Tag: aasim

Reaching up

Today morning Aasim casually reached up and unlatched the top latch of our front door!!

He is tall for a nine year old – the first image which flashed in front of my eyes was – Aasim about 15 months  old would walk upto the dining table around meal times and peer very critically at the food kept there – only his eyes would reach above the table top. He never bothered to try and stand on tip toes to get a better view or may be he already knew it was not worth the effort…

and we could  read  in his eyes if the food presented was to his liking or not

Looking Good etc etc etc

Lately I have come across several parents who are so keen that their children appear to be “well adjusted” and not make them “look bad” in front of the their (parent’s) social acquaintances that they end up with children who are thoroughly de-spirited and totally lacking that urge to experiment or learn anything new. Well I don’t really interfere with anyone when it comes to parenting decisions they take but it does bug me, to use a mild word, when these parents try to put down other children as being wrong and also imply lack of culture.

Thankfully these very same parents also, most of the time, think that “boarding schools” are good – at least their children will have a chance for themselves.

Yes! Aasim’s school re-opened.

On the very first day he walked up to the podium during the general assembly and talked about FIFA World Cup. Honestly I never knew that he even knew about, let alone was following the event.

Unfortunately both his girlfriends have moved to other cities to which he said “What a waste!”.

Other than that it is life as usual for him and us….

Punching Pench

The week was threatening to be one of those usual ones with people, programming and politics etc. However landed up here, Saturday morning on his way to Pench and I after some hesitation decided to tag along for a day. We (myself, Aasim and Kallu) started early afternoon and Swati was game enough to join us in the night. Pench is just 90kms from Nagpur and yet we had never visited the place before this….

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]

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?”

Happy Holi!!!

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?

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 😉

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!!

Whew! what a week!!

Keelback(?)

As if Diwali followed by Eid was not enough it was Aasim’s 8th birthday on 5th Nov and just like previous years the entire class was invited. The decoration theme was Winnie the Pooh and before I was called in to control the crowd I did manage to get some pictures.

The party was fun and Aasim did manage to WOW some of the new girls with his room and soft toys!! I like the way he is growing up around girls – he firmly believes that one should have 3 to 4 girlfriends, the logic being – if you have only one then you get teased but with 4 everyone just keeps shut…. apparently he has told this to his teacher.

Despite sleeping past midnight all of us did manage to get up early enough for our Sunday morning bird watch/walk – We went to Satpuda Botanical garden walked for just 668 meters and saw 54 bird species. The distance data could be captured thanks to my latest toy.

The highlight of the walk however was not a bird but this Buff-striped Keelback snake – These snakes are harmless and you almost never see them in a threatening posture. It was only after I picked it up that I realised that it was defending itself against the attacks of a Long-tailed shrike.

The evening again was dinner at some friends with the loveliest of mutton korma…

Waahhh!! I want one more weekend!!!

I will format all your hard drives

Computer Teacher: What is notepad?
Aasim: Notepad is a text editor
Computer Teacher: No, notepad is a software for creating text files and simple documents! Now tell me how do you start notepad?
Aasim: By clicking the shortcut on the desktop.
Computer Teacher: Is this what has been taught to you?

Cut to after few more transactions of the above type

Aasim: I will format all your hard drives!!!

Thankfully only a few teachers in his school are like that – His class teacher gave Swati the best compliment a mother can expect to hear “We have enough hunks and punks in the class but your son is a charmer!”

Click Here!

Aasim was given an exercise in creative writing at school.

The topic was “My School”, he wrote the best he could but the coup de main was somewhere near the last – It read – “To see a map Click Here” :-O