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Valentines Day

admin — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 04:23:39 +0000

[ Mood: Confused ]
I wonder why all these hotels and gift shops and jewellers and boutiques and restaurants and florists and card shops and holiday resorts and pubs and discothques and mobile phone companies want me to give THEM money so that I can tell MY valentine that I love her.

Raghu

Im just gonna get some candles

This one is for the Belgian

admin — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 18:29:59 +0000

It is with disappointment that I read that the Belgian Grand Prix might be removed from this year’s Formula 1 calendar.

Belgian Grand Prix at Spa Francorchamps, nestled among the mountains, is both spectacular and emotive. The Monaco GP might be more glamorous, but the Belgian is definitely the true driver’s circuit and has produced some of the most brilliant racing moments. The best of them all being Mika’s stunning pass of MS in the closing stages of the 2000 GP. That is arguable the greatest overtaking manoeuvre of all time, even hard core MS fans would agree.

Look at the accompanying picture, taken by one of the greatest sports photographer and you can see why this ciruit is special. It has been taken from close to the Eau Rouge, a corner thats truely breathtaking and a favourite among the specatators.

Taking this curve at full throttle seperates the men from the boys and what makes it daunting is the fact that, as you approach the curve uphill, you cant see the exit. The better drivers take it at around 300 kmph absolutely flat out, with hardly a hint of a lift.

The weather can, and often does, play a big part in making this a great circuit and due to regional weather conditions, it can be wet in one part of the circuit while being bone dry in the other, a pit stragist’s nightmare.

Somehow, the calendar feels odd in the absence of this great one.

Raghu

Classy and old-world

admin — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 07:27:37 +0000

[ Mood: Happy ]
My wife and I went all over town yesterday looking for a wall piece that could act as a TV cabinet cum show case. The first sentence also disproves G.Rajesh’s theory that I start all my blogs with “My wife and I decided to take my 2 1/2 year old daughter Netra to…… “. We dint take Netra along since we were actually planning to BUY furniture and not BREAK AND PAY for it.

We visited Style Spa (On the higher side but very contemporary and stylish. Sharp lines and cool veneers), JFA (really loud furniture ideally suited for tele serials - if you like beds with hugely patterned head board in WHITE color, then you should go there). Kian and Furniturewala (both of them specialize in and succeed in making average folks {like me} feel is peasants - you are talking REALLY expensive stuff here). Jokes apart, both these places have some really stunning stuff, its just that it was way beyond my budget. I would seriouly buy furniture from these places immediately after I buy that Irish castle that Ive set my eyes on. Ekbote (no great shakes personally).

Now coming to the best part, Woodpecker in Besant Nagar. This place stocks amazing stuff at prices that make you take notice (more so if you have just stepped out from Kian or Furniturewala). We absolutely fell in love with a classy piece with an old-world look (at least I thought it was classy with an old-world look) that was just within our budget (interestingly, I dont like to get too much WITHIN my budget - yes, you heard me right. if I planned to spend Rs.10000/- on something, its unlikely I’ll buy something for Rs.4000/-. I rarely go much beyond my budget), which we settled on after the customary bargaining.

A piece from Style Spa was a close second, but as the saying goes second place makes you first of the losers.

Cheers

Raghu

Swimming and Baywatch

admin — Mon, 05 Sep 2005 12:57:32 +0000

Last weekend, my wife and I decided to take my 2 1/2 year old daughter, Netra for a swim. The idea was to show her a good time and parallely introduce her to the crutial life-saving skill of swimming which is also a great exercise.

If you watch Baywatch (”watch baywatch”, interesting pun that, eh?) as often as I do, you will realize that the people in baywatch have 2 things in common. 1. They have terrific bodies and 2. They are excellent swimmers (the third thing is that they all seem to have remarkably low level of IQ). I agree that very few people watch baywatch for the swimming part, but thats beside the point.

Now I am not going to mislead you by saying that point 2 caused point 1. The people in baywatch have terrific bodies because the director of baywatch hired such people to play the roles, though I suspect David Hasselhoff is old enough to be Pam’s great grand father. This way, David is very similar to our local heroes who get paired with heroines less than half their age.

Coming back, Netra was initially very excited about splashing around in a huge pool (about 3 feet deep), but her initial euphoria soon evaporate when she realized that her foot wouldnt even touch the floor and she had to hang around my neck to stay clear. However, she soon recovered and had a “whale of a time” splashing water on my face while clinging on to my neck with one hand (kids have strange ways of displaying gratitude) and doubled up with joy when I pretended to cringe and get hassled.

NetFlow team in Queensland

admin — Tue, 16 Aug 2005 09:35:35 +0000

[ Mood: Amused ]
The NetFlow Analyzer team went to Queensland for an all-day team treat on Friday, ably coordinated by our Chief Treat Officer, Rajeshwar.

Queensland is a theme park and the theme is “strapped in various objects and jolted around violently at high speeds until your brains are vibrating like jelly”. Some of the rides are really scary and its surprising no one has got seriously injured so far. I personally sat out a couple of rides citing “upset stomach”. To a casual observer, it might have appeared that I was chickening out. As it is the case usually, the casual observers were right. I WAS chickening out. I mean, if the Good Lord had wanted us to be jolted around at high speeds, HE would not have given us bones. It is a lot of fun to sit around and watch people as they come out of these rides, tottering as though they have been hitting the bottle hard.

The Crazy Horse (which started briskly with the famous MGR number, “Achcham enbadu madamayada̶ soon had me clinging on to the horse (not a real one thankfully) desperately. The horse’s sole ambition in life seemed to be to hurl me down and make me the laughing stock of the people who gather around to watch the clumsy ones. Makes you feel glad that we have automobiles these days and we dont have to rely on horses to get around. But still, I think they should have given it a more appropriate name.

However, our team’s Jhansi Rani, Shuba and Anu enjoyed every bit of each ride and screamed for more. Jawahar was his quite self all the time, but something tells me that hes got a very wild side, yet undiscovered at

AdventNet. He just gives a knowing smile when probed deeper.

Gerald was a big hit with a bevy of school girls who had come there on an excusion. Such was Gerald’s popularity rating that Shah Rukh Khan might have felt neglected in this crowd. At several points we had to form a human chain around him to protect him from over enthusiastic “fans”.

But the quote of the day easily belonged to Senthil who, after a particularly “spinning” ride, wanted to know why we ran all our demos in Debian. Is it because it is more stable??

Stable!!!!!!!!

Vada and the news for the common man

admin — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 04:17:47 +0000

[ Mood: Amused ]
Our President Abdul Kalam is in Iceland and the first news I saw about his visit was this, “Kalam has vada sambar in Iceland, and likes it”.

This is news for the common man (and Im as common as men come). Not for us, the economic policies, the bilateral relations, the trade embargos, the arms race and other boring stuff that these high level diplomats are known to discuss.

What we like to hear is something we can readily “identify” with.

Vada-sambar is easy to identify with.

Even when Clinton was in India, there was a lot of noise about what he ate at whereever-he-was-staying. “Even the way he scooped the dhal makhni with the tandoori roti was very original”, a daily quoted.

To end, Im just going to quote our President, “Eat vada, it is very nice. Also have some sambar, you will love it,”

Cheers

Raghu

Weekend at the zoo

admin — Mon, 09 May 2005 09:24:54 +0000

Over the weekend, my wife and I decided to take my 2 1/2 year old daughter Netra on an “educational” trip to the Zoo. These insane urges occur in parents on and off and are usually thankfully ignored. But in some rare cases, these are actually put into action.

The morning weather which was very nice IMMEDIATELY turned very hot, the moment we called the “call taxi”. Never the one to “take the back-step after I have taken the front-step”, I decided to push ahead and do the trip anyway.

All along the way, we tried to explain to her in animated ways that she would get to see Lions and Tigers and Elephants. She has seen them in picture books and already knows how they “shout” and so it only seemed logical that she would be damn excited to actually see those animals shouting.

It turns out that the zoo is in Vandalur which is, well, very far away and when we reached there, it seemed as though Vandalur was the hottest place in India. It was also so crowded that I suspect that every single person from Chennai was in Vandalur (along with several of their visiting relatives).

To be fair, the zoo has a lot of animals and birds. There are even several species of Cockatoos. This was a great educational experience for ME. Here I was 34 years into my life and havent even heard of a bird called Cockatoos and in a matter of minutes I get introduced to 3 species of Cocktoos (The Great, The Lesser and I forgot the third). This was a major culture-shock (though I must say I dealt with it well).

The zoo authorities have the animals in really HUGE enclosures and these animals I must say are not the exhibisionist kind. They just lie around in a corner quite unmindful of the major proportion of Chennai population who had come there just to SEE them. The crocodiles were particularly bad. They just LIE there doing nothing, mouths open, as though they had been drinking and playing cards for several nights. Watching crocodiles cant be the most exciting hobby in life. And tortoises seem so dumb that many of them routinely starve to death when food is just a few foot away. (I hope I dont get irate mails from animal lovers - Im just trying to explain how I tried to educate my daughter. OK???)

As far as Netra, she was more interested in watching the other children and trying to shake their hands than on finding out how lions shout. We would routinely go near a huge enclosure which had a tiger and point to something near Andhra border and say, “Netra!!! Look at that. A TIGER” and she would repond with a “Grrr”.

I got a fair idea of the amount of educating she had got when I pointed to a far far away bison and asked her, “Netra, do you see the bison”??? and she replied with a straight face (shes too young for sacrasm), “Yes.. on top of the tree”.

We intend to take her again to the zoo when she attains a more appropriate age, like 15 when kids would rather be shot than seen going out with their parents.

Channa Masala and creativity

admin — Tue, 29 Mar 2005 06:50:05 +0000

[ Mood: Angelic ]
Cooking makes me feel creative. I say that because I read that phrase somewhere and it sounded cool. No, I mean seriously, it does make me feel creative. Just this morning in a surgical cooking strike so blindingly

fast you would need slow-motion replay to even see it, I made some great channa masala. I was in, I was out, I was done.

And all through this process I was feeling so creative, that I could have filled up all the surplus creativity (notice here that Im talking only about the surplus creativity) into several small airtight Tupperware containers and brought them to the office to be kept close to me while I write my JSP

code, which are so badly in need of some creativity.

Ok, there were also some “not-so-creative” thoughts (like “did I add the salt????”………….”OMG!!! did I add it twice??????”), but lets leave those out for the time being.

Let me give you a sample of a creative thought that I had:

Why dont we get together some sort of a cooking group right here in AdventNet. The entry criteria can be very broad and allow any “carbon based life form”. Im sure a lot of married male ADVENTurers would gladly join in (Im seriously counting on sridharr). Obviously this would be done outside of regular office hours of 8AM to 10PM when there are no deadlines for the next 3 months.

Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “As a married man with enough opportunities and necessity for cooking even otherwise, why the hell are you talking about a cooking group within AdventNet”. The answer is simple, “I dont have to clean up afterwards”.

Vote for what you think of this idea:

1. Please go away.

2. You call that a creative thought, Seriously?????

3. Not a bad thought, but dont get a big head.

4. So much creativity and innovation??? Please accept my next pay cheque.

Raghu