Tag: life

YAS (Yet Another Sunday)

It is a lovely Sunday morning, am sitting outside in the garden – Shiku, the Shikra chick we raised and release, just paid a visit – he has got into this habit of occasionally coming very low and inspecting the front yard. At times he shouts till one of us comes out…

A very young squirrel is hopping around – she better be careful 😉

The construction activity has been slowed down a bit – the current ETA is 120 days more to finish the civil work, however I very much like what has been done so far. Some time last week we saw River Tern as well as a Little Tern fishing over the pond/lake which is our backyard, a common kingfisher came and sat on a window ledge – I really hope that the bird life remains undisturbed there… unfortunately it won’t be for long.

Yesterday night we saw an adaptation of “Night of January the 16” it was an adaptation which I feel even Ayn Rand would be pleased with… and yes the verdict was “not guilty”

Lastly, I have decided to stop taking any new photographs for atleast next 3 months – the number of good photographs which I have not been able to post process has gone totally out of control…

Damn! even after ten months of regular gym my trainer still manages to dig out muscles which I never knew existed…

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….

Reality Check

The little cormorant which we had taken in on Friday could not make it thru the night. sadly we could not even find out what was wrong with it.

After 5 years of battling, mother nature has still not been convinced that my lifestyle and diet do not warrant a haywire lipid profile… on top of that I have been heaped with a very high blood Homocysteine levels. So I along with my doctor and friend have decided to take the fight to the next level. I have been put on medications which are most likely to last for a long long time.

SANIsoft has had two sequential years of very good business – going by the trend of past years the next year we are likely to see a dip… was brainstorming with Swati as to how to discount for that and how the cash flow should be managed.

I now have enough pictures to put out my own book however I now also have offers for putting my pictures as a co-author in two other books one to be published from Canada and Other from Italy – been wondering if I do need want a book all by myself….

Swati 1, Swati 2, Swati 3, Swati 4

Arrrrghh!!! Sometimes I feel that I am married to 4 different women!

7. A peadiatrician and a forensic expert, how did you become a PHP geek

This entry is for in response to her 7. A peadiatrician and a forensic expert, how did you become a PHP geek?. I have written about it in bits and pieces, most of my friends know about it and my most common remark is “I got bored of being a doctor!” but thats not really correct. Here is it again for her and yes some day Aasim might want to show it to someone….

Continue if still interested….

Birds, flying and more

Oriental pratincole

The week just zoomed past….

Throughout the week we were sifting through resumes, We are currently running at full capacity and it is always a bad idea to do this for long – there has to be some redundancy. Yes, project overlapping is there but I want to have at least 30% spare man hours. Besides this we are also working on ways for faster project transfer than what is currently in place, this just means further standardization of coding practices and more extensive Unit Tests for the Models. Also spare hours means that the programmers contribute more to Open Projects. I am very pleased with how Koppermine – The KDE client for Coppermine Picture Gallery is turning out.

Swati and Aasim hopped over to Delhi for the weekend, Aasim wanted to hook-up with Kabir and Swati was meeting some of her old old friends.

Yesterday I indulged myself with a day full of bird watching along with a few more birder friends. First we visited this amazing place right in the heart of the city which we recently discovered. It has a huge heronery of Black Crown Night Herons and Cormorants with 100+ nest. Noticed a very interesting thing, the chicks of Black Crown Night Herons are out of the nest even before they can fly and scamper around on the branches begging from any adult which cares to feed. Some of them even manage to get down to the ground and forage!!

We then proceeded to the nearby Wena Lake where the wader breeding is in full swing. Got a ‘photo lifer’ – Oriental Praticole! it is a very beautiful and relatively unafraid bird. Oh! by the way – I use the word photo-lifer to describe a bird which I have captured on camera for the first time. Another interesting image captured was of a Club Tail dragonfly eating another dragonfly.

Last week also saw the commencement of the first Nagpur-Bangkok flight which will be a great time saver for us, wasting nearly 2 days at Mumbai was a pain. Also, it looks like the Nagpur Flying Club will soon start, if not that then the Gondia Flying School will definitely start – I intend to get my Private Pilot License as soon as they start.

Games

Someone from the previous generation tried to tell me that at 40 one should start to sit back, settle down and learn to be content. My only response was “Yeah! I will go and kill myself!!” accompanied by vigorous nodding of head, true to my expectation my words went unheard and my action was taken as acceptance…

What the heck! – The game has just about begun on the *next* level, I am still groping around for the power-ups needed to cross this level, beginnings are at times frustrating, irritating and seemingly insurmountable and add to it the fact that the game is so open ended 😉

Thursday found myself amused at the fly from Bangalore whom I caught in my Honey Pot – I usually don’t run my honeyd and snort (whats the point – I am not prosecuting them) but I was bored – this luzer was so dumb that he was not even using a proxy. I patiently scanned him and then I let him in – wall’ing messages were not a hint enough that he was caught, best of all he was searching for NEF files, it was a good fun for the 30 minutes or so it lasted.

Am currently reading “Marker” by Robin Cook, it is another matter that may not complete it, but all the detailed description of the autopsies made me a bit nostalgic, we use to do a lot similar stuff, the banter in the mortuary was almost the same as was the thrill… Unfortunately nostalgia has a habit of not giving you the complete picture, significant part of the picture was about the bureaucracy and an even larger part was corruption, the end result was that if you really wanted to do your stuff you found yourself painted into a corner. Leaving Forensic Medicine was a very conscious decision – the future was dominated by the dark side.

Parineeta!

swati2
Swati

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!!!

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?