Tag: life

Getting rusty?

I remember I was saying “turn the debug on for dhcpd and see what it says when you try to…..” but I never completed that sentence. “SWEETHEART!!!” there was something in the tone of that yell which made the hairs on the nape of my neck prickle, I rushed outside Swati was already saying “Patel aunty is not well” referring to Mrs. Hansaben Patel our neighbour since eons.

Instinctively the thought process shifted gears, the rapid succession of evaluative thoughts some how make the passage of time to appear dilated, I followed the pathway of pointing hands to the kitchen of the first floor flat.

My first mental reaction to the scene that presented itself was “Damn it! I am not a doctor any more I just am not equipped to handle this” I desperately looked around – Yogesh was looking very expectantly at me to do something miraculous, Uncle was too shocked, Swati was asking me something, Aunty was on the floor delirious – there was no escape. I can now play back the whole thing in my mind from a third persons perspective rather than the first person which usually happens…

I see that I reach down and felt the pulse left side first then the right side as she turned towards me her speech was slurred, look at the face look at the face something prods me – It is twisted to one side it is more pronounced when she talks – she is not talking coherently – C7 pops up in the thought process I frantically try to grope the depths of my old knowledge for what it means, 7th Cranial Nerve aka the facial nerve! Assess damage – shift to an intensive care – “Swati car” – “Wokhart Hospital?” – It is a cardiac care unit – this is neuro case – It is the closest, I reply “Yes” I get back to the patient – I am a doctor once more! She has had a stroke! I ensure that her trachea is clear and she is breathing, the pulse is erratic but good volume. I help Yogesh carry her down to the car.

We reached the hospital in a couple of minutes and the doctors took over… She will recover just fine.

Swati now tells me that there was no apparent hesitation ever in what I did but I know!

Hmmm so may be I am getting a bit rusty – to quote Aasim’s favorite phrase these days “So what!”

Hectic!!

Returned from Pattaya on Tuesday and will be again leaving for Bangalore on Monday. Have to schedule unimaginable number of things in the intervening days but I guess I will manage well :)

From Monday myself and Swati will be in Bangalore to attend foss.in/2005. This time I am not giving a talk and looking forward to it!

Will meet a lot of old friends and listen to at least some talks for once. The event itself has come a long way from IT com 2000 and so have we, it feels great to have been a part, how so ever small, of this event since past 6 years. Along the way we have gathered close friends, lots of knowledge, also a small sense of self significance and humility.

Another thing different this time would be that Aasim will not be travelling with us – He, like the event, has also grown. Heck! it feels like yesterday that we celebrated his 3rd Birthday at IT com 2000 and now he has his own set of responsibilities. He is brave about it but he loved to be the only kid around the venue, we will miss him too… but somethings have to be done.

Amongst all this there indeed is one commitment which is suffering – my aim to put a 1000 pictures at NagpurBirds before 31st December. Oh well! I may still be able to do it if I have time.

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!!!

Home Alone!

Swati and Aasim have hopped over to Delhi for the weekend and I am home alone – this is a rare happening, We mostly travel together for business or pleasure but this time I could not join them due to a lot of things… I do have a lot of things planned out for the weekend like post processing pictures, checking out some of the new birding spots and a date with the foster-mother of one of Aasim’s friend (yeah, Swati fixed that one for me!)

I did manage to drag myself to the gym in the morning and my trainer ensured that I exercised but rest of the things are already threatening to sink into the quagmire of lethargy and inertia. I have an option of fooling myself and saying that there is a lot of work at the office but that would require morphing into a real conman 😉

In fact apart from debugging other peoples code the only task at hand is reviewing the new PHP frameworks which have been springing up lately and looks like the epidemic is spreading faster than bird-flu, BTW I feel the panic over bird-flu is totally unwarranted!

I, personally, am more of a library oriented programmer rather than favoring a framework. Still, I found that Symfony framework for PHP5 to be quite elegant specially given the fact that they have some pretty complete documentation. I very much liked the idea of having configuration as YAML files which are compiled into PHP and cached for subsequent requests, that said I still don’t see myself building a web-app which can handle 10,000,000 hits a day using that framework – in fact any generic framework has too much bloat to handle real high traffic.

Hmmm…. looks like the post has turned out to be more geeky than I intended

Disclaimer: My experience of building a web-app which can handle 10 million+ hits a day is restricted to exactly ONE and thats was almost entirely done using procedural programming. So none of the above might be true….

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

39 Today

Reading what I wrote a year ago – I appears as if I was sounding almost pessimistic!

Well lot has happened in the past year – mostly on the work front – SANIsoft. Despite everything (read that as people being head hunted / quitting ) I have managed to train a line of second in commands, guys who can take a project to completion once the architecture is decided upon. This leaves me to overlook the macro aspect of the projects without getting tied down by minor details like parse errors.

I have also been spending a lot of time reading other peoples code and learning, in turn improving the code quality with the main aim being to perfect reproducibility of programming and easy transferring of domain knowledge….

Hmmm… the previous sentence sounds awfully like some marketing crap – in real world terms it basically means that any team can take up the work of another with minimal problems and we can train new people much faster than what it took before – end result is that we are much more productive.

We matured from a Partnership to a Pvt. Ltd. though most of it is just legal paperwork, it does poise us for a ramp-up if we need to.

On personal front there were several small but satisfying things.

For the first time in we got ourselves a *new* car – A brilliant Yellow WagonR Vxi – of course I got a bigger kick when Swati agreed for putting a DVD player in it!

For the first time I joined a gym and am sticking with it well

Photography continues – though I am now photographing different kind of birds…

I got the best Birthday gift of all – a set of 31 Asterix and Obelix Comic books!

In retrospect – it still does not take much to keep me satisfied ;)

A blind date with Vultures

Long billed vultures

Sunday, 28th August, 5:55am – The phone rings, I spring out of bed, for once I had wished that it would indeed ring at this unearthly Sunday hour, voice at the other end said “Good Morning, 6:30?” I confirmed “Yes!” and kept the phone back in the cradle. By now Swati is up as well – “Raju?” she questioned, which elicited another “yes” from me. I was now out of the bed brushing teeth, Swati without a word brewed hot coffee for me (Did I thank you for that love? – Thanks anyways >:D<).

I double checked my camera, flash, lenses, batteries. Put in the bread and jam sandwiches into the rucksack along with 2 liters of drinking water. Raju arrived on dot at 6:30 on his mobike, I was wearing my shoes sitting at the doorstep. Swati quickly ascertained from him as to which direction we are heading… a soft goodbye and take care… we were off!

OK! let me put the things in context here. A few days earlier some birdwatchers had reported White-Rumped Vulture (Gyps bengalensis ) sightings in Nagpur district and we were told that it is just 50Km from the city. Raju had finally managed to extract the details – I don’t know why but the older bird-watchers are very reluctant to share knowledge >:P– of the location and that is where we were going. I am sure that if you are least bit interested in birds you will know that Vultures are fast disappearing from the Indian sub-continent and that our excitement was understandable.

We reached the first landmark village Umred about 45Kms fast enough and asked around. To our dismay we found that no one had seen or heard of Vultures being around for years… to further add to the disappointment we found that the next landmark village we were told about was in fact about 35Km further away instead of the wrongly reported 5 – the bright light at the end was the affirmation that the entire road was tarred and motor-able. Which indeed proved to be true, once again the when we reached the second village the actual site was still about 10Km and the description given to us matched to what the villagers described.

Our spirits perked up when after about 5Km we caught the first glimpse of the cliff we were supposed to reach. We were still in time despite being mislead about the distance. We ultimately reached near the base of the cliff at 9:15am, about 90Km from home.

Raju scanned the cliff face with his Binocs but I could spot 2 of the Vultures almost immediately with my naked eyes, Raju spotted 2 more – our excitement knew no bounds.

Even as I took out my camera we started walking up the hill to reach as near as we could. We knew we had just enough time with no room for errors – the air would soon be hot enough to generate thermals and the birds would glide out in search of food…

We took several pictures when suddenly Raju recalled that White-rumped Vultures preferred trees, besides these looked a bit different – so these had to be Long-billed Vultures (Gyps Indicus) and indeed he was as usual correct. At 9:45 they took to the air and it was then that we realised that there were actually 7 of these critically endangered birds!

With the birds gone we explored around the base of cliff and the cliff face a bit more. From the looks of it, Vultures have nested at the spot in the past and the numbers were probably much more.

We gobbled our breakfast while discussing how the spot can be further studied, interspersed with some lurid boyz jokes ;)

Since we had come this long and we still had time, we decided to climb to the top of the cliff and see for ourselves how the view looked for the Vultures… This was also a sort of personal triumph because I am a wee bit scared of climbing (note: climbing not heights 😉 )

We started back for Nagpur at around 12:00 noon and reached back by 2:00pm as promised to Swati – right in time for a lunch of finger licking good Chicken Korma. Aasim and Swati had invited some of his friends over with their mother for lunch….

Hmmm… may be more of her someday.

Signs of time

Crimson Rose

Another thing which I did for the first time in my life. I joined a gym! Yes, complete with a personal trainer and a nutritionist. No, I do not expect to be the next Arnie Baby, it became imperative due to the fact that self administered diet control and exercises were not enough to keep my lipid profile under control.

They have started me real slow and there are guarantees for no aches or pain but it did feel nice to be told that I do not look 40, perhaps a marketing ploy…

Yeah! I am *not* 40 yet but will be next year anyways – old men are sentimental right?

Anyways the work out was lots of fun and I do intend to stick to it specially given that Swati also goes to the same gym at the same time. Ah! you should have seen the crestfallen faces as she introduced me as her husband ;)

Colors

Click for bigger picture
Common Jezeabel

A whole lot of things are happening most of them good some not so good but overall I would say that life is  predominently colored eye soothing green like almost everything out here after the recent fury of rains. There are a lot of things to write but again the motivation to put it in the journal is lacking, I can fool myself and put it down to lack of time but it is not really that…

Photography continues but studio work has been restricted due to lack of time on Sundays… but yes I have been able to continue uploading pictures at NagpurBirds site and it as of today has 300 images. I am waiting for Swati to process some of her bird videos to put on the site.

Swati liked this picture of Common Jezebel butterfly very much, it was taken on a cloudy morning at f5.6/200th sec and a flash. Perhaps there were a few fine water drops on the lens giving the soft halo to some parts of the picture.

Retire at 7??

I was just about to retire from LJ when I read Life cycle of bloggers and then in succession how I might be in the trap of 7 combined with how to beat a writers block

So what am I doing – I am writing to beat my writers block and how I am not going to get embroiled in the trap of 7 by retiring from Live Journal

Damn! all these articles should come with a age rating, because by the time you reach my age you have long realised that there is no 10 but what is inside you and when things are to be done there is only one way – Put your head down start and finish it – also comes the enlightenment that the purpose in life is not to get things done BUT to do things which make you happy, I will further shorten that last statement and say that the purpose of life is to be happy – All your other actions follow from this peculiar tenet.

Wait! this is not so original as it may sound, some one very very great had almost the same thought and went ahead to find enlightenment beneath a tree! Is the net with its far reaching branches and roots the modern day equivalent of that tree by any chance?

Ha! what a thought… …

Hmmm, Like I said, old age, which I define as anything nearer to 40 years, does somethings to you – I already am feeling the urge to stop writing and doing something better like taking out my camera and clicking some pictures

Does a LiveJournal entry of about 280 words qualify as having beaten the writers block?

In the immortal words from the classic, “frankly…I dont give a damn.”