If a bunch of losers hound another loser – who wins!!! 
Yesterday afternoon finally gave us time to open the DVD which had been lying for some time now and watch the movie Parineeta. Watching the movie flashed my thoughts back to a time, many, many years ago, when my mind was in a totally warped and f*cked up state. A time just after we had done our Hang gliding course… two incidences played themselves vividly in my mind.
The first one was when I took this picture of her to send to prospective grooms at a friend’s farm house – she looks so gloriously flushed and beautiful because we had just just made passionate love… and the other was from Alibag where as a part of our afterplay conversation we were discussing my engagement with some fatso in about 15 days time!!!
I reached out to touch her hand and began “What if I….?” I did not need to finish the sentence – she, without moving her eyes from the screen, said “Failure was not an acceptable outcome for me!”
Today, I dare not and need not contemplate – what if she had failed!!
After the movie, we spent the rest of the evening sipping mouth numbingly chilled Pink Champagne while munching “Sev Murmura Bhel”
Happy Holi to everyone… Feeling a bit old… Aasim is out there with his friends playing Holi with his friends, a lot of them are children of folks I have played Holi with when I was about 8 years old. Somebody is blasting Hindi re-mixes… but somewhere further are strains of “mohe panghat pe”…
Swati is planning hot palak parathas – Bhang anyone?
It is bright and sunny again and I intend to enjoy the couple of days before it gets too hot…
Somewhere in the middle of last week I was made to undergo a medical exam for insurance – the good news is that my Lipid Profile seems to be behaving itself. Spent a lot of time going over the Zend Framework – looks like a good start the best thing I liked was that while it can be used as a framework it will also serve as a component library. I do intend to use the Zend Service, Search and JSON soon.
However if one was to look for a complete and usable framework I would right now recommend Symfony.
A part of the week was also spent on learning a bit about structural engineering and how differential settlement of underlying strata of a building can effect the walls… and also about the unfortunate fact that even if you are willing to pay some people are reluctant to give their best.
The plot where our new home is being constructed has got part rock and part soft backfilled soil!! The structural engineer had redesigned the footings and added a note that there can be differential settlement of the footings – that basically means that some part of the building may settle down more than the other – the end result being some minor cracks in the walls at place. While the cracks are not big deal and many houses have it and can be easily repaired etc etc (BTW. walls do not hold the building in place). We got down to researching the stuff on our own and found the solution is simple – dig deeper and also found out that a couple of feet deeper there is hard rock!
Thats what is now being done – what I am pissed at is the fact that finding this was not my job in the first place…
Yes a meeting is being scheduled between the architect, contractor and structural engineer and Swati – hopefully they will get the message. People do listen when Swati talks business 
Whew! The first three days of the week were dominated by construction related activity but a lot got done – finally the layout is complete, bore well has been dug and a three phase electricity meter has been installed and connected. Swati’s birthday passed in a whirl in the middle and then we decided to escape to Kanha.
This time we took our own car – Swati drove very well (for the uninformed I am not allowed to drive ) and we had with us Aasim’s grandparents, yeah they *are* Swati’s parents but when Aasim is around they are more his than ours – that paints the picture very aptly.
Kanha as usual did not disappoint us – Tiger sightings were poor by the usual standards but that was enough for grandma and grandpa. The most heartening news was that all the 4 cubs of Indrani have survived and in fact most of the litter from last year has survived and there are at least about 20 young tigers romping about, in deed this is the time (15 to 18 months of age) when they get into fights and also are targeted by poachers but they have come this far and I have hope!
Oh yes! for the earlier part of the week we hand another wild guest with us – may be Swati will write about it some time later….
Happy birthday
Yes, thats her name and she literally personifies it with her skin tone, but thats not all there is to her – she is 30+ a kathak Bharatnatyam dancer and – hold your breath – a geek by profession. Though (un?)fortunately not much into FOSS and I am not going to push my luck in trying to convert her.
She is one of those rare type of women who knows herself and not afraid to reach out to get what she wants, neither is she afraid of letting the world know what she is. Amid all this she still manages to be non-aggressive and almost merging with the crowd.
Yeah, yeah! I know the question and I have to admit that I am lucky – I saw her in a shopping mall and mentioned her to Swati, next thing I see is that Swati is talking to her – the rest, to lamely borrow a phrase, is history.
She is not from Nagpur but will be around for a year… and has agreed to be my muse for that period of time.
More?! Search and you shall find….
A few (well only 2) people asked as to how I managed to create a second line of command in such a short span. Umm… I have not really documented the process and there is no magic formula which will work… besides I am an awful manager. I am sure a lot of management gurus out there must have got this honed down to a fine art but none the less here is what we did.
Some background first – None of my current project managers knew PHP when they came to SANIsoft which was a good thing because I got to teach them PHP exactly the way I wrote it – complete with all my finesse, flaws and work flow quirks. So in many ways, in the end, they were my coder clones – that made my job easier – I knew how they worked.
One fine day I just switched the daily reporting method. The top three (based on experience) now got daily reports from three newbie/trainee/junior programmers each. These reports were summarized and then sent to me. Over the next few days they learnt that what was written had to be verified and not taken on face value, I nudged them into realising that if they kept tabs on what was happening throughout the day instead of trying to gather things at the end of the day it would be simpler for them.
What took me by surprise was they had to told to be more forgiving towards mistakes of the juniors and the difference between what was good enough and perfect and when to opt for either (roughly views, controllers – good enough. models – perfect). Then came judging – who could be trusted with what level of code… this last part is still on going and perhaps will go on forever – I need to evolve this into a kind of employee gradation process.
Since all of the above was happening on live projects – I had to, for some time, work bit more with minding the minded and the minders ensuring that the clients did not suffer in anyway. In the end it has been a hugely successful exercises for everyone involved.
Well thats about it.
Redundant – adj 1: more than needed, desired, or required;
Am once again looking at ways to make myself redundant at SANIsoft.
About 18 months ago we realised a need to have a second line of command in the programming team, the work was just too much for me to keep up with first hand – I needed some filtering and summarizing of the day’s events. about 12 months ago we achieved that and I am very happy to say that my project managers are doing a great job, there are occasional fires which I have to overlook so that they are handled correctly smoothly but more importantly the work flow has been smoothened to a point where such incidences are greatly reduced.
So what will I do? The image adjacent is a rendered view of our new home cum office – the construction was started sometime last week after Swati literally shook the entire bank machinery from the country head to the lowest level executive here to get the loan amount sanctioned. The ETA for completion has been put to about 12 months. As far as SANIsoft goes the new facility will allow us to double our capacity. As myself and Swati sat on a stone at the new plot and reminisced how we had started nearly 8 years back with one computer and myself as the lone coder targeting an annual income of Rs60,000/- (we did much better) to present 12 coders and …. we felt a sense of pride similar to what a parent feel on seeing their children grow, however we have been warned that we should now view the complete business in a more detached manner.
As a new home the place offers larger living space and there is a huge pond on the South-West – the result – a lot of birds and our bedroom is going to be over looking the pond. In fact this guy was the latest visitor.
This is 5.3kms as the crow flies and 7.1kms by road from our current home, placing it just outside the city limit – in fact the road which runs in front of the new plot divides the city from the outskirts!
In more recent happenings – yesterday myself and Raju did a tour of all the nearby lakes looking for any signs of illness / death in the birds, thankfully everything seems to be fine for now.
The afternoon saw an awesome shoot where for the first time I tried bright yellow as the theme colour, yellow backdrop and floor, matching yellow drape for the model and lots of gold jewellery… Skepticism prevailed all around till the preview of first few shots but I ultimately got more displayable pictures than in any shoot before.
And yes – Happy birthday to an *Old man*