thecruisemaniac.com

Im back to writing on the blog after quite some time…  Things at work have kept me quite busy!!! And as 2008 draws to a final closure, I thought I’d write up a post on the yearly roundup… Something that I missed last year for reasons that I’ll mention below…  So yeah, here goes nothing:

2008 started with a dark note this time around for me with Mom being admitted to hospital for a Bypass surgery.  The surgery was succesful, mom started recovering her health and January went by quite fast… and then hell broke loose!!!

On the afternoon of February 2nd, mom left us all!!! A shock that none of us was prepared to take! So there went February 2008, down the frigging drain!!!

March and April went by pretty dullish… Nothing interesting in life… Except to mention that I was no longer associated with Nisarga from that point on…  I dint see the same commitment levels coming out of me…  I dint see any point in anything else in life at that moment.

Life did a steady climb from May onwards, when I was asked to travel to Turin, Italy for 3 months.  Lovely trip, amazing places, awesome beaches, serene hills and fields… That was the best 3-month-period of this year.  Met some lovely people in life! Had some of the best Tiramisu and pizza in my life.

Back to India in August, Sasken started dipping down the scales… Motorola was dying… things in my life were however moving good… Got to work on the Media player for Motorola’s Symbian series of phones.  The sad truth however is that not one of the devices I worked on lived long enough to hit the market!

And then on the 1st of October, Teleca happened.  They were opening their operations in India and wanted Symbian developers! Took an interview, got whooopped!! and was offerred a job there… Lovely salary… and most important of all, the power and responsibility to create the India team!!! Joined Teleca on the 10th of November and things have been great since then!!! I am finally going to be able to realise my dream of working on a Nokia phone!!! Double w00t for me

So yeah, Things rolling good after a very very bumpy and rough ride!!! As 2008 draws to a close, heres a list of highlights in life in the year:

1. Saw a live football match for the first time in life!!! Juventus vs. Inter Vs. Milan @ the swanky new stadium in Turin.
2. Learnt italian!!! Personal best for me! Proves that I’m still wired tight and right!
3. Got promoted at work. Yippeeeeeeeeee!!!! I is Senior Engineer now B-)
4. Shifted to Jayanagar from CV Raman nagar.  I now have a crowd at home… Its back to living with a group
5. Bought a 500 gig hard-disk and managed to fill it up to its brim!  Im now busy trimming it down!
6. Got myself an eee-PC - I picked up the eee-PC from jace at BCB7 for an undisclosed sum .  Good company… Ultra lightweight stuff!!! Totally awesome thingy thats running a fullblown Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) distro right now…
7. Got myself an iPod nano - Finally into the apple family… I would never pick up anything more than this from the apple family!!!  49 grams of uber-ultra-light-weight goodness!!!
8. Did a bike trip to Ooty with scorpion032 a.k.a. Laxman Prasad and swaroopch a.k.a. well… Swaroop. C. H.
9. Travelled to Nandi hills on bike again!!! With my roomies…
10. Got a new job… Got more responsibility and got to meet some uber l33t peeps @ work!!!
11. Managed to do a looooooot of reading!!! and a lot of listening to music!!!

Pretty positive outlook I have eh??? Well life rocks… thats the rule… and we live on to die another day…

There goes the post for the past year!!! Lots of new things learnt… lots of pain felt… lots of love lost… and lots more of love gained…

I guess this is what is called a roller coaster ride…

Chao… and Wish you all a very very happy and prosperous new year!!! Have truck-loads of fun…  If life’s giving you the kicks, take it, and enjoy it all…

If you’re reading this post, it means that the host migration that I decided to do has gone through successfully.  I’ve moved on from bluehost’s platinum hosting plan to a simple yet effective hosting solution by expertrio.com.

Special thanks to preshit for making things happen pretty quickly And yeah, the cruisemaniac continues to roll…

One small quirk that I had to go through was to login to phpmyadmin to upload the database backup that I had of the blog at the older location.  I would love to have this feature built into wordpress… This would be a total dream thingy to have

And before I sign off and retire for the night / early-morning / whatever at 2.30 AM, a quick update on life: Things have been going good!!! I’m loving it!!! Every moment of this rollercoaster ride that I’m riding… And oh, I will come out with some good news pretty soon…

’til then… Chao…

This is a post I religiously put up for every barcamp!  Be there!!! BarcampBangalore 7 is happening at IIM-Bangalore on 13th and 14th of this month.

And as a regular Barcamper for all BCB’s, I’m gonna be there fixing up Wi-Fi and other tech issues that people might be facing!!!  But yeah, this time around, there are a couple of interesting sessions.  My particular fav being Ujj’s  - Working on your dream project with a day job.

This barcamp is also showing some clear demarcation on sessions based on Art / Careers / Non-tech as opposed to the usual Organized - Chaos that happens during every BCB. Lets see how things move ahead… I prefer the Organized - Chaos mode anyday Makes a barcamp worth attending

The entire list of sessions in schedule at barcamp are here.  I’m gonna try to blog as well as twitter. And probably upload my pics on my flickr page here…

And yeah, do follow BCB7 on twitter here to get the updates on events / locations / schedules / et. al.  ’til BCB7 tomorrow morning, Chao…

Oh… as a parting note…. This is a barcamp..

There ARE NO Spectators! Only Participants… Enjoy your experience!

P.S.: The title is a li’l conked out… credits to the Salaam Namastey Hindi I use on twitter

When I came down to bangalore back in September 2006, I had one and only goal during my house-hunt.  Find a place where I stay all alone… Have a place all to myself…  The reasons behind the thought were my experiences in staying with a group in Pune…

I was probably not very comfortable in the group-dynamics part of life… or so.. I thought… So, I then did get a room + terrace combo all for myself… and it was nice… alone, in total peace with myself, solitude, and all those sordid, sober words!!!

But over a period of time, ( 1.5 years actually, of having done nothing in my life other than the regular job of pumping out water from my room everytime the overhead storage tank overflowed and my room got flooded ), I decided that it was better I moved out of that forsaken place!!

And now, I’m back to living between a lot of noise :-D.  I have now shifted from C. V. Raman Nagar to Jayanagar, and moved into @daaku’s place where we are now 5 people.  That would mean a lot of noise wouldnt it???

Its gonna take time for me to get accustomed to so much of people around me… but yeah, life’s good!!! noisy and fun!!! And the best part, I get hot roti’s and sabji EVERYDAY for dinner!!! Which effectively means that I eat everyday!!!

The only trouble that I see is travelling on Inner ring road into Koramangala and onto Bannerghatta road.  Quite a painful ride… but hey, when u have Linkin Park giving you company, “It doesn’t even matter!”

Life is good!!! Life moves on…

P.S.: I felt compelled to write this post because I need to give the roomies credit for putting up with me

Two years back, this time around… I’d just resigned from my previous employer at pune.  I was packing up stuff to leave for Bangalore and join my new workplace.  4th September, 2006 would still be remembered as one of the most dreaded days in my life.

When I had time to take a coffee break, I had this sudden flash of thougths that ran across my mind and hence this post…

Till May 16th of this year, till I landed in Turin, Italy, I had nothing on my track record to prove that I was a useful, as the corporation calls it, “resource“.  Since then, Life has come around so fast and so full that as I gave more thougt into the whole sequence of events, it did seem not only gratifying… It also felt extremely complete… the whole scenario connected!

I actually got a pay raise! and transitioned as a Senior Engineer in the organization! Special credits to my Manager for making this happen!!!

I got into a high-priority team at work! Apart that being a huge incident in itself, I also realised that I’ve not lost a lot of symbian in the last 2 years of not coding on symbian! I’m not the sharpest… but I’m still sharp… Probably the late night coding sessions with @daaku paid off finally!

That apart, the team I work with has so much of electricity (OK, I am not accepting any lame jokes on this pun) in it that work becomes a breeze… I’ve started falling in love with code once again… Irrespective of how painful it is to take a crashlog, figure out one bug among about a million or so lines of code that my team uses, fix it, ensure that it doesnt get repeated on other components that might use the code, et. al. et. al.

As I was writing the previous paragraph, I was reminded of Chetan Bhagat’s One Night at a Call Center.  In the book, when God speaks to the people stranded in the Qualis at the bottom of the pit, he mentions to the main narrative Syham that a Bad Manager is the root cause of all evil :).  And God also tells Shyam and Vroom about getting a bonus in the process of setting things right!

That just happend with me! The very same damn thing happened with me :D!!!!!!  I’m sure more than half the industry is ruined by people like Subash Bakshi!  My first year and a half at work was totally ruined by horrible managers!!!

Well, turning back, it was overall a bumpy ride… some really big potholes hidden under water, getting caught unawares many times, and at the end of the day, coming out of it all…

Life has come a full circle for me and I must thank you all for putting up with me for whatever I’m worth!

P. S.: I love twitter!!!!

Delayed post, nevertheless an important one!!!  Its been close to 3 weeks since I touched down in India after completing my first stint abroad in Italy!

Italia was lovely… India just leaves me speechless…  I’m not going to do the Italy has this… India doesnt have that kind of a comparison post…

But I’m definitely compelled to answer a few people that I met and keep meeting time and again with a “perspective” about MY country…

The answer is straightforward… The math is simple… When you dont have population, you dont have scale, and you can micromanage more effectively.  Europe as a continent has just about the population India has as a country!

India is never about micromanagement… Heck, India is not even about management.  India is just about scale… The scale of a billion and more heads… and counting… And still running strong…

And on a post that comes on the Independence day weekend… I can always still go back on the sentence I wrote a couple of lines above and say thus:  Europe may have a truckload of things indians always dream of… But come august 15, no Italian ever has the pleasure of listening to A. R. Rahman’s rendition of the country’s national song!!!

Vande Mataram!

&
Jai Hind!!!

This update must have been here a couple of weeks back… But then, other things have kept me away from my blog for quite sometime now… And when Himanshu Bhai left a comment on my blog, it spurred me to get up and post an update… So here goes…

Cinque Terre was 3 days of awesome holidaying on one of the most amazing coastlines I’ve ever seen in my life!  Awesome treks along the coast.  Again…  Some of gods best art executed in total true colour…  Enough of explaining… A small sneak preview of the photos that I’ve uploaded on Flickr! here.

A small sneak preview, if you could call it… is here:

So many colours in a single photograph

My Kodak camera can do this??? Whoa!!! :-0

Photo credits Optical Illusion

The Cinque Terre — five picturesque fishing villages perched on Mediterranean hillsides, splendidly brushed in sun-washed colors.

Or so say websites and it truly a paradise on earth…  Ever since I saw this place on the way back from Rome, I’ve been soo wanting to come here and spend a couple of days and trek along the cliffside.  And this petty dream has come true today… with my generous PM offerring to give tomorrow off!  Friends heading to Rome and I’m headed to the Liguria province where Cinque Terre is located.

For those that’re not really comfortable with Italian, heres what Cinque Terre means: Cinque (Chink - kweh) meaning 5, and Terre (Therre) meaning land.  And it is… the paradise consisting of 5 small villages from south of the coast to north namely: Riomaggiore, Manarola, Cornigilia, Vernazza, Monterosso al Mare.

I’ll be spending 3 days at Riomaggiore and covering as much of the rest of the coastline by foot and by train.  This is gonna be an awesome trip!!!  Expect some good photos when I get back.

’til then… Ciao!!!!

This trip I have to definitely blog about!  Innsbruck’s a place thats long been on my bucket list and finally it’s a strike!  Two lovely days at Innsbruck! The alps is just too lovely to look at!  And getting caught in the Euro 2008 football frenzy is just too incomparable!!!

A few snapshots:

The rest of the innsbruck story is here on my flickr stream.  Its a quick and small post, but then yeah, Pictures would be better in explaining the experience!!!  I’m at a complete loss of words!!!