My Thoughts !

Its over. All hard work of the past few months is getting over. Last Saturday, we deployed our GUI in our production. It was a port of CGI-C++ GUI to JSP. There were two biggest challenges. First was not to touch the server code for any reason. The second was to reproduce all the functionalities of the existing GUI in the normal production cycle. The "normal production cycle" here was actually designed for fixing few IRs and CRs and sending the application to the clients. We wrote the entire GUI from scratch in this cycle. This was a Herculean task, still we managed it - of course with several sleepless nights and 90 hour weeks. Today is the first day in production. I'm sitting in the office and monitoring the process. Just in case if something goes wrong, we have to fix it. No much problems. Its going smooth. Have to sit during the night times and monitor for one week. OK. After that? The question remains unanswered. If more new functionalities are added in the GUI, then I might work on it or, if new work is coming for team, then I might get assigned to it, or I might shift to another team, which is looking for people with my skill set, or I might shift the company. Not sure of what I'm going to do. Waiting for my director from onsite to land here. Have some troubling questions to shoot at him. Then within 2 weeks I'll know what I'll be doing.

Watching sunrise from the beach is really a picturistic. I tried going to the Besant nagar & Thiruvanmiyur beaches. But it is crowded with people. People who come there for daily exercise, people who come there for jogging, people who come there for a fresh air and of course, people who come there to see the sunrise. Me, who hate crowd, switched to VGP. Its lonely and very clean. Even thought I've to travel 30 kms up & down to reach the beach, it has become my favourite beach to visit in the mornings. When Jai was here, he used to give company, but now I'm going there alone. Slowly getting used to it - thanks to my iPod.

I've had a variety of experiences at that beach. Whenever I go there, I park my bike and start walking near the waves and collect shells. Last saturday, after I collected a handful of shells, I came to my bike, put them on the petrol tank and went again to find more. When I returned with few more, I was surprised by an additional shell. It was very big and looking nice. I don't know who put it there, but it was cute :-) Long back, when I went with Jai, there were two chinese gals (might have stayed there in VGP resort) came to the beach in their bikini. We started walking towards them. They jumped in the water; collected some shells; brought back to the shore and went back to the water again. When we were nearing them, they removed their tops and kept it near the shells collected on the shore and then went to the water. Aha! Me and Jai was left speechless. We passed them and sat at a distance and enjoying the show. I've been there at the beach during the day of Tsunami too. A group of college students, who stayed in the resort, were also at the beach on that morning. It was a cloudy morning and the sunrise was not clearly visibile. The quake happened when I was travelling back home and the waves hit the shore around 9 AM. Hope those students have not gone near the sea at that time. Today when I went there, I saw a guy, who was dressed in full formals including good leather shoes. He sat in the sand near the waves, facing the sea and started meditating. I don't understand why he has to dress that way and I don't understand how he selected this place and this time for meditation. Hmmmm, people are just themselves!

What would someone think if they saw me? "What is this guy doing here? Alone; listening to some music with earphones; walking all along the shore; collecting something from the ground; sometimes standing & starring at the sea? Hmmmm, people are just themselves"?

This was shot with a good old Yashica Electro-35 and got scanned almost after an year. It taken was taken at Manali. It looks like Karthi was skiing thru the snow, but in reality, he was just posing for the camera :-)  

Now a days, I'm becoming very much absent minded. Should blame my work pressure & personal problems I guess. Things like losing bike key, losing the house key was happening for sometime. The peak was going to office without switching off the stove. I kept the milk vessel in the stove to heat it and completely forgot it. I locked the house and went to office. I knew it only when the security in our apartments told me when I returned by 11 pm. The milk completely dried out and the remains started of a fire inside the vessel. The flames were 3 feet high. Our neighbours noticed the fire and immediately told our apartment office. They quickly brought a ladder and reached our kitchen window and turned off the stove with a stick. The fire was then put off with an extinguisher. I was thinking how lucky. 4 feet above the left burner was the wood work for Aqua Guard & shelf and I used the right side burner. My neighbours were at home and they noticed the fire. The office persons were able to find a ladder.

Apart from losing a vessel, there was no damage at all - I thought. I was wrong. Terribly wrong. Somehow it created a mental barrier in me against using the stove. I stopped cooking! I couldn't overcome it for almost one and a half months. I know this is all bull shit and I have to come back to normal somehow. Few times I'd make up my mind; go near the stove to prepare coffee; stare it for 2 mins; and then come out of the kitchen. Even on weekends either we ordered food for lunch or Viv cooked. I didn't know how to come out of this. This friday, we were talking about the plan of going to Anu's house for lunch. She was not feeling well for the whole week and said we'll have next week. Then suddenly I did this. I invited her and everyone for a lunch on saturday. Dinesh, Chaithaya, Anu & Jo said they will be coming.

Today Viv went to office; Kich went home, so no one was at home. I bought vegetables, cleaned all vessels, and kept everything ready. But I couldn't start cooking. Jo & Anu came. I was talking to them and a parallel thread was running in my mind - should I ask them to cook? It was like getting into a cold river on a early morning of a winter. You know that the water will be freezing cold. You know that the moment you get into the water, you'll feel the chillness for a less than a minute and then you'll be fine. But still, you can't get into the water just like that. Thoughts will be running in your mind like should I swim or go back home and take a shower in hot water. With all these thoughts, at a fine moment, you'll close your eyes and dive into the water. For me, getting back to cooking was very much like this. With all my thoughts that I'm not going to make this time also, I lighted the stove and kept the cooker with dhal. Then I felt ha! thats it. The next one hour I was enjoying it. Yes! I'm cooking again. Yes! I'm cooking again. Yes! I'm cooking again.

I know that I'm not an invulnerable guy, at the same time I've expressed a good amount to mental strength a lot of times. Esp. when Hughes turned down the offer and left us jobless, I was surprised by the way I reacted to the situation, comparing to others. I was in Bangalore and seaching job. I was very particular about my job. I never wanted to enter a consultancy company and the nature of job I'm going to do was also important. To worsen the situation, after few months, my dad decided that its a waste of time and asked me to come back and join teacher training. I can't really blame him. Sitting in a remote village, all he knew was software industry is no more a prospective one after the dot com bust & 9/11 attacks. The ordeal lasted for 6 months and finally I got a job without sacrificing my job requirements. (Jobs infact. Got two offers at the same day evening) When I looked back how I was in the past 6 months, I've handled the situation pretty well. Back in those days I've even gone to an extend that Me and Ganesh were discussing the possibility of starting a corporate training center!

I don't understand this. If I can handle the darkest days of life so easily, what made me so weak that I can't handle this stupid just-nothing thing?

The rumor finally comes true ! After ditching Intel for several years for its chips performance compared to PowerPC ones, Apple is switching to Pentiums. One of the main reasons for the switch is IBM & Freescale, producers of PowerPC chips, were not able to meet the supply requirements of Apple. Additionally the heat generated by the latest PowerPC chips disqualify them to be used in Laptops. A Powerbook with G5 processor still does not exist. Backward compatibility? While M$ always tries to provide a backward compatibility to any extend (I remember when I was in College & .NET was introduced, one of the first experiments we did was to create an exe with C# and run it in a M$ DOS machine. Believe me, DOS was able to load that file and said, "Windows is required to run this program"!), Apple makes very bold decisions like this. They don't try to wear the Golden-Handcuffs called backward compatibility. They moved the hardware architecture in the late 80s. They drastically changed the OS and moved to BSD Unix kernel for the modern Mac OS. Now they switch the processors. Everytime they do a major change like this, they loose a small amount of customers, but then they do get new customers in a pretty much big number.

So what next? A M$ Windows with Vmware & Mac OS on top of it? Dell getting license from Apple to create Apple PCs with preloaded Mac OS & selling it? Code with Visual Studio and execute it on Mac OS? The arena is now open and fantastic things are yet to come. Lets wait. May be I'd be blogging from my brand new Mac in an year from now :-)

When we were coming back from Pondi, we stopped at some ECR beach. Sesh and Vikram were jumping and posing. Kalidas was shooting them with his Digicam. At a distance, I was sitting in the shade and talking with Satish & Bala. I was having his Camcorder. Just zoomed at them and clicking at them. Although there is no clarity, the picture looked good. Good contrast and a perfect timing.