over the life time of anyone's life. I am hoping to write it up soon and latter on update it over time in the future:) The other ones may probably sit forever in my dashboard!

A weekend without Internet

2007-07-30T11:33:00.000-04:00

Last Friday afternoon to Sunday night, the only thing that i had close to a electronic gadget was a cellphone. That too we didn't have mobile signal all the time. I don't remember the last time over the recent years when i was like this without having access to computer/internet. Computer and Internet as become almost synonymous in the current era of life style & technology. I guess it must be a very long time leaving the time that i was in India during my wedding last year. There too, i had computer access at my home in Chennai. Only when i was in my native place, there was no computer.

Not that i am super busy always coding or doing useful stuff with the computer, but it is just the thought of not having access to computer/internet for 2 days provides time for many other normal stuffs that I generally overlook most of the times. Checking emails, reading all kinds of news and searching in Google are part of my regular activities for computer/internet other than work. Anything you want, the first thing i check is Internet say weather, directions, any purchase, store timings, reviews for anything & everything starting from tour packages to every crap that could be imagined and the list goes on...

For the above said life style, the past weekend was a total different one. The reason : our weekend camping trip. We had put up our tent on a primitive site (no water or electricity hookup) on the Shenandoah Valley KOA camping grounds. I have to write a separate post about the camping trip. That will come up sometime next week

Real Estate - Part 3

2007-07-19T16:32:00.001-04:00

Equipped with all the numbers, the next step was to find a home realtor. After discussion with friends, we came to know that there were two types of realtors in the market. In general the buyer doesn't have to pay the realtor. They get their 3% commission from the seller. But some realtors give back 1.5% of their commission to the buyer as a cash rebate. Nothing is free anywhere! Then how come these second category of realtors able to give 1.5% commission to the buyer? The buyer gets only a minimal set of service from the realtor. The buyer has to do the research on the locality, vacant properties etc... The realtor will show you the place and do all the necessary stuff to seal the deal. I don't know exactly the difference between the two kinds of realtors but the above is a rough analysis.

The realtor usually has a tie up with a particular lender who will provide all details about the available loans for you. He will get your SSN, financial details such as how much we could afford for monthly payments, down payment and other related financial details. He will then provide you with a set of loan proposals and we need to select a best one suitable to our needs. The lender will let us know the maximum loan that we could avail and the realtor will help us to find a house for that amount. We could play around the figure that the lenders comes up to a certain extent since we could change a little bit of the input parameters. But in general, our loan limits will be higher than we plan for. But the trick is the bank will lend you money, but you need to make sure that you could pay the monthly payments with ease. These lenders will run the application with multiple banks and generally provide a better deal than a buyer going to each and every bank and checking up with their respective loan details.

We went to a realtor that our friend referred. She was a very nice person and she gave a rough idea of what we are going to see in the market and later introduced us to her lender. He inquired about our affordable monthly payments, financial details and after running our credit score, explained our loan details and the amount that we could avail with our scenario. The loan amount didn't come as a surprise to us. We already did our homework and we know we will be in that range. We earlier had a figure slightly above the one, the lender mentioned. The realtor searched in the home database with all the variables money, type of house, number of bedrooms, age of the house etc... She printed out the details of the houses that came up after the search and briefed us about some terms that were there on the listings. There were not many houses that we had in mind for the money that we could afford. Anyway, we collected all the details and told her that we will get in touch with her shortly after going through all the stuff that we found out that day.

Real Estate - Part 2

2007-07-17T16:55:00.000-04:00

There are many factors that needs to be considered before planning to look for a house. The foremost thing is to find out how much one can shell out each month towards house payments. For this, one has to estimate his average monthly expenses, his savings and income/bonus. Single or double salary makes a huge difference over the estimation. The estimation should cover all aspects of expenses over a period of 2/3 years in general. One cannot determine an accurate estimate but one should have an idea of what he is getting into and where he is standing right now and what will be the status through the initial years after buying a house. One's goal is to reduce the number of variables in the above estimation, keep the variables that are necessary to a minimum simple logic and have one or two branches in the estimation for the IF clause (if this happens, that happens etc...). There will be always some factors (housing market crash, getting laid off from work) which one cannot control and one has to plan to a certain extent regarding the overall scenario or at the least shouldn't be taken by surprise when they have to encounter similar kinds after buying a house!

In our case, monthly expense calculation part was the easiest part. We left few things in the initial calculation but later we included everything that do right now. Other than the regular grocery, we included utilities, phone/cell, dress, movies, food, health, car service/maintenance, vacations and India trip during the final estimation. The variable factor was my wife going to work or studying, starting a family (we got married in November 2007) .

Though we don't know exactly about the former, it will make a great impact for the down payment of the house and will help us with the monthly payments. If she is going to study, then it is going to cost us more in the near future but it would be a good future investment. She could also start work next year, if she gets through the H1B lottery system. She could also start work if i get a green card. H1B and the green card process are not in out hands. Anything can happen and we cannot depend on these two factors as such when planning for a house.

We are not very sure of the latter. A lot of thinking/talking has to be done on this front... This has its own set of responsibilities and a whole lot of ancillary expenses. Once a little one arrives into the family, everything will change constantly and hence we need to make sure that we save enough or consider about this situation since it will be in the near future.

After considering all the above issues, we arrived at a monthly payment that we could afford without changing much of our current life style. We also calculated how much we could afford for a house down payment and the savings that we will maintain in the bank as a buffer zone.

Real Estate - Part 1

2007-07-15T07:40:00.000-04:00

Lately, most of my extra time was dedicated in researching about real estate market in our neighborhood. This usually happens when one decides to buy a house. This is not something everybody does many times in their lifetime. I don't exactly remember when i went to a friend's place (not a apartment, but to someone's own home) for the first time in USA. It should have been in Florida for sure since i was studying there during my initial 3 years in US. Starting from there even now, when i go to someone's place for the first time, I like to look at their place, building style and interior decorations, garden style, window decor etc... Though i may not be able to give a thorough analysis or review about everything with a expert knowledge, i usually made a mental note about most of the stuff. I know from the very beginning days at Florida, someday i would be looking for a house to buy and may be subconsciously i was making notes for that.

This is not a easy task anywhere in the world and particularly in a place where you are working as a immigrant. If it is a place in your home country, you will know more details about related things since you have grown up there. You could get to know a lot about what you don't know from family, friends and other sources. You will hear about their stories, experiences and anecdotes when they built/bought their own houses. But here in a different county, you rely on friends alone for everything. Now you have the advantage of internet, where you could browse upon related blogs, news articles, reviews of people who are in a similar boat as you are.

A lot of dynamics about house buying has changed over the years. In this post, I need to compare with what i know in India with what i am looking for here in US. During the previous generation, people used to buy house when the kids go to high school. I still remember how my parents built our house in our native place. It is usual for everyone to live in a rented place for quite a few years and building or buying a house is a long strenuous process. A separate discussion is needed if i have to compare about buying/building a house. But, now the trend for everyone is to buy a house even before they get married. Here, i am talking about friends that i know of who mostly belong to the IT industry.

Coming Soon - Sivaji

2007-06-14T15:58:00.001-04:00

Everybody is writing about Sivaji and i don't want my blog to be the one without any reference to Sivaji! For the past few days, Sivaji music has been running repeatedly in my work computer. I am a big time rajini fan and i have seen his movies many times, for just his style, few movie clippings in recent movies such as Baasha, Padaiyappa innumerable times. I have most of his movies in my dvd collection. Very early from my childhood days, like many other kids of my age, i grew up watching Rajini & Kamal as movie stars who had their own movie signatures, audience. Most of my family members were huge fans of Rajini and i loved his style from a very early age. I like Kamal also but when it comes to a choice, always its the Rajini style, punch statements that captivated me the most. I didn't enjoy Chandramuki that much as other Rajini movies, since i felt the storyline was not upto Rajini's character. But looking back at Baba, this one was a great comeback for Rajini. Even Rajini, needs a come back at some stage.... Life is like that. nobody can escape from it!

Rajini rocks

I watched Sivaji trailer more than 20 times. Don't think that i have no other useful work to do. I work full time and whenever i get bored, i watch the trailer once or twice! A lot has been written about Rajini-Shanker-Rahman combination over the Internet and also i am not good with these stuff (movie reviews, analysis and stats). I have got the tickets for Saturday show. So, i won't be checking the regular rediff and other Indian websites, since they will end up with a sivaji review. I want to watch the movie without knowing anything about it. In normal case, i don't mind seeing a movie if i knew the storyline or many things about the movie. But Sivaji is not a normal movie!

Caste based reservation model

2007-06-05T14:18:00.000-04:00

One more post/ranting about caste based reservation model in India. I have written a few posts in the past about reservations. Recent incidents involving Gujjars request/intimidation/riots for including their caste to ST category is the reason for this post. I don't know anything about Gujjars till last week. I found out some details about them from wiki. I also don't have any clue about the requirements needed by Indian law to recategorized a caste from one to another. But i know one for certain. The incidents last week tell you how far a section of people will go for enlisting themselves under the the SC/ST quota.

If the Rajasthan state government yields to this kind of shameful act without giving proper considerations(just for the sake of vote bank politics), this is going to set a bad precedence for the generations to come. Already some MPs in few states are garnering supports from local community leaders to bring their caste under SC/ST quota. In Andhra Pradesh, MPs from a certain community cutting across all party lines have had a meeting to look into these unworthy schemes!

Loudoun county court - Part 2

2007-05-31T18:36:00.001-04:00

When the judge signaled the start of the case, the cop on the left side of the room opened one more door and eight people entered and sat on the jury section. Then the case hearing started. The judge called for someone and an elderly lean guy came and started testifying after taking the oath. He was working as a chemist in some government forensics department. The prosecutor was asking many questions to him followed by a couple from the defendant lawyer. During the whole process, the jurors were making notes of the discussions.

We were able to make out that the case was about drug possession. I have seen many movies having court room scenes both in Tamil and English and this experience was exactly like the movies. The case was straight forward. The police had found a small plastic bag containing stems of cocaine plant from the defendants car and the case was about that. I never thought i would be see something that close to what i see in movies. The whole thing that i described above took nearly 20 minutes. When i entered the courtroom, i didn't even think that the case would be something that i could understand in a few minutes of a session. Also i thought the case in a small county court may be of some issue that doesn't needs a jury. But this case was very clear and there was a eight member jury. We were able to understand everything happening on that court hearing and since it was the first time that i am sitting and watching the whole court session, i was enjoying every moment of it.

The only sad part was the verdict was not delivered in that session. The court was suspended for lunch session. I don't know how many more sessions that case needs to get to a final stage. I don't know whether that guy was convicted or not. But my impression is that the guy would be convicted. I have to live without knowing the verdict!

Loudoun county court - Part 1

2007-05-31T12:45:00.001-04:00

As mentioned in the last post, this one is about our visit to the court when my brother was doing his paperwork for getting his marriage license. There were totally three court rooms in that building and doors were open on two of them (they were empty). After asking the cop whether we can just barge into the third one, when we entered the room, we saw two cops and a lady casually chatting among themselves. They all stopped talking and turned to look at us. I asked them whether there was any hearing and one cop replied that one is going to start in few minutes. I told them that we were just looking around and we sat down on the last bench beside the door.

After a couple of minutes, few people entered the court room. Two sat on the defendant side while the one sat on the plaintiff side. Out of the two, one was dressed in suit and he was the lawyer for the other black guy. Both these guys were looking very young, one working to protect the other. The lady that sat on the plaintiff side was the public prosecutor. There was one more lady who sat on the first bench nearby the plaintiff side. One more cop was now in the public side, the place where people sit and watch the proceedings.

In few seconds, the judge entered through a door on the other side of the room. One more lady accompanied the judge and she sat a little away from the judge. She had a computer and i guess she was doing the administrative work. The lady that i mentioned when we entered the court room, now sat on the other side of the Judge in between the judge and the witness stand. She was the typist that everyone would have seen in a typical court room movie scene. To the left of the witness stand, we had the jury section.

Marriage license

2007-05-30T17:27:00.000-04:00

I found out details about getting a marriage license in USA when my brother got one last week. It seems the number of documents needed for getting a marriage license varies between states and also between counties in a state. New York (my brother lives here) and Georgia(my sister in law lives here) needs birth certificate along with drivers license and also you get your license after a one day wait time during which time you can go and cancel the license if you change your mind! When we looked for the required documents near my place in Virginia, it was only drivers license and they issue the license immediately. We went to district court at leesburg to get the work done. Before going there, my brother called up a guy (i don't know the exact designation they give here for conducting the marriage thing) and set up an appointment for noon. We all went there and while my brother and sister-in-law were filling up the forms, I and my wife were looking around the place. Since my wife was interested to look at a court case hearing, we went inside a court room after checking with cop that we could go inside the court room. A separate post is needed for this episode. Should be coming up soon.

When we came out of the court room, my brother and sister-in-law were sitting around a table along with a well built elderly bespectacled man. He was signing some papers and asking them how to spell their names. Then he asked all of s to follow him to one corner of the building that had windows on two sides and a "staff only door" on the third side. He then read the vows for the bride and the groom and they replied with the usual 'yes. i do'. He handed over the certificate and said that we could get copied on the counter where we gave our filled up application. We had parked our car on a 2 hr parking lot and we still had 40 minutes left. It was sunny outside and we decided to walk and look around the place. We had ice cream from a nearby small shop and then went to a church that was two blocks away from the court. When we were searching for parking spot earlier, we saw this church. It was a small church but a very old one with a delicate stone structure. We went inside the church and i guess it was a protestant church since there was no Jesus or Mary statue on the altar. The inscription on the building said that the church was built on the year 1895. The glass windows inside the church were huge and they had nice paintings on them. The wooden chairs were very old and it made the "squeeeek sound" when we sat on them. There was a bible and a song book on the back of each of the wooden desks. After a few minutes, we traced back our way to the parking lot, and started driving back to our place.

Strawberry festival

2007-05-29T17:53:00.000-04:00

My brother had come over for the memorial weekend and we didn't have much of a grand plan for the whole weekend. He got his marriage license on Day 1. We went to DC museums and spider man movie (IMAX) on day 2. They have to start back on day 4. We had nothing planned for day 3. After returning back from museums, we took a short nap before leaving for the movie. ring that time, i was looking at the Loudoun county weekly and came across this article about strawberry festival nearby my place. It is an hour drive from my home. I always liked strawberry on any possible thing and we decided to visit the strawberry festival on day 3.

The weather was very nice and it was a little after noon that we started our trip on day 3. It is kind of a festival that we see in our native place back in India during our childhood days. The festival was conducted in a national park during the weekend. There were lot of stalls selling fancy stuff, jewelery, paintings, hand made souvenirs besides the food stalls. People had dressed red/green clothes and there were lot of strawberries everywhere throughout the place.
We had strawberry funnel cakes, lemonades and sundaes. There were some stalls selling fresh strawberries but it was very expensive. We also noticed that the fresh strawberries that they were selling were not farm fresh. (in that sense, they were from company boxes that we use to get in the grocery stores).

There were not many activities for the adults. But there were lot of stuff for the kids. Face painting, puppet shows, wall climbing, Hay rides, and a few other fun games for the kids. We rested under the shade of a big tree for some time enjoying the strawberries and chit chatting. After a couple of hours, we started driving back to home.

Human trafficking

2007-04-26T13:41:00.000-04:00

Recent news about BJP MP Babubhai Katara is very much amusing in the nature that it makes one wonder how innovative and daring our elected MPs are cheating/violating the laws... There are many industries as such that you can easily figure out how these politicians pocket money to themselves. But this one is unique in nature because it involves the immediate family. I am sure that there won't be much money to make in these kinds of situation. but even then these elected crooks do all kinds of petty stuff. Police have found leads to few more MPs who are into this huhman trafficking. These MPs don't belong to a single party. MP's should take upon the good stuff from other party MP's but our MPs do the same for all kinds of money laundering techniques.

I am hoping that the judiciary should do its best to punish these MPs provided the government doesn't interfere on this issue for any political gain or vote bank politics. These guys will have plans to procrastinate the judicial process and if they pull the right strings at the right time, they can even come clean (THIS IS INDIA!). There are lot of episodes like this involving high profile public personalities who can do whatever they want right in front of everybody and get out of it unscathed after some years. Public memory will fade away quickly and these guys will be back again asking people to vote for them in the next election!

Weekly Salary

2007-04-20T10:29:00.000-04:00

I think there is only one salary format throughout INDIA. Everybody gets their salary on the first of the month. that is every month. When i came to US, it was something new to me when my brother explained that salary in US could be monthly or every two weeks. The idea behind twice a month concept is that the employee will have a notion of money every other week and this will influence the spending pattern.

To me, it doesn't matter. I remember writing accounts when i was studying in high school for the pocket money that i get from my parents. I always have a mental picture of what i have and how much to spend. I know nothing will change that. When i was studying in school, i used to get paid every two weeks. Then at work, it is the normal monthly pay. Over the past three years i have been at this work place, our company went through lot of mergers & acquisitions. But throughout the time period, salary was paid monthly. Only the date changed during this time frame. Money was deposited to my account on 31st or the 2nd or the 1st of every month.

After the last recent one, monthly salary got changed. Our company was acquired by a multi billion dollar company and this company has a weekly pay day. This was something i have never heard of. From this month, we are getting paid on every friday. Again, to me it doesn't matter. But i am just wondering about the red tape this weekly pay thing will create to the Accounting dept. for the company. It will be 4X times the normal monthly one. I guess and i hope there will be many other important factors considered at the corporate level that will offset this 4X extra work!

Coke & Car

2007-04-13T16:59:00.001-04:00

I started writing the following post last year but somehow it got buried in my blog dashboard. Since i didn't have time to write a new one this week, i thought i will complete what i started earlier... I hope this summer is not as hot as last year!

----------------------------------------------------------
Weather has been pretty good this week. High of 70's is great for mid summer in DC. This was not the case two weeks ago. It was really very hot and mercury was wavering around mid 90's in the afternoon time. You could wonder why i start writing about weather in a post titled "coke can"...

After giving much thought about diet considerations, i bought a dozen coke cans from the local grocery store. I had planned to take them to work, so i don't have to get coke from the vending machine when i need one. The next day, i took two cans to work. When i got out of the car at work place, i took only one can leaving the other at the front passenger seat. That was a huge mistake.

I have heard of coke can bursting inside a freezer and even once seen the freezer after a coke burst. But, i have never heard of coke can bursting due to high temperature till that fateful day. When i left work that day around 8.00 pm, i opened the car and sat in my seat as usual. When i was about to keep the lunch box in the passenger seat, i noticed the coke can. i immediately thought that the coke can would be hot because of the hot weather. So i was expecting the can to be hot and when i grabbed it, i felt something different. It was not heavy as it should be. When i brought the can close to my face i noticed the bloated top portion of the can. That time i knew the reason for the light weight of the can and that made me to roam my eyes over the car interior. Oops... i could see coke everywhere in the car. The front and side glasses were the worst affected area. I went home and cleaned the inside of the car with water, windex. These stuff removed the color patches but i could smell the sweet odor of the coke inside the car. I thought with time the odor will go off. but it didn't go. Also later i found out that i missed lot of places when i cleaned since they where not easily reachable.

Finally i did a car detail for $200 bucks and everything inside the car was looking new & shining!
Thats my story of coke & car :)

Visual Studio 2005 - wierd bugs

2007-04-03T14:26:00.000-04:00

I use Visual Studio IDE to do c++ coding at work. Though i am not a typical software pro who hates Microsoft, I usually whine about their non-user friendly GUI at the least. At our work place, we use visual tomato software to navigate, refactor, read, edit, correct typos/mistakes in c++ code. I even disabled Visual Studio's IntelliSense because it was more harm than good. When we load a project or make some changes, IntelliSense will take ages to update its state. There was no option to disable the IntelliSense feature. grrrr... After spending sometime searching in internet, i found a crude way to disable it. But it works!

I use the "find in files" option regularly to find examples & to understand how specific stuff work since i am using a third party software in my current module. Last week, suddenly i got the following error message when i tried to find something "No files were found to look in.Find was stopped in progress." I was certain that i didn't do anything remotely close to any settings that would have caused this to pop up. i searched in msdn and got pissed off with the generic useless solution.

Then i started searching in google using related search terms and i finally got the solution to get rid of the problem. It was the simplest solution to fix out a weird bug like this! the solution was also kind of funny and weird on its own. I don't think of any direct relation with the bug & the solution, but it fixes the creepy bug :) So i am happy.

don't think of step by step procedure to fix this bug. just one key stroke. Control + Scroll Lock and all is fixed. i found out the above solution here. i laughed out loud when i read through the post and came across this concluding part that had the solution.

"It also deserves a nomination in the problem solving category. Spin around on your chair 3 times, clap your hands twice and then press... Control + Scroll Lock and all is fixed...."

Freelance Writing

2007-03-30T11:35:00.000-04:00

Good newspaper articles, columns and recently blogs always makes me to think about my writing skills. I don't remember exactly when good writing fascinated me but i am very certain it is not in my school days. If that had been the case, I won't be writing this post about writing. I would be a good writer now. period. But i am not. There is lot of room for improvement and i am still finding it difficult to write about something that i know very well.

I got a chance to explore my writing skills during my final year when doing our bachelor's thesis. But that was the time, where we didn't even give importance to the thesis itself. So i and another friend did the coding module completely and asked the other guys to to finish up the documentation. The next one was when i did my master's program. That time i found it extremely difficult to write up my thesis work. There was no one to relegate the documentation work now! Whenever i submit a chapter to the professor, the final one would be after 4 or 5 revisions. I learned a bit about writing that time but was too focused about other things then. Wrapping up my studies, getting a job was high on my priority list.

Once i started working, i know it is the perfect time to try out different stuff that i always wanted till that time. Whenever i read a good blog, i usually think upon spending time to improve my writing or at least to write something in my blog. There were lot of things going on in my life and these were keeping me away from writing.

Then i was planning lot of stuff and i was not able to get through any of it in a given time. later i lost interest on most of it. Lately, good blog posts have rekindled my writing flair and instead of planning for a long time, i decided to take it right now slowly. lets c how long i continue this time...

How is my driving?

2007-03-23T13:23:00.000-04:00

Have you come across this sticker "How is my driving" in any vehicle when you are out in the road? This will have a toll free telephone number to contact along with a identification number for that particular vehicle. I have seen quite a few in recent weeks and whenever i see one, the first question that comes in my mind is "how successful is this initiative?"

I guess this would be some sort of court directed disciplinary measures when someone drives rashly or violates certain type of road rules during a said time. I am curious about how often people will call this number in a normal basis for a given vehicle? To a certain extent, I am definitive that someone will call this number if the vehicle didn't follow rules and that caused some mishap in the road.

As for me, whenever i come across one sticker, i always want to find details about this process/mechanism and how it works. This instinct will usually fade away as soon as i get off the road. I guess i will never find about this stuff unless i drive so bad and end up having a similar sticker in my car. I hope i don't do that... But at the least, i have written a post about it in the blog!

International telephone calls

2007-03-15T13:44:00.000-04:00

I still remember the time when i used to look at the watch when i make a call to india. after i finish the call, i will calculate the remaining amount of available call time in the calling card. this was around 4 or 5 years ago. That time i was a student and new to US. The tariff to international calls was very high that time compared to what we have now. I remember paying 40 cents/minute to India that time. Now we can make decent India calls through reliance for 8 cents/minute. the cost is even less if u go for lesser known calling cards. but then, the quality depends on the time when u make a call and a lot of other factors...

I make lot more money than i was 4 or 5 years ago and the calling cost per minute has come down. But, even now, the situation remains the same. Becoz the average monthly cost still remains the same compared to what i make. My talking time has increased compared to the past. That time i was single, now happily married... More people in India to talk with!

So, i still look at the remaining time after i make a call. When will this scenario change? will it change?

I hate congress

2007-02-16T14:39:00.000-05:00

RBI opposes priority loans to minorities

this is the main reason that i hate congress party.... they embrace minority appeasement to the greatest extent. They are the GOD to vote bank politics. I am not saying that BJP doesn't do the same. But the way congress does, no party can beat them!

Sometime earlier i was pissed off, when i came across a news article about how the current government is collecting data about minority population district wise so that they can distribute
central government funds in a similar fashion. I don't know what stage that is in. These things may work out to be a very good short time strategy for the nearing next election but in the long run,
this is worse than the Britishers "divide & rule" paradigm that decimated our people and brought our country into British rule...

one more time...

2006-09-19T13:40:00.000-04:00

one more time, starting today i am planning to update my blog at regular intervals. As many people usually do, i too have innumerable reasons for not doing what i wanted do for a long time. Other things getting more priority becoz they may be easier/fun to do or u would have had lot of things going on at work/personal life or else there may be no excuses at all but just like it, one fine day u would have stopped doing what u wanted to do...

i may have stopped blogging due to few/all of the above reasons. I was not certain even to get back to write up short posts for a long time becoz i was kind of nervous and felt bad about myself. if u had a chance to look at my previous posts, or my mindset over the past i would have clearly dealt abt the current situation. losing interest on something over a period of time; how to sustain/revive the same and all about maintaining priorities/objectives etc...

Just like the last reason "One fine day", i thought i will give a try one more time in regards to blogging and here i am with this post!

Forgiven - keyword

2006-05-23T09:19:00.000-04:00

I have seen many kinds of keywords pop up while browsing internet or using different kinds of software. But the one that intrigued me most and made me to come up with this post is "Forgiven". I came across this in the local county library while returning books.

I had borrowed few books sometime back and this happened while returning them. Since the return date was due while i was away in vacation, i had asked my friend to drop them off in the library. i collected all the books and kept them on the dining table. one of the book was "The Prince" by Niccolo Machiavelli. It was a very small book and i didn't have time to complete it. After the vacation, my friend said that he returned all the books in the library. I thought the episode was over. But not...

Two weeks back, i got an email from the library that the book "the prince" was still outstanding and fine charge is getting accruing as of that day. I checked up with my friend whether he remembered about the small book and i also searched for the same in my place. But i was damn sure somehow that the book should have slipped the returns area without scanning becoz of its small size. So i went to the library the next day itself since the fine is not small( 25 cents a day). i checked up their catalog and it mentioned that the library had 2 copies and when i went to pick them, i saw 3 copies. Hence i was kind of sure that the third book might be the one that i returned.

i took all the 3 books to the checkout area and talked to them about my problem. The lady at the counter checked up the barcodes and she found out that the book they thought was with me was there and she apologized for the mistake. Although i knew that she will remove the fine from my account, I asked about it since i wanted to see how she overrides the system. I have seen these kinds of situation before (superviser over riding the system to give a discount) but at all these places they would scan their member id and press 1 or 2 button. The library was having its own windows based software and i was patiently looking at the screen. she selected something from the options and Then this combo box had these keywords "cash, credit, debit... ". She selected "Forgiven" from the bottom and the fine vanished from my account. I smiled at her and told her that the forgiven stuff was really cool/funny.

Self Portrait Tuesday - All of me #1

2006-02-21T11:29:00.000-05:00

I wish my hand had the collective power, stamina and strength of all the four present in this picture!!!

This picture = Self Portrait Tuesday Feb' 06 theme "All of me".

Scaled down episode of Ramayana in reality

2006-02-07T11:18:00.000-05:00

Many of us would have heard about this small episode of Hanuman setting fire to lanka in Ramayana. Being part of a epic, if anyone feels uncertain about the veracity of this incident, then they have to look at this article in CNN. This is a scaled down version involving a mouse and a house instead of Hanuman and Lanka. Some old guy who tried to dispose off a mouse by throwing it in a small fire outside his house that was started to burn leaves got a huge surprise. His entire house was destroyed because of the mouse. Luckily for him no one was hurt. The burning mouse ran into the house through a window, and the flames spread up from there and throughout the house.

Year 2005

2005-12-29T14:23:00.000-05:00

i wanted to write about my personal experiences over the year 2005, but i guess it won't be out for a long time. Anyway, when i browsed through some of the other ones that i regularly visit, many had written about catastrophes that rocked this year. If i have to start mentioning them, then here goes the list; Asian tsunami, hurricane Katrina, Monsoon rains in mumbai, chennai, earth quake in Pakistan...

I feel very sad for all the people who lost their lives, for those who lost their loved ones & families, for those who lost everything that they had till that time and for many of those who are yet to get to their normal life. I am grateful & glad that all the people that i know, who live in these regions are hale & healthy after these disasters. These things make me to think about life/death and its relation with our surroundings.

When nature takes its own way of destruction, mankind remains helpless inspite of all the scientific advances that has been achieved. I hope that Year 2005 would be a tocsin for everyone of us to restrain from arrogance, greed and many more negative aspects that prevail one's own character. Let us venture into Year 2006 by redefining our goals/objectives in life, to live a life that obeys the laws of nature, that creates & develops a symbiotic relationship between mankind and mother Earth and finally respecting each & every life form that has the same rights as that of mankind over this world.

Many things to write about...

2005-12-28T14:51:00.000-05:00

In the recent days, i am temped to write about anything and everything that i come across, but for the time, I am not able to update the blog. Many other new & old stuffs is grabbing my attention and that pushes blogging down the stack. Out of the other stuffs, few are somehow related to blogging and it is good that i am able to work on them, but the problem is improper time management. To my knowledge, I have spent lot of time anaylzing over time management & planning, but i got to excel in that domain.

Traffic lights

2005-11-21T21:13:00.000-05:00

I have heard many things that people do while waiting in their cars during traffic lights. I have seen few of them myself. Frequently i would notice women adjusting their make-ups, doing touch ups here & there. I have seen many people reading news paper and once, even saw a lady reading a big book by having it over the steering wheel... Drinking(coffee or soda not alcohol)while driving has become a regular thing so there is nothing special to mention about it. I shouldn't mention cellphone usage as an ancillary activity while driving. It has become a integrated part of driving now a days.

I try to avoid using cellphone while driving and to a greater extent i am following it. I take calls from my parents only and snap off all other calls while driving. My friends would mention that i will be also using cellphone once i get comfortable with driving. It has been almost one year that i am driving regularly and still i don't want to use cellphone while i drive. It's the fact that not all phone conversation will be nice & normal and sometimes it may result in a situation that could distract your driving abilities thereby causing accidents. It is not that i am a bad driver, i just wanted to be on the safer side. My total commute time for work is only 30 mts daily and i guess this is significantly less than the average american commute time. Whenever i wait for traffic lights, i look over the nearby cars, their drivers/passengers, cars speeding from opposite direction, buildings & people around the traffic light etc... I find it interesting to capture all the activities that take place near the traffic light during the short wait time.

Today when i was waiting in the traffic light, i noticed something weird. As usual i was looking around and when i gazed to my right side, i saw this expensive car in the next lane. I couldn't even recollect the car make or color now but i will remember what the driver was doing at that time. He was shaving his beard patiently using a electric shaver. This is the main reason for me to write up this post about traffic lights...

Ambiguous maps

2005-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00

I came across a substandard map while browsing BBC website some time back. Article url: BBC article Take a good look at the map. It is present at the bottom of the article. For convenience, i am sticking the same here. I didn't read the entire article, but just let my eyes wander over the map to find out the epicentre of the recent earth quake. I was particularly bothered by the way the map portrayed India - Pakistion border region.

There are certain ground rules that has to be followed while publishing a map irrespective of the target audience. For example, a good map should show a North arrow for direction, map/data source if the reader has to get further details, map scale for better understanding of features in the map and how they are related to each other and legends if the map shows a variety of data. Most importantly, a map should represent at least the base map correctly and as close as possible to the real world.

Some of the features that i think that makes this map a flawed one are

1) Kashmir is represented as a sovereign state (two regions): Pakistan controlled Kashmir and Indian controlled Kashmir. I have seen many maps where in the former is called as "POK - Pakistan occupied kashmir" and the latter as a INDIAN STATE... I cannot digest the fact that this map shows both India & Pakistan in same scale with respect to Kashmir.

2) Both India & Pakistan have same colors while kashmir has different color. What are they trying to come up with? I am making this point mainly because people associate regions with color coding and here India & Pakistan has same color while Kashmir is having different color as if it is a different country... There is no clearcut boundary demarking India & Pakistan, but Kashmir is clearly noticeable as a separate region.

3) What are those small zig zag lines that are present in the INDIA-PAKISTAN-KASHMIR region? They don't look like any province/district boundaries and it seems to me that they are not at all related to the earthquake. Then why the heck they are using them over the base map. Unnecessary data will confuse the audience and will make the map more complex.

4) The maps doesn't have basic attributes such as north arrow, data source, scale, legend etc as i mentioned earlier.

If i have seen this map in some xyz website, i would have passed over it thinking it as yet another faulty map. But this is part of BBC news, a well renowned prominent newspaper. I am still wondering how these ambiguous maps get through their editorial. If someone who has no knowledge about South Asian region looks into such a article, even if the reader doesn't reads the article he/she would gaze over the map and i am sure this map creates/propogates a false impression of the reality.

I am able to make these observations because of the graduate course "Analysis of Thematic data quality" that i took in my masters program at UFL. It mainly dealt about methods to come up with accurate, user friendly map representations, how to find out misleading faulty maps that may be sometimes created by mistake or intentionally to disseminate a biased or untrue propanganda. I really liked that course a lot not because that i got a "A grade" easily but for the nature of the course syllabus. It was truely a graduate course: no exams, no quizzes, only assignments, presentations and a final project. Even though that semester i was very busy with my thesis work, I enjoyed and learned quite a lot in this course.

Symbiosis - Nature at its own.....

2005-10-25T22:10:00.000-04:00

Credit: Novartis Visions of Science 2005/Jim Greenfield

" Photographer Jim Greenfield took the picture off the coast of Curaçao in the Dutch Antilles islands. A shrimp enters the mouth of a fish to clean its teeth. Fish value this service because shrimp can remove and eat harmful parasites. When fish need a cleaning, they approach the anemone in the background, in which the shrimp lives, and open their mouths, encouraging the shrimp in. Both partners benefit."

I came across the above picture/details in news.com. I am really amazed about this kind of mutual symbiotic dependency. I have heard the word "symbiosis" in different situations such as business tie-ups, bilateral agreements between friendly countries etc.. But this kind of natural symbiosis makes one to think about nature's profound diversity and its various symbiotic interdepedence. Symbiotic relationships between different countries, business corporations as well as any other such thing related to human race are because of mankind's ability to apply rational thought process and logical reasoning over the available/expected knowledge to achieve a certain objective.

I eat non-veg and i love to eat fish/shrimp at any given time. But, look at this fish and the shrimp. Who would have taught them that they are not harmful to each other? Who would have told the fish that the shrimp is good at eating harmful parasites and thus would clean its teeth? Who would have told the shrimp that if it goes inside the mouth of the fish, it could come back alive, that too with some food?

I wonder at nature, particularly envy about its ability to create, manipulate many kinds of complex heterogeneous systems consisting of different kinds of living organisms including mankind and having a sustaining machanism for all kinds of its integral components for a prosperous life,development and growth. My thesis for Masters degree was designing a automated system to estimate citrus production on-the-fly. The process of identifying citrus from the pictures taken over the citrus trees was the most difficult module and i am citing this as an small example of how difficult it would have been for my questions on the earlier paragraph...

I am thinking of one more natural symbiotic relationship but nothing is coming to my mind. I guess there should be many more in nature that are yet to be discovered by mankind. After looking at this picture and after this posting, I am planning to do a search on symbiotic process to know more about these natural wonders.

Am i talking about nature or something more than nature???

"Mottainai" - Japanese word

2005-10-18T21:35:00.000-04:00

Lately, I have been reading many books and "Made in Japan" is my recent book. Somehow i was not able to complete this book within the due date and this is the first time i am paying late fees(late by a week)... I am a member in loudoun as well as fairfax county libraries and i got this book from fairfax county since it was not available in our local loudoun county. The nearest fairfax library branch is far away from my place and i need to go that far just for the sake of library. So usually i renew the books online but in this case, it seems that i had reached the renewal limit. So I ended up paying the fine. That's my story about this book.

Here, i am not trying to do a book review but am going to write about some of the features that i really liked. For those people who haven't heard of the title, it is the autobiography of Akio Morito, one of the founders of Sony corporation. The author now and there explains many aspects of japanese lifestyle, culture and tradition throughout the book. He mentions that they have helped him to make distinct, productive, clear-cut honest decisions while being at the crossroads on difficult business crises as well as normal day-to-day situations in life.

He explains about this japanese word "mottainai" in one of the chapters relating to japanese business practices. I really liked the significant message that this word carried, that i immediately decided to write about it in my blog. This word "mottainai" was the reason for this entire posting. I am quoting the meaning from the book as such...
"It is an expression that suggest that everything in the world is a gift from the creator, and that we should be grateful for it and never waste anything. literaly mottainai means "irreverent", "impious" but more deeply it carries a sacrilege against heaven. Everything is provided as a sacred trust and actually are only loaned to us to make the best use of. To waste something is considered as a sin."

I can write many other great things about this book that i liked, that i learned, that i found highly knowledgeable but believe me, everything in my humble opinion, has its foundation on this word "Mottainai".

Shyama, The Mystical Indian Woman

2005-10-13T20:14:00.000-04:00

I went to a dance concert last saturday. It was from south indian actress/dancer shobana & and her students and this blogs title is the name of that dance concert. It was raining throughout the day and I drove roughly 45 miles to go to this place. I saw couple of accident sites on my way and my friend who was coming from baltimore saw 3 or 4 more. It was a bad day for driving though...

This is the first time i am attending a live concert and i was really looking forward to this program. This was arranged in a local high school and while we were waiting for the show to begin, we were chatting/comparing about the available school facilities in US and INDIA. We were sitting in the last section of the auditorium, since we had purchased inexpensive tickets. I guess there would have been 30 rows in front of us. Most of the crowd was from southern india and i thought, I will see lot of gals out there, but it was mostly families...

About the concert, it had three parts. the first one was clasical dance, the second one was theatrical dance drama and finally bharatanatyam - western fusion. There was a small interval after the second part. In the classical section, i really liked the dance about kali, the Goddess of Tantric Worship. They did a great job in portraying the dark hued contemporary and mythological powers of goddess kali and i still remember the fiery dance steps and the powerful facial expressions. They finished the classical part with a dance on the mischievous nature of lord krishna in his childhood days.

The dance drama was about Shyama, the tradional indian women. It was a satirical drama illustrating the dowry system, the social stigma, that is prevalent even nowadays throughout india. It was quite funny in the way they had enacted the whole drama, starting from showing the two families, then matching the respective bride's and the groom's horoscopes, regular engagement with idhly vada chutney, after some bargaining agreeing to a common list of things for dowry and finally the D day... On the day of marriage, the groom's family asks for even more dowry than the mutual agreed things and eventually shyama, the tradional indian gal puts the grooms family behind bars by going against the system, against the tradition, against her supposed to be future in-laws, against her parents wishes who were trying to work out a compromise. Drama came to an end with the police arresting the groom family...

Then there was this short interval. The organisers have arranged for food & snacks stalls. Hence people were going in & out... I usually don't like to go out in the interval even in movies. After the interval, there were few empty seats in the front section. when i was wondering about it, shobana announced in the mike that those in the rear seats could fill in the empty front rows... Immediately, we started to the front section and we got into the 6th row. Believe me, I was very happy to go to the front section and i truly appreciated her approach towards the audience.

I felt that the final fusion part was outstanding by itself. They danced for " Maa Tujhe Salaam " from AR. Rehman's Vande Mataram album and one more western classical song that i didn't know. Both of them were breathtaking and marvelous. i really love those music and the fact that i was able to have a great visual along with the music got me excited. In the end, all the people stood up and gave a standing ovation to shobana & her troupe.

IE - Firefox - Opera

2005-10-03T22:25:00.000-04:00

For a long time, i was an ardent fan of internet explorer. I didn't switch to other browsers even when many of my friends recommended. When i get used to some sort software, i find it extremely difficult to switch over to a newer one. After some time, looking at firefox & opera at many of my friends computers, i finally dumped IE and downloaded firefox. i really liked the tabbed browsing and mouse gestures in firefox. Opera was also having everything that firefox had, but the free version had the advertisement panel. Also, i didn't like opera user interface for some reasons...

In the recent days, i noticed that firefox takes up heavy memory, even with only one open tab. It irks me since my laptop has only 512 MB for RAM. When you start firefox and check the windows task manager, it will show 30K(approx) as memory usage for firefox in the initial state. You end up opening many tabs as time goes on and when you check the task manager, it would be roughly 90K for firefox... Later when u close all the tabs except for one, you would think that the memory usage would go back to the initial state(30 K). But the problem is that firefox still maintains 90K... I guess probably this may be a reason because of some memory leak... I thought this would be fixed in the newer versions... I am using 1.5 beta and still this issue is there. I tried replicating this issue in different computers/versions and i am feeling confident about this situation. But my question is someone should have encountered this long time back itself and should have been a known/corrected bug... I may be wrong or my reasoning may be also wrong. i don't know...

Anyhow with opera providing free versions with no ads currently, i have been planning to switch over to opera. I am also waiting for IE version 7, which people say supports most of the current features that are available in opera/firefox. Since, it is being built from scratch, its performance, security features should be lot better than previous IE versions. But i don't know how long will it take for IE 7 to hit the market. Hence hoping to shift to opera slowly in the near future...

Lake View.....

2005-09-28T22:24:00.000-04:00

I usually park the car in front of the gym. On the rear side of the gym, there is this big lake and a bunch of three storied apartment complexes on the other side. Since the front parking lot was full today, i parked in one of the rear spot, which was facing this beautiful lake and the apartment complex. Usually while inside the gym, I will be looking at the rear side through the windows. Always I would think of going to that side just to have a look at the lake, but everyday i imply rush to the car and will be driving back to home because i will be already late for something else.

I finished my workout and was about to start back to home. Since I parked the car on the rear side, i was there and it felt really good to be there at that moment. Time was little over 7 and i guess sunset would have been 20 or 25 minutes earlier. It was not completely dark. Sky was kind of dark bluish throughoutwith patches of darkness waiting to wrap up the earth for the night. The shadows of the apartment buildings fell over the water on that side of the lake. Inbetween these shadows were numerous sparkling lights glittering from the apartments where people were settling down after a long day's work.

When you look at the water at a certain angle, you could see the complete reflection of these buildings and the entire thing was a great feast to the eyes. I have mentioned only the visual part till now. There was this "kwak-kwak" sound coming somewhere from the lake and it was quite distinct because I felt that it was coming from a single duck. This was not the usual "kwak-kwak-kwak-kwak-kwak-kwak...." sound coming from many ducks. I don't know how they call a group of ducks but I know this was from a single duck... I carefully browsed the lake from one end to the other but couldn't get a view of this single duck that i was looking for. Then again i concentrated on the shadow regions of the lake and suddenly i saw this SINGLE duck wandering alone searching for its friends. I guess probably somehow it got lost from its group and spending the evening alone. After giving company to the duck for 5 minutes, I started my car and drove towards the main road. I am hoping by now the duck has found its friends.

Creativity on the go...

2005-09-15T21:28:00.000-04:00

Creativity on the go...

I took this picture sometime during oct/nov last year. We were driving back from rayleigh, NC and when i saw this car, i really liked the way they have made the face on the car boot and i guess most of the people who had seen that car would have thought about doing something similar on their own....

Although its lifetime is minuscule, it has made its impact on this earth... Elegantly sitting back on the car, it has captivated at least one human being to my knowledge. It has made me to write about it in the blog also. I am just wondering who would have created it? i still remember this event becoz that was the first time i saw snowfall. Even though the snow was just few inches, i was really excited at that time.

Afterwards i saw many snowfalls in Washington, DC and now waiting for the fall colors.... I will try to add some pictures that we took last time during fall colors.

2005-06-22T20:38:00.000-04:00

The biggest problem is to achieve an equilibrium of the three different states that i mentioned in my previous discussion. for this the first step is to identify one's own personal goal. This usually is influenced by one's own family settings and normally shapes up before adolescence. Some cases, one may get a spark later which may change his perception about life. Parents play a vital role in identifing one's interest. Family, friends and the local community acts as a supplementary factor in developing one's interest to a particular field. These people should be in a position to provide information about various options. They should also help a child in deciding what to pursue. There is a fine line between giving indepedence to the child in deciding what he/she wants and to provide a biased opinion on something what the parents need.

tips for a content life...

2005-06-15T21:46:00.000-04:00

I received letters from local administration for my decal/personal property taxes two days back. I thought i have to find the offices or search in internet and do everything but these people are prompt in getting money from us. I also appreciated their brisk attitude and sent out checks yesterday itself. I received the final bills from the utility companies for my previous apartment in florida. I didn't cancel them when i moved out since my roommate was not sure when he will move from that place. Most of them consider transfering acount as setting up a new connection. This then will incur activation fees and hence we left them as such. Since the lease for that apartment expired last month, he had moved to a different place and i cancelled the accounts.

I still have a bank account in gainesville and i have to close that. With that i would have closed all my association with that place except for my memories. Many of my friends from the graduate school are working within Florida. Hence i will be in constant touch though... I love to go to Miami and i went almost every summer when i was there. In graduate school, I felt that life during college was wonderful and more fun than graduate school. Now, i feel that graduate school was lot better than work. I guess when we get comfortable to a particular life style and feel content, we will be pushed into next level in life. This seems to be true because now as a bachelor, u don't have any commitments and you are the captain of ur ship. Then marriage, then children, then social status, then ... when will this end?????

We got to find a equilibrium for a given time based on what we did in the past, enjoying the present and at the same time working for the future. Whatever your life style, your profession, if you are in a position to organize a given timeframe in your life equally for these three issues, then you will be having a wonderful life and also assured of a superior life style in the future. If you let down one of the above three issues, then you may feel sorry or will not have a satisfactory life in your current state or later in the future. This equlibirum may be different for different people based on their respective personal goals but the point is one should work towards getting closer to the equilibrium.

movie maniac

2005-06-13T22:25:00.000-04:00

If you look at my last week, you can easily find out that my preference next to work was movies. Occasionally i change into this movie maniac and go see lot of movies in a very short span. I am famous for these type of movie spells. This started way long back to my knowledge. Almost all of the summer vacations during my school days, I go to my grandparents place or visit one or other family members. Once when i went to my uncle's place for the summer vacation, they were having a video rental shop that time and it all started there. i saw roughly 30 movies in 10 days and i guess that may be a reason for my glasses in the later years. I don't remember exactly when this happened but i think i was 11 or 12 years old.

Those summer vacations were great time and i used to love them. Since i was the youngest kid in my father's family, everybody used to support me and i would always have a say in all the small fights/disputes with my brother/cousin. I also have to mention one more episode related to my passion towards movies. I don't know when usually parents let their kids go to movies with their friends. In my case, my mother was verry lenient and i went to a movie with my school friend after the final exams in my third grade. That too i still remember, i didn't ask my mother for permission. I made up mind and told her about it before the exams. she also didn't object it since she was very broad-minded with these aspects. The theatre was close to my house and we went to the movie after we finshed our last exam.

I started out writing today planning for something else but ended up with my passion for movies. I think i will slow down on the movies, since i cannot work with my other stuffs. Hoping that the movie maniac guy living inside me goes to a long slumber and i will get a chance to spare time for my other pet topics.

2005-06-12T21:04:00.000-04:00

last week was a hectic week. Couple of friends came to my place during the weekend. We spent a whole afternoon in a huge open shopping mall without buying anything. I always wanted to have plants inside my room and we visited a nursery to find out details about indoor plants and other necessary accessories that go with it. Decided what plants to get, but thought of visiting one more nursery next week just to get a better idea and to check out whether they have more varieties. In addition, I watched 5 movies and here i am noe typing my small installment of the story...

i came back from work late almost everyday and saw couple of movies during the weekdays. we were gearing up for a product release this week in work and that was the main reason for a hectic week. Though i was assigned a small module since i was a fresher, i was nervous with the bugs that cropped up from my module. I fixed all og them and am looking for a great week ahead.

I am planning to write about my recent boston trip in which i wanted to put lot of details about the trip in the blog. Let me see how much i can remember and how much in that I could write down. I also started writing more about mundane things, since i am finding it easier to fill up the blog compared to writing about new things/concepts which i have to think a lot and eventually i find it difficult to spend that much time and end up contributing nothing to the blog.

DMV office (2)

2005-06-08T08:16:00.000-04:00

I was not able to spare time for blogging yesterday evening. I saw this movie "my cousin vinny", browsed internet for sometime and later went to bed. before sleeping, talked with couple of ppl in the phone. if i need to mention all the ppl that i talk with, then that would itself be a big post every week!!! though i have reduced my phone time a lot now, i still spend considerable time in phone.

yesterday i thought i could get the remaining stuff related to change of address done at the dmv office itself, but they directed me to go to the loudon county office. i need to pay personal property tax, parking decals to the county for having a car in virginia. i have never heard of this stuff in florida where i did my graduate school or most of the other states where my friend's live or in my brother's place. i heard very few states have this type of tax and i haven't come across any other state till now. let me continue when i find time. i won't specify any particular time since i cannot stick with the schedule.

trying hard to get into the system

2005-06-06T07:59:00.000-04:00

it has been long time and it is always very difficult to continue anything after a short break. I wanted to write something from last week and finally i get to write now... I am hopipng that i will be regular here after. Things are getting into placed in the new apartment and i feeling good with this new setup. I have to resolve some of the issues in my to-do list and fine tune the others. I have started reading two books and also into the monthly dvd movie rentals. These movies have consumed a lot of time in the recent weeks and i am going to put a brake on this activity. I am always temped to go easy with movies and we have reduced the dvd rentals from 3 to 2 checkout yesterday and i have decided not to watch movies every evening during the weekdays. There is nothing wrong with the books but i wanted to stick with one book at a given time. But i meddle with two or three books and i need to work on this issue in the future. will try to continue in the evening or else certainly tomorrow

political topic #2 - politics/corruption/judicial system

2005-04-29T22:25:00.000-04:00

i don't remember when i last read about indian judiciary system, its underlying fundamentals, various procedures involved for a criminal/civil lawsuit or how to get a arrest warrent or a bail for the same. i guess i would have gone through some of said details during my history/civics classes in my high school. that was way long back to remember now. But I should thank our politicians and some of the celebrities since they make news for all the wrong reasons regularly in newspapers & magazines now a days.. Now i feel really bad that i didn't study my civics or history classes thouroughly back in those days since i cannot follow most of the current news or headlines easily.

Though i understand some of the common phrases that are used to describe the legal process for many cases related to various politicians, i don't know the niceties behind them. This is the only classification in which politicians of different parties come across together as a single identity. If you name a department, then i could name a politician who have some form of legal case pending on him while he was the minister of that department. These type of corrupt politicians are at large at state level compared to central. With the advent of multi party coalition governments at centre as well as state level, it is just a matter of entering politics and being elected as a MP or MLA and having some legislators in the ruling alliance to safeguard one's corrupt position. Though i am not blaming all of them, I am concerned about the percentage of the rogue elements that is in sharp rise during the past decade.

Even if the government changes after 5 years, and you end up as a opposition, it is not that easy to proceed with the case in the court. We have lot of loop holes with the existing judicial system in all aspects relating to criminal/civil laws and hence it is a matter of lawyers with whom you associate with for your case. If you could afford the best lawyer, then you could be free all your lifetime even if you have made grave crimes. If you don't believe me, check the newspaper and do a search.

do u remember the salmon khan case about druken driving or the case on big telugu hero shooting a producer at his home or about the fodder scam or about different scams of the current Tamil Nadu CM? some cases were started around 9 or 10 years back and i guess still they are in the beginning stage... with good lawyers you could delay the case for ever and during that time you could manipulate it whatever way you want. It all depends on how much money you have in your pocket. Money is a basis for the first two celebrities to be still free and for the later two, politics was acting as a protective shield.

Some laws were created during 19th century and many others belong to the independence era. Lot of things have changed completely in terms of social and political life and hence the laws should also be changed consistently to reflect them to be effective. but that is not the case with the indian judicial system. There are amendments to the law but the rate at which this is happening is not upto the expectations. we need more such things sooner and these should be appropriate with the current standards so that they can be used to confront the evil menace comprehensively.

corruption and politics are closely associated and it is not easy to elaborate on one issue without making references to the other. When you want to set something right, then comes the judicial system which is arcane and not effective at all to tackle these big brute evil forces. hence i started with something in mind, went through these topics in a random order and about to finish today's blog without any concrete conclusions. I gave some examples about how you could escape from the jaws of law and i hope to continue this discussion in the next blog also.

Political topic #1 state/central government

2005-04-25T23:56:00.000-04:00

I wanted to write about two topics today. Let me start the first topic by mentioning that many of the examples and comparisons that I quote would be naive and not at all accurate since this is the first time I am writing out my thoughts on some political issues. I may not be having adequate expertise in these issues but I thought I should start expressing myself and will be gaining familiarity as days go by.

I had a argument with one of my friend some time back regarding the state & central election results for Tamil Nadu and Indian government. In the past two or three elections, whenever there was simultaneous election for both central and state government, the people of Tamil Nadu had mostly chosen different alliances at the state and central level. Hence we end up always with a group of central ministers with one party working with the state government of its rival party. This has a profound effect of the welfare of the state subjects.

Let me explain why I started of this topic. In the recent days, I see many statements from Tamil Nadu CM and Indian FM regarding Tamil nadu issues. Both of them are bickering about each other and putting the blame for everything on the other party. I don’t know how much to rely on the information they provide on these issues. I could table the issues now a) Tsunami relief b) chennai desalination plant, c) Sivagangai district central co-operative bank. State government is blaming the central for inaction and finance ministry is blaming the state government for something or the other and at the end of the day, the people of Tamil Nadu are deprived of what they should have got a long time back.

Politicians should come out of petty politics when working as part of government. When they represent the people, the state/central governments should leave out their political rivalry, and work for the upliftment of the state/national subjects. This should be the ideal case and I know I cannot expect 100% ideal situation in real life. At least there should be some coordination between the state/central relationship. What I can see from the newspapers are utter quarreling, disagreement and chaos on issues related to state/central conformation. Politicians mention about the issues such as the procedure involving setting up of desalination plant, allocating funds, floating tenders, issues with various governmental agencies and these are not at all clear to the normal public. Hence, we are not able to get a clear picture of what is happening and who is wrong.

Consider Andhra Pradesh for example, they had/have the luxury of having the same alliance in the state and central government and I guess it would have helped them a lot compared to Tamil Nadu. I don’t have any perfect calibration or ranking in which I could make this assumption. The standard for comparing two states is a complex and controversial discussion and I will deal with it now. All I am telling is that the people of Andhra Pradesh are lucky enough to get the same political parties in state and central and this would be definitely a positive point for them compared to Tamil Nadu.

I don’t have time for my next topic. Its already late and I got to sleep now. Will continue tomorrow...

introspection...(cont)

2005-04-22T23:05:00.000-04:00

i forgot to add some more stuff yesterday. my earlier schedule for improving my writing skills were not based on any approved writing tutorial patterns. i created that schedule as such while thinking about ways to improve my writing. while i was waiting for the laptop, i took some books from library related to writing skills and still now i didn't get a chance to read the books. but i was able to get a brief overview of the books and i learnt that one of the first steps in writing is to write about what ever you are interested and to revisit what u wrote after a week. Only a week later, they are asking to do corrections/modifications to the script. ie. redrafting. Another point was write for yourself. you don't have to impress anybody out there.

i tried to be perfect in the first attempt itself and since i thought may be some of my friends/ family members may look at the blog, it increassed the pressure and I always tried to modify the draft as i do the writing. that time i thought i should make my blog private and do the writing once the laptop arrives. then i thought when would i know that i am a good writer. if at all i decide at a certain time frame that i am a good writer and make my blog public then is that the maximum that i could attain... also most of the times, we remember only the great public personalities but don't know how they worked to get to that point. hence i decided that whatever i write from now on will be public and i will not worry about what others feel about my writing in the current stage.

i will write as if i am writing in a piece of paper and trashing it later( not showing to anybody because i may get embarassed with my own writing) but i will never quit with what i am doing. i will take steps to improve and finally i am sure that one day i won't feel liek trashing what i write and that time i guess i will be a good writer. i don't know remember when i got interested in writing to this extent but i am sure this is one of my fascination that i strongly belive would help me in the future.

as for as i learnt in the writing book, the author asks the beginner writers to write about everything that they get inerested as much as possible. hence i have decided to write about things/incident that excites or gets my attention as well as continue with my small "american dream " project. so i am ready for mixing some unconventional topics inbetween the small project. I wanted to contribute very often to the blog and lets hope i will in the near future...

introspection...

2005-04-21T22:26:00.000-04:00

i was thinking for a good excuse for not maintaining the blog in the past 6 weeks... i have a legitimate reason. i was waiting for my new laptop... before that i was writing from my work computer in the evenings. i had anticipated the laptop to be shipped during march second week but couple of changes, i finally got my laptop last week. it was a dell inspiron 600m and i guess it is cool. i was doing the normal browsing, downloading songs and i am almost done with it now.

i am really afraid to look back about the things i wrote in the blog. most of the stuffs that happened related to this blog, i had mentioned would happen and i promised that i would take steps to avoid them... but here i am. not able to contibute anything to the blog for 45 days... i should take responsibility for what i am. i failed about something what i thought i could do. this is the case even after providing lot of flexibility while making a plan for the future.

my point is the task of maintaing a blog is simple compared to life/work goals. but if one concentrates on these small things that will help a lot in the future. i accept that i failed but i will not quit. i will try to continue from where i left and first try to complete this small project " why did i start to america" as soon as possible. from there i could go to the next logical level.

look at the previous sentence carefully. i am not specifing anything concrete. i have used "try" twice to show that i will put my effort sincerely and will do my best. is it a correct mindset or am i not sure about what i want? i don't know what to answer for this. probably i am slightly nervous since i was not able to stick with my previous schedule and wanted to express that in my concluding words.

Why did i start to America? (part-5)

2005-03-07T17:05:00.000-05:00

Third year in the college was different than the first two years. Normally, at the end of the third year, companies would visit the college for recruitment and hence students usually get serious with activities such as preparing for entrance exams, interviews, group discussions and also with the regular course works. I know I should take GRE and TOEFL for applying to grad schools and during the initial weeks in my third year, I was trying to decide when to take these exams. I know it takes considerable time to prepare for these exams and I also wanted to have my recruitment options open. Hence I had to work more than the normal guys, since I have to prepare for recruitment as well as higher studies.

Very few students in my college were interested in higher studies. The well-known path to success was getting placed in good companies during the first week of recruitment. There were few seniors who had completed GRE and applying to grad schools at that time. They helped us to a certain extent for preparing to GRE and selecting grad schools. I was in pressure that time because I was one of the very few who did not go with the customary trend. It took four months for me to prepare for GRE. I didn’t apply for companies during the initial recruitment period. After finally completing the GRE exams, I started to apply for open positions in companies and got placed in a company called “Planet Asia” within a week. Though I had decided to pursue higher studies, I thought that it would be safe to get a job as a backup if something goes amiss with my plans. Two weeks later, I finished the TOEFL exam which is generally considered a lot easier than GRE.

During GRE preparation and the subsequent months in which I applied to graduate schools, I had to work extra hard since I have to do the normal college work, catch up with placement activities and at the same time prepare for these exams. I planned all my work in a meticulous approach and mostly executed all of them as per the schedule. I learnt through this experience that proper planning/execution with dedication will always lead to the objective whatever it may be. Selecting graduate schools is a difficult task since many factors that you have limited knowledge has to be given careful consideration. Some of the factors are type of active research in the school, chances of getting admission, chances of getting assistantship, cost of living, weather conditions etc… one has to narrow down the list of schools based on these factors and also should select schools such that some of them should have moderate chances of admission, some as dream schools and some as backups. I think I applied to 4 moderate schools, 3 backup schools and 3 high ranking schools. The situation was analogous to selecting a college for my bachelors 3 years back. That time I thought I would know everything to select graduate schools after three years. I had knowledge but always what you need to know is more than what you know at a given time period. Hence you should try to develop methodologies to process the available data, get rid of unnecessary elements, provide priority to the refined data based on their sources and other related issues to make a good decision instead of waiting for all the data.

Why did i start to America? (part-4)

2005-03-04T15:45:00.000-05:00

I have to mention about two important milestones associated with my first year. One related to engineering admissions and the other about the ragging problems that were there prevalently in almost all the colleges irrespective of the standards or discipline or reputation. I have to write few words about the bloody communal riot in Coimbatore followed after three months by serial bombing that left many people dead and had a terrible consequence on normal life and badly hit the business community of the city. During both the situations though nobody in our college got into trouble, all of us were little frightened during those weeks.

Single window system was introduced for the first time in Tamil Nadu and through this system students were ranked based on their higher secondary grades and engineering entrance exams. Students have to select college and specialization based on the availability with respect to their ranks through a systematic counseling procedure. Earlier the admission was decentralized and the specialization could be selected only in the second year based on the first year grades. This system led to widespread corruption and malpractices related with the admission issues for merit as well as management quotas. The single window system streamlined the admission procedure and took care of the above said problems extensively for the merit quotas and to a certain extent to the management quotas. The introduction of this system was greatly appreciated and accepted by the students in particular and by the general public throughout the state.

Tamil Nadu government enacted the Tami Nadu Prohibition of Ragging Act in 1997 which gave immense authority for the college to deal with ragging problems. This was after the gruesome death of a first year medical student Navarasu during a ragging stint at Annamalai University. Because of the publicity and the widespread acceptance of ragging as a part of the first year college life, generally parents were worried about their kids especially those in hostels. Although our college had strict rules about ragging, we were ragged by our seniors to a certain degree during our first year. Mostly ragging was fun/interesting and little annoying sometimes. Generally the seniors will become friends afterwards and will be helpful in the forthcoming years in college. I personally consider some degree of ragging to be fun and part of college life. Only when it goes to extreme conditions such as physical abuse or continuous disgusting provocation, it has to be severely condemned and disciplinary steps should be taken. But defining a fine line between enjoyable and extreme ragging is highly subjective. To enforce these measures to the adolescent population is especially tricky and complicated.

I don’t remember anything in particular about my second year in college other than having tremendous fun, doing little friendly ragging on the juniors, making frequent visits to all the movie theatres in Coimbatore. Normally it was party time for almost all the days in a week. I along with my friends would always study during the study holidays before the semester exams only. But, we were able to end up with a minimum of overall 75% or better than that based on individual capacities. The point was we always studied with respect to semester exams or grades. I guess probably we would have gained more knowledge if we were interested with the subjects. But to my understanding, this was/is the state of mind of a typical student.

Why did i start to America? (part-3)

2005-03-02T19:19:00.000-05:00

The specialization in the engineering course was equally important as joining a reputed college. I guess always there is a bargain between the college and the field of interest. Most of us would have gone through this situation. I also prepared a list of the colleges that I was interested and also found details about various branches. My first preference was to get into computer science, next being electronics since it is more related to computers than other majors. Then came mechanical/electrical but I’m still not comfortable with mechanical drawings or electrical circuits. While I was waiting for counseling (where I select branch/college based on my rank in the state), I understood that if I stick with computers then I would end up with a college that was last in my list. But if I go for Electronics, then probably I have to go for a college somewhere in the middle of the list. I would have gone to the college that was first in my list if I had selected mechanical/electrical engineering.

I selected electronics and settled for GCT in Coimbatore taking into consideration the above said factors and all other misc. inputs. I am very happy with my choice but sometimes I sit and think whether life would have been better than now if I had taken computers. It is a million dollar question that cannot be answered by anyone. Only god will know that. But, I consider joining electronics in GCT as one of the best decisions in my lifetime. That being said, if I start to write everything about my good old college days then it would take up most of the blog. Probably, I will write the important things that happened, memorable experiences that still relish in my memory, the state of mind that I had during the four years.

Why did i start to America? (part-2)

2005-02-26T16:13:00.000-05:00

I decided on an engineering major for one more reason. I was attracted towards computers though I had limited exposure in my school days. I always thought I would excel in software area with my good analytical/logical reasoning!!! I found out that I am more comfortable with computer subjects than others. Also at that time period, doing a bachelors degree in computer science is highly regarded as a successful step towards a good career.

The last one in my high school, changed my life significantly since it was for the first time in my life, I had some definitive goals and was working hard to achieve them. The goals were to get admission into one of the premium engineering institutions in the state. Till that time, though I was not a topper in my class, I was generally above the class average without putting efforts at all. Since I didn’t have any particular goal like getting the first position, I usually don’t toil myself heavily with school work. I will school work making sure ample time is there for other activities like watching TV, playing with friends etc… Since my father had to work outside the state, I lived with my grandparents during my high school. During that time, I learnt many aspects about the social life pertaining to our family, ethics and culture from my grand parents. Since I had been always with my parents till that time, I had difficulty coping up with the new surroundings initially. But latter as days went by, I learned to manage myself and to enjoy the new living style. With all these in my life, I had to concentrate more and put additional efforts for working towards my goal of joining a premium institute. With my sincerity and dedication, I really worked hard and I completed my high school with good grades that was adequate for a premium institution.

Why did i start to America? (part-1)

2005-02-23T19:02:00.000-05:00

I' am going to write about the reasons behind my journey to America, What I learnt during the process of getting into one of the world's most sought after country, how i managed to survive during the initial period, getting used to the new life style and trying to acquire a authority over it now.

Though I can't remember exactly when I started to dream about visiting America, I would like to mention a few things about my childhood days that acted as a precursor to my American dreams. When I was 8 or 9 years old, my uncle used to visit INDIA every two years. He was the first in our family to settle in USA during the early eighties. Whenever he visits us, he would bring lots of chocolates, toys and more stuff for everybody in the family. The important point is that my mother's family consisted of my uncle & five girls. My uncle is the youngest and he used to bring almost everything as six sets, five for each sister family and one for my grand parents. The concept that he was able to bring something for everyone in the family greatly amused me. At that age as a child, those were the things I was very much interested and that made me to dream about visiting USA and returning back like my uncle.

My mother’s family was a main reason for my fascination towards USA. One by one all of my cousins started their USA journeys. Later when I was 13 or 14, I learnt through my uncle and cousins about the various exciting opportunities, comfortable life style, gigantic shopping malls, freeways and all great bits and pieces about America. These amazing facts encouraged me to visit USA and to explore all the mesmerizing things I hear about it. I clearly understood that the best way for this to happen is to do an engineering major and to pursue higher education in USA. I know this would be the first step towards my American dream and from there I will start for much higher goals in life that I was not sure during that age.

will continue in my next post...

2005-02-20T14:20:00.000-05:00

I had lots of work during this week and I should not give that as a reason for not sticking towards my policy of 3 blogs/week. Probably I should have done a review during the midweek about the status of my weeks schedule and modified the priorities of the remaining work. This would have given me a chance to check whether I'm on track during the week.

Since I am trying to push many different activities into my life in a short span of time, I should classify the work into different groups and try to achieve them one at a time. I am having trouble in narrowing down my interests to any particular field/scope. Following are some of my interests: Learn to swim, improve my inter-personal & communication skills, improve my knowledge on work relates stuffs, maintain an active blog, read lots of books on varied topics, improve my writing skills... I know that I'm taking more than I can handle and I'm interested in doing a little bit on everything. I guess I should not choke myself with everything and finally lose enthusiasm on many activities.

Earlier this week, I was trying to decide on a topic on which I could write for the next two weeks. While I was thinking about the topics, I found out thatalmost all the topic needed some background details or good knowledge about it, if I have to express my views. After a while, I decided on writing about certain aspects in my personal life. This way, I don't have to worry about the concepts/ideas since I will be familiar with most of stuff. Then I could concentrate on how I express my views, flow of idea, writing skills etc..

with this I am finishing off this post. Expecting to do the homework for writing a good post next time earlier itself instead of writing instantaneously as I type in the computer.

finally, these are my short time goals...

2005-02-16T18:41:00.000-05:00

I should write appropriate captions or else leave that caption field blank. This is regarding my last post, since it says short time goal but doesn't mention the goals at all in that post.

Following is the summary of my short time goals.
1) Improve writing skills
2) Learn & practice different types of writing (descriptive, comparison, narratives etc...)
3) Learn & practice different methods for expressing my views/attitude (first person, third person narration)
3) Use of appropriate words and short sentence structures
4) Improve English vocabulary
5) Write about a certain topic for 2 weeks. This is the pattern I am planning to use for this project.
6) Use of little amount of normal activities along with the main topic as filler
7) Try to maintain formal written English all the way through the blog
8) Be prompt and regular in maintaining the blog

I would like to work on this project for 12 weeks. Starting from Today (16th Feb '05), i would finish this project by 16th May' 05. I am thinking now that I could relax on bullets 5 & 6, since this is the first time I am doing something of this sort. By working on this project, I expect to gain knowledge on the above said topics and would be in a better position to define my next project. I sincerely pray to god for his help in accomplishing the goals set for this project.

Short time goals/objectives

2005-02-11T15:24:00.000-05:00

I am still struck with the topic of deciding the short time goals/objectives for the blog. Though I am not looking forward for a perfect goal, I probably should end up with a reasonable one. The question I have with the reasonable one is “how much time I should provide to attain this reasonable goal”. If I am able to decide on the time for this reasonable goal, then I should at least have in mind what I will do after I reach these goals. I guess during this course, I might stumble upon various other fascinating stuffs and something will act as a good place to start for the next project.

I thought I will finish the first stage of deciding the objectives for the project by this week. I have almost finished on deciding the objectives but still working with the time frame. I know strongly that everything in this world is related to time axis and if you decide to achieve anything even on an atomic level, then immediately will be encountered by the question of how much time is needed to finish that task. Time duration plays a important role and you cannot easily end up with a appropriate time interval for a given project. If we decide on a long time span than the required time, you may end up lazy in the initial stage and may not at all attain the final goal. On the other end, with a short time span, you may be in a hurry to finish the project and may leave some important aspects of the project.

Having said these things, I have decided to carefully estimate the time duration for this project. Since, I have made a decision on the goals, I should breakup the goals into individual components and look for the time needed to accomplish them and the sum of all these time components should give me the estimate for this project. I should take into consideration factors such as current stuffs what I do, new things that could come into my life, sudden unexpected things that may happen...

I want to and I guess I would finalize the short time goals/objectives within a week.

Taking a perfect decision...

2005-02-09T18:50:00.000-05:00

Continuing with my discussion from the previous post, I am still pondering on various options for this blog. Looking at today's caption, I was asking to myself "could we say that there is a perfect decision for a given situation". I was thinking if something is a perfect decision now, will it remain the same in the future? If you consider the same situation after a decade for instance, then probably you would end up saying it was a better solution at that time, but may be if we had resources as of now, it could have been done better.

My point is there may be some decisions which would be deemed as perfect throughout the timeline. But the probability of finalizing such a decision is extremely small. Most of the normal situation that we encounter will always end up with a better decision than a perfect decision because of the complex interdependence between the decision and its relation to other factors that are not in our control. If something goes wrong in day to day basis, not as per our plan, I would make my stand flexible so that I could take on the unexpected things in life without getting greatly upset or annoyed.

These things came into my mind when I decided whether I will end up with a perfect decision for defining the objectives for this blog. I have almost decided that I will write personal/general views at the beginning stage for this blog. First, I should get myself acquainted with the habit of writing in the blog regularly. I have not come up with any specific objectives, but would decide on them before the next post.

While reading some magazine, I came across the google adsense program, how it helped a teenager to make $5000/month in a short span of time, google's marketing strategy and its technology etc... I thought though I may end up with a meager sum, may be I should try this stuff on my blog. Currently only my friends and family members would look at my blog that too not frequently. It is not the money, but the things that I would learn from this experience excited me a lot. Also this would be a source of inspiration for me to work with the blogs. Hence I added the google ads and google search tool to my website. When I looked at my blog afterwards, there were only ads about blogs in my website. I was surprised to a certain extent because I thought there would be different types of ad in the website. Then I realized that the google adsense program would direct ads based on my website contents and since I have mentioned blogs many time (why/how to create blog, its features etc..) and nothing else, then it is obvious that I get only those blog ads.

I am hoping that there would be different kinds of stuffs in the blog in the near
future and thus different types of ads in my website!!!

...

2005-02-07T18:34:00.000-05:00

I did some search about blog writing in google and found out different views on maintaining blobs. People are classifying blogs into personal/business blog, decide on the type of audience some one should target before starting a blog, ways to maintain a healthy blog and lot more stuff... I don't know what I would finally end up as particular reasons for my blog. But I have started to think about the reasons and the objectives that I plan to achieve by writing these blogs.

I had some basic ideas for this blog, but now I should decide whether that is sufficient. Though I am not interested to get the attention of many readers initially that would be something interesting to have at a latter stage.