Wierdest Birthday Ever

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:

1. 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.
2. 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?"
3. 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

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)

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.

1. Don't leave alone at night.
   
2. Don't let your phone(s) go down when you're travelling alone.
3. Never disregard both 1 and 2 at the same time.
4. 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.

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

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

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

 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.

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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:

1. I was not a localite.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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?

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

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.