Mission 2013

Do For Sure
-----------------------

1. Now that I am at a company and team of my choice, work really really hard.

2. Regular and hard gym schedule, first get back to May 2012 shape and then go beyond.

3. Buy a Kindle and read more.

4. Visit at least one new country, hopefully for a vacation.


Maybe
-----------------------

1. Start a three month no alcohol regime on 1st Jan 2013.

2. Spend at least two hours a week with my Playstation.

3. Make at least two safe investments.

4. Bring back the college days and grow my hair long, like really long. Maybe even the beard though Hyderabad doesn't seem to have the weather for a beard.


Outrageous
-----------------------

1. Join a self defense class.

2. Try learning a musical instrument on my own.

3. Move to VimDiff from Araxis Merge.

4. Truthfully complete at least one Salman Rushdie Novel

Back

I am back at Mothership, now just need to get back to motherland.

Ciao ...

The Dark Knight Rises recap and review

================================SPOILER ALERT - This entry is a complete spoiler if you have not seen the movie, but then if you have not seen it already then you are not really a Batman or Nolan fan and you may as well read it. ==========================================


The first scene of the movie is absolutely mind blowing, a big plane on top of a small plane, people jumping out of the big plane onto the small plane and ultimately crashing the small plane, it is all very much Nolan like unbelievable unprecedented and yet looks as realistic as it ever can get. From here on it is all Dark Knight like where Bruce Wayne is lured back from leaving his dull life as a super rich eccentric billionaire to once again cleaning up the underbelly of Gotham.

The first scene where Batman shows up is quite awesome too, it happens in the middle of a chase sequence and at that point you are too busy comprehending the persona and raw magnetism of Bane, you are just not expecting Batman in that part of the movie and suddenly the lights go off in the underground motorway and the theme of the music changes from automobile sounds to BATMAN music and for the next five seconds all you hear is the cheers from the other people watching the movie along with you even more so if there are batman fanatics and fanboys around.

The music of the movie is extremely good, Hans Zimmer is at his usual best, every chase sequence, every build up, every twist and every sighting of the dark knight is accompanied with equally engrossing and apt music themes in the background. Then right around the half time of the movie is the one on one fight between Batman and Bane which again has been done very much in the "The Dark Knight"  fashion. Through out the movie The Dark Knight Joker seems to be on top of things and the audience seem to think that this time around the Batman is definitely going to loose to the Joker but the vigilante always comes on top in each of those instance. Not so much with Bane, Bane is just too big and raw for the Batman, in the one on one fight Batman's supremacy is crushed to death and the body left to rot with a broken backbone. In my honest opinion this is the best scene of the movie, Nolan has put it as majestically and as "dark knightly" as possible.

Up until the end of the scene of the game of  American football everything is well thought, well written, well planned and well executed just the usual Nolan way. But that is when the dark knight movie from Nolan ends and Batman from DC Comics begins and of course it gets all shitty and childish. A nuclear bomb/reactor of the size of a car, batman and bane cheap-fighting on the streets in broad daylight, Gordon running behind trucks like a Bollywood movie, are you freaking kidding me. All of it seems so lame, so shallow and so NOT  Dark Knight like. It is like suddenly some dumbass from the studio started making the movie instead of the mighty and the great. The ending is even more pathetic, it seems to be written for one and one purpose only, so that DC Comics and the the movie studio can make more movies and mint more money. Nolan I am begging on my knees please release an alternate ending in the DVDs/Blu-Ray of TDKR.

Nolan's movies have one particular aspect about their endings, they will make you think "Oh fack, now I will have to watch it again". Not so with TDKR, I have already seen it twice and even on the second watch I did not find anything new, to be honest after the Bane and Batman fight scene I felt the movie was such a drag, though to be fair to Hans Zimmer just the background score is enough to keep you glued to your seats till the very end of credits.

In all I am not sure of the word extremely but I am sure of the word disappointed for at least the last quarter of  TDKR.

First 3/4 Good to Amazing
Last 1/4  Disappointing to Lame.


Ciao

It has begun

I think this is where it will start to go all downhill for the foreseeable future.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18993308

With Facebook expected to come up with disappointing numbers in it's quarterly results on Thursday I think the time has come for Silicon Valley to take a hit just like I thought here


Ciao.

Attitude

I don't need your attitude, I have one of my own.

Master Card

Flight Tickets to Copenhagen - www INR

Chicken Club Sandwich - xxx SEK

Coffee at Starbucks - yyy SEK

Hotel Room with a view - zzz SEK

Cab with that big a moon-roof - vvv SEK

Walking alone on European streets at 11AM in 18 degree Celsius - PRICELESS




Ciao


P.S. Best Euro-trip ever :)

Never call me Lucky

He worked by day

And toiled by night.

He gave up play

And some delight.

Dry books he read,

New things to learn.

And forged ahead,

Success to earn.

He plodded on with

Faith and pluck;

And when he won,

Men called it luck.

A few days back someone mentioned it to me that I have been "lucky" in life for some of my experiences and I did not like it one bit to be stamped with such an abuse, never tell a Capricorn boy that he is lucky. I have earned and deserved (Hell, I have bled for some of it) every bit of joy, each feeling of despair, all my experiences, every single achievement, various rejections, every half and full-blown kiss, even my failures and before I use it I will make myself worthy of my inheritance too.


Ciao

New Finds

Tonight in Babylon (Acoustic version) - Bryan Adams

Contrary to my expectations and even at this age he keeps coming up with good songs. Somehow I like the acoustic version better than the original.

Breath of Life - Florence & The Machine (OST Snowhite and the Huntsman)

I have come far in life

From 16 MB of RAM on my first desktop PC to TBs of Hard drives.

From a bike to a car to an office bus.

From failing VHDL exam to debugging HW bugs (I am a SW guy).

From waking up at 2 PM to leaving home at 6.50 AM for work.

From spending all I had in my pocket before the end of the month to saving 90% of my salary.

From hogging on Butter Chicken and Coke to mocking people who take two servings of dessert.

From waist 28 (60Kg) to 32 (75Kg) to 30 (65Kg).

From Friends to The Big Bang Theory.

From an Apartment with a view to a work cubicle with bugs and rodents.

From Janak Puri to 3 continents (3 more to go, not interested in Antarctica)

From Hangovers to Protein shakes.

I wish someday I could justifiably write a blog entry "I have come higher in life".

Confessions of a lucky son

Mum - It's Friday night, we are having a beer night, right?

Me - Moooooommmmmmmmm, I am not really in the mood tonight. I have to go to the gym too.

Mum - But you had promised for today.

Me - I had promised for Sunday, Sunday is when the gym is closed.

Mum - Sunday was shopping and dinner out day, today was Beer night.

Me - Mummmmmyyyyyyy.

Mum - Get it from the shop on your way to the gym and let's have it after gym.

Me - Ok (reluctantly)

15 Minutes later at the liquor store I see a board with the notice that the liquor store is closed over the weekend for three days due to municipal elections in the city and I am like YESSSS, god listens to me :)

Sounds so made up but this really happened to me today at home with my mum, and no my mom is not even an occasional drinker, she drinks like once in six months. Once in a while mum is really cool about everything in life. Lucky me :)


Ciao

Hell has broken loose

Mark Zuckerberg is a genius businessman. I admire him for his business acumen, you don't get to be a billionaire in less than ten years without business acumen (ahem deceit). Though I must say it aloud I hate businessmen simply because in the world of business even more so in the capitalist world of business everything is driven by the fundamental principle of greed.

Instagram for 1,000,000,000$?
It is just an application for phones, till two minutes ago it worked only on IOS. I am of the opinion that MZ did not really make this purchase for the right reasons, FB does not really need Instagram, Instagram in itself is not worth even 10% of the price actually paid for it, Instagram was taking pictures to FB anyways so facebook din't need it so badly either. Even as an application Instagram is so ordinary, personally the only thing I find great about it is its name. Kudos to the creators for coming up with the name, I think the name has won them this lottery of countless zeros after that 1.

Coming back to the point of hell and breaking loose, MZ has made this expenditure just to eradicate all innovation and competition in Social Networking (Computer Science of this decade) in the swiftest possible way. I say Social Networking since sadly as of today almost 80% of all innovation and development in Computer Science is either Social Networking itself or directly related to it. All this deal has done is made that bubble the biggest it possibly could get, now it just needs a prick from the outside and entrepreneurs, VCs and the rest of the business world will be running scared to recover their investments, hell they would want profits too. No matter how many diamonds you find in the valley the number of $$$ bills is the same in the treasury. I am too young and amateur to make such a statement but I think in 9-18 months from now Silicon Valley will be at its feet begging the government for a bailout, bulls will have made their money, MZ would still be the king of his empire but thousands of Engineers will have lost their jobs and inflated salaries. Hundreds of Comp Sc fresh graduates will be staring at a horror of a beginning to their careers and once again the gold rush of San Francisco will come to an abrupt and untimely end. This one will not just only be about money, this will be a big setback to Engineering and technology as a whole, every innovation in the world of software engineering will come to a halt for at least a year, and this is 21st century, time moves faster now than it did in the days of Da Vinci, one year of wasted time will be a setback to a complete generation of technology and people.

I sincerely hope for all the selfish and personal reasons that this does not happen but I cannot see how it will not happen.

Ciao

Table Tennis

After years, i don't even know how many i played table tennis today and that too with Mark 5 rubbers, havent felt so great in months.

Ciao

Woooowwwwwwwwww

I must confess being at home for most part of the last week had made me feel lonely in my bachelorhood. But GOD came to rescue me and clear all my doubts. :)


Girls Described in detail

Thank you God.

Ciao

Bedridden

Since Friday night I have had a terrible sprain in my lower back, to the extent where on Saturday morning it took me literally 5 minutes from getting out of my bed and reaching the door to the bathroom. In the process I had to crawl on my knees, hold onto anything that I could and use the strength of my thighs and arms to the limit to lift my body weight. Thanks to the support belt and pain killers it has got better since then but I still can only sit for 15-20 minutes in one stretch, can only lie on my side and it takes around twenty seconds to stand up from any other position.

I don't even know why I got the sprain in the first place, Friday in the gym was like no weights day, just free training and some sit-ups for the abs. But as soon as I bent for the first time in the shower I could not stand up again, I had to stay on the floor for some time before I was able to get up again. And then one hell of a night began where despite a pain killer I could not sleep all night, any orientation was aching like a b**ch.

Anyways now that I am at home for a considerable number of days I have decided that I am going to catch up on the umpteen number of things that were getting pushed back due to high intensity regime at work for the last three months or so. The list of things I wanna complete before I am fit and fine again are,

1. Update the music collection on my Iphone, I am using like 2 gigs of space on my 32GB device.
2. Perfect my use of vimdiff with files and folders and say bye bye to Araxis merge for the sake of honesty and integrity.
3. Read my FreeBSD text book, at least 2-3 chapters.
4. Read in part one of the pending novels from my bookshelf.


Ciao

World of Catch-up

The mobile phone industry has become a universe where every major vendor is playing catch up with at least one other competitor vendor, and of course every vendor is playing catch up with Apple and IPhone. For instance look at Google's hurried and shallow effort of competing with Siri, I admire Google for a lot of things but they need to stop with this tendency of launching and maintaining products in beta mode forever. Information technology industry is not in its infancy anymore, Google needs to realize that and change its Modus Operandi.

Companies like HTC and Samsung also need to realize that their time to market strategies will not win them market share forever, sooner or later they will need to come up with true innovations to maintain sales numbers in the long haul. That is how Nokia did it in the nineties, though they too were limited to innovating hardware and aesthetics, at least those were the innovations that were accepted by the market. Sure they tried Symbian, engage and what not but none of them were really worthy enough in the first place. One fine day came Apple and changed the rules of the game, it was no longer about the phone, what mattered most was the ecosystem. In one stroke of genius (years of R&D too) Nokia's dominance was reduced to a frightened and sinking ahip. Anyways all this was not my motivation when I thought about writing this post.

Has anybody noticed that this mobile phone boom has brought a new trend to the industry, the current flagship product is introduced by the company's CEO to the whole world, and my first reaction to this trend is " How can these CEOs be so damn stupid and naive". Yeah sure it worked for Steve Jobs but that is only because he was so good at it, he believed in his products and he believed only because he had such a big part to play in designing these products. I have seen so many product launch presentations in the last three years from various CEOs and each one of them (Barring Jobs of course) has stinked worse than a stale fish. Even Tim Cook's presentaion of IPhone 4S was barely a malformed shadow of Steve's cultivated salesmanship. Every time I reach the end of a product launch by a CEO I am already half demotivated of even considering the product. SJ gave a lot of good to the technology industry but I think this was his sly joke to get even for all the bad the industry did to him. As if he is looking from the heavens and saying "Right, top that", and he knows noone ever will since all these CEOs are not salesmen, they are rich and learned men trying to sell products they don't really believe in or care about, all they care about is sales numbers. Of course, they fail at it miserably, that is what happens when you imitate competition blatantly. You don't win a boxing match by wearing same trunks as your opponent, you win it by training harder than your opponent and using your head better than your opponent.

Don't try to imitate SJ, instead learn from his philosphy of never playing catch up with competition. Do your own thing and try to perfect it with each iteration.


Ciao

Relaxed and Rejuvenated

I am back from my vacation/bachelor's party (for a friend) and all pumped up for 2012.

The high points of the vacation were,

1. Arambol beach, it felt divine to be on this beach. With less than hundred people around, a really affordable shack, fantastic weather and cool fireworks it was THE MOMENT of the whole vacation.

2. I read the book The sense of an Ending on my way back to Delhi. I do read books for leisure and recreation from time to time but I can easily say this is the best book I have ever read. If Da Vinci Code was like 12 hour long s*x romp of thrills and mystery then this book was like 5 hour long foreplay of life and feelings, tingling and memory worthy page after page.

3. Experiencing Lust, betrayal, Gerascophobia and Peace. (in that order and each catalyzed by a distinct person, I know it sounds cliched)

4. Fastest kiss of my life ( <20 minutes into the meeting), though it might not have been won absolutely fairly.

The vacation was very different than what I had anticipated or hoped for and I liked the version that happened to me much better. These five days helped me realize so much more about life and for a change it came through external sources. Usually I introspect and live my life based on what I learn from the introspection and don't really care much for the world around me, of course it is way too self-centered but then that is how I am, I call it Individualism.

2011 had made me realize I was doing just fine (maybe even great) being single, I think life is simpler when I am single. I get to make all the decisions based on what I want and how I feel in that moment of time, neither am I dependent on anybody nor do I have to think of dependence of others on me and I like both those aspects individually as well as a combo. It is also not just about freedom, the very technology I develop (Mobile Phone) should definitely get some of the blame for making me averse to all this relationship business, the concept of constantly being-in-touch over text messages and Skype irritates me and for sure I cannot do that anymore. However I have realized or been made to realize I will be very very alone soon enough and at the same time I am also not ready to give up my well cultivated go-solo attitude. The conclusion of realization being that friends will neither be there nor be enough forever, so the only unanswered question as of now is "WHEN and with WHOM?".

Enough about companionship, the five days also proved to me trust and leverage are as fickle as an infant child. The best of your friends will betray you and the worst of the strangers will surprise you with kind acts and that is life so no point complaining about the bad, take each day as it comes and try to be as happy as possible for the good. It is really stupid to give up on somebody for one bad mistake when you have been with them for years treading life in a "happily ever after" mode and no I am not talking about an ex-girlfriend. Sometimes it is better to loose a battle to win the war.

I expect this vacation experience will alter my way of life in a significant and important manner and it all started with one simple question from my friend on the eve of my birthday,the question was something like "What were my biggest moments between 8th Jan 2011 and 8th Jan 2012". After answering the question I realized the moments that had mattered (since they came first to thought and recollection process) had nothing to do with my biggest achievements (in the traditional sense of the meaning of the word achievement) of the year, instead it had everything to do with the smallest of experiences and most innate of feelings. To be perfectly honest I completely surprised my own self with those answers and I am sure I was not even drunk by then ;), FYI in my day to day life all I talk about is technology, ambition, money and of course pretty girls.

A picture of me and my friends from the beach,




Work oh work I am back to embrace you for the rest of the year.

Ciao

2012 starts with GOA

I must confess 2011 was a better year than what I had expected it to be, though I had very moderate expectations to begin with. It was not one of my best years but for sure it could have been worse. Career wise I made a few ripples, got to work on a couple of exciting projects. Personal life wise I am where I was at the end of 2010 i.e. nowhere, but that is absolutely fine with me for now. Home and family wise everything is calm and peaceful, all in all I would label 2011 as my best year in the last three years. Thank you god for this breather after 2009 and 2010.

A couple of my friends asked me about my new year resolution and after some thought I could only come up with the most obvious one, getting back to where I belong in my career (as of now I am a few thousand miles away :D ).

As a custom I have stayed indoors for the night of 31st Dec three years in a row now and 2012 was started the same way. Nevertheless January has to be made happening and so tonight I am heading to Goa for five days of vacation :) .

May 2012 be the year where the world finally starts to move towards peace and prosperity.

Ciao