An extremely hectic May it has been .First of all there is work which has been quite challenging lately with truckloads of responsibilities and endless sprints*.I want to go home so badly that my head aches every time I think of Jam and my trip is still a month away.Bangalore is unpleasantly cool this summer.It is extremely bright in the mornings with fuzzy sunlight around lunchtime and then around 3 in the afternoon,the light fades away-replaced by dark thunderous clouds and then inevitably-rain just when you have to leave office.innumerable bedraggled evenings-the most agonizing thing being standing at a traffic light with the rain slowly soaking through to your bones-drop by drop.I have always been a person who hates getting wet in the rain.What joy do people get out of dancing in the rain is something that I have not been able to fathom.Also there is this exam to be given and preparing for exams while working is so difficult-you only have the second rate hours of the day at hand not that any studying gets done on weekends.

Traffic in Bangalore is a funny thing.I wonder if it is the same in other places but there seem to be certain windows of time in which there is a lot of traffic on the roads and then there are lull periods in between.For e.g if I leave home at 8:30 then I am often caught in a mild rush on the road-these are mostly people trying to make it to work by 9 sharp but then unusually there is a lull in the traffic around 8:45-8:50 as most of these people would already be close to their respective destinations.but there is no 9:15-9:20 lull as people who have to reach work at 9:30 and also those wanting to reach by 10:00 are already out on the roads with the latter group out by this time in anticipation of heavy traffic!!

Now with Internet at home,blogging would be easier and more frequent(I hope).I am in the midst of a downloading frenzy but hardly have time to watch the movies I have already downloaded.I have a backlog of unfinished books too.There seem to be pending to-do lists everywhere.Work really squeezes the juice out of you.

* After singing paeans for Agile I sometimes do think that it might get difficult if you are the only one in a story point

Sick :(

I am not back as yet but have been terribly sick all this week ...in fact from last Friday.I was sick on my birthday too as many of you doubtless know.I still managed to cut a cake and my roommates managed to polish it off for me.It is a subtle kind of fever....my skin is not actually burning hot but the fever is there underneath...every time I think it is gone,it comes right back.I am depressed and tired.I sweat underneath my bedclothes and it goes away and then I start shivering because of the sweat.I have been taking antibiotics and have been thinking not so rosy thoughts.Not going to office for 5 days means I have lesser number of days of leave to go home which is again depressing.I will probably get a blood test done once the dosage of pills is exhausted.really depressing stuff.Everybody is sick in Bangalore.We almost had an epidemic in our team in office.On the friday of the Megadeth concert only 10 out of 23 turned up for work.Hi Denzyl if you are reading this :-) Leave a comment sometime to cheer me up.
I feel a bit like Rodya in Crime & Punishment not to say that I feel murderous but delirious.Rodya of part 1 and 2.The Wikipedia article on C&P is excellent by the way.I owe replies to some emails from some of you and this is my excuse for the delay.Till I am hale n' hearty again.

I have a sudden urge to eat Singhada with sauce.Not Samosas.Singhadas in all their crispy glory.

Recently....

Its been a crazy post Diwali November.Getting adjusted to the new house.Falling sick repeatedly due to diarrhea.Planning for January.Work getting a little hectic.This weekend I was completely engrossed in traveling and attending Grihapravesh-es.Have been listening to a lot of classic stuff-The Doors and Sabbath and esp Led Zep (OK what do call a Hippie's and a carpenter's ideal date?--- tripping on Doors ( apologies to Saanjh :-) ) ) .Also I am mostly dead on Orkut but pretty much there on Facebook ( due to company intranet filtering and 'coz I hate Powerscrap) with all its myriad applications which ask you to characterize people , poke your friends, put up your fav comic on your profile and do thousand more fun things.Really you should check it out.*

I have been buying books left right and center since the last five months and lately I have been able to catch up on reading instead of just admiring the bookshelf.

Books bought recently:

1.The diaries of Franz Kafka
2.Gravity's Rainbow
3.Madame Flaubert
4.A clockwork orange
5.Brave new World
6.Nirvana's Biography
7.Step across this line
8.The ground beneath her feet
9.A father and son
10.The code book
11.Dubliners
12.Above average

Among these I have only managed to read A father and son,Above average and Brave new world.All the rest are in unread or half-read stages.I was impressed by Brave new world and I would say it pretty much beats all other Dystopian themes by quite a margin.I like the irony and the grey ending of the book and they way that issues like purpose of life are explored without firmly sticking to one.Another post I did on Dystopia some time back here
Hopefully I would have something interesting to say next time around.Most probably I would be putting up some older posts which are in draft just 'coz I have put enough effort into them to delete them.

*I think that lately, all I have been doing is pimping various sites.I know people come to my blog just to navigate to other cooler pages but what to do, hardly anything interesting happens in my life. I have been told that everything that I do has an air of recklessness to it-including this blog.

Yeah, back at the roadhouse they got some bungalows

"All right,all right,all right.Hey listen ,listen,listen man.I don't know how many you people believe in astrology.(to a woman in the crowd)Yeah that's right baby.I am a Sagittarius.The most philosophical of all the signs......But anyway I don't believe in it.I think it's a bunch of bullshit ma self. But I tell you this man.I tell you this-I don't know whats gonna happen man but I am gonna have my kicks before the whole shit-house goes up in flames!!"

--live in Boston '70

A life of unrestrained hedonism.The dream that was always there and now will see fruition.

When I woke up this morning, I got myself a beer
Well, I woke up this morning, and I got myself a beer
The future's uncertain, and the end is always near

Let it roll, baby, roll
Let it roll, baby, roll
Let it roll, baby, roll
Let it roll, all night long

Yeah, I am gonna have my kicks before the whole shit-house goes up in flames.

A post a day.....

The folks at the office say that Agile is really the way to go but me being a newbie don't know really.We (the torch-bearers of hardware) never really had an exposure to Waterfall anyway,so can't really judge which is better.Life is increasingly spent at meetings,trainings and presentations which is fine as long as you can sit somewhere where you can become invisible and snatch a wink or two.My strategy is to go for a little behind the middle seat so that I can still be at the back if the back-benchers ( seaters?) get called to the front.I am slowly getting addicted to Excel and Confluence-the wiki they use in our place.Life's little achievements consist of avoiding the maximum number of traffic lights by choosing bizzare driving routes,buying novels from shady second-hand books stores and by trying to eke out the most tax benefits by investing (planning to invest rather) in schemes which make you feel like that masterji in some old Doordarshan era ad-"Samay samay par LIC ka premium bharna jaroori hai".I am really thinking of writing book reviews to make this mundane blog a little more exciting by posting scandalous ideas and in general antagonizing everyone.Yeah and book reviews are very subjective things(that's what writerscafe.org says about Book review guidelines)-so everything is an opinion and not fact.

If you think that you have a tech(or a science) bone in your body,
check out boiledbeans
A visual quiz a day complete with a scorecard .What fun! this is the first thing that I do in the morning at the office.

A random conversation at work:

Female 1:but the J2EE trainer was good.
Male1:No,was bad.I did not understand much.
Me: Me neither!
Female1:but he was very helpful.
Me:You have been afflicted by the Stockholm syndrome.
Male1:but thats when........
Me:Yeah but it's similar to that.analogous.
Female1:what's what syndrome?
Male1 and Me:you wouldn't understand-you need level for that! bwahahahahaha!!
*Female1 grimaces*

And this featured in our conversations too. Wikipedia fascinates always.


Also innumerable Homer Simpson conversations......... with Male1 being a Springfield resident-almost but Male1 has been sufficently irradiated.(I will have names for my co-workers soon)


D'oh!!!!-just look at his expression here!!.LMAO :D

I love my job.

Has been a while

Its has been a while since I did a decent post.Life's been pretty busy,hectic would not be the apt word.Wake up-go to work-come back and sleep and then wake up on Saturday around 7 and think-oh, no going to work today- and then promptly dozing off for a couple of more hours.It is a strange feeling,I never actually imagined how life would be working and so far this life has been good to me.My routine in the office usually involves-reaching there by 9:30,coffee break of 10-15 min around 11:00,lunch around 12:45,loitering in the campus for about three quarters of an hour,another coffee/tea break around 3:15 and the office crowd starts thinning around 5:45-6 and everything is quiet around 6:45-and yeah around 6 ,some head to the cafeteria for snacks while some go to the gym-I head back home,cursing and breaking furiously in the maddening MG Road traffic and in between I also do some coding desperately trying to come to grips with unfamiliar programming concepts/vocab "requirements"-"analysis"-"design" all mean different things in different contexts and the most scariest word of them all-static............
I dream of red lines and yellow lines and light bulbs and red crosses and cntrl-x,cntrl-v,cntrl-c all running in wild maniacal circles around me- taunting me to confront them till I hear the sweet purring of the CPU acknowledging my almost perfect resizeable-resistant -pesky user defying-UI.

it's almost Asok-in-Dilbert ian this love for my workplace is but I cant help it if my manager is a very co-operative man and that my team members do not actually suck but the honeymoon is gonna end soon- I have a vague premonition.Sometimes I do have that instinctive urge to bunk-to run away form work and cool my heels but then as a friend of mine pointed out-'you get paid to do this' so I curb the desire and get along with the job at hand.Finally read HP-7 and the last duel between Voldermort and Harry is almost anti-climactic- Expelliarmus?against the most feared wizard?The last chapter is such BS but it was unavoidable 'coz this would be the only way of ending the saga.I couldn't help feeling a bit sad at the end of it all-no more waiting for the next book ,no more Hogwarts ,no more Hagrid's creatures or Hogsmeade....

In other shocking news,Carlos Tevez moved to ManU(was hoping he would move to Chelsea-the presence of Crespo in the Blues starting line up two years ago being my sole reason for supporting them) on a two year loan from WestHam and Alonso continues to behave like a spoilt child.Kumble scored a century(I just love Test cricket!).Amidst all the sporting upheavals ,I decide to start another blog.So I present before you Bourgeoisie Armchair Philosophy- a blog solely dedicated to discussing things other than my personal life,sports,music, random musings -in short everything that I do not talk about on ICISIF.I am co-hosting this blog with Niksworth. No, I could not think of a better name and it just came to me. Bourgeoisie 'coz of my earlier Communist leanings,Armchair 'coz I am not the kind of person who actually does something about what he says and Philosophy is just to validate any post that I might do under the garb of that word though Niksworth might disagree.happy reading.