All three of us are going to be there at BarCamp Mumbai. I may chicken out of my proposed talk “Your pictures on on your website” in favour of enjoying more with all you guys…
P.S. Yes, I know my talk title is the base line for Gallery 
Author: Tarique Sani
Punching Pench
The week was threatening to be one of those usual ones with people, programming and politics etc. However
I was not expecting to see much wild life but I was pleasantly surprised. The carnivore population of the place is nowhere as high as Kanha but as lovers of all wildlife we never run after the tiger like most of the others visiting the place. In fact I really pity the people who say they did not see anything just because they did not manage to spot a tiger – folks open your eyes please!!!
Rightly guessed we did not see a tiger either but I got some good pictures of Jackals and the Blue Bull (it actually is an antelope), a rare full frame of a Cheetal suckling a fawn. I say rare because the Cheetal mothers usually bolt as soon as they see a vehicle stop, specially while they are feeding… but this girl let me fire at least half a dozen shots before she decided that she had posed enough. We saw vultures both white-back and long-billed am thrilled to say that Pench is supporting a population of at least 60+ Kallu got, according to him, his first decent shots of Yellow Wattled lapwing and I am sure over a period of next two days he will surely spot the tigress….
On the work front – Two new programmers joined in today, last week one of the new girls quit for a weird reason – she wanted to go to Pune give an interview for experience, she was emphatic that she wants to work with SANIsoft for at least an year but she wanted to give this call center interview for experience. I really can’t understand what this with interview experience?
We declined the leave and she choose to quit instead. Today morning she calls up and says she wants to continue – I would be damned… Well, too late, we already have replacements in place.
Lastly, as a remedy to Aasim’s boredom we have employed him as a part time summer trainee at SANIsoft his job entails finish learning logo and ensuring that all the M$ Windows machines are duly up to date. He got smart to the idea and even negotiated a stipend from his mother and a 5 day week.
P.S. Pictures will take some time to be processed – too much work today 🙁
[Update]
The pench pictures are HERE
[/update]
Inter-veiwed
The entire last week was spent in interviewing people – some highlights
#1 Sir, I know that I have done every question wrong but I know everything
Thank you ma’am we will call you when we need managers
#2 Sir, can I get an interview experience certificate – I want it for my CV
Sorry we do not give interview experience certificates.
#3 Can’t say I know PHP 100% I know about ummm 99%
Wow – I can’t claim that after 8 years
However we did pick up 4 freshers – now 5 weeks to create PHP programming zombies out of them.
The work on the new home is now in full swing the plinth will be complete in a few days, we shopped around for wood for door frames – good teak is horribly expensive, would have loved alternate building materials but nothing came close to having the finish that I liked…
Had an awesome photo shoot with Swarna yesterday – unfortunately she will now be gone for 2 months, also now I am holding back some pictures which will be there only in the *the* book….
Aasim to Swati “Quarter to ten is not good enough, You better be there at nine forty five!” but on the flip side to his credit, yesterday seeing everyone was too busy to attend to a candidate who had come for interview, he walked up and asked “Do you know HTML?”
You are old…
You are old when girls half your age are women and older when you say “Bah! Kids!!” to their flirting with you….
Birds, flying and more
The week just zoomed past….
Throughout the week we were sifting through resumes, We are currently running at full capacity and it is always a bad idea to do this for long – there has to be some redundancy. Yes, project overlapping is there but I want to have at least 30% spare man hours. Besides this we are also working on ways for faster project transfer than what is currently in place, this just means further standardization of coding practices and more extensive Unit Tests for the Models. Also spare hours means that the programmers contribute more to Open Projects. I am very pleased with how Koppermine – The KDE client for Coppermine Picture Gallery is turning out.
Swati and Aasim hopped over to Delhi for the weekend, Aasim wanted to hook-up with Kabir and Swati was meeting some of her old old friends.
Yesterday I indulged myself with a day full of bird watching along with a few more birder friends. First we visited this amazing place right in the heart of the city which we recently discovered. It has a huge heronery of Black Crown Night Herons and Cormorants with 100+ nest. Noticed a very interesting thing, the chicks of Black Crown Night Herons are out of the nest even before they can fly and scamper around on the branches begging from any adult which cares to feed. Some of them even manage to get down to the ground and forage!!
We then proceeded to the nearby Wena Lake where the wader breeding is in full swing. Got a ‘photo lifer’ – Oriental Praticole! it is a very beautiful and relatively unafraid bird. Oh! by the way – I use the word photo-lifer to describe a bird which I have captured on camera for the first time. Another interesting image captured was of a Club Tail dragonfly eating another dragonfly.
Last week also saw the commencement of the first Nagpur-Bangkok flight which will be a great time saver for us, wasting nearly 2 days at Mumbai was a pain. Also, it looks like the Nagpur Flying Club will soon start, if not that then the Gondia Flying School will definitely start – I intend to get my Private Pilot License as soon as they start.
Petrichor
Games
Someone from the previous generation tried to tell me that at 40 one should start to sit back, settle down and learn to be content. My only response was “Yeah! I will go and kill myself!!” accompanied by vigorous nodding of head, true to my expectation my words went unheard and my action was taken as acceptance…
What the heck! – The game has just about begun on the *next* level, I am still groping around for the power-ups needed to cross this level, beginnings are at times frustrating, irritating and seemingly insurmountable and add to it the fact that the game is so open ended 😉
Thursday found myself amused at the fly from Bangalore whom I caught in my Honey Pot – I usually don’t run my honeyd and snort (whats the point – I am not prosecuting them) but I was bored – this luzer was so dumb that he was not even using a proxy. I patiently scanned him and then I let him in – wall’ing messages were not a hint enough that he was caught, best of all he was searching for NEF files, it was a good fun for the 30 minutes or so it lasted.
Am currently reading “Marker” by Robin Cook, it is another matter that may not complete it, but all the detailed description of the autopsies made me a bit nostalgic, we use to do a lot similar stuff, the banter in the mortuary was almost the same as was the thrill… Unfortunately nostalgia has a habit of not giving you the complete picture, significant part of the picture was about the bureaucracy and an even larger part was corruption, the end result was that if you really wanted to do your stuff you found yourself painted into a corner. Leaving Forensic Medicine was a very conscious decision – the future was dominated by the dark side.
Happy New Year!!!
Huh!?
Just as we were about modestly done with celebrating a good ending to the previous financial year (for the uninformed 31st March is the date) I wake up to this truly *Maniac Monday*
Fortunately, for you my readers most of the problems fall either under some NDA clause or will hurt friends – so I won’t write about them, instead I will just pat myself on my back for having shifted the problems from the *no reasonable solution* list to the more satisfying *solvable* list. Ah! the joys of been a suited geek, well I still wear jeans just that my job profile is now more that of a suited geek 😉
Back to the happy part – I would publicly like to thank one person who 8 years ago made me angry enough to look beyond my little town.
Thank you Mr. Prakash Agrawal!
Thanks for not letting us get the very first website order that we had so laboriously pitched for… Thanks for taking time out and making it a point to be there when we were about to get the advance amount and so eloquently making a case against us. Thanks for making us realise that technical expertise and marketing are not related in anyway. Oh! Mr. Agrawal I am so sorry that your venture into the world of web folded shortly after it started.
Now folks – do not think that we are ungrateful – Swati did meet Mr. Agrawal a some time ago and he was kind enough to assume the older patron role and ask “How we were?” She had dutifully replied “Aap ki dua hai Agrawal Ji”
WinXP re-install….
Yesterday Aasim’s machine which runs WinXP refused to boot, nothing wrong with the hardware just something went wrong in Windows – have tried almost everything but I guess re-install would be the shortest answer.
However there is a hitch. Windows distro, oh well – it is not a distro at all. you have to find all the drivers and programs you need from N number of sources. I learn’t this lesson long ago but however despite all precautions I am missing my MapSource Track and Waypoint manager CD, the further aggravating fact is that I cannot download that program – only upgrades are down loadable… If any of the Garmin GPS users have any other idea please let me know. I only use that to download and convert data. Hmmm must look for a Linux based equivalent – after all I presume the USB on that thing just emulates the Serial port or whatever.
<deep breath/>
With temperature finally crossing 100F summer is here – Mangoes, Watermelon, holidays I no longer get those…