Author: Tarique Sani

Weekended

Fun started right from Saturday afternoon once the barbecue party was confirmed.

All the ingredients were just right for a great party – a few friends, great white wine (and rum), excellent prawns, lots of chicken with great marinade from Swati and crisp dried easy to light coal… sorry no pictures were taken, slept at 1am but was again up at 6am. I just can’t seem to sleep late no matter what but on the flip side it gives me a lot of time all by myself, I post processed a bunch of pictures for https://nagpurbirds.org – if you have not looked at the birds on the site I would suggest do take a look – It now has 910 pictures of a total of 181 species.

The birds some how sensed that we were home and were creating a ruckus outside so for a large part of the morning Swati and I sat out in the sun feeding all our familiar courtyard visitors, it was heartwarming to see all the old friends coming, inspecting, muttering, chirping, tweeting in excitement or displeasure. The most vocal amongst our visitor is a pair of Common Mynas…

Early afternoon we got hooked to a movie on the cable “Neal n Nikki” which we like despite the fact that the movie bombed at the box office – may be general movie going public does not like fun being made of the stuff they really enjoy 😉

After the movie Swati just did not want to stay indoors so I called up Raju and asked if he was game for some bird watching, he was! he has just acquired a new 10×50 and I baited him with my fresh copy of Ripley’s Guide, within 20 mins we were off to Wena Lake situated about 20kms away. For the first time I saw a flock of “Pacific Golden Plovers” and there were 9 of them….

Ummm, seems like awfully small number of words to describe the awesome amount of fun we had over the weekend – but thats that.

Another week

The feeling for entire week gone by can be best compared to sitting in a second class compartment of a train which is running terribly late – you cannot do anything but wait!! Everything seems to be in a state of transition the loan, the clients, projects, photography everything!!

Hopefully things will improve from today on wards.

Have got a great field guide on Flowers of Sayadhari – must make some efforts to learn at least a couple of hundred names besides “flower watching” as a hobby is easy and cheap… somehow birding seems to be taking a second seat in terms of preferences these days. It is not that we have not been moving around Saturday we went to Koradi and yesterday it was Ambhazari and Sonegoan lakes…

Among other things my programmers have taken upon themselves to (re)learn C++ and KDE programming – Checkout See https://koppermine.sf.net. It still has a looooong way to go but we are surely on the way.

First week!

It passed by fast… things on the work front were a bit subdued with some clients still on a holiday, thankfully I have a new programmer and she will be ready to go on a commercial project in about 10 days more.

Lately I have been lurking on PixelPost Forums and have contributed a bunch of addons and am now on to optimizing and security audit. I have been using PixelPost 1.5beta on my latest project, I did consider using Coppermine NG but then Coppermine NG now is #1 a 1000 pound gorilla with a kitchen sink, #2 A gallery software I wanted a Photoblog

On a personal front Aasim clear his test for Yellow Belt Karate and is waiting to get his Mindstorm NXT I guess I will get one for myself as well 😉

New(er) Year!

The song for yesterday’s evening was Piano man by Billy Joel

“And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar
And say, man, what are you doin’ here?”

Was very tempted to steal some presentation format and fill in the blanks but then as far as LJ goes there are a lot of gaping blanks in what I have chronicled, yes I broke the new year resolution of writing at least twice a week almost the very next month.

On the personal front the year was largely dominated by photography, I managed to setup a small studio and Nivedita was the first model to be photographed there, wish I could have more sessions with her. I attended the New school workshop on photography. In response to a retort that my site was popular only because of my abstract.minimalistic nudes series I stopped updating them for almost 6 months and reintroduced them only after proving my point, have however now removed them to an independent site, will be expanding the project with collaborations and more… I did manage to put up the 1000th picture for display on to my site.

Nagpur Chapter of BNHS triggered the re-launch of passion for bird watching and I splurged on a D70 with a good set of lenses – this was my 500th LJ entry

Things got very hectic from April onwards, We again went to Bangkok. I still had a clean bill of health for the year and we made another trip to Kanha, soon there after Aasim travelled alone to Delhi.

Events are mostly a blur after that – We created the site NagpurBirds.org with a promise to put Nagpur on the birding map and succeeded. I did another ‘first time in life’ thing – joined a gym – have still not given up…

September saw me turning 39, around the same time SANIsoft turned into a private ltd, we got ourselves a new car and took a mini vacation in Pattaya.

This year Diwali Eid and Aasim’s 8th Birthday happened in the same week – the first week of November…

foss.in happened this year was Aasim’s year, we almost did not take him to Bangalore though. For a change I did not give a talk and enjoyed the event much more than ever before. Interspersed between these are periods of work work and still more work. Thankfully I have managed to reign in my working hours and learned to delegate responsibilities at work and the sky does not really fall.

2006!? It is starting with promises of things which are bigger than I/we had ever imagined to be, it is almost scary in a way, like, like school exams but I guess we are prepared. Will write more as things unfold

Dissecting a Sunday…

So it was a Christmas Sunday… It started early with a resolve to tinker around in my so called photo-studio which was threatening to turn into a dumping ground for the household junk and thus had to be redeemed to its former glory.

Ahem! I love hyperbole 😉

It was nice to note that lights still work the backdrops had not accquired fungus during the rain and I could pretty much light familiar subjects with ease, though now I am want to aim for more elaborate setups with my up coming new project. By the time everyone else woke up and breakfast was done the sun was in the courtyard and Swati wanted to sit out so that we could warm our aging bones… Unfortunately we still havn’t got used to the luxury of not doing anything and Swati had the wonderful idea to practice her Sitar lessons, now that she is playing reasonably it was a pleasure to soak in the music along with the warmth of the winter sun, time eased itself effortlessly into the lunch hour.

Aasim had been wanting to go and check on the winter migrants since morning so Swati packed all of us into the car and we headed to the other side of Ambhazari lake, disappointingly there are comparatively very few migrant ducks this year in Nagpur but we did manage to see a flock of “Red Crested Pochards” from a very close distance – I have pictures which I will post at https://nagpurbirds.org but that project seems to have taken a backseat for a while. There was also a mixed flock of Common Pochards, Tufted Ducks and Lesser Whistling Ducks in the lake apart from the usual Coots, Egrets, Herons etc…

While during the drive back we got a call from a friend that they will be coming over for dinner – Swati did not want to serve anything ordered from outside so we got busy and quickly assembled everything needed to make Chicken Biryan as that is the easiest thing to cook once you know the proportions right. Desert was cake with ice cream, the cake has the juiciest of rum raisins which I plucked gleefully till I was banished!

After dinner all of us sat and talked till late….

Flickr API Rant

Aarrrghh!!! for all its usefulness and genius of design, I specially like the Auth part, the Flickr API does not provide a straight forward method to get all the comments made on a particular photo.

The only hack I could think up was to aggregate the Recent Comments RSS, parse it (they do not send the image ID as a tag either) and cache the results in a DB to be shown with appropriate photos… the downside besides being very crude method is that I cannot get comments on my non-public pictures :(

Anyone got a better idea?

Growing up…

Aasim seems to be growing up with a taste for off-beat stuff to put it lightly… I can now sympathise truly with my parents and appreciate that they allowed me to do the things I did and thus I am allowing him to do what he wants.

Yesterday he went out and got 6 small, expensive but ugly Piranhas to keep in his aquarium, he had a choice of almost anything in the shop far more colorful of bigger but no, so far so good this is more or less in line with what some, if not most, boys are likely to be fascinated with – however this does not end here – to decorate the aquarium he wants to put in a dog’s skull (he has one and thats a different story). When asked why? he giggled very gleefully and said that he will tell his friends that he had put in an entire live dog and the skull is whats left behind :-O

In an other unrelated chat with someone

#dude – You Dr. Tarique Sani?
#me – Yes…
#dude – I wanted to ask you something…
#me – sure
#dude- Why don’t you ever write anything technical in your journal
#me – Cause I got a life!!

Getting rusty?

I remember I was saying “turn the debug on for dhcpd and see what it says when you try to…..” but I never completed that sentence. “SWEETHEART!!!” there was something in the tone of that yell which made the hairs on the nape of my neck prickle, I rushed outside Swati was already saying “Patel aunty is not well” referring to Mrs. Hansaben Patel our neighbour since eons.

Instinctively the thought process shifted gears, the rapid succession of evaluative thoughts some how make the passage of time to appear dilated, I followed the pathway of pointing hands to the kitchen of the first floor flat.

My first mental reaction to the scene that presented itself was “Damn it! I am not a doctor any more I just am not equipped to handle this” I desperately looked around – Yogesh was looking very expectantly at me to do something miraculous, Uncle was too shocked, Swati was asking me something, Aunty was on the floor delirious – there was no escape. I can now play back the whole thing in my mind from a third persons perspective rather than the first person which usually happens…

I see that I reach down and felt the pulse left side first then the right side as she turned towards me her speech was slurred, look at the face look at the face something prods me – It is twisted to one side it is more pronounced when she talks – she is not talking coherently – C7 pops up in the thought process I frantically try to grope the depths of my old knowledge for what it means, 7th Cranial Nerve aka the facial nerve! Assess damage – shift to an intensive care – “Swati car” – “Wokhart Hospital?” – It is a cardiac care unit – this is neuro case – It is the closest, I reply “Yes” I get back to the patient – I am a doctor once more! She has had a stroke! I ensure that her trachea is clear and she is breathing, the pulse is erratic but good volume. I help Yogesh carry her down to the car.

We reached the hospital in a couple of minutes and the doctors took over… She will recover just fine.

Swati now tells me that there was no apparent hesitation ever in what I did but I know!

Hmmm so may be I am getting a bit rusty – to quote Aasim’s favorite phrase these days “So what!”

Not anything…. in particular!

I seriously need to invest some time in not trying to do something all the time and enjoy that – not doing anything…. besides it has just been like this since morning!

Had a great barbecue party yesterday evening – some friends had come over with lots of Surmai fish, Jumbo prawns and chicken, not to forget some excellent wine. So while Aasim enjoyed hard rock with the girls we adults sat around the fire cooked and fed them. Yeah we hogged as well!

Forties is the new thirties

Just got around to reading the Sunday newspapers and there was this article on how men and women in their forties are more health and appearance aware and that forties is the second adolescence for them. I couldn’t agree more on this. However, what pissed me off was the recurrent references that men are doing this so that they can be with younger women – Bull Shit! I would anytime prefer a fit forty something with no hang-ups for a date over an outgoing tweenybopper.