Month: October 2003

Amidst the increasing madness and chaos we decided to grab on to that last grain of Fantasia and elope for the afternoon…. We forsake the car in lieu of my Scooter!! The early winter breeze and the still warm afternoon sun was soothing…

We quickly finalised a larger bicycle for Aasim’s sixth birthday and then on the way back entered into a book expo not expecting much BUT there Swati discovered an unexpected gem. Part two of a book which I had given Swati nine years ago.. Presented by Pritish Nandy it is a collection of translated poems by the ancient Sanskrit poet Amaru – Unchained melody

“Her breasts were crushed
in his embrace
               as joy raised
goose pimples on her skin
Her clothes fell
fell well below her hips
as passions rose.
                STOP!!
Enough! she said.

And then?
Then I do not know what happened.
She fainted, fell asleep
or simply became one with me.
Who knows?”

Two days without receiving a single email – I am not missing anything 😀

Here one person who is enjoying Diwali most is Aasim – well he is supposed to BUT this time he is much more involved. He went out (with his mom) and got lots of electric string lights and has put it all over the windows of his room, His mother is supposed to draw rangoli every morning in the courtyard and gifts are to be sent to his friends…

Speaking of gifts looking at the amount of sweets sent over from US of A to people in Nagpur it looks like the IT industry and Indian IT pro are doing much better this year…

Wishing every one a very happy Diwali!!!

BTW – Aasim has learn’t his first swear word – “Damn” 😉

Picturesque – speechless

For once the Sunday was as anticipated on Saturday and the Monday mania is still to hit us…

Yesterday I got up early… well at 7:30 on a Sunday is early… saw that several bugs have been posted by beta testers since they were mostly trivial zapped them and committed everything back to CVS, that too using Aasim’s winXP PC as workstation 😉

Burn’t the 1950 animated Cinderella, downloaded using Kazaa on to a VCD and in the process learn’t a whole lot of stuff about avi and vcd formats. By the time I finished it was time for a late brunch of mutter parathas and rice with liver curry.

Post lunch Aasim wanted to see the VCD I had cut – he is ever fascinated by the story – I always thought that Cinderella would be a girl thing, well it is not…

All three of us cosily tucked in the bed promptly dozed off for the afternoon well before the story ended.

Evening saw us venturing out to the new shop which has come up – 5 floors filled with lots of stuff and stuffy people. We got Aasim some LEGO and headed for PlanetM.

Dinner was at one of our fav Chinese joint which unknown to most also serves a fabulous Bengali cuisine…

Aasim was literally rolling with laughter when Swati read out the above strip to him, so Swati asked him does he want a baby brother to beat up. He thought for a while and then said “Can’t we just have a baby monkey instead?” 🙂

Presumably this was triggered by the fact that a bunch of fairly young and very boisterous black faced Indian monkeys invaded our garden and wanted to play with our cat… The whole scene was too funny to watch till the point one of them got enamored by my camera and wanted it. There are a couple of very good shots which I managed to click before hollering them away.

In other things its been a while since I updated my LJ clients and was pleasantly surprised to note that both Logjam and Semagic now support offline storage of entries, though in my opinion it is Logjam which has got the concept right with using XML and username in directory.

Phew!! What a week….

Monday our big old granddaddy UPS decided that it was an ideal day to die, no points for guessing who did the honors… That set the pattern for the crisis.

With MSEB supplying electricity which makes the voltmeter go like a yo-yo I could not dare to plug the machines directly, as the vendor so innocently suggested – effectively the complete SANIsoft was dead. Only one machine Aasim’s survived because it has a teeny weeny UPS of its own. I managed to get online with it and send mails to our entire client list that went into a frenzied panic akin to a grasshopper landing amongst the ants!! Apparently all of them have everything at stake in the project we are doing for them – I wish we here saw more share of that everything for slogging our ass off for them.

Thanks to some friendly hardware vendors, by the end of the day we did manage to procure some of those 500va thingies and put at least the main server and a workstation working.

The next day saw the cable connection going bust and then the day after that had Aasim coming down with fever. I cannot remember how Thursday passed.

Yesterday morning suddenly the cablewala announced that check connectivity, wow download speeds of 60 to 70kb per second. The UPS guy called up and said please send the car the UPS has been repaired – Miracle.

The real miracle was that I anticipated Aasim getting very high fever and could take measures to avoid anything real bad…

Things have been improving since then or so I think, none of the clients fired us, Aasim’s fever appears to be under control, connects are still holding I am downloading some Disney classics for Aasim.

Sometime in midst of all this I took a load off my head – got a much needed haircut

Hoping for a peaceful Sunday