Author: Tarique Sani

155mm in 24hrs

Sunday I was cribbing about lack of rain and since yesterday it has rained more than 155mm – thankfully water logging is not a big problem in Nagpur and roads clear up very fast….

Cats, dogs and no rains

It has been cloudy everyday over the past week but has not rained… it is threatening to get hot and humid again.

Again the feeling of restlessness is growing, that gnawing to do something new! As you grow older why is it that finding new dreams becomes so difficult? Everything is filtered thru “rational thinking”…

In the very least I want to start writing again, technical as well as non technical stuff but my grammar has gone to dogs and the cat has got my tongue 🙁

YAS (Yet Another Sunday)

It is a lovely Sunday morning, am sitting outside in the garden – Shiku, the Shikra chick we raised and release, just paid a visit – he has got into this habit of occasionally coming very low and inspecting the front yard. At times he shouts till one of us comes out…

A very young squirrel is hopping around – she better be careful 😉

The construction activity has been slowed down a bit – the current ETA is 120 days more to finish the civil work, however I very much like what has been done so far. Some time last week we saw River Tern as well as a Little Tern fishing over the pond/lake which is our backyard, a common kingfisher came and sat on a window ledge – I really hope that the bird life remains undisturbed there… unfortunately it won’t be for long.

Yesterday night we saw an adaptation of “Night of January the 16” it was an adaptation which I feel even Ayn Rand would be pleased with… and yes the verdict was “not guilty”

Lastly, I have decided to stop taking any new photographs for atleast next 3 months – the number of good photographs which I have not been able to post process has gone totally out of control…

Monsoon magic

Finally the monsoon has firmly set over the region. Cooling things down to the twenties… Half of 2006 has also passed and been a good year till now.

I am still overwhelmed with work but I took some time out last week to try making a real life project with cakePHP – https://cakephp.org as the framework and PHPEclipse from https://easyeclipse.org as the IDE, for want of something better I decided upon creating a Photoblog after the first couple of hours I found myself liking the code so much that I registered a project at cakeforge called cheeseCake (yes pun intended). After about 10 hours of programming a lot of which was spent in trying to search the cake documentation (the weakest point of the project) the results are at https://cakeforge.org/projects/cheesecake/ – I intend to keep this an SVN only project for as long as I can 😉

On business front a kind of Joel Spolsky Vs. Paul Graham dilemma seems to be the crux, however since I am already seeing “why this boom is different” kind of articles appearing I would say that we are definitely approaching a flat period if not the end of the boom. Does not take a post graduate degree in business management to know what to do in such situations…

Damn! even after ten months of regular gym my trainer still manages to dig out muscles which I never knew existed…

Looking Good etc etc etc

Lately I have come across several parents who are so keen that their children appear to be “well adjusted” and not make them “look bad” in front of the their (parent’s) social acquaintances that they end up with children who are thoroughly de-spirited and totally lacking that urge to experiment or learn anything new. Well I don’t really interfere with anyone when it comes to parenting decisions they take but it does bug me, to use a mild word, when these parents try to put down other children as being wrong and also imply lack of culture.

Thankfully these very same parents also, most of the time, think that “boarding schools” are good – at least their children will have a chance for themselves.

Yes! Aasim’s school re-opened.

On the very first day he walked up to the podium during the general assembly and talked about FIFA World Cup. Honestly I never knew that he even knew about, let alone was following the event.

Unfortunately both his girlfriends have moved to other cities to which he said “What a waste!”.

Other than that it is life as usual for him and us….

Reality Check

The little cormorant which we had taken in on Friday could not make it thru the night. sadly we could not even find out what was wrong with it.

After 5 years of battling, mother nature has still not been convinced that my lifestyle and diet do not warrant a haywire lipid profile… on top of that I have been heaped with a very high blood Homocysteine levels. So I along with my doctor and friend have decided to take the fight to the next level. I have been put on medications which are most likely to last for a long long time.

SANIsoft has had two sequential years of very good business – going by the trend of past years the next year we are likely to see a dip… was brainstorming with Swati as to how to discount for that and how the cash flow should be managed.

I now have enough pictures to put out my own book however I now also have offers for putting my pictures as a co-author in two other books one to be published from Canada and Other from Italy – been wondering if I do need want a book all by myself….

One more guest!!

Looks like time has come to really consider a huge bird hospital kind of cage. It has not yet been a complete week and there is an adult Little Cormorant recuperating in the front yard. It was found flapping weakly near our main gate as we returned from the gym in the morning. I really can’t find anything wrong with it except that he felt very hot – have cooled him with a little shower and he now looks much better. Hopefully we can release him by evening. We are hopelessly ill equipped to keep a water bird…..

Set it free!

The most satisfying moment for the week past was when we set free the Shikra chick which we had been looking after for past several weeks. I am happy that we could manage to teach it how to kill and then how to hunt, yes they have the instinct but it needs to be honed. Swati has a detailed diary of the care taking it needed and there are also a few pictures. the poor thing was mortally scared of the camera so we did not click much.

On work front we have now have a programmer whose full time responsibility would be “Open source development and management”. Apart from working on Coppermine NG, she essentially will see to it that the other programmers are kept busy with Open Source work when they are not involved in commercial work. Earlier one of the senior programmer would do this job when they were free but since past couple of months they have been too busy with commercial development to look into it.

With Aasim’s summer vacation still continuing I have not got enough time on his computer to post process the pictures from the May end trip…