Power Play @ Gurgaon

3
*** Rant Filter***
*** Context Filter*** Bollywood context required

If I were asked to rewrite the famous Deewar scene, it will go like this.

Vijay stays in Sushant Lok and Ravi in Sadar Bazaar - Gurgaon

They meet at Vyapar Kendra, Sushant Lok for their famous scene:

Vijay - Mere paas fridge hai, tv hai, ac hai, washing machine hai. Tumhare paas kya hai
Ravi - Bhaaaa..i, mere paas inverter hai


and that leaves Vijay speechless because he has been struggling with power cuts in Gurgaon and so are others. It's hard to explain why he couldn't buy an inverter or get a house in society with power back up, but let's ignore that discussion. Another side point, the amount of power cut we have in Gurgaon actually exhausts all the inverters, so even Ravi has issues (we'll ignore this as well)

Recent Power cuts forced a shift in my thinking. I used to think that having power supply is a necessity and backup a luxury. Now, I think having power backup is a necessity and continuous supply is a luxury (that none of us has now)

Disclaimer: I fully well understand that I play a part in this whole problem by not approaching the right people and raising my voice. In my defence, I just hope all such things were a tad more obvious to those who are responsible for it.

Art of creative punishment

0
There was an article in The Times of India about punishment to children. The writer wasn't particularly amused by the idea of punishments as a means to improve kids. She went on to talk about how it demolishes their confidence and all. I have no comments (neither for nor against) on what she thinks. However, there was a specific punishment example she mentioned that floored me due to sheer creativity involved.

Her teacher used to punish students by making them stand in a dustbin. She used to tell them, they are there because that's where they belong.

Before I get labelled a sadist, let me clarify that I am not hailing the punishment because of the impact it had on kids, but because it sounds quite ingenious.

Astrology, Dreams

0
This one is a spaghetti post.

Most of you would know that Mars is closest to earth these days. Astrologically the planet is considered a source of energy and impacts all. Since its closest these days, the impact is higher, few stand to gain and few stand to lose. Apparently I have been chosen to strengthen the losing category.

By now, you must have realised that I am a fan of astrology. Fan enough, to publicize it over net. Last three days have played havoc on things at home and to some extent workplace. More significantly, it altered my dreams (not the long term ones, but the involuntary ones while sleeping). Here is the list

1. Disturbing Dreams: I have had a series of disturbing dreams all this week. I don't always dislike them, because its like watching a movie while sleeping [saves time and provides entertainment :-)]. However, you don't want to watch tragic movies all through (esp if it involves you), so that's the part that concerned me.

2. Recursive Dreams: I saw a dream in a dream and I did something in my internal dream (Level 2 Dream) which I cannot do in real life. When I got out of my Level 2 dream, I tried the same thing in my Level 1 dream and I could do it. Next, I broke out of my Level 1 dream to real life and that's when I failed :( However, it was an interesting experience and a first for me.

Side Note: I have often wondered about awareness while dreaming. At times, I even try to continue a dream that got discontinued by thinking about it consciously.

Sometimes losers win

2
This isn't about the famous series The Biggest Loser or its Indian counterpart Biggest Loser Jeetega.

I have always wondered how people can survive and rise in organizations in-spite of their incompetence. There may be many reasons for it. Not the least of them is to create an environment that fosters and encourages incompetence.

Never argue with a fool or he will drag you down to his level and beat you at it

I have seen 'leaders' whose only competence is to stick around in office infinitely. And if that is the case, the project is bound get screwed thereby generating the need for long (unproductive) hours. Once that happens, the environment is set for the losers to shine.

That's what losers do, they re-define winning as being losers, so its a win/win game for them and a lose/lose for non-losers.

* I have always avoided using word loser in my conversations/writings. I am using it here because it's just so casually powerful that it conveys how strongly I feel about this subject.

Horse Trading @ Work

1
Camels are traitorous; they walk thousands of paces and never seem to tire. Then suddenly, they kneel and die. But horses tire bit by bit. You always know how much you can ask them, and when it is that they are about to die. -Paulo Coleho (The Alchemist)

I think I see horses and camels at my office all the time. There are silent killers who will drop dead one day and be gone. And then there are others who will keep showing dissent at regular intervals to keep you abreast of their low morale. Be careful to identify your camels and horses and handle them accordingly.

Beginning of year end

1
As year 2007 draws to a close, I am planning to put up my list of year's top 5s. Thanks to internet (the enabler) that is allowing people to do such stupid things :-)

I have an initial list of categories, I intend to work on the entries in next few weeks and publish the results. Feel free to leave a comment mentioning your choice for a category or a new category if you care.

As much as I would have liked to do it on popular votes, I simply cannot, because I don't have enough readers (yet, my hopeful yet!) to cast votes :-)

- H'Wood Movies
- B'Wood Movies
- Sportsperson
- Flops (B'wood)
- Songs(Any)
- Ads
- Worst Ads
- Moments in Cricket
- Worst phrases (anywhere)
- VJs/anchors/RJs

Lottery - *Jai Veeru revisited

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***Context Filter***

Bollywood context required to read the post (excel can be used regardless)

Long before I saw Sholay I have been a fan of using coin to make decisions for me. Recently I found another situation which needed guidance from the coin, and I couldn't find one. So, I decided to write an e-coin. It's a little more flexible than the physical one, so it can be tossed once or 10000 times as the need may be. And it is a multidimensional coin which has any number of choices you want as opposed to the traditional two.

Try it if you want to. Get a copy here.

All disclaimers possible go with it (Not responsible for any wrong decision or a machine crash blah blah blah...)

*Jai and Veeru are the main characters of Sholay

Re: Vista

0
Looks like someone agrees with the annoying security bit.

http://techdirt.com/articles/20071127/022730.shtml

Sunsets

2
I have been a big fan of sunsets all my life. [I will try and write a clog explaining why :-)] If I have a camera with me, I don't leave an opportunity to capture the beauty (as much as I can). Here are some of my favorites.

Sagar, MP, India


Bhopal, MP, India

Grand Canyon, Arizona, US


Scottsdale, Arizona, US (1)


Scottsdale, Arizona, US (2)


Another fascination I have related to photography is to take shots from my window(s). I will soon publish a couple of them as well.

Moonshot

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Here is a moon shot from my Panasonic FZ8.



Delhi Metro(cks)

0
Its been around 10 months since I went to Delhi. The idea was to go to IITF. Well some trip it was, a pleasant surprise. Roads to and in Delhi are fantastic. There are all the right signs at all the right places (well almost). Things are in order as they should be everywhere. Well, that wasn't all that impressed me. The Metro, newest addition to Delhi is truly world class.

Thanks to Metro and a series of flyovers, almost all of Delhi now travels in air. Trade fair was fine, not that I was expecting a lot.

All in all, Delhi rocks!

Re: URL the SEO way

1
The original post talks about optimizing your urls for search engines.

http://www.amitsrivastava.net/2007-11-11-url-the-seo-way/

As soon as the web started, so started the efforts of indexing it. The search engines worked on figuring out the best way to get relevant sites. With time the searches got more and more powerful. Circa 2007, searching is the most common way of browsing internet (I read it somewhere and it suits my common sense). With this new found power, the tables are turned and websites need to make sure that they are search friendly to make their presence felt.

Vista

3
There's been quite a buzz about vista not delivering on promise and being a complete failure but being a microsoft fan I was not deterred. I even got it for my laptop. It was all fine until a few days back when some things happenned

1. Noone in my family liked it. I constantly assured everyone that once we get a hang of it, things will look better and may be even superb.
2. I started doing some serious work, rather tried doing some serious work and realised it's not going to be easy.
3. Copying files is quite an exercise, you get to confirm it so many times (at least twice if copying to OS drive). I have always been clicking yes without reading the warnings though. After all how wrong can you go in copying a file. I guess, will have to find a way around this one (may be there already is which I don't know of)
4. The copy times seem to be substantially longer than expected.
5. The whole security thing appears to be more of a protection of my machine from me rather than anyone else.
6. The occasional blanking of screen. I skipped my heart beat the first couple of times, but it is much better now that I am used to it.
7. My batch files and some other utilities don't work. I am yet to debug the reason for this, but I am suspecting some of my command line utilities including my batch files won't work in the new os.

I am willing to trade my new vista with the good old xp any day at least until MS does some magic in its service packs. As J C Penny commercial puts it - its time to work your magic ;-)

Following link has more professional material on the issue, definitely worth a read.

The Vista Death Watch

(Mile)Stoned

1
As Socrates would have put it - An unplanned life isn't worth living. I seem to be increasingly getting into this mode. I have always been a man of planning (who likes creating plans not necessarily executing them). On top of my instinct, my work environment further reinforced it over past few years. The situation has gone to the extent that I cannot live a day without having a plan for it. Even if I need to waste my time, I need to think about it before I do it and apparently I keep doing that all the time.

Well, this may sound like a fantastic way of managing time (or may be not). But having first hand experience of living it, I know its not. The only thing it does is, you micromanage your inefficient day, and soon enough you start nano-managing* your inefficient-er day.

Every plan comes with inevitable milestones. No matter how small they are. It becomes an act of always reaching for something (and more often than not you don't reach them in time or not reach at all).

So, all that puts a question mark on the quote I started with - Is a planned life living at all?

I am sure I am not the only one with this syndrome, or I just hope so.

* Micromanage = Micro + manage. Micro is 1 millionth part, nano is one billionth. For mathematically inclined, nano = 1/1000000000

Logic vs Facts

0
Classifying colleagues has been one of my favorite activities. I can safely say the same for almost everyone around me. Here is an old one.

This time, my parameters are facts and logic. To elaborate, there will be people who can be trusted for their facts and those who can be trusted for their logic. Adding a layer of abstraction, you have people who can be trusted for their Information (fact). And there are people who can be trusted for their judgment (logic).

Using the quadrant theory, I have 4 categories:
I+J+: Industry movers(can fit anywhere, but will rise sooner than you think)
I-J+: Great Leaders (with good I+J- or I+J+ around)
I+J-: Great Workers (with any of the above around)
I-J-: :(

Where do you fit in?

Sudoku Solver

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I wrote this one around 2.5 years back. I wasn't clogging then. It follows a brute force approach to solve a sudoku and hence may take substantial amount of time (15+ minutes in some cases) and processing power for tough ones. It first fills all the straight forward ones, fixes those values and then goes on to check all the possible combinations for remaining values.

The algorithm can be improved by widening the scope of the "straight forward fills". However, I haven't done anything more on it than what I did the first time (doesn't that always happen?)

Link

Age old puzzle revisited

0
Almost everyone knows this puzzle:

"teetar ke aage do teetar, teetar ke peechhe do teetar, bolo kul kitne teetar"
(Two birds on the left of the bird, two birds on the right, how many birds in all are there?)

Translation changed the front and back part to left and right just to simplify the translation :-)

The most common answer that a person jumps at is "5". Well, popularly the answer is not correct. The right answer is 3. The catch is that the teetars (bird) referred in the two clauses are different and hence the twist.

However, I feel thats not completely right, the minmum possible number is 3 but anything greater than that is as true. I know this is a silly one, but couldn't resist putting it up.

This one is my favorite so far :-)

0
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20071101/how-hard-could-it-be-five-easy-ways-to-fail.html?partner=fogcreek

Combination Generator

12
This started with identifying possible scenarios for something that we needed to test. Here is the gist of the problem.

There are 5 parameters and each parameter has a list of possible values. Generate all the possible cases. Plain old combination.

The first solution that someone followed was to generate the list manually :-). So, I tried and improved it by hardcoding a fixed number of "for" loops for the number of possible values(number of values were fixed too). But then I decided I will roll it out to others and thats when I thought of all the questions that people might ask. So, I realized, not making it general is too lame a solution. So, here it is, a general solution for generating combinations, of course there are upper limits to the number of combinations it can handle due to the limit excel has for data.

Please read the disclaimer before using it. Any constructive comments are welcome!

Link to the excel

RE:ziuq a si siht

0
The subject reads - "This is a quiz" reversed. Steven Kryskalla got 3 (and almost got the 4th) and jsn got all of them with few insights on the questions as well :-).
Here is the deciphered post with comments inline in italics and clues in bold.

If you got the subject of this post and if you are able to read this then you would have guessed what this post is going to be about. Well, to clarify just in case, this is going to be a ciphered quiz. The cipher can be different for all the questions. So make no assumptions. Here you go starting with the rotten one

1. What does PDF stand for? If you could read the specific one, get ready for a more general one, key lies in my name
Answer is "Portable Document Format" and the next cipher is Caesar's cipher with Key D (4)

2.Who said this - give me a lever large enough, and I will move the earth? If you could read this your TRAIN is on track for the THIRD one.
Answer is Archimedes (jsn made a comment though about this not being true). The next cipher is Rail Fence Cipher with 3 rails

3.Which animal is the vehicle of lord kamadeva (God of love in Hindu mythology)? The last one is a trip back to where we started.
Parrot. The last question is just reversed

4. What is the name of Stephen Hawking's medical condition
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

metaclog

0
An unexamined clog isn't worth clogging is how Socrates would have put it. So, here you have a clog about a clog - Metaclog. For those who don't know the Meta prefix, here is a slightly confusing explaination.

Metadata is data about data. Which leaves us with two possible interpretation of the meaning of Meta. MetaX can be X about X OR data about X. In any case Metaclog will mean the same thing.

Few things that I have tried to change consciously in my approach to clogging.

- size of the clog
- frequency of the clog

I feel smaller and more frequent clogs may be more effective in getting readers (if that is what the clog aims at) as opposed to otherwise. I believe this should happen due to the ADD syndrome that most of us suffer from today. We tend to have a short focus span. We seem to look at lot of things for small periods of time and more often than not repeatedly look at the same things. In effect we might end up spending good amount of times on those frequent things.

However, all said and done, the content is obviously more important. When I started the clog I started with an assumption of no readers which has been almost true so far. But my belief was pleasantly shaken when I got a few comments on my post ziuq-si-siht, people not only read but responded to the post.

Well, in keeping with the spirit of keeping it short, I close this one here and move on to writing my next entry :-)

Travelling through times

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Travelling across time zones can be quite painful. However, I figured a positive side to it recently. With all things constant, I tend to push my schedule, pushing my sleeping time further daily. It sometimes works well to reset it by complete disruption. I realised this is true for all things that fall in routine, they deteriorate. A routine disruption to routine may be a welcome thing.

ziuq a si siht

5
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1.Jung qbrf CQS fgnaq sbe? Vs lbh pbhyq ernq gur fcrpvsvp bar, trg ernql sbe n zber trareny bar, xrl yvrf va zl anzr

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3. wcnas ehlfr adaof vnnmh o)hao itpco ewtth hiltv ieldm e(dle hdyog ?esns rbkwr eaeia mihec ookav gooii utlyt lteai athes rd

4. noitidnoc lacidem s'gnikwah nehpets fo eman eht si tahw

Reprogramed?

0
Came across an interesting post about how programming changes one's life. It's probably true for most of the professions that need some special skill. They tend to take a life of their own inside you.

Summarizing the post in one line; programming job makes you more "anal"ytical and obsessive.

http://devizen.com/blog/2007/09/11/ruin/

The kind of programmers that it talks about are the hardcore ones, the industry doesn't have many of those. The post is fairly lengthy and I don't completely agree with it, nevertheless, makes an intersting read.

When small is big

0
"In grand scheme of things, small things matter because they are indicative of situations in which big things are being done" (said who? me, of course)

I will explain this with two examples that are close to my heart:

Code Quality: Listing down two very common issues that you will come across:
- Absence of documentation in code (Code comments or javadocs/interface definitions)
- Improper variable names

Apparently they have no impact on the code itself, but more often than not it describes the situation in which the code was written. There are multiple possibilities. Code written by a careless programmer with no constraints or written by a good programmer with time constraints and so on. And none of these are favorable.

Broken support System in an organization/project: Its easy to ignore small hiccups (just like punctuations) in support services, since they don't have much to do with the revenue collection directly. If you find yourself struggling to keep up your regular services at an acceptable level, there is a bigger problem to handle than just fixing those day to day issues. Its not about that one thing remaining incomplete, its about fostering an attitude; "its ok to have things incomplete". If overlooked, these things become a norm and end up destroying the culture.

The idea here is, to use small things as god sent warnings about bigger problems. They are the just the symptoms indicative of the actual (bigger) problem.

Breaking it up

0
I was talking to someone and I said "I will take a break from work for some days" but then I asked myself, will I, actually? Thinking about what it would mean to take a break from work, here is what I came up with. Taking a break is about not having to use the following words:

- issues
- Structure
- efficiency
- Quality
- risk
- Next steps
- performance

and, not touching a key board, of course. Feel free to add your words/activities to the list.

iConic Lessons

3
I read the biography of apple supremo Steve Jobs (iCon) few weeks back. I picked the book thinking I'll pick up a lesson or two myself. Sounds lame, but don't we always pick biographies for this very reason. So, I will be talking about the lessons from the book in this post.

Lesson # 1: is the outcome of Lesson number 2 which is described next. It states - "I can find reasons to keep me away from effort in most of the scenarios"

Lesson # 2: No matter how smart you are, how hard you work, to be really successful you have to get lucky one or more times to take you a notch up. There are many smart and hard working people bumping their asses all around, not earning anything, not even a compliment, since they never get their lucky break. To summarize you got to be lucky to make it big, so think hard before you start working hard.

So making it big is like a lottery and you have to get lucky to win it. But then to win a lottery you need to buy tickets, and may be lots of them to improve your chances. At last here is my positive lesson. Thanks Steve.

boom again!

1
This is related to one of my earlier posts boom.

'It's only when the tide goes out that you learn who's been swimming naked.'

This is a comment made by Warren Buffet and it sums up the idea of my post very well. While its all green, no matter who you are you get a good deal. It is when things subside you realise what is real and what is not.

My 5 minute theory

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I believe that the difference between a person who seems to know something/enough about a topic and one who is completely at loss is more often than not, just 5 minutes. For most of the average daily life topics, it will suffice just to have a small five minute overview to save you from a complete loss and embarassment. I have felt the same for banal topics to sometimes highly technical topics. I wonder if the feeling is shared by others!

The vicious circle of inefficiency

0
During my work I have often experienced that on tough projects, if things start going wrong, they very soon fall into a self propagating spiral. The spiral makes its causes stronger causing it to become more steep as it progresses.

Here is the scenario that is almost a norm in non performing teams or in teams with new members.

The work doesn't get done - The manager gets mad - Forces people to overwork - People get exhausted - they are not left with time and energy to learn - kills any chances of improving their skills to make them more efficient.

In the end the team spends the maximum possible time on their work but the amount that gets done is generally disproportionate to the effort and then the whole phase of apathy comes in when nobody cares about anything anymore. You just have people blaming each other for the situation (more commonly management v/s leads v/s developers).

So that was the problem part and I feel the whole responsibility for this should be taken by the management because they generally have greater power to change the situation. The biggest precondition for that to happen will be acknowledging the problem. Few points which I think would work and should be considered:
- One who has the power to change are the only ones who can be held responsible
- If a team is not performing, it is not team's fault. They are just in a wrong place
- Either improve them or remove them.
- Removal should happen only if there is no chance of growing people. If there are worthy candidates invest time to nurture them
- If the management cannot improve anything though they acknowledge the issue, they should step down/out
- If the management cannot improve anything and don't acknowledge the issue, they should be removed. There has to be someone who should be able to see the problem. If not, then the problem is probably not real

I am pretty sure the list is far from complete and it was never meant to be.

Night(mare) at lga

0
Every time I see things in US, the feeling I get is - "They have thought through it all". Their systems and process are just perfect. The traffic in general to automation of practically everything, you pretty much have it all covered. However, this Tuesday (June 13th) I realized that with all the structure there are glitches and more importantly the reaction to the glitches.

To start with a three hour flight was delayed by around three and a half hours. The flight had to try three different airports to find the one where they could find some space. In all this frenzy we ended up at Lagaurdia instead of Newark. All the passengers were hoping that they will get some kind of arrangement to transport them to the right airport and they were not wrong. However, it took the airline around one and a half hour to settle the matter. The whole thing doesnt end here, the luggage takes another hour to arrive (add to it 1.5 hours already spent) and while we were waiting nobody had any clue whats going on. The carousel area had heaps of luggage all over the floor. Just when you thought it was all over you realize that it is impossible to find the taxi that was booked for you by the airline and you cannot see a single official on the airport who could help. The few that were there had no clue what was going around. The taxi queue had more than a hundred people waiting. For me, the nightmare ended at around 2:30 Am in the morning when I could reach some place to stay.

This made me wonder what could have been done by the airport peope to have handled it better. The only problems that come to my mind are contingency management and lack of personnels on site. The systems have been working so well that none of the officials had any clue of what to do when things go wrong. Half of them were running away from people lest they might have to answer their questions. The ones who were unfortunate enough to be caught by people were fortunately rude enough to be let off as soon as they were approached.

I think having all the order all around hasn't helped them learn to deal with emergencies well.

The magician and the sorcerer

0
This one is a clog for bored. If you are looking for substance in this one, hope to get disappointed. Well, this one is about a slight resemblance in the appearance of two very famous characters, one 'real' and the other fictional.


Here are the two very famous characters side by side and I find them to look pretty similar. Though i realized not many others share this point of view, nevertheless here you go.

For deeply uninitiated, here is a very brief profile of the characters:

Zidane: is one of the best footballers of his time, more famous for his head butt now than his amazing performances. Played for Real Madrid and Juventus and was instrumental in getting France to win 1998 world cup. Won FIFA world player 3 times (only other player to have won it thrice is Ronaldo)

Voldemort: is the archteype evil in the famous Harry Potter series. Having read all the six books so far I have realized that the fame of the Harry Potter series is attributed as much to Voldemort as to Harry Potter.

Now, the point of this clog is that somehow I felt that these two characters look so similar in their appearance. Not to draw any conclusion on any similarity between the two otherwise.

We will probably see no more of Zidane in future in soccer but stay tuned for Voldemort as he comes bigger and better in the movie this July and in the final installment of the HP series in print.

Scared of hi-five

0
Since last two years whenever I talk to some old friend, whom, I have not spoken to in last couple of years, would ask the same question: "Where am I working?" which is perfectly normal. The follow up question when they get to know that I have not switched my job yet, they would ask why? Some do it normally some do it vehemently as if its a crime to stick around. Well, I dont blame them compleltely because I think I have outlived the normal industry life by many folds I guess.

I read an article from N R Narayanmurthy that said, love your job don't love your company and the article ends with big bold letters that read " talent leaves deadwood doesn't". All that makes me wonder, am I a deadwood then? and do I need to switch to prove I am not. People's reaction to my 4+ years stint in a company is generally one of shock. I wonder what will happen when i hit 5. Will they fall on their face as soon as i mention this number. All of this scares me to touch the 5 year mark. Not that I have too many reasons to quit but you can always find millions if you really want to.

More and more I talk to people it seems like you are missing on something if you dont try switching. To a large extent this is true because you start enjoying your comfort zone and traditionally comfort zones are not really great places for actual growth. Well, nothing is in offing as of now, but then who knows.

boom!

1
I read somewhere that the salary of a batch passing out is a function of their starting salary. If the starting salary is low, it almost always stays so for the rest of their lives. The situation is worsened by the fact that its boom time and more than anything else what matters is “to be at the right place at the right time”. Those who missed the booming jobs, no matter how talented they were they just missed the bus. Now that is the missing part of it, the getting part of it is equally ugly. Every tom, dick and harry is getting cool deals all around. You can hardly differentiate between the good ones and not so good ones. You just don’t know the difference, the sad part is even they don’t. Those who get it assume they deserve it. The boom has changed everything for Indian youth. The amount of success everyone is seeing around is way beyond I could imagine 5 years back. I don’t know if it is good or bad but I do feel bad when a jerk gets something that he doesn’t deserve and is keen on flaunting it.

With so much volatility all around, not sure where this is all going. So many people are predicting an end to all this and I am dreading the day when this happens because that will bring volatility once again equally for everyone good or bad. Well, let’s see how it all unfolds in next couple of years. Till then, keep basking!

From MIT to Harvard and back

0
So many people in the world dream of going to these schools (I know colleges and universities are called schools in US:-)) but not many actually get a chance. I never really dreamt of going there but it always made me interested if I get to know that a person is from MIT or Harvard or likewise. Interestingly, my commute these days starts with MIT station and ends at Harvard as if to tell me how much more of these universities you want! I am yet to visit those campuses, so may be in some of my next posts I will be writing about them.

Pigeon(s) out of my water tank

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This is slightly later than I expected. It’s the continuation of last post where I talked about the shocking discovery of a pigeon in my water tank. However, as it turns, it was not a pigeon, there were pigeons.

Next morning, my flat mate decided to stay at home in the morning to take care of the situation by getting external help. Unfortunately the external help was not around and we were getting more and more nervous and that’s when it was decided that we will take the pigeon(s) by wings (or legs as it turned out). It was as difficult as it sounds because just the feeling of looking and maneuvering a dead bird (it’s easier in case they are small and their density is low) is enough to put you off. But now that we were up to the task we had to finish it. So, we created a noose of a wire that we could find on the roof. In preparation to the event we had already collected stacks of newspapers and plastic bags. The noose was perfectly built thanks to my flatmate (looks like he has been an executioner in his last or who knows may be this birth, you know the case of double identity Peter Parker taking baddies as Spiderman, my roommate SD taking baddies as executioner :D) . But even with that perfect noose, one noose was just not enough to get the bird out as the bird has been dead for a couple of days (may be more, but I don’t want to go there) and its body was losing its form getting and was almost in a semi solid state on the day. So eventually after going back and forth, using newspaper and stick unsuccessfully I decided that we will have to use our hands directly. Till this point we were just aware of the existence of one bird, wore plastic bags as hand gloves, took the noose and used the hand to pull one of the legs to get the shit out of the tank. As soon as I thought it was done, I heard sd calling me again, that’s when he had realized that there was a pair inside. May be two of them were dead fighting if they were of the same gender or might have died fucking if they were of different gender. I am assuming that the popular culture of human beings has still not penetrated avian community. Now that we had the experience of doing it, the second one was a charm, was thrown out in a giffy without a hesitation and the primary task was done. Then there was the clean up stuff to be done for which we surprisingly got external help and the job was complete.

People have had hard time believing that this actually happened and I don’t have a flair for convincing people either, so tt was labeled as one of those “dog ate my homework” kind of excuses for reaching late to the office.

Pigeon in my water tank

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The lesson that I learnt today morning was once in a lifetime - "If you smell a dead rat, there proably is a dead rat" so go find it out. As it turns out that me and my flatmate both sensed that there was something different about the water that we were consuming for days. My hypothesis was that its probably because of mercury suddenly rising, the water pipes started emanating some odour which manifested itself as smelly water in our house. However, with passing days it seemed to get deadlier to the point I could not stand using that water. My flatmate I guess was still ok, none of us had even brought this subject to discussion so far. He might be having a different, equally sane or may be saner hypothesis that seemed to keep him quite till the time I brought the subject in the morning. Something like "I feel something dead in our water tank". In an instant we agreed that this is something worth checking because I had used words "dead" "water tank" in the same sentence. And that was the beginning of one of our most shocking (its not mine actually, you will know why later) sights in weeks. Checked tank # 1, looked fine except for a few small insects. Tank # 2, that happenned to be closer to my flatmate, had the volcano inside and he rushed away coughing and I dare not peek into it. So unlike my friend I dont have any visual memories of the incident just a few smelly ones. However, we discussed a few minutes back that this may be something worth a look for seriously sick and disturbed and we might want to attempt a photograph for the same. This is still a thought lets see if it comes to fruition. Well, that was just the beginning and there is still some part remaining. The pigeon is still in the tank and we need to get back home. Apparently one of the guys in our building has taken a sick leave today, well we can guess why.

I am back

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After a long break, lost into I dont know what I am back to writing at least one piece to break the jinx. Warning: There may not be anything worthwhile in this post because I dont really have any thoughts while I am writing this and its just there to count as a post.
Now that I am at writing gibberish, i would try and do that on a topic. Well after a long time I was idling on net and chanced upon many of my unread mails on my personal account. Its been a while since I went through it. Well, going through it I realised that I have not been thinking a lot about my old ties and am busy doing not really sure what, may be just the office work which takes up more than a day's share of time anyways. While doing that I recollected something known as art of developing loose ties or something of that kind which I read somewhere (too many references to unknowns are going to be there in this post..!) and then realised how bad I am at it given that I have lost touch with almost everyone other than me and I guess for no good reason. Getting in touch with people once in a while is something that adds to your perspective and lightens you up at times when you realise so simple stuff that you dont know about outside (outside my workplace) world. Another reason why such thoughts are coming to me today is because one of my very close friends got married yesterday which made me wonder that we are the 'mainstream adults' now. I got slightly scared of the thought that I might get into a wedlock soon without me realising where I am going and when it happennned or when it should happen. The scare scares me further when I see my current situation where there is always a scramble around to find time to do simple and normal stuff. I dont know if I have more work or its just my own making. Even if I have more work I guess it would come back to me because I can choose my work which I may not be doing wisely so far. Well, this is going nowhere and I need to head out. So until next post think about your past/sorroundings for a while and stay tuned!