Category: Live Journal Entries

It is a nice Sunday morning, I am sitting with the windows of the room open and the cool breeze is wafting the sweet smell of Mogra flowers in… …

Needless to say everyone else is asleep!

Yesterday evening I took a placement seminar for NIIT students, a lot of PHP advocacy but the general lot there is pathetic. Aptech has been sending better candidates, but just better, I need somebody good!!

Yesterday was also Aasim’s result day – they dont have formal exams till he is in 1st standard and best, they are not given homework. They just evaluate the child’s progress… things have been good for Aasim. He was thrilled to be back at school, apparently teachers are a lot more tolerant of his bullying than we are 😉

We enrolled Aasim for a Roller Skating camp. Lately we have observed a disturbing trend – he just does not want to try OR be persistant. He either has to do it well in the first go or not do it at all. There are several things that he does very well and he gets a lot of praise for it, may be this led to the current behaviour – trying to get only positive strokes.

Anyway he was OK at it for the first day, could walk around, fell a few times but not hard thanks to all the protective gear.

We feel he is enthralled enough by the speed to give it a try, besides he saw that there were several 4 to 5 year olds with various degrees of expertise.

Let’s see how it goes … …

I survived nearly a week minus the net without any perceptable withdrawal symptoms. No anxiety or panic attacks, no feeling lost or depressed. I just relaxed and enjoyed my time with myself. Vizag is 10 degrees cooler than Nagpur so despite everyone complaining of heat we did not feel any discomfort.

I spent quite some time reading finished a couple of Perry Mason, The Ringworld triology (less said about it the better) and *Underground* recommended to me by Kishore and a must read if you have not already done so – download your fav format from https://www.underground-book.com

Rest of the time was spent on the beach, some “feel-good” shopping for trinkets, playing with Aasim when ever he had time for his parents or just sitting and talking trivia with Swati.

The office in Nagpur was well managed by the guys and there were no nasty surprises for us when we returned.

BUT in the end nothing is better than Home *Sweet* Home and the feel of your own bed on your back !!

Now who sang that song?

Anyway *Rush* is how the day has been, got to complete N things before we leave for our mini vacation OR as Swati calls it a very long weekend to Vizag to my brother who is in the Navy. Ah! the swimming pool …

BUT I read that Vizag is just as hot or worse – BUT – Swati has prescribed a break for all of us so we better take it.

Finally a project which really warrants use of SOAP, hmm… not really XML-RPC would have worked but SOAP-RPC has got better future scalability. I was pleased that I was able to set up a service which returned a custom made image – The downside is that the whole thing is returned base64 encoded instead of a pure image stream but what the heck bandwidth and computing power is cheap and anyone intending to run a service which can be consumed by ASP/JSP/PERL uniformly better have lots of bandwidth and computing power.

To jumpstart my team with SOAP I started to write an idiot’s guide of sorts but then I stumbled on this URL https://www.soapware.org/bdg it is a wee bit dated but just the thing which will get you going.

It goes without saying that my SOAP server and client both are written in … … YES! PHP!!

I guess all that the Bangalore junta is going to write about for the next couple of days in the RW show …. ….

less said the better

I must be getting old way too old for my own good – a while back I wanted to type PMS and I typed PHP, an hour earlier I stood in front of the Microwave a good 15 seconds before I could recall the correct sequence on the keypad, Microwave thing has happened once before as well. I cannot decide if it is funny or scary!!

Naah!! must be the heat

A bit of free time in the afternoon had me wondering about my hobbies. The best I had – I turned into my profession, so that leaves me with what? Reading – not too much of creativity involved. Stamps – I have not touched in past 10 years and anyways who writes letters now.

Sketching – The problem with sketching is once I get started with a drawing I just cannot put it down till it is complete.

Then there is photography, hmmm… guess it is time I did some still life photography, B/W pics of some of Swati’s crystal collection will be great! Maybe this Sunday I can cajole Swati into posing for me, have some ideas in lighting which I would like to try out.

One of these days I must make Vivek (another of Swati’s school time friend and the guy who took my pic for the ProPHP4 cover) intro me to some models, maybe we can hijack his studio as well. Yes – Swati is also into photography – runs in her blood – her father was a professional photographer.

I also have a desperate itch to pick up a new skill, one thing I always wanted was to be able to play an musical instrument, but I still dont have the time for it.