Siddharth's Blog

Hectic days.
Looks like they are here to stay. Its both good and bad. The good: I am really getting to learn more on my job. Also, I'm managing my time better to get the optimum results out early rather than relax and do it. The bad: I have personal commitments that may take a hit and my real estate hunt is worrying me no end when I can't give it the right time slice of my working day. Its bad to be flooded with work when you need to be out of office early for some other reason.... but that's the way life goes these days. Things are moving along though, and we should be in some shape to freeze matters soon.... so I hope. For the moment, hanging in here. :)

Ah.... My compilation must have finished. Time to close this note. Ciao.

Back again
Its been a long while since I posted anything out here. Its good to be back :)

Meanwhile, trip to Kamath's wedding was quite good. We did not see much of the wedding though. Am still waiting to see the Chitradurga pics taken by friends' cameras. Its so easy to be trigger-happy with a digital cam :)

More soon.

Lazy weekend.
Spent whole time at home or at my desk at office reading up on stuff pertaining to managing finances. I don't feel quite rested though.... One thing is certain, it feels good to dream of building our own home. As expected, its the journey from the dreams to making it a reality that is a little exhausting ;)

Happy Father's Day to my Dad and Father-In-Law-to-be :)
And.... congratulations to my little sis (Nupur) who'll be graduating next week!!

Hmmmm....
From Teheran Times (originally reported by Kuwait Times, whose URL I could not find): a US truck carrying radioactive material stopped en-route to Iraq. I think I should not be surprised if US finally finds evidence supporting its cause for the war against Iraq now ;)

Random links:
* The Prisoner's Dilemma.
* The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee (by Balzac).

Quote of the day (Read it here):
Success: To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children, to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends, to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded!
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Parting thoughts:
Yay!! The Pistons beat the Lakers in the NBA finals! :)

Life....

Okies. Its been a nice weekend and its a very hectic Monday to start the week (Its almost time to go home now). My uncle (Rakesh Mama) was here for the weekend and we had a pretty good time with him. I realize at times like these that my life as a bachelor is not what my parents or elders would feel remotely comfortable with. Half the things in my room are in a mess (quickly dumped below the bed to give some area to walk on ;) and the kitchen hardly contains enough stuff to make tea (coffee is not the house, sorry). Its a tough task to find more than 2 cups which are of the same design or size and the windows have enough dust on them to make them look naturally coloured brown..... amazing how these things don't attract your attention on a normal 'non-parent-association' working day since I and my room mate don't usually cook at home anyways and by the time I enter home its dark enough not to notice any weird colours in any part of the room under the tubelight. I'm pretty certain that after seeing my place all elders in my family will thank God that I'm getting married soon.

But I digress, coming back to the weekend.... On Saturday, Mama and both of us (I and Vrushali) walked around a whole lot of Bangalore and were driven around (in an auto-rickshaw) even more than that. The matter of search: real estate. The search was an eye-opener for the most parts since the property rates turned out to be even higher than poor-old-me thought they were. But it was better to find that out now than later. We stopped only for a brief lunch throughout the hops. The high point was the wonderful dinner to end the day....

Sunday morning, I continued to display my love for badminton for the third straight week.... partly to my own surprise ;) One hour and 2 broken shuttles later I and my friends returned home. Then again the trio (Mama, me and Vrushali) were off. Met my aunt and had another good meal with their family. Went to see off Mama at the railway station after that. That concluded a rather nice and tiring weekend.

Evolution

I finally managed to get some time to download newly released testing binaries of Evolution (1.5.9.1) and see first hand what so many people were praising. I join that crowd as far as the neatness of the new GUI is concerned.... Installation was not so much of a breeze as I thought it would be, but since my system at office is not a standard Fedora configuration (its a result of numerous RPM upgrades of RH 9.0) I half-expected things to break anyways.... I had to remove the evolution data created by the older evo and move the older gconf entries out of the way too. Then Evo 2 beta came up nicely. The disappointment was that I lost a few old mails in the inbox of Evo 1.4 and had to configure my account and re-create my mail filters all over again (basically start from scratch). Logged in to IRC to see what I did wrong and learn a few tips in case installation should have been more easy for me anyways. Happened to meet NotZed who showed me how to reclaim my 'Sent' mails from Evo 1.4.... Was very pleased to get that done. Now, I just need to get my addressbook imported again. But that, my friends, is another story :)

Word processor woes

Topic for the day.... why is MS Word is the de-facto standard?! I've used that software for years now, at college and at work and never thought so much about it as I do these days since I've started using Fedora as my default workstation. Here is what is my evaluation....

The good:
I like the interface. Its good to have keyboard shortcuts for almost all your regular work; and given some patience you can even understand specifics such as how to get your templates and auto-text to function as you want them to. Its a good editor for documents which are less than 100 pages long. On Windows, I did not know of any utility which came close to offering the functionalities I would get in word.... at least a couple of years ago AbiWord and OpenOffice were not in the same league, I felt.

The bad:
For all the convenience to create the document, it offers nothing but major inconvenience to share it once your work is done. There is no default PDF export function available. The word document format is not made available for others to be able to write/edit a document made in Word using any other software. For the same reason, MS Word does not allow you to save your work in any open format which would be handled better by other editors. In other words, a pure and undiluted monopoly. If I need to give a document out to others, I have to hope that they have MS word installed on their system.... and preferably the same version as what I'm using. (I've seen colors get screwed when an Office 2000 doc is opened in Office 97).

The downright ugly:
This link may come as a surprise to some MS users. That the word format stores some information about the document creator was known to me (I think I know how to instruct word to store correct information for the creators), but that it would include text from other open documents was a surprise. I don't know under what conditions this happens, but ignorance is certainly not bliss in this case.

If you are reading this and still not convinced, I think this article on the GNU site may do a better job of explaining it....

Homage
This real-life story is really painful to read. I wonder how many Indian Army men and their families would have gone through similar ordeals.

Things you get to see from other blogs

Browsing from PlanetGnome led to some interesting pages on IMDB. These are the top 250 and bottom 100 movies rated by users online.... Suddenly, I feel better about not getting enough TV time on some days.

From slashdot: Here's someone who can tell which parts of america prefer to use the word 'pop' and which like to use the word 'soda' for carbonated drinks. I'd like to see a similar study for Indians who use the words 'cokk', 'phanta' and 'coool drink'.

Weekend highs

Had a really relaxing experience at a restaurant after a long time. The place in question: Bombay Post on Airport Road (Carlton Center). Cuisine is primarily north indian and not extremely high on spices (which is good for my taste buds). Price tag is on the expensive side with bill touching around 800/- for a couple. Its worth the money for an unhurried (but not overly slow) lunch. Ambience is good too. Do try the Jewel Thief if you like black currant :)

Another weekend, another movie. This time it was Potter time. Checked out Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. The book was more gripping I thought, especially because the director had to remove some content to fit the movie within the desired length. But, all in all, decent entertainment.... worth the 45 minutes I spent in queue to get the tickets ;)

And, last but not the least, a big thanks to the blogger folks for their service :)

Night outs and Pilani....
I guess for almost all BITSians, these 2 things go along together. Okay, I agree, I'm almost an old timer now since its been 4 years from college; but yesterday's night-out reminded me of the 'good old days'. The sore difference was that I missed my wingees. It used to be fun to put laccha even when you thought you were just about to give in and go to bed. The topic never mattered.... maximize the time awake and minimize the genuine output of the activity (in most cases.... "Lets go for chai/maggi at ANC. We'll come back and ghot after that!") I wished it had been my wing and ANC all over again. But then, there was work to be done....

Found a nice collection of RSS Readers on the web. I'm trying to get straw working on my system, but have some nagging issues with the setup which I'll fix in the next couple of days (hopefully). Work is on the rise hence this activity will have to wait for a li'l while I guess.

This was yesterday at Bangalore.

When 2 good friends announce the date they're going to tie the knot with each other, its great news. And when it comes as soon as you reach office in the morning, its even better! Congrats Vikas and Shyamalee! :)