Disaster Area

A common disaster

2009-04-20T17:37:00.002+05:30

After years of bleeding edge innovative disasters, I had a common one.. Spilled tea on my laptop... Everything else is fine, but the touchpad is behaving erratically. Sometimes it gains a mind of its own, and the mouse pointer starts dancing all over the screen, and it keeps clicking left and right randomly.

Ashish suggested that it will be ok once it has dried off, and I'm currently hoping against hope that this happens, because its rather irritating to work like this, and I don't really want to lose a couple of days of productivity because of this.

Wierdest Birthday Ever

2006-10-06T17:42:00.000+05:30

Happy Birthday to me!

This has been one of the wierdest birthdays ever.

First off, people started wishing me several days in advance.
There were several reasons for this:

ICQ alerts for birthdays on your friends list 2 days in advance. Most people looked at the alert, but did not look at the details and started wishing me 2 days in advance itself.
Orkut alerts birthdays for friends about a week in advance. I started receiving happy birthday scraps a day in advance. I responded to some of these with "In which timezone?"
Some people used their mobiles to set an alarm for the day. Unfortunately, by some quirky behaviour of electrons, they were alerted a day before, and they wished me yesterday saying, "Isn't today the 6th?"

Ironically, some of these early birds actually missed the worm, and managed to not wish me today. (yet)

Thankfully, my brother Rachit, along with Nikhar and DJ managed to find a cake somewhere and we had a nice family dinner Desmond's, after which the three of them somehow lifted me and gave me a tiny round of bumps, between receiving calls on my cell.

After picking up Rachit and DJ's bikes from office, we were heading home. Somewhere on the way, DJ disappeared from my rear-view mirror, and I stopped to wait for him. After some time, we figured that he got detained because tools started arbitrarily falling out of his bike's toolkit, and he stopped to pick them up.

Since I didn't feel like heading home so soon (It was only 1230 am, and it was my birthday, for crying out loud), we decided to head out for a drive (my favourite hobby). We headed towards the clover-leaf interchange on the BMIC, and went over as many of the loops as we could before heading back home.

High speeds, several drifts, a cake, and half a movie later, I went to sleep, preparing for a long day of work ahead and an early morning.

Unfortunately, different people have different ideas of how early an early morning should be, and I started getting birthday calls as early as 06:30 am, and I had to abandon sleep after barely 4 hours.

Wishes in office were freely forthcoming along with threats of bumps at 3 pm. One of the kids actually figured out how to use an SMTP server and sent out a broadcast mail from me(!) telling everyone it was my birthday and actually inviting people at 3 pm. (Kudos to whoever did this for actually copying my signature in this mail, making it appear more genuine ;)) However, nothing really materialized at 3 pm or even several hours after that. I nearly began to enjoy poking fun at my teammates for being wimps, when they finally gathered enough courage and people at around 7 pm to give me five minutes worth of bumps. Seriously, if this is all one has to bear after religiously kicking in on absolutely any birthday celebration, its totally worth it! Then again, I can safely speak such words because I have the advantage of my weight on my side.

On a more serious note, a thought that is spinning around in my head since morning: Nearly a quarter of a century, and nothing substantial to show for it. I hope I can fix this before long.

Laptop woes

2006-07-14T02:32:00.000+05:30

After nearly 2 years and a month of working at Trilogy, they finally decided to give people at my designation some real laptops. Well, I did have an IBM 600X before this, but that was so stone age, that it was embarrasing to show it around to others.

As it happens, we are getting some spanking new Dell Lattitude D620 to replace both my desktop and laptop. While I do feel that my productivity will drop by around 25% in moving from two computers to 1, I still did opt for this because the new laptop is kinda cool!

I did figure that the image that help was ghosting on to the laptops was kinda wierd, so I asked them for a factory piece along with the CDs so that I could install things myself to my satisfaction.

In some of these respects people like Dj and myself are both boon and bane for the sysadmins. Boon, because we take several things like this off their shoulders, and bane because we know our stuff (or atleast we think we do), and usually bug them a lot more than the average user.

In any case, Dj and I both walked off with a factory fresh laptop and the cds, and set about reinstalling Windows from scratch, in tandem, kind of doing the same things.

Except, after we had finished installing Windows, and then installed the motherboard drivers, my laptop crashed.

A fresh install of windows, with just one driver update and it was corrupted already.

An even more interesting event was that I was able to recover using the Windows Recovery console by expanding just one missing file (SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\PCI.SYS), and things are back on track now.

Sitting at home and formatting the other drives, I decided to make this blog post from the spanking new laptop. Its kind of sad that I'm doing this using IE. I haven't gotten around to installing Opera yet because the partitions are not formatted yet, and I decided to put up with this just this once.

All this while I was still trying to get some work done on my old laptop. Contrary to point 12 in this joke, it does seem that computers do behave like women sometimes, and my old laptop just BSODed on me twice in the span of ten minutes. Talk about jealousy!

I have yet to put this new laptop next to my desktop. I hope it takes this more sportingly.

OutOfPetrolException at name.deepjoy.Bike(12.30 am)

2006-07-08T02:37:00.000+05:30

Dj and I typically wait around for each other, if we're leaving for home in the middle of the night. While this was reasonably balanced a while ago, of late, he's been waiting around for me more often than the other way around.

Tonight, he figured that he really did want to get home and sleep, and I was only halfway through the workspace that I was reviewing, so he said he's leaving and, well, left.

Incidently, both his phones were out of battery.

Around 10 minutes after he left, I received a call on my office desk phone. It was Dj, calling from a borrowed phone, telling me that he was stranded halfway to home as his bike was out of petrol. I told him I'm coming to pick him up.

I got the workspace I was reviewing on my laptop and basically ran from my desk to my car, and drove like crazy to where he was standing. My head was basically spinning with fear (and a little bit of anger too) in the time between his call and my getting there. Thankfully, he was where he said he'd be, and nothing worse had happened.

Of all the cities in the world, Bangalore is the worst choice for a 24-year old software professional to be stranded alone on the road at 12.30 am and borrowing people's phones to call for help, even if he is a yellow (or brown?) belt in kung-fu.

I raised an eyebrow, when he said he wanted to go find fuel somewhere, but I could see his point of view, so we drove to the closest 24 hr pump that I could think of, and got a bottle of petrol and dropped his bike home. We then went and grabbed some tea at one of the midnight places, and I did calm down eventually, but I nearly scolded Dj worse than his parents probably ever have in the meantime.

Lessons to take away from this incident.

Don't leave alone at night.
Don't let your phone(s) go down when you're travelling alone.
Never disregard both 1 and 2 at the same time.
Never, repeat never, disregard 3.

Dj, I'm sorry if I said a bit too much. Then again, what are friends for anyways.

Oh, well, back to work again.

Six Sigma, or nearly there.

2006-06-30T03:41:00.000+05:30

One of the most popular places that we go for dinner is McDonalds. McDonalds is a good choice because it typically has the fastest turnaround time between entering the restaurant and getting your food, even when there is a Tirupathi style queue. The other advantage of going to McDonalds is that you can enter any McDonalds in India and order a McVeggie knowing that it is going to taste the same as the McVeggie that you're used to having around your home base. I'm not saying that this is the best possible veg burger around, but I'm saying that anyone knows that they are amazingly consistent in their taste, size, crunchiness, softness, and whatever other parameters you could measure a burger by.

Or so I thought.

Last Wednesday, DJ and I headed out to McDonalds for a quick dinner like any other Wednesday (or any other day for that matter). As usual, I ordered the two veg burgers on the menu and a fries and coke to go with it. Attention was mostly on the football match playing on the television while I chomped through my first burger and fries... I don't know how it is with you guys but eating at the big Mac is a mechanical process for me, I unwrap the burger, open a sachet of chilli sauce, apply it inside the burger and eat it, all the while never taking my eyes off the TV screen.

Perhaps that is why the second burger came as such a rude shock to me.

It was burnt.

Not visibly. I couldn't see the cutlet charred or anything, but I knew that it was burnt at the first bite. DJ smelled the burger and confirmed my opinion.

I went back to the counter and they replaced it for me. Kudos to them for that.

However I went back to wondering what the reject rate for McDonalds is? ISO 9000? Six Sigma? I couldn't find this information anywhere, so I'm guessing that McDonalds hasn't really gone too far to find out, but what I'm really interested in was what was the probability of me getting that burnt McVeggie?

Six Sigma translates to less than 3.4 defects per one million opportunites. In McDonald's case it would come up to approximately 1 defective burger a week, all over India (don't ask me how I came up with that approximation: Its 4 am). I'm not overestimating when I'm saying that I think their actual error rates must be lower than this.

So. 1 defective burger a week. all over India. It comes to me. Its not even funny.

In other news, my website is down again, and this time, its not even my fault, its a bug at my service provider's end... Since he's such a good friend of mine and since there are only two days for it to fix itself, I'll wait those two days before raising hell with him.

In other-other news, the stupid car servicing guys were not able to fix my car's driver side window and the wheel alignment after their third attempt at it. I screamed at them at the top of my voice (which is actually pretty high), and stood on their head for a couple of hours to get the Window fixed. Unfortunately I took them at word when they said that the wheel alignment fixed, it must be fixed. This notion was swiftly disabued later... Now I have to go back and scream at them for some more time to get the wheel alignment fixed.

Showing the finger

2006-05-18T20:06:00.000+05:30

Cut my finger this morning, while trying some simple stuff like cutting open a pack of coffee with a knife. While this is not really news, I've been having a tough day at work since morning, because of the freaking finger.

While diarrhea, fever, flu etc. are not really enough to keep me away from work, this tiny cut in the finger has had me squirming in pain every moment of work.

On the other hand, I just got a band-aid and have since then been showing the finger to everyone :-P

And to you too:

I know, you were expecting something else, but my limited sense of decency prevented me from making this any more obscene.

On a mor intrsting not, I'v bn wonring how it woul b if I wr to typ without using that fingr. All sntns in this paragraph ar in that mo. I wonr if anyon an figur out whih fingr it is, an what I was trying to typ? Of ours, th first qustion shoul b asy basu of th pitur, but what about th son on? I promis a isastr iat to anyon who an figur it out xatly. I won't hat, promis!

Riots, Strikes and other routine stuff

2006-04-24T16:19:00.000+05:30

While I've lived through the worst riots in Indian history, life has been more or less peaceful the last few years.

Then, last Wednesday, the thespian Dr. Rajkumar passed away.

The subsequent riots brought back memories of 2000, when the college admission process, and subsequently, the start of the academic year in Bangalore was delayed because of the riots in Bangalore. It was when Veerappan had kidnapped Dr. Rajkumar, and Bangalore was burning for that. While I was in Mumbai, awaiting the start of the college year, I remember Dr. Rajkumar for having touched my life at that time.

This time around, we headed indoors as soon as we heard the news. However by the middle of the second day indoors, we had run of Maggi, and gas in the cylinder. This brought back hard hitting memories of 1993, and it looked like we had a hard 2-3 days ahead. That and a couple of other factors combined and we made an ad-hoc road-trip to Goa. No offence intended, but we will always remember Dr. Rajkumar for providing us with this opportunity, if only indirectly through his fans.

In other news, I was headed towards my brother's college to meet his HOD regarding some shortage of attendance letters that they had sent to my parents in Lucknow, when I received a call from him, asking me to give the whole thing a miss.

Apparently, everyone in his college was on strike, demanding the dismissal of his college warden on accusations of sexual harrasment. Thankfully, everyone included all the students, the non-teaching staff, and all the teachers, all the way up to the vice-principal. The point in question according to me was, who they were striking against, but my brother was having good fun nevertheless.

I'm almost envious of him, never having been a part of a college strike myself. This, and a couple of other incidents are making us wonder whether we should consider politics as an appropriate career for him.

509 Bandwidth Exceeded

2006-04-24T00:32:00.000+05:30

In my zeal to make a sitemap for my site, I ran an automated script on my site.

The stupid crawler ignored robots.txt and exceeded my available bandwidth.

My really nice hosting provider went and bumped up my limit for the remainder of the month, so that my site is up right now, thankfully.

Have I mentioned that he's a really cool dude. :)

Fun in a late Sunday evening disaster.

2006-03-17T15:27:00.000+05:30

While the trip out of town with my Mensan friends started with a disaster, the trip itself was a lot of fun, and relatively uneventful disasterwise.

Or so I thought, as we re-entered Bangalore, with home calling out to us.

Near the Yeshwanthpur junction, we were following a maroon WagonR, which had several dents on its back. Occupants in my car remarked how it looked fresh out of an accident, with green paint still visible on some of the dents.

Even though there was moderate traffic, it was flowing at a reasonable speed of around 60 kmph.

As we crossed the Yeshwanthpur signal, the WagonR in front of me decided on its own volition that it was time to stop. This decision was taken when it was several meters out of the signal's stop line, which even I had crossed while it was green. What probably confused the poor bloke was the fact that the orange light was out in the signal in front, so when the signal changed from green to orange, he got flustered (being fresh out of the accident) and stopped.

Seeing him stop, I slammed on the brakes. While I was able to reduce the impact considerably, the resulting mild tap from my (huge) Safari on his (tiny) WagonR was enough to shake things up, to say the least.

This is where the fun starts.

Dazed by the impact, I started to reverse my car. In doing so, I touched the Scorpio which had screeched to a halt behind me. The owner of the Scorpio promptly got out and started to scream at me in not so pleasant words.

As he was doing this, I brought his attention to the WagonR in front of me, which, as we were speaking, was reversing and banged right back into my Safari which had spared him too much damage only a few moments ago.

This is where the crowd started having fun.

The crowd, which has not really received due mention thus far, had already collected, and a couple of people were screaming themselves hoarse from the sidelines. The ironical part is, even the cars were not damaged, apart from a few scratches, let alone human damage, and the screaming on the part of the crowd was totally uncalled for. But then again, who calls for such things to begin with?

The traffic police had, by now, involved itself in the affair, and had collected my license and surveyed the damage, all in the space of the 90-odd seconds before the signal opened again. They told both of us to wait after the signal where they would come and settle things.

Obviously, the traffic policemen had started having fun.

We went past the signal and halted. I noticed the Scorpio guy halt a few meters ahead of us to survey the situation and to see if he could extract any advantage out of the situation. Seeing the police headed towards us, he obviously decided that the non-existent damage to his car was not worth getting involved with the police for. Pretty soon, he grew wise to the situation and headed off.

Meanwhile, the 5 of us got out and started arguing with the middle-aged male driver of the WagonR. While he was pointing at a dent presumably caused by my car, Sundar calmly pointed out that the same dent was too low to have actually been caused by the Safari, which, obviouly is slightly on a higher side, vis-a-vis suspension. When he tried to point at a higher dent, Pradyot pointed at the green paint which was fresh on the dent, which could obviously not have been caused by my black car with grey bumpers.

At this point, the fun went out of the other person's life.

He started on the track that he doesn't want to get into a haggle with the police, and was ready to leave. Several factors could be the reason for this sudden change of mind, some of which we only noticed afterwards.

He was a non-kannada speaker. Had I been alone, I would have wanted to avoid the police myself, being a non-kannada speaker. However I had the benefit of two native Kannadiga passengers and was willing to fully exploit the situation to my advantage.
The previous accident had broken off a part of his car's rear number plate. If the police had noticed this, they would have screwed his happiness from here till kingdom come.
He must have remembered that after green, the signals go orange for sometime and not red as he had thought previously, at which time, you are expected to go through, if you've crossed the line and stop otherwise. The site of the accident was obviouly on the wrong side of the line, and by connection the law.

Nevertheless, since the police still had my license, I was in no mood to let him go unless he retrieved it from them. This he agreed to do. We waited for the policemen.

When the policemen finally reached us, he had this sudden turn of thoughts and started pretending that the policemen were on his side and frantically started pointing at the various dents. Luckily for me, the policemen themselves were only Kannada speakers, so they spent most of the time talking to Sundar. Sundar handled them admirably, with all the tact of his age and experience, and pretty soon, we figured that the policemen were looking at the magnitude of the dents for their bias. When pointed out that the dents were obviously relics from a previous accident and had no connection with my car whatsover, they turned over a good leaf and they asked us to mutually settle it as we saw fit.

This is where Sundar started having fun.

Having got the WagonR driver in a position he wanted, he wanted to ensure that after moving away from this place, no other hit-and-run case relating to this accident may be filed (considering that the police had both our vehicle numbers). He asked the police officer for an assurance to that end. As it happens, the police guy was unwilling to provide any assurance to that effect. The only way to go about getting that assurance was if we would make a trip to the nearby police station, and file a letter about the compromise with the police.

I was ready for this. The other driver wasn't. There ensued another bout of argument to convince him to see this point of view. Anyways, we soon headed to the police station. By now, most of the tension of the accident had eased, and we only wanted to get away from there asap.

Sitting in the police station, while the inspector was writing out the letter, I started getting fidgety and started fiddling with some random papers on the inspector's desk. Before long, Pradyot whispered in my ear to make me stop.

For most of the people with me in that car, this was the high point of the whole episode. Everything in that situation was stacked against me:

I was not a localite.
I had the bigger car, and by common-sense logic (or should I say mob logic), was obviously at fault, no matter whose fault it really was.
I was the younger driver, aged 23 as opposed to the 37 years of the other driver. By this assumption I was obviouly the more immature driver, even though he had more dents in this car.
Because of 2 & 3, I must have exuded a rich, spoilt brat image, something I've been striving to achieve since a long time, inspite of it being entirely untrue.

After all of this, a mutual compromise was probably the best thing that I could have asked for. I should have been thankful to God for that and all that, and the way I went about expressing this thanks was by fiddling with the papers on the inspector's desk?

The trip ahead was mostly focussed around this aspect, and the other gory(?) bits of the accident were more or less forgotten. We all had a lot of fun. :)

For reference:
Cars referred to in this post:
Tata Safari Dicor
Maruti Suzuki WagonR
Mahindra Scorpio

People in my car:
Pradyot, Sundar, Mayur, Saikat and ofcourse myself.

Early morning disaster.

2006-03-16T23:03:00.000+05:30

Typically, I stay away from early mornings. Honestly. I've gone to the extent of refusing early morning meetings at work because of my fear of the morning sun.

On that fateful day however (last saturday, March 11th, 2006, approximately 6 am to be precise), I was one of the two in favour of departing early. This had something to do with me being one of the two drivers for the trip and naturally supporting the grandiose plans of beating the Bangalore traffic by leaving early.

So, just as I was getting into the bath, removing my spectacles, I heard a loud snap, followed by a crash and a shatter.

Fearing the worst, I located my spectacles. They were in my hands. I put them on. Something didn't quite seem right.

I looked at the floor. I could see piecies of broken , rather shattered glass. Dangerous. Something wasn't quite right.

If I had my glasses on my nose, what were pieces of glass doing on the floor? I didn't have any memories of having dropped them recently, and I'm not the kind of guy to throw them around in fits of anger, besides I couldn't recollect any such fits in the last few minutes.

I took off my glasses and looked at them. Turns out that one of the screws had given way and the lens had fallen down. The screw, though intact, had caused the snap while giving way, and the glass lens was responsible for the subsequent sounds.

While I got a towel on and swept away the glass pieces, I got philosophical about why an old and faithful pair of spectacles would give up on me, especially looking out on a nice 500 km drive on some awesome roads, when I would depend on them so much?

I had a couple of thoughts:

My spectacles were jealous of my spanking new pair of contact lenses. While I'm not really used to the contacts yet, I've started leaving my good ol' glasses home on several occasions, especially when I'm headed to parties.
The weather. It has been getting warmer in Bangalore recently, which caused the lens to expand and hence cause the screw to give way. Why only one glass, and not the other? Because I have different power in both eyes, and the right lens is significantly, repeat significantly thicker than the left lens. Do the physics. Thats why.
Wear and Tear. Maybe they just got old and gave up. This is the most unlikely possibility, because I've had other spectacles for longer time periods and have never had them behave like this before (i.e. lens falling out before other forms of damage).

Yes, I wore contacts through this two day trip and have been on contacts ever since. The upside is that I'm now getting used to wearing the contacts on a daily basis because I don't have the fallback of the glasses any longer. Eat your heart out, old broken pair of glasses.^*

^*But I'll miss you anyways.

Where is my website?

2006-02-20T13:19:00.000+05:30

Some people would know that I have my own website at http://www.ujjwal.net/

While it does not have a whole lot of content right now, it does host my family tree, which is huge, and any other random stuff that I feel like putting up for someone.

While I've been labelled a geek since a long time, (close to my first semester in Engineering, in 2000 to be accurate), I only took the big step and got my own domain and website last year.

In this last year or so that I have had the site, there have been two occasions that the site went down. Both of them were obviously not problems with the provider that I buy from but the provider that he buys from.

The first time around, the provider's provider ran away with all their money. The grapevine is still ripe about what the case is this time around.

For a website, being down for a day twice a year is big deal. Really Big Deal.

My site is not a high traffic website, and it does not need to be up 24x7x365, and does not cost me millions of dollars every hour of downtime.

But your website is something that you expect to be up. All the time. Its like the foundation of your geekiness.

When such things start going down, exactly at the moment when you are rejoicing the newest addition to your family tree (I became an uncle yesterday, again^*), and want to update the good news on your site, you start to question who this Murphy fellow is, and what is his nit with your life anyways.

I just hope my provider doesn't read this and decide that he doesn't want the disaster zone on his servers. I really like my service-provider. He's the most awesome dude, I've ever known.... Except for the website going down, which of course is a miniscule detail in the general scale of things.

^If you really do go browse through my family tree when its up, you will realize that at 250+ individuals, again* is the operative word here. :)

Update: The site is now up. Didn't I tell you what an awesome dude my service provider is?

Tiny little disaster

2006-01-04T22:22:00.000+05:30

Tiny little disaster. The cup broke while walking from the pantry to my desk. Thankfully I had finished the coffee already (yes, I sit that far away, at the other end of the world... oops, office.), and nothing spilled. No one was hurt either.

I typically don't blog disasters this small , but its been a long time since I broke a cup or blogged at all, and I have a backlog of disasters pending to be written up, so if any one is reading this, please keep an eye out for backdated posts, as long back as November 2005.

Missing Life Support System

2005-10-26T13:54:00.000+05:30

You were on life support?

Thats just a catchy title. If you know me, you know that I'm referring to my mobile phone, which for a number of reasons, is my life support system. I lost it last night.

Again?

This is the most common question I've been asked by everyone whom I've told so far. I categorically deny it. I've never lost my phone before this. It has been out of commision for repairs and stuff, and I have been lost without it, but, at all points of time, I would be able to accurately pinpoint where my phone was.

If you are always so sure of where your phone is, how did you manage to lose it?

Yes, thats the catch. It fell out of my jacket pocket while I was riding my bike yesterday. So, I knew that its in my pocket, but when I reached office, it wasn't there. An attempt to call the number made it clear that the phone was out of reach both literally and figuratively.

Hang on, but wasn't yesterday the day when Bangalore was Mumbai'ed? What were you doing riding your bike in all that rain?

Yes, thats another story altogether. I was trying to get to office. It took me nearly an hour and a half to travel around 4 km, because of the roads jammed with water and traffic, most of which I spent talking on the phone to long lost friends (yes, thats an activity I enjoy in my spare time). Once I had got past the packed area onto clear roads, I put the phone away and reached office, covering the remaining 3-4 km in around 10 more minutes. Somewhere in this rush, the above-mentioned unfortunate event took place.

Don't tell me you went looking for it later...

Well, hopelessly optimistic fool that I am, I did. However, since the phone was unreachable, I had assumed that one out of two things must have happened:

The phone must have fallen off into a puddle of water, and all its internal circuitry must have fried up instantly. While my phone has survived getting wet earlier, this was probably too much for it to take. It wasn't a Nokia, you know, which by the way, my next phone is likely to be.

Someone picked it, and took out the battery immediately. This would have rendered my phone unreachable, while giving them the time to get it to appropriate people who might be able to hack into the protection that Reliance built into the phone, and get some money from it somewhere.

Since both options would basically mean that I had to buy a new phone, I had come to accept this fact.

I still went to look for it. Didn't find it, of course.

So how are you reachable now?

Office phone, Home phone, landline, online etc. Or through comments on this post. I'm too distressed by my loss right now, to give coherent thought to this. Maybe I'll put in some effort later after I've bought a new phone.

So, you're blogging after a long time, right? Had a lack of disasters lately?

What kind of friends or well wishers are you anyways? I only blog disasters in my life, and you want me to blog more?

Besides, its not a lack of disasters, but rather a lack of time to type those disasters, accountable for the lack of posts in this blog. However, I could still use some goodwill.

Ok, you've lost your life support system. You deserve to be a bit grumpy. So its ok, we're not taking offense.

Thanks for understanding. None intended.

A chain is as strong as its weakest link

2005-08-23T12:15:00.000+05:30

Since some time, my bike had developed a new 'feature': Every now and then, the chain would come off. This would then require me to take a break from the tiresome job of riding, to get off the bike and fix it, much reminiscent of the old bicycle days. The fact that this usually gives me greasy hands is proof of how much my bike loves me...

Last night (around 12 hrs ago), the bike decided to give me even more memories, and the chain came off as usual. However, when I got around to fixing it, I realized that there was something different..

No matter how I tried, I couldn't get it fixed again. The actual reason for this was that the chain had also come off the inner sprocket.. Now try as I might, I was unable to make any significant progress, apart from getting more grease on my hands..

So I decided to drag it home, and get up early to get the bike repaired..

Now we all know how likely that is to happen.

As it turns out, I ended up taking a lift to office, and still missing the meeting for which I wanted to reach office early.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a chair!

2005-08-11T11:00:00.000+05:30

For those who can't guess, the above is the image of the base of a chair with a broken wheel. According to some, the only crime of the chair was that I sat on it.

Of course, I deny that absolutely, and claim that it was already broken before I sat on it, but there are few who will believe that.

Thankfully, I got up just in time, and I did not have a great fall.

Of course, I also prevented history from repeating, which would have been really over the top.

Proximity Warning

2005-08-10T21:43:00.000+05:30

Recently Jyothirmayee, Vinay and their team moved to a cubicle close to mine. Vinay has been talking about impending disasters ever since.

As if to fulfill his wish, one happened today.

For some trivial thing, Jyothi stood up and called my name. As it happens, at this time, she had two things in her hand: a cup of coffee, and her mobile phone.

As she said my name out loud, she also fumbled and dropped the things from her hand... Murphy's law has it that the coffee had to spill over her mobile.

Here is the result:

Of course, what is being shown here is the coffee having been wiped off (There is the stained handkerchief as proof).

Lucky for her that the phone didn't take any significant damage :)

A tale of the fallen toothcap

2005-07-19T04:28:00.000+05:30

A lot of disasters have been skipped here, some of the notable ones included an accident on my bike with my brother, and a flight I was supposed to travel on getting cancelled.

However, the last one really takes the cake as being the whackiest.

Yes, this is a tooth cap. It fell out during a recent flight from Delhi back to Bangalore.

I can hear you going GROSS, but I'm sure you also understand that this means I now have a poor tooth with a huge hole in it, which lies exposed to the big bad world of bacteria without any protection, and not even a life to speak of (yes, they killed the tooth during root canal surgery). There is also a slight hint of pain involved.

This makes the impending visit to the dentinst extremely important and urgent. Priorities in increasing order are:

Find time to visit dentist
Take an appointment with a dentist
Find a new dentist. :(

Of course, this might have the side effect of getting all the other cavities cured before they become this serious, but that would only be a side effect.

Megalomania: Happy Birthday

2005-03-14T16:31:00.000+05:30

Megalomania: Happy Birthday: "After thinking about it for a while we decided that the Chicken Heuristic was a little too simplistic and so we abandoned it. Using the other 3 heuristics we managed to separate the non-vegetarian noodles and the vegetarian noodles and put them in different bowls. Once that was done we found pieces of chicken in the vegetarian noodles. It was a little confusing at first, but we finally figured it out. Our heuristics hadn't worked. We now had two bowls of noodles, both containing equal amounts of the non-vegetarian and vegetarian noodles. Luckily we had some more vegetarian food and so the vegetarians didn't starve."

Since most of the sequence of events is already outlined above in sridhar's blog, let it suffice to say that I was(am) one of the vegetarians, and we just about managed to get by with what little food they had spared for us.

Add to this the fact that I hadn't slept for the past 40 hours or so just complicates matters a wee bit... albeit only slightly...

Its gaim this time

2005-02-16T02:09:00.000+05:30

When I moved my workstation to a cubicle closer to my new team, two things went wrong.

The office boy screwed the keyboard PS2 plug, when trying to plug it into the socket.

My gaim (instant messenger client that I use for ICQ and MSN) stopped working.
Yes, I mean stopped working. I mean, I'm not sure what went wrong, so I decided that this was an appropriate time for an upgrade. Alas, even the fresh latest install didn't work. Am back to using the sucky MSN and ICQ clients for now.. :(

Leading through vision!

2005-02-14T21:29:00.000+05:30

One of the first things that we learnt during the company induction is the stages of leadership.

Learning the ropes

Leading through example

Leading through others

Leading through vision

While this blog itself is proof that I'm in stage 2 (just like in my career), there is a particular post which shows that I'm developing properties of stage 3 as well.

This post is here to show that I'm making small waves in stage 4 also. Yes you got that right, Leading through vision, in the disaster zone.

Here go some small incidences that prompt me to make this statement:

So I got myself a website. That is, I purchased a domain name and some web-space from DJ. The intention was that I would be putting up my family tree on the net. So, the root of the website still points to this blog. However, eventually I did get around to installing some family tree software on the website. Hey, what do you know, barely 2 days within my getting the family tree started, something happened, that I've not heard happen to anyone at all. DJ's web space provider went down! So, I thought that it must be some temporary problem, but eventually it became clear that my site was not coming up anytime soon. As it turns out, one of the main stake-holders of the provider had gone underground with all the money, and the rest of the company was about to declare bankruptcy or something like that.. Of course, DJ did make alternate arrangements faster than humanly possible and he gets full credit for that... After all, its not his fault that he took me on as a customer.

So I thought that only my computer behaves wierd. However, one day, even Sridhar was naratting that his computer was behaving completely wierd, in a way he has never seen it behave before... Apparently his shell used to exit everytime he did a "cd". Now does that rock, or what!

Ok, I know this is over the top, but DJ actually blamed the Tsunami on me, in a joke one day... Now that is definitely over the top. I disclaim it completely. It wasn't my fault.

Now, if only my career was progressing as fast... 8-|

No food once more.

2005-01-24T15:09:00.001+05:30

Another day, same mistake.

Because of the late breakfast that I had, I didn't feel like having lunch at the normal lunch time.. Asif, Sridhar and DJ were going to Forum for lunch once again, so I just asked them to get me a burger or something.

Guess what, they forgot.

I wasn't even surprised or shocked at this.. Its just that I didn't think that three people would forget me like this.

I feel like shutting these people in some room, and leaving them without food for a month.. However, I'm too much of a nice guy to actually try that....

Being a nice guy doesn't take away the anger, though.

The Ripper

2005-01-20T18:30:00.000+05:30

What happened today is one of the greatest proofs of the fact that I'm a disaster zone.

So, we decided to go out for lunch, instead of eating in the office. So, we walked down and were getting into Mrinal's car. Just as I was sitting in the car, I heard a rip.

Guess what! It was nothing but my jeans. Now, the surprising part ofcourse is, how can someone's jeans tear, without any provocation whatsoever..

QED.

The Tap Went Dry

2004-11-26T00:21:00.000+05:30

The above was the catchline of a poor joke that was doing the rounds among our group. Infact, the history behind this is as follows:

Once again, purely at random, DJ cracked a joke, which was not even funny, but only contextual. It was basically an attempt to construct a joke out of something innocent that someone just said.. Frustrated at all of this, we started saying that lets come up with a catchline, and wait for DJ and/or Sridhar to construct a joke about it.
I don't know what came to my mind, but the first line that came to my mind was the line "The tap went dry". (I think what was in my mind then was the ages old ad, "Kaha tha na Rahul, paaani chala jaayega" (for non-hindi readers :-P "I told you Rahul, the water supply will get cut off!!"))
It is better for the reputation of my blog that I don't repeat the jokes that came up after that.

But this happenned ages ago. The reason that I mentioned all of this on the post today is that today, the catch line struck back at me.

Today in the morning, the tap went dry.

Basically, it was some problem with the motor in our apartment. The strange part is that out of the three Bathrooms in our house, only my bathroom was without water. Actually the tap was spluttering with air, as if it was trying very hard to give out water, but was unsuccessful.. I waited for a long, really long time for it to start up again, but without success. As a result, I was late to office again, inspite of having got up early for a change. I guess I just deserved it for starting off with such a sad catchline, to hopefully convert it into a reasonable joke.

Do catchlines have a way of getting back at you and taking revenge? I guess this one did. :(

The bike strikes back

2004-10-28T15:54:00.000+05:30

Finally at 5 am last night.. er.. today morning.. I had resolved all issues and left with Shailendra and Vandana, for home.

As soon as I started riding out on my bike, I realized that something was wrong.. And when I looked back, my suspicions were confirmed.. I HAD A FLAT TYRE!

How it happenned was a great mystery, because it was fine when I had reached office in the morning. It was probably my bike's way of repaying me for all the torture that I put it through by riding on the Bannerghatta Road(?) on the way from and to home.

I rode it for a while, in hopes of getting some place open. (It was five am so this was stupid!, but if you have been awake till five am, then sometimes its ok. to be stupid... ) Finally I parked off the bike at some petrol pump and started to walk towards home (only because there were no autos in the vicinity..). Just as I was contemplating my deplorable condition after the 6 km walk to home, I spotted an auto coming towards me, and caught it promptly.

The fact that I had to skip lunch because I was getting my bike fixed is only a sideline. Ofcourse, since its not the first time I'm skipping a major meal in the last few days, this does not count as a major disaster.

No Dinner for me!

2004-10-27T01:17:00.000+05:30

Well, so it was a rare occassion. Really rare that I should ever give hunger a lower priority than anything else. But I did.

I had loads of work to do, so I asked DJ to get some food for me from wherever he was going, instead of going along with him, as I usually do.

After waiting till nearly midnight, hunger finally overtook my concentration on the work to be done, and I called up DJ to find out what exactly was holding him up??

As soon as I greeted him, he realised what he had been forgetting all through dinner, and his silence was kind of enough to make things obvious. He had come back to office, and had forgotten all about my dinner!!!!!

Even the office pantry had run out of most edible supplies, and I had to have Cereals + Milk (which is usually breakfast for me) as a poor substitute for dinner.

Reminds me of the golden rule in life, "Pehle pet puja, phir kaam duja!" (translated from hindi: "First worship your stomach, then go on to other work!")

ICQ

2004-10-21T19:01:00.000+05:30

Amit's ICQ crashes when he tries to add me to his buddy list... This happens only with my ICQ UIN!! Now is that wierd or what??

Disaster Aura

2004-10-19T18:28:00.000+05:30

Seems like the disaster zone around me is growing in size... or maybe I am developing a disaster aura..

The following incidents are why I'm saying this:

(1) New Office, busy with setting up a server : Housekeeping dude is collecting cups.. while passing in front of me.. he almost drops his tray.

(2) Asif, Mrinal, Bill, Joe, Jason, etc. sitting and talking.. Asif is leaning on the separating glass pane, and I'm standing with my back to it but not touching it..
Suddenly, I hear glass breaking behind me, and shards of glass touching my back.. Apparently asif, lightweight as he is, was a bit too much for that poor piece of glass.. Phew.. this one really scared me...

(3) I enter cafeteria, Jyothi drops glass. As usual, I get to carry the blame on my broad shoulders... 8-)

(4) Ooops.. forgot to add this... A couple of us were heading to Corner House, and Gaurav was riding his bike alongside me. Suddenly at an intersection, another bike came and crashed into Gaurav's bike. It wasn't even Gaurav's fault at that, but people kept throwing slanting glances at me, when they heard about this.. :P

Disastourous Update

2004-10-19T17:44:00.000+05:30

Long time no disasters?? Or more like, long time no disasters reported!!!

I guess an update here is long pending.. But adding a separate post for each disaster is overkill..

So, I'll just list out the most notable disasters so that we are back on track and I can get back to periodic reporting.

(1) Crashed Mrinal's car:

Poor Mrinal :( . He developed some sort of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, or something, which basically rendered his wrist useless due to pain. Since he was on his dad's Fiat Uno, which basically steers as easily as a truck, I offerred to drive for him.... Barely had we come out of the new office building, that an auto sverved and hit the front of the car.. Sahana was around and handled the situation, and one of the turn signal indicators of the Uno was damaged.. I want to get them fixed but mrinal doesn't seem to be interested in that... :(

(2) Jinxed journey:

It seems that my journey to meet my parents in Lucknow is jinxed. There hasn't been a single occasion when I have completed the journey from Bangalore - Lucknow - Bangalore easily and without any glitches..

Like this time (yup I was on vacation recently), I was determined to have a comfortable and flexible journey. So I booked flight tickets for Bangalore - Delhi, Delhi - Lucknow, Delhi - Bangalore, left out the Lucknow - Delhi tickets for flexibility.

After reaching Lucknow, I got train tickets for the most ideal train which would give a 6 hour window in Delhi, having enough margin for the possibility of the train getting delayed.

On reaching Lucknow station at 5 am (yes thats when the train was scheduled to leave..) I found that the train had not yet arrived from Delhi. The right time for it to have arrived was the previous night, 10 pm and it was late by over 8 hrs. Also, it would take about 4 hours to depart once it had actually arrived, which means that my 6 hr window was basically worthless.

I tried to get a bus to Delhi, but apparently there is only one a/c bus, and that too leaving at night, which meant that option was meaningless again.

Ofcourse, I finally did get to Delhi (took a flight, the most expensive option), but it just goes to show that basically trying to plan life is meaningless...

googlea8a97ead1e7abd9b

2004-09-17T15:45:00.000+05:30

For Google Sitemaps verification.

So much for contact lens

2004-09-16T14:20:00.000+05:30

So, a month ago, I decided to go in for Contact Lenses to replace my spectacles... Actually I wanted to do this for a long time, but got the nod from the doc only in July.

Finally, after weeks of procrastination, I stepped in to an optician's store two days back.

For some wierd reason, that dude was hell bent on convincing me to go for ordinary soft contact lenses, when I was more interested in Torrik or semi-soft, because I have significant cylindrical power in my prescription. After arguing it out with him for nearly an hour, I agreed with his proposal of getting a trial pair of ordinary soft-lens for a week.

Within a day of wearing those lenses, I was convinced that my original conviction was right, and those lenses would not work for me, and I would have to get Torrik lenses.

I mentioned this problem to Joe, but he didn't really count this one as a disaster. He said that its pretty common for people to have some problems before they can find the right pair of lenses.

It would seem that being the disaster zone, I had to convert this into a disaster somehow...

So anyways, I decided that I would use this pair of lens to get comfortable with the procedure of wearing and removing the lens, so last night after going home, I decided to try them on a couple of times.

On my second attempt, I dropped the right eye-lens. Strangely, this time (yes it had happened a couple of times before as well) I couldn't find it at all!!

I spent around an hour looking high and low for the lens, but just couldn't find them. Its unbelieveable how that lens could have simply vanished from the face of the earth like that, but it just happened. Actually it might not be so unbelievable when you consider that it happened to me..

So, I now have only one lens. God knows what I should do with it. But anyways, I'm definitely not going for ordinary lenses next time. I guess I should practise little bit with the one lens that I have, before moving on to the more expensive Torrik lens...

Small things like the fact that I spilled 'Real Mango Nectar' on my desk don't even deserve a mention nowadays.

Archive from my TWiki

2004-09-16T06:30:00.000+05:30

List of disasters : to give you a hang of what to expect on this blog!

24 Jul 2004
Spilled milk on the breakfast table, also on mobile, at home.
Got wet in the rain.
25 Jul 2004
Spilled coffee on self in pantry.
27 Jul 2004
Spilled Real mixed fruit juice on cell-phone. (My cell-phone is taking a real beating these days. )
3 Aug 2004
Broke Chair. Simply by sitting on it.
22 Aug 2004
Spilled Soft Drink on Bill in Kabab Corner, while trying to be good and move the table
25 Aug 2004 & 26 Aug 2004
Who says Linux is a secure OS? I feel that someone is running a malicious script on my system, and periodically deletes exactly the stuff that I'm working on!!!! Webmin slimily upgrades itself to version 1.150-5 from 1.150-1 (Which by the way is THE latest release on www.webmin.com) and deletes all its own files. All this happens without even a warning to the user, and is discovered only when I go to the directory to look at the files. All the linux gurus(read Mrinal and Sridhar) can suggest, is upgrade to SuSE Linux 9.1 Could someone please enlighten me on how this is different from Windows?
30 Aug 2004
Decided to take the plunge and upgrade my system to SuSE 9.1 overnight. After setting up my stuff in a way that I would better like, I decide to go in and resync my sandbox. For some reason, it failed, and I decided that I would be better off dropping the sandbox, and creating a new one. As soon as the sandbox is dropped and all items deleted, I realized that I made a big mistake. The sandbox I just dropped had approximately 15(fifteen) files checked out, and that basically consisted of all of my weeks work, which I hadn't checked in, so as not to break the build. So much for source control acting as backup for code. Thankfully I found a way to recover deleted files from reiserfs by using rebuild-tree, and salvaged all my work.
3 Sep 2004
Had recommended Inchara for dinner last night, after meeting with Joe (Liemandt), inspite of resistance from Mrinal. Found that the others didn't like the place, and Bill actually got stomach trouble because of the food that he had there. Mid-day, he left for a visit to the hospital and didn't come back for the day. I mean, he wasn't even there the week-end.... All because of me... One disaster that I possibly couldn't forgive myself for. More importantly, I don't think that Bill is ever going to forgive me. Even more importantly, I don't think that my recommendation would ever be taken seriously again.
4 Sep 2004
One disaster which was not my fault at all. I just arrived at office around afternoon. I find Anshu & Unni panicky over something. Apparently, all our files had been dropped out from Source Integrity. No idea how it happened or who did it, although some suspected Unni, because he had dropped the sandbox. Somehow, we were able to recover it from the latest copies of the sources present with Unni. I'm beginning to get disillusioned in source control.
4 Sep 2004
Talking with Praveen & Sridhar, we realize that we will not be able to use CUPS under SaMBa? after all. It seems that the SaMBa? server has to hold Windows printer drivers for the client, and has to pass the print request directly to the printer, because it will be in raw format, rendering CUPS redundant. In less geek terms, this basically means that all my work over the past three weeks was meaningless, and that we should have waited for the printer API to proceed after all.
6 Sep 2004
Dinner at Casa Picola. A glass broke. Again, it wasn't my fault, it was the waiters. My instinctive standard disclaimer humoured everyone, but the waiter, who sheepishly admitted to his fault. Everyone was laughing for quiet some time.
6 Sep 2004
After the printers debacle, I moved on to VPN. After reading up on VPN for a while, I decided to set up a small VPN server of my own. So I got a fresh NT tarball from Sridhar, and installed PPTP on that. Guess what Windows greets me with!!! The Blue Screen of Death, what else!!
8 Sep 2004
Bike keys fell off the bike, when coming to office from home. Wasted around half an hour looking for them, and finally had to give bike in service station to get entire lock set replaced. The fact that the keyring also contained the helmet-lock keys and my office drawer keys is only a minor detail....

Finally down to blogging

2004-09-16T06:26:00.000+05:30

Famous last words:
* Finally getting down and starting a blog of my own.
* Had to revive my blog after a long time.
* This blog is there to tell the world about my thoughts.

A few real life instances like these, and watching the inconsistent life cycle of the blogging world, combined with the Ultimate Question (no not that one...), "What do I write in my blog???" had kept me away from blogging so long.

However I have maintained a TWiki page on my company LAN for around two months now, with a list of the regular disasters befalling me. This page has a small audience now, and most of them recommended that I move this stuff to more public areas like a website.

While I'm too damn lazy to actually do a website for myself, I did concede to the idea of blogging about my disasters. (only after a lot of philosophical discussions: Would I want to reveal my thoughts? Would anyone be interested? Do I have the time? Does it really matter? What is the purpose? Is there a spoon? How many roads must a man walk down in his lifetime? Where do we go for lunch?)

So, after the preamble, I need to get down to why this area is called Disaster Area.

First of all it is inspired by Disaster Area of H2G2 fame. Second, I'm something of a Disaster-prone zone myself. I mean, usually if there is a glass to be broken somewhere, my presence is enough.

Like they say in many diet-courses, if you write down what you eat everyday, then you eat less. In the same theme, I'm hoping that if I write down whatever disasters occur to me, there might be less of them.

I guess thats enough for an introduction without even mentioning a disaster!!! I'll put my page from the TWiki as soon as I can... meanwhile...

This blog is published in the hope that it will be entertaining, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of HUMOUR or READABILITY FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the MOO Specific Private License for more details.

Showing the finger

1990-05-18T20:06:00.000+05:30

I know, you were expecting something else, but my limited sense of decency prevented me from making this any more obscene.

On a mor intrsting not, I'v bn wonring how it woul b if I wr typ without using that fingr. All sntns in this paragraph ar in that mo. I wonr if anyon an figur out whih fingr it is, an what I was trying to typ? Of ours, th first qustion shoul b asy basu of th pitur, but what about th son on? I promis a isastr iat to anyon who an figur it out xatly. I won't hat, promis!

Disaster Area

A common disaster

Wierdest Birthday Ever

Laptop woes

OutOfPetrolException at name.deepjoy.Bike(12.30 am)

Six Sigma, or nearly there.

Showing the finger

Riots, Strikes and other routine stuff

509 Bandwidth Exceeded

Fun in a late Sunday evening disaster.

Early morning disaster.

Where is my website?

*If you really do go browse through my family tree when its up, you will realize that at 250+ individuals, again is the operative word here. :)

Tiny little disaster

Missing Life Support System

A chain is as strong as its weakest link

Humpty Dumpty sat on a chair!

Proximity Warning

A tale of the fallen toothcap

Megalomania: Happy Birthday

Its gaim this time

Leading through vision!

No food once more.

The Ripper

The Tap Went Dry

The bike strikes back

No Dinner for me!

ICQ

Disaster Aura

Disastourous Update

googlea8a97ead1e7abd9b

So much for contact lens

Archive from my TWiki

Finally down to blogging

Showing the finger

^If you really do go browse through my family tree when its up, you will realize that at 250+ individuals, again* is the operative word here. :)