Author: Tarique Sani

Happy Diwali to everyone

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” 😉

Sleepy Sunday

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

Sunday snatched away….

The day has ended but I am still restless….

It was a nice day… Woke up late to 2 SMSes, one from a client and one from a friend both needed help with their servers, could solve the clients problem as it was my own setup…

Then finished the novel “Nemesis” – nothing earth shaking there, settled down to a session of security fixing in Coppermine… After which a lunch of biryani, followed by a movie… Do watch “Treasure Planet” if you have not done so yet – a good take on the original classic.

Towards evening boredom lend itself to trying some Hi key Low Key photography am almost satisfied with the results…

Then we went out to get a pair of trousers for Aasim – he is out growing them at a phenomenal rate – had coffee at Barista, back home, dinner of Swati’s hand made Dosas

More mail, more net and here I am – not tired – nothing more to do….

Guess there are times when one is just not satisfied

Absurd dreams of a nut!

Things have been pretty weird lately, am caught in whirlwind of emotions which are diametrically opposite. A whole lot of good and whole lot of bad. The picture on the left though not initially taken to be symbolic BUT it now is – Dreaming of further regression OR dreaming of something in future…

Work has been very very demanding not to mention that it has been enjoyable as well. Work on Coppermine is progressing at a clipping pace, as I type this I am chatting with one client who keeps awake through out the night on other side of the world so that he can liaison with us and at the same time telling both my team leaders what my vision of the new projects about to begin will be…

Got the check for an article I wrote long back, thus another 10K got added to my Camera fund today – looks like next month I will have it.

As the first crop of senior SANIsoft programmers is now moving on I am realizing that I have not inculcated enough “People Skills” in them.

They came to me when they were 18, it was their first job, were with SANIsoft for almost 5 years during which all they had to do was learn PHP , more PHP, anything else was secondary, even goofing up on commercial projects was OK as long as they learned from their mistakes. They never learned any skills about talking to people, manipulating them, OR any alternate skills other than what was needed to get their creations working on the target servers – they knew their PHP, at times better than me, and were the demigods of SANIsoft… …

Alas real world is so much more different. Two of them are throughly disgusted with the job market and/or managers, one left programming and joined his father in printing business.

Somewhere I am feeling very guilty….

37 Today

37 – As a number it doesn’t inspire much reaction as would 36 or 40, so… I turned 37 today…
Last year I had summarised my life with a sense of hope, a hope of settling down. That way for me the past year has been very relevant, I moved away decisively from the duppie fold to don a more Saturnian mantle… so much so that my only major regret in life is – I still suffer from Acne!!

Hmm… I am surely getting old!

The day itself was hectic – a bit more than usual, woke up to be greeted by 12 red Roses from Swati and some lovely orange Gerberas from her sis.

@vaibhav – We went to a place called “Sarhadi” for dinner which serves fabulous NW frontier cuisine and gorged ourselves to our gills.

Thanks to everyone who greeted me throughout the day….

Special thanks to ravi who was the first among the online buddies to greet me and sidcarter who made a special entry just to mention my birthday 🙂

Wisdom impinges upon your consciousness in so many unusual ways…

Today I morning I saw a Plaintive Cuckoo Chick being fed by a Tailor Bird – It reminded me about WTO

Then this one has had me thinking “God lives in heaven because he lives in fear of his own creations!!” caught it when Aasim was watching “Spy Kids II”

The week and the previous one has been very hectic – the best part is after a long time I am really into programming a non-commercial project, work on business front has been very busy juggling various projects. Had a very pleasant surprise from two of our clients today.

In the afternoon we went to a book shop to browse – finally got my hands on a dead tree version of Asimov’s Nemesis. After that we decided to have a leisurely coffee at Cafe Coffee day. Hmm…. we should do this more often, it is fun to watch the teen/tweenage crowd.

Things on photography front have taken a back seat but I do intend to come up with at least a couple of good shots over the weekend