Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Memories ..

The guys from my school days, Don Bosco High School Irinjalakuda Thrissur, had a small get together on the 26th of December 2008. I could not go because of the work here and most of my leaves are taken. I generally take 5 leaves at a go as travelling from Noida to Kerala with lesser number of leaves would be foolish. But after seeing the pics from the party bash they had, I wished I were there. To see all those faces, old ones but changed ones, were great. Some of them are here posted by Nikhil. Some of them are also in Jibi's/Jerils's Orkut Albums.

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

One hell of a day

This one I have to say was one of the worst days ever.

Gitesh gave me him iPod to format yesterday night. I was trying to get the thing done in iTunes, but the option never came up. The word format literally confused me and I started thining about formatting the whole drive. I did format the drive yesterday and today morning Gitesh told me that the iPod stoped working. He then later went on to an Apple iStore where he was told that nothing could be done. This meant that I had lost 16 k !

I went on to do my work not thinking of the iPod much, before I had got the call at about 3ish. I got stuck with some javascript that had to be done in the project. It took me 5 damn hours to figure out that XHTML does not allow element.innerHTML to be assigned. This meant that prototype and Yahoo tree will not work. This pissed me off.

Then came the shuttle matches. I generally go and play some for relief. And I get pretty mad when I play bad. Well I played very bad today. NO shots went right and I was furious.

Well that makes today a screwy day.

Thursday, December 18, 2008

Body Art

I always wanted a tattoo on my body. Not necessarily in a place which is viewable, but still on my body. I thought long and hard on what to have temporarily drawn. Long idealistic sentences, figures of angels and devils, or even some ones name. Then it struck me to have some thing techi. A barcode was the first thing that came into mind. Now I was searching for a suitable image. Some thing which also had a message. This image, I thought, was awesome.



We (I, KD, Srinath and Gitesh) went to GIP one saturday to check out this place where tattoos were done. They turned out to be temporary ones but the properitor also did permanent ones. So on sunday we went to sector 44 were he lived and got it made after two and a half hours of constant suffering. The pain was bearable but to sit on a chair with no shirt on while he tattooed it on my back (lower neck) in the cold weather was tough. It pained even after it was done and now it has started peeling. The layer starts to peel but the skin will still have the drawn picture.

It is awesome now.

Thursday, December 4, 2008

Tech Talks with a Geek

It was a long weekend for me this around. It was due to a meeting with a partner of ours. I thought it would be one of those guys who just know the stuff that he wants but is not willing to understand the complexities involved in the development of the project. This was just the second time the TEAM had asked something of this magnitude of me. What came up was something I had not expected. The person, I was told, was a very technical person. The first thing that struck my mind was that I could have a same language thing going on here and that could be beneficial.

The person was meant to be Luke Hohmann. An agile enthusiast, a pro developer and an excellent orator. I was lucky to have an opportunity to meet and talk 'techi' stuff with him. I was also interested knowing that he had Martin Fowler as a close friend, a person whom I admire. It is very rare that you will find people who have a passion for technology, any technology, and have experimented with almost all the stuff out there. He is now venturing on a territory which os very interesting but fruitful called Innovation Games in Enthiosys.

The technique that Luke uses to convey a message is also very striking. He puts forward the questions 'why, when, where, how and who' and tries to answer them. These being the only types of questions, it makes it very logical to ascertain the validity of a message. His knowledge of human psychology and statistics is an added gain. I also liked the statement that he passes quite frequently 'Its a bitch !'.

I dont think I would be able to meet a mind like his.