So...that's that.

It's been ages since I wrote anything that did not end with a semi-colon. Excepting, of course, the e-mails that were follow-ups to things that ended with a semi-colon.

Life has been pretty mundane and normal - not something that goes down well with me, but then most of us don't have a choice. If we had our way we would probably want something radically different from what our respective lives are at the moment. I for one would like to have lots of fast cars, fancy sleek laptops (both the electronic variety and the other) and cocktails at breakfast, lunch and dinner. Then again, I am not James Bond or Vijay Mallaya. And, Mallaya has an airline and a yatch to boot.

Somethings are scary. And sometimes they screw up the head. I was at this party drinking beer and thinking about bootloaders and memory management looking and feeling totally lost and at home, like I normally do at any party. Then suddenly this cute woman whom I have been seeing walk in and out of my field of vision come to me.

[Afraid]

After getting done with the usual introductions and pointless things she proceeds to park herself next to me. By which time the people hanging around have vanished. At this point, I would like to make a point which is I don't know to handle women. Especially ones that are tipsy. Very tipsy. It was as this instant, I would at least like to believe, that a couple of nice ideas in my heads about how to optimize memory accesses and improve computing were forever lost to mankind.

[Scared]

" ______ has left you all alone and wandered off, eh?"

"Umm...yeah! But, that is normal. He does that very often but I am used to it."

"He is so frustrating. I just can't understand him! Argh...!"

"Umm... yeah. I write code for a living. I know how it feels."

That line did not have the required effect. The required effect being the are-you-completely-mad-or-hard-of-hearing-look.

"I dated him until last week. It was so frustrating..."

[Minor heart attack]

And she starts to sniffle and then cry. Now, mind you, I can't stand crying women. They are like Fermat's Last theorem - it is believed that a proof existed but it took a really clever guy to come up with a 200 page proof to actually prove it. And even then, someone found a couple of mistakes in it.

The enterprising and clever witted fellow that I am, I had a line for the occasion. Bang out of Pulp Fiction.

"It's ok. You can't really help it. Shit happens!"

She said something else which I didn't really catch, but it is something that I don't think was very nice. And then she went to get another beer for herself.

Now, this woman is really cute, intelligent and will be an investment banker someday. As they say, a bomb. I would have asked her out if I was someone else and wasn't furiously hunting for my little nitro-glycerine tablets.

My cousin, when I told her, thinks that I should have risen to the occasion and offered a shoulder to cry on. Been a gentleman and prised away the beer from her. Offered her comforting words and all. At least offered her a tissue. I was a fool, she said from her apartment in the USA. But in my defence, they did not teach me all this in college.

"When things go the way you want in Linux you kill the processes and start all over again. If you are using Windows, " my professor gave an evil laugh, " you are pretty much dead. You should switch off and switch on your machine and pray to God that you won't have to reformat and re-install Windows."


P.S: I am waiting for my electric mandolin. In a couple of weeks.

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2-L

Notice the cool Joe Satriani poster and the ultra-L cubicle number.

Umm...

Who says religion cannot be fun?

Dinner

There's a nice sparkling red-wine to go with the pasta - lasagna. Soft music plays in the background. The lighting is a little dim but just right - it doesn't intrude. The soup was magnificent, but what was worth remembering was her trying to blow on it to cool it down. She picks up the wine glass and swishes the wine inside. Her voice is music. Specially, when she tell me how much she is enjoying this. The wind brings with it the tangy smell of the sea. Dinner on a balcony, thirteen floors up facing the ocean isn't great. It's heaven. The waiter clears the plates unobtrusively and gets rich chocolate cake for desert. The chocolate cream sticks to her lips and her trying to get it off makes her look sexy as hell.









WTF? Stop dreaming.

"Swami, ondu masale!!!"

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Donnie Darko

Check out the spiked hair!

Stud macha

Photo blogging rocks.

Mobile photo blogging rocks.

Screw the chocolates

When Tom Hanks stuttered, "Life is like a box of chocolates...you never know what you are going to get next" it became something of a cool thing to say in a totally random situation. Cheesy maybe, but still it made others aware of the fact that you watched movies out of Hollywood. Heck, I've used it myself in interview when asked what life was about. The interviewer wasn't really kicked about this one and I did not get the job thankfully.

Right now, I could say my life is like a box of chocolates. Not Lindt or even Cadbury's but probably, a box of Campco or some other random local brand. The difference is that I know, one hundred percent, what I am going to get next - a lousy piece of sweetened and slightly gooey cocoa. And frankly, after twenty two years of eating sweetened and slightly gooey cocoa it stops being fun anymore. Even if it contained copious quantities of liquor.

A techie's life, I have realized of late, does not make interesting blogging fodder. If you think that a techie in Bangalore spends his time after office pub-hopping or partying, you would be wrong six times out of ten. And I, for your information, fall into the six.

The most interesting thing in my life usually involves successfully compiling code, making software images and making sure that they do not crash.
Then there is the occasional installation of a DVD writer or a new phone. This is is the part in self-help books where the author strongly suggests that you go out and meet new people. Socialize. Get a life.

Back in college I used to crib about life to anyone and everyone who would listen about how life sucked. Surprise surprise! LIFE DID NOT SUCK. Yeah, there generally wasn't enough water to clean up, proper clothes to wear and a hundred bucks was a princely sum. But, as is with everything in life, in retrospect, drinking cheap rum with colored water with a chemical taste that was passed off as cola while chewing on peanuts fried in oil of a very questionable nature and origin was a hell of a lot more fun. Walking in the dark along a beach with a raggedy bunch of friends that reeked of rotting fish beats walking around in a mall filled with very very pretty and possibly single women. Cribbing about not having air-conditioned labs in college is a damn sight better than being stuck in an air-conditioned lab at work where it just a shade above freezing.

I guess it is the company that matters. Colleagues are nowhere close to a substitute for hostelmates, classmates, batchmates and collegemates in that order. Right now, I am counting the hours to the night of 29th when I shall hopefully leave for a weekend to Suratkal. A weekend of simple pleasures that will put in perspective this highly materialistic life that I have started living. No doubt, it will make me feel like shit, but then like Tarantino constantly hammered it into his fans in Pulp Fiction - "Shit happens..."

This is dedicated to all that we had back then in college. I sorely miss them and you guys. This is to you wherever you are. It fuckin' rocked. Thank you so much for all the good times. Let's do it again one more time, all of us together!

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Stud

I got (what we baays like to call) a stud phone. Here is what the Sony Ericsson k550i looks like. It has loads of nifty features including a 2.0 megapixel Cybershot camera and this amazing slick slim look.

The best part of this new acquisition is that I can:

a)Listen to the shitloads of mp3s that I have at home

b)Not listen to some crappy radio channel on the bus ride

c)Listen to Radio Indigo which is bloody good. They, for a change, play proper rock. They also play shitty hip-hop and bubble-gum bullshit, but on the ride back home I can listen to some real neat shit. For instance, I got Poison(Every rose has its thorn), Pink Floyd(Coming back to life) and Aerosmith(Dude looks like a lady) back-to-back

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What is D---I---S---C---O?

It really doesn't getter any better than this. Which kid wouldn't want to be taught English by Mithun da. You have to absolutely check this one out!!!


P.S: Watch out for the ugly woman who screams, the bald man and the random four guitarists!!!ROTFL

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Why the F***?

I can't understand what the hell is so wrong with me. WHY THE F***?

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Nifty nifty shite.

My only reason for the hajaar crib about the antediluvian Red Hat 7.3 that I run on my system, was I couldn't upgrade to a fairly decent version of Firefox, say 1.5. Which leads to an inability to install ScribeFire. Which means I cannot post from work.

For those you have tried such a daring stunt throwing all caution to wind, you know what it is all about. And those of you who haven't - please don't try this at home! And lastly, if you did try and succeed please tell me how.

But, then, we use this nifty thing here called rdesktop which lets you connect to a decent Windows Server 2003 machine, where ... wait for it... there is Firefox 1.5. So, hence, now I have Scribe Fire and here is the first of many posts from my clunky Linux for your reading pleasure/displeasure.

P.S: Yesterday was a good day. Two things happened and I would be much obliged if you guys could all take a minute out, close you eyes, cross your fingers and pray for this techie's two plans to succeed. The thing is every time I try to drop the BigMan up there a line, it is either busy or out of reach. But, mostly, I suspect my calls are being blocked. Could you please route it your way?

Much obliged!!!

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Washed.

I still think the Aussies were lucky. Had it not rained, they would have gotten their collective rearsides kicked. Saved by the finicky Bangalore weather...


But, then again, 100 mein 99 beiyman, phir bhi mera Bharath mahan.



Addendum: We just let them win today. You know all the athithi devo bhava

What kind of shoe?

I can't figure out what kind of shoes go with jeans as well as a pair of formal trousers? Sneakers I already have. This question is part of my quest to look dashing, handsome, sexy. Or in one word - pseud.


P.S: I work out at the gym in office where I muck around with device drivers for a living.

P.P.S: Indian cricket is over-rated but it is still fun to watch.

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Of times long gone...

Books, Pizzas and a Ghazal

I hauled ass down to Brigade Road/Church Street today with an intention of blowing moolah on books that I have been eying for over a year now. It so happened that I had picked an excellent time on a Saturday to land up there. The fact that I was meeting a very pretty friend of mine and her boyfriend and various other friends for pizzas that she was buying (her birthday was last week) at one caused me to land up at an unearthly hour. Namely, 10:00 am on a Saturday morning. Owing to the Ganesh chaturthi the roads were empty - so much so - that it took me exactly 20 seconds to get across Residency road at the Brigade Road junction.

I started with Landmark, since they had posters outside screaming about a 70% sale. Inside, the only thing that had anything to do with a reduction in price was one free CD of things that are made for 3-year olds (who watch skimpily clad women) if you brought one CD of things that were made for 3-year olds. Somehow, the only things that were of interest were Douglas Hoffstader's Godel, Escher, Bach : The Eternal Golden Braid(Wiki link), a bunch of really awesome jazz CDs (John Coltrane,Chet Parker and the likes) and some cool and nifty Jansport bags that were obscenely expensive. The book I plan to buy later, the music I can download off the net and I'll settle for an decent imitation at one-tenth the price from National Market.

Thereafter, I stared at the pretty women walking around with idiot boyfriends who look like potential gay band-members of boy-friends. The only thing that I do not have that they have is a fat-wallet accompanied with an inclination to spend. And, of course, the pretty woman on the arm.

I eventually landed up at Blossoms which in the past I always entered mentally preparing to stop from looking at the graphic novels since I never had the money to buy one. It's kind of stupid to ask your dad for half-a-grand to buy a glassy comic. Most fathers who were born in the fifties in India and are accountants will disagree before you can say Frank Miller or Alan Moore. Now, thanks to Tejas Networks' belief that I am an asset to their organisation by way of a monthly pay-check, brought me my comic-book orgasm.

Yep! Frank Miller's "Batman: The Dark Knight Returns". At long last...my collection of graphic novels sees the light of day. Also Khaled Hosseni's The Kite Runner and Srividya Natarajan's No onion nor garlic. The last one was a random pick simply because it is a satire involving TamBrams in Chennai and so on. I've just started reading it and it is one scream, more, if you are a TamBram and you either live in Chennai or have made frequent visits to relatives who live there.

Reviews soon. The lunch was good. G was made to stand on a chair in the middle of Pizza Hut and then asked to tell everyone that it was her birthday and then all the staff sang for her. She was red and thoroughly embarrassed. Hell, her birthday was on the 9th. We all had a good laugh, including the boy-friend.

Listen to Hoshwalon ko khabar kya by Jagjit Singh from the movie Sarfarosh. The movie was brilliant, but this song is brillianter still. I am not a big fan of ghazals and metaphoric Urdu, but this one was explained to me by a Doctor of Chemistry somewhere in the middle of a snow-covered peak in the Himalayas at 13,000 feet. The last two lines are specially very nice (excuse the bad Urdu):

Hum labon se kah naa paaye unse hal-e-dil kabhi
Aur voh samjhe nahin yeh khaamoshi kya cheez hai.

Roughly, do correct me if I am wrong, it means that "I could never put in words and tell her what was in my heart, and she never understood what that silence meant". Awesome! Listen to this on Youtube here.

Have a lazy Sunday!!!

P.S: Thank God, they didn't know about yesterday. I think I would have fallen all the way through to the basement three floors lower - chair and all.

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Wisdom

The best of women are either taken or married. The ones that are taken are with absolute fools. That girl in Coffee Day last Saturday was with an idiot beyond description. I am sure he wouldn't have heard of Himmesh and if he has, then he is probably a fan.



Phucking Filistine!

Clarification aka fine print: I mean that he is probably so dumb that he hasn't a clue about Himmesh and , if he did know who Himmesh was, he is dumber still to be a fan. Sorry about the ambiguity!

Phuck!!! ROTFL!!!

Memories and a piece of black cloth.

I was flipping through on the IdiotBox a couple of hours ago and I chanced upon Mohra playing on one many Hindi movie channels.

For those of you who remember, this movie hit the screens in '94 and became some kind of a hit. There was Akki and there was Raveena( who by the way, I still think, is very very cute). This is one of my memories of Paresh Rawal's comic roles. I don't remember much about the story except that there was Akki playing cop, Raveena as the chick, Paresh as the side-kick comic relief and Sunil(back then he was still Sunil and not Suniel) Shetty trying very hard to hide when the spotlight shone upon him.

But, what I do clearly remember was the smash hit Tu cheez badi hai mast mast. This song became a rage overnight. Suddenly it was very very hip to tie a black cloth around your head and wear tacky dark sun-glasses. I have vague recollections of doing that with every piece of cloth I could find from towels to doormats. It was the next coolest thing to Batman/Superman cape for a 8-year-something boy. I think there was this girl in my class in Mumbai who wore a rip-off of the white dress that Raveena wears in that song on her birthday. Some of us guys thought it was cute - in a very kiddish way.

The song didn't really make any sense then, nor does it now. It is a song that Akki and Raveena sing to get into the baddie's night club to catch the baddie in the process of cutting a 'deal'. It is hopelessly glitzy in a cheap way, like most songs of that era. Countless dancers in lurid costumes shimmying around. Every second step is a pelvic thrust of some form and every third step is Raveena thrusting her assets in and out. Very sexy, but the dress, now that I think about it, was among the worst. Ever.

There was something so catchy about that song that we used to sing it in the bus on the way to school and back again. Another one of those kind of songs was Stop that starring Govinda. Sexy sexy was a number that everyone wanted to sing, but a lot of kids were told that it was bad word. We used to furtively sit in the last seat and huddle closely and sing that one, just to rebel.

On a tangent, Dhak Dhak karne laga from Beta is one of the sexiest Bollywood songs ever. It was so classy and yet so...hot! Madhuri is still hot, though she has an almost fake American accent after so long a stint in Denver.

And with that sweet note...Good night!


P.S: Here is the video. Bad quality, but still it's got sing-a-long-lyrics in Hindi. Check out the hips in the opening. ROTFL.

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Crib...!

Indian Idol : They might be good singers and hunks, but they get to hug Mini Mathur!

Arranged Marriages : WTF?



P.S: Even if I did make the next big operating system, or beat the shit out of Google, coders never get called to 'Koffee with Karan'. Thank God for these little technicalities.

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The post that would have been..

AWESOME!!!!






(Pity, I need to take a crap! NOW!)


P.S : The votes are in. Fungus wins with Shatry coming in a close second. Readership of blog = poriki/elebands group, formerly of NITK(formerly KREC).

Help

There are apparently somethings called "Callback registering mechanisms" and "Associated Event Handlers". There are also "Call back functions".

Somehow then, there are the "Interrupt Service Routines" or "ISR" for short that handle interrupts. They do this by taking snapshots of devices and then sending them up.

I can't figure how the f*** all this happens. At least , not clearly enough to say that, "Yeah...I get it!" So will someone please point me where I can find a simple and, yet, not too laymanish an explanation.


Remember, all this is happening with C and C++ and on Linux kernels.

Please, my a** is on the line!!!

Monday Blues

I installed the ScribeFire plugin for Firefox. It is pretty neat now, and has lots of bells and whistles. It's pretty much the only way to post now from office considering that SysAdmin does not allowing posting blogs or commenting on them. I can view blogs though.

The only hangup is that this is happening on Windows, which I rarely use. The Firefox on my Linux is a clunky old one. I am using RHL 7.3 fer crissakes. Simply because of compatibility issues. I have also discovered that rpms are not very nice if you are using KPackage. Hopelessly complicated and vexing. The damn thing cannot download dependencies itself and install. And this problem is recursive. I sorely miss my Kubuntu at home. Apt-get is such a breeze despite all it's clunkiness.

If you know of a better way to manage and install packages in RHL 7.3 please let me know.


P.S: Is there any way of changing the font renderer that older versions of Firefox use? The one on my Linux has the shittiest font-renderer. I can't read half the stuff that is on the screen.

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Saturday.

The weekend finally happened. Actually, as I write this, I am half-way through it. And, it was a nice weekend, considering that I closed my first PR on Friday evening and then did my first check-in into the CVS server. It wasn't anything great, but it sure was a good end to a slightly lousy week. I would go into the details, but that is about as interesting as Laloo's nostril hairs. It wouldn't be in the best interests to make a sincere attempt to reduce the already low readership that I seem to attract (or is that 'not attract' - since it's a negative and the negative of a negative in the sense of a positive?).

So, I hooked up with some friends and hit 'Downtown' on Residency road. We had some beers and then we walked it down to Blossom's. I had this irresistible urge to go and buy some graphic novels. The collection there is simple awesome. Specially, the Neil Gaiman Sandman series and the Batman: Return of the Dark Knight (by the maestro himself - Frank Miller). Also on the shelves were Hush and Hush returns. Despite not being as great an aficionado as Bhayak or AK, the shelf there gave me a little orgasm. Add to that a stack of Calvin and Hobbes on the side.

The prices are a little bit of a pinch. Specially, at the end of the month, when you try to figure out where that huge chunk of salary went. You look around - you still wearing the same old clothes that you have always remembered wearing, you still travel by bus, and most importantly, you are still hopelessly single. Where the f*** did all that money go?

The validity or the plausibility of being single and broke may be questioned by many, but I think I have an answer to that. Screw all the bra-burners and all. But, hang on to those tomatoes and eggs and slippers, ladies, at least for the moment - or till my next post.

All, that apart, I am looking for a copy of " Quidditch Through The Ages" or "Fantastic Beasts and where to find them" for my sister. Her birthday is in a few days. And something for my Dad. Suggestions are most welcome. But, please please, where in Bangalore could I possibly find those two books? Blossom's did not have them? Maybe I'll try Landmark or Crossword. If you do know where to find them, leave a comment here or drop me a mail at subbu.ubbus [at] gmail [dot] com. Much obliged.

On an aside, why aren't pretty women attracted to me? If you are the lovely lady with the red handbag/purse who travels each morning by the 8 am 500K Volvo bus, please, I would really like to speak to you over coffee. Or if you know here, tell her that I would like to speak to her over coffee. Much obliged, again.

Hello...Yet again.

As I once again prepare to unleash myself upon the blogosphere, with yet another blog, which I think is the right way to mark every stage in life, I am considering the worth of writing long sentences that border on being nonsensical.

It's been just over a month in the corporate world and specifically in the area of optical communication networks. My dreams, of late, involve successfully debugging embedded software, getting rid of glowing red LEDs and jacking card in and out of slots.

Work isn't bad, but it isn't Woodstock/Pecos either. All in all, the salary at the end of the month seems to make things look a little rosier. Or is it just the bloodshot eyes?

This is a new blog that will (cross fingers) attempt to locate a funny vein in the average techie's life, though at times venturing into regions streaked with a little darkness.

Catch you in a little while.