Vagaries

11:51 am - update

Travel update:

India vacation coming up from 31st May to 16th June. I'll mostly be in Bangalore.
Join in the parties if you'll be around.

One also desires to have a pythagonal road-trip, but it might be too difficult to pull
off given the tight schedule.

Running Update:
(thanks for the gentle reminders)

Six more runs since the last update:
- 3 3.5 miles runs around shoreline
- 1 3.5 mile stanford dish loop
- 1 3.5 mile San Aquino trail

The heatwave has moved all running to treadmill indoors since the past few days.
2 treadmill sessions. 5 miles each.
This activity is going to take a significant hit in the next few weeks. Refer travel update
above and other updates below.

Other updates:
 After weeks of Guitar Hero, finally  I'll lay it down to rest today and pick up the latest
toy I picked up from my fav local store in the morning. Wii Fit is finally here!! Can't
wait to get home and try it out. Will put out a review soon...

04:03 pm - Weekend run

Route: Shoreline, Mountain View
Distance: 3.8 miles (there and back) - mostly running.
Type: straight and flat, no slopes

Pedometer data here

09:55 am - Weekend Run

Route: Stanford Dish loop, Palo Alto
Distance: 3.6 miles (wam-up walking for the first incline and three quarters of the last mile)
Type: Hilly, steep inclines

Pedometer data here

09:33 am - re-run

After a long time I have started running again. My this year's aim is to get through two half-marathons. I'll be dumping my running logs here to get some open-source motivation. Do your bit and shout out once in a while if you don't see a run update for more than a week :)

Yesterday's log:
Route: Stevens Creek trail, Mountain View
Distance: 4.4 miles (there and back) with half a mile of walking.
Type: straight and flat, no slopes
Pedometer data here

Current Mood: cheerful

12:50 am - back, maybe

Contrary to the popular belief, I still ain't dead yet. Had not-so-good six months in the non-wired world but here seems to be some sense of normalcy in life again, at least for the time being.

Also completed 29 years of wasting oxygen. Somehow it feels better if I think of it as 27 years and 24 months.

So ... what all did I miss in the last 6 months?

Current Mood: calm

07:11 pm - Isn't it weird ...

... or at least a little surprising that Santa Clara county library owns 380 copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows?
Thats just the hardcover books, and doesn't include e-books and audiobooks.

Current Mood: amused

06:10 pm - Tarots

Today, I might go out and buy a set of tarot cards - a dragon(oh, I love dragons) or LoTR(love Hobbitses too) set.

You are The Sun

Happiness, Content, Joy.

The meanings for the Sun are fairly simple and consistent.

Young, healthy, new, fresh. The brain is working, things that were muddled come clear, everything falls into place, and everything seems to go your way.

The Sun is ruled by the Sun, of course. This is the light that comes after the long dark night, Apollo to the Moon's Diana. A positive card, it promises you your day in the sun. Glory, gain, triumph, pleasure, truth, success. As the moon symbolized inspiration from the unconscious, from dreams, this card symbolizes discoveries made fully consciousness and wide awake. You have an understanding and enjoyment of science and math, beautifully constructed music, carefully reasoned philosophy. It is a card of intellect, clarity of mind, and feelings of youthful energy.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

05:40 pm - another watch out

After Network World's top 10 listing, Byte and Switch puts 3Leaf in it top 10 storage virtualization companies to watch for!
very cool.

In other news, I am thinking about going to Burning Man next week. Still need a few more co-travelers to reach critical mass.

12:52 am - watch out ...

My company (3Leaf) features in Network World's list of top 10 virtualization companies to watch. Virtualization talks are appearing everywhere after VMware multi-billion IPO and an near-zero-revenue Xensource's half-a-billion buyout. But I also like this list  because of other companies on the list. I have worked with or been close to some of them and they have some neat solutions to offer.

It also feels nice to be slowly coming out of stealth and get a little sunshine.

01:03 am - yacss! (yet another customer support story)

Owing to the recent mail-theft fiasco, I ended up receiving some items twice. So I wrote to customer support of one of the big online
stores asking of a way to return back the extra item that I have NOT paid for. The response I get is that they are terribly sorry but they can't
 take it back  as I didn't make the return within 14 days of purchase.

I am not quite sure what to do next...

04:50 pm - Rock and Rockies update

The Indian Independence day reminded me that I didn't mention my second Rocky Mountains National Park trip on 4th of july. This time around we did a two day trek starting from Grand Lake, going over the flat top mountains, and finally ending at Bear lake. My friend and accomplice, the Theoretical Joker, put up an entry about it here.

Spent lot of July summertime in concerts ranging from Alka Yagnik/Kumar Sanu to Indian Ocean, String Cheese Incident, and Roger Waters.
Also caught a local presentation of Neil Simon play - they are playing our song - and a stand-up riot at San Jose Improv. All other days, I have been hiding in my cube working on obscure problems.

That's all for the updates since I have been gone from LJ world. Your turn now - what have you been up to?

12:45 am - The Case of Missing Mails

Last month, most of the packets left at my door by fedex/ups/dhl went missing. I do most of my shopping online and have been receiving
packages at my door all the time. But for all of last month, I'd get a mail notification that  a package has been delivered and when I got
home there won't be anything. Someone surely was stealing our packets!

  As the list of missing things piled up, aj and I decided to put up a hidden cam on our door and monitor all activity when we are away.
  A trip to Fry's made it clear that buying an actual spy camera that could be used in that position wasn't worth it, considering the chance
  of our scheme succeeding being so thin. It would be an utter waste to lose all our packages and a nice extra sum on useless cameras.
  At home, we spent a weekend taking apart my roomie's webcam and making it fit into an unnoticed little corner of a window overlooking
 the main gate. After a night full of design and debates, we finally got the rig all set. We were expecting another packet on Tuesday, so we
 did a dry run of our setup on Monday. Apart from a few glitches that we could easily fix, our setup was ready for the show - recording 6 GB
 of video stream of our door and the way leading up to it.

 As expected, we didn't find any package on returning home. Quick scroll of the video showed the UPS guy tucking  a package under our
 doormat. The next five suspenseful minutes were spent binary searching the video: there/gone/there/gone. And there was the culprit - one
 we (or atleast I suspected all along) - our neighbor's kid who has been hovering around a lot during the summer vacation.  All through the
 plan, we never actually believed that it'll work. But here it  was - our master shot - and we were ecstatic.

 I'll leave out the what-next debate details and the awkward encounter with the parents, and just say that we manage to get all our
 stuff back and the little adventure had a happy ending.

Current Mood: calm

12:49 am - music of the spheres

I have tons of small entries to make for all these days I have been away from LJ. Lets start with most recent first.
Last Friday, I and roomie went up to Lick Observatory to attend Kurt Ribak Trio concert at Mt Hamilton. The volunteers
at Lick observatory had told us about the shows when we went up there last winter. And when a half-priced ticket offer
landed up in my mailbox, it was just too good to resist. A trip up to Mt Hamilton alone is worth much more; especially
because they don't allow cars to go up after sunset, when the astronomers get to work. The view on Friday night was
fabulous - with san jose city lights (that's astronomy-friendly sodium lamps)  below and a clear night sky full of stars
and galaxies overhead.

The $18 ticket included the jazz concert by Kurt Ribak Trio, an astronomy lecture on big bang and origin of the universe, viewing of a ring nebula through the old 36 inch telescope, and a commemorative coffee mug ( We took mugs, other option were wine glasses). In addition to that, there were a bunch of amateur astronomers at the observatory with their expensive  shiny telescope, willing to show you whatever you wanted and patiently answering all questions.

- Kurt Ribak Trio: was awesome. Try out some of the songs at their site. Havana Gila and Tango Para Mi Padre are my favs from the show.
- 36 inches telescope: We also got to experience setting up of the telescope: the wooden floor is raised and dropped, and the
  dome goes around to place the slit above the telescope.
- Lecture on Big Bang was very basic but fun. And some of the simulations were really nice.
- The amateur folks with scoped were the best lot. We got to see Andromeda galaxy, A twin star system, messier 22 star cluster, saturn, and
   some other interesting bodies.

Oh, and later I found out that one Jeremy Zawodny was there at the show too - in the vip section though. Read his entry on the concert here.

All in all, one awesome Friday night! For anyone interested, there are a few more concerts coming up in the first week of September. Google for it.

12:25 am - life update

While the journal was gathering moss, I have:

- Managed to get a lot done at work. Though I am still not where I should be, but it could have been a lot worse.
- Spent many a nights at office and had many pizzas for dinner. Both me and my code have gained considerable bloat.
- Spent memorial day weekend at L.A. and San Diego. Much fun was had.
- Caught up with my SFF reading - Bujold's Cetaganda and Ethan of Athos, Simmon's Ilium, and RCW's Spin.
- Replaced songs with audio book in car and at gym. Half way through 'Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell'
- Settled down with my Treo and adjusted to its faults and shortcomings. Its hunger for batteries still keeps getting me in trouble.
- Attended A R Rahman's concert in Oakland. Great performers and extremely bad sound engineering.
- Decided to buy Wii. Still looking out for deals and packages. All ideas welcome.

10:40 am - razr no more

Having used Nokia phones for several years, it was really hard to adopt to my razr's unuser-friendly ways. And finally when I was getting a
hang of it, folks at office decided that I needed tracking round the clock and dumped a Palm Treo 750 on me. Its called a smart phone and
for the time being, its definitely outsmarting me (even though it runs a windows whatchamacallit).

Good part is that it comes with a 3G plan which, when enabled, might ease life a bit.

Current Mood: groggy

12:34 am - and so it ended ...

Back from rio and back to work. The trip was fun, but 5 days are way too short for all that can be done in rio alone. Definitely a place I am going to visit again. My Aus-NZ trip got canceled this week, so its a good thing that I stuck with my brazil plans. Oh, and no Aus-NZ also means that
some of you will be seeing me in sept-oct in India.

I also made a start towards learning portuguese on this trip. Hopefully it will go better than my previous attempts to learn french and mandarin.

Current Mood: lethargic

06:41 pm - and so it begins ...

Got tired at work, and decided to fly to rio de janeiro, brazil on impulse...
This is the most unplanned trip I have ever made. Let's see how it goes...

08:33 pm - mailing woes

I lost a few mails on my gmail a/c this week as exceeded my storage quota ( I am a popular guy). So, now I have to
spend some time deleting mails from the a/c that didn't even had a delete button a while back.

And this happens on the heels of Yahoo announcing its unlimited storage mailbox!

Current Mood: contemplative

02:42 am - Vitamin D, more vitamin D!

After spending a lifetime in my coding dungeon, I finally got a bit of sunlight on the weekend - thanks to some old friends visiting this part of the world. Much fun was had with long cacking sessions and roaming around. The fun finally culminated with Eric Clapton concert on Sunday night (while friends back in India were still high on Iron Maiden).

Back to the coding dungeon now. And 3 in the morning is not the best time to be updating journals :(

Current Mood: working

12:03 am - chess puzzle soln

Solution for 12/28 chess puzzle.

best time :
1st puzzle 12 min
2nd puzzle 10 min
best combined time: 27 min


Thanks to all who tried.


( chess-mess soln )

Current Mood: cheerful