Back from vacation

I came back this week from a nice short three week vacation to India. Spent time with family, friends and had a good time. Travelled a lot - bangalore , chennai , tirupathi , devakottai and kumbakonam. The temperature variation was huge -20 to +27 when i left from montreal and +27 to -11 when i returned back. Most of the snow has melted since i left and not much of fresh snow.

I went by Emirates to bangalore. The new bangalore airport is nice and big. liked it though it is far from city and actually 90kms from hosur. The flight from JFK to dubai was almost full of indians. The journey on A380 was nice. It carries 800 passengers. It is spacious and the 13-14 hour journey on it did not feel so tiring. Surprisingly did not have much of jet lag this time when i returned back. Generally when going to a diff location, i dont have jet lag. But almost always i have jet lag for a week when i return back to my living place. It was different this time.

Back to regular routine in montreal.

Resumed tweets

In Jan, i resumed to tweet after i was not updating my blog regularly. Both of them took a pause during my vacation to india. In Jan, we had lot of fresh snow and driving was tricky at times. Tried cross country skiing.

Visited New york and caught up with Sujith and Ashuthosh. It was nice to meet Ashuthosh after a gap of 6 years (after college). We played in the fresh snow. Had a good time in New york.













Also met my old colleague Ahilan in NY.

Welcoming 2009

Yesterday night we went to place jacques-cartier for the new year countdown. There was music and lot of people despite the cold of -18 with a wind chill which made it feel like -25. We joined the crowd and some bit of dancing on the ice to welcome the new year. There were nice fire crackers at the old port. We were there for an hour. By that time, the face got cold and kind of froze due to the cold. Then came back and dozed off.

Today it is pillayar nombu. So went to temple today to pray to Lord Ganesha. I saw that the temple was crowded and i came to know that special poojas were happening on the english new year. I was a little surprised.

To celebrate pillayar nombu, i went to Prof. Kannan's place. After the pooja and ellai ethi eduthukuradu, we had the nice soft vadas and idli made by his wife. I had prepared gajar ka halwa as prasadam and everybody liked it.

Then i started to update the blog after returning home. sleeping now. That brings the first day of the year to a close.

Wish you all a very happy and prosperous new year.

Todos: 2009

I generally dont make a resolutions or todo list every year. But i want to pen down this time and see how it goes. I will keep posted how the todos are progressing during the year.

I plan to do the following this year
- Being more in touch with friends
- Organize and upload pictures taken since beginning of 2005. This has been a long pending task and photos keep getting clicked and piling up.
- Organize my contact list into one central and keep it updated. I want to maintain a centralized one online.
- Learn Swimming and Ice skating
- Improve on skiing
- Improve in photography. Take good pics with DSLR.
- Back to active hacking
- Work more on andhramahabharatam and close it

Update: Added the missing ones.

Looking at 2008

Just jotting down about the year so that i can read it later. It was a busy year which just passed by fast. It was an important year.

- Moved base to Montreal after first two months in cyprus.
- Did sky diving and River rafting
- Made another attempt to learn swimming with some success
- Very little of hacking this year except for few small tweaks
- Workwise, new project , new people , new location - got comfortable.
- Back to skiing after a gap
- Visited Quebec city, Niagara falls , Toronto , Montreal.
- Got out of the laziness in cooking induced in cyprus

What i have been up to

It has been almost 2.5 months since i last posted. I have been busy with work , visiting friends , visiting quebec city and mont royal and other places around montreal and doing much needed winter shopping. I completed my swimming classes.

It is good to see snow back again. After a kind of active summer, looking forward to a good winter. 

Feeling tired afer swimming class today. Hitting the bed. 

Snow in montreal

This is my first full winter in montreal. I arrived in march here during the end of winter. 

The first snow fall of the season was on Diwali (it was a mix of snow and rain). Then it really snowed on 25th November.  It was a nice walk on the fresh snow and a slow drive back home. All of that got washed away. It was cold. The winter is here.  It is going to be white for the next 4 months. 

Last week (09 Dec), we had the first real snowfall of the season. Lot of snow, i guess more than 10cms of snow. Then the temp dropped and all the snow froze and there was freezing rain. We did not venture out in the morning as we did not have winter tyres (mandatory in quebec starting this winter) and stayed at home. All the snow froze and we had around 1-2 cms thick ice on the car. We had to scrape the ice from car. It was a tough job lasting for over an hour. If freesing rain happens daily, then it will be too much of work than i can take. Lucking freezing rain happens only once or twice during a year which is good to know. 

After that we have been brushing away the snow on the car daily. Today the temp rose and there was rain and then in the night, the temp start to drop again. Due to this the melted snow became a layer of ice and all the roads had a glossy look on them. Hard to walk but too nice to enjoy. 

The temp has varied from +6 to -18 (+ wind chill) till now. 

Coming to the winter wear, we are coverted from head to toe except for the face. Once you wear the full winter wear, you dont feel much of the cold. Only the face can feel how cold it is out there. Only ice and melting ice makes it hard for driving and also walking on it. Sambhalke walk on ice. 

Never fill air in the car tyres with bare hands at -12 degrees centigrade even if you are going to be out for under a minute or two. I learnt it the hard way. My hands were red and numb for a good 10 minutes. 

We also went to ski bromont. We were there on the opening weekend and as bunny hill was not there to start practicing, we took to the top of the mountain and came down the green trail. The snow was being groomed constantly but the ice was becoming ice. This was making it hard to stop with the skis. Lot of screeching and not much grip to cut through the snow. We went up and came down twice. The first run took around an hour. I was skiing after a gap of two years. The second run down was quicker even though i got too tired. There  was lot of pressure on the knees and the legs as it was hard to stop to slow down. We had fun. It was good being back on skis. 

Last swimming class

Today was the last class for the swimming beginner's course.  I still am gonna drown if thrown into a deep pool but will go down after a few kicks and few bubbles. Despite the very slow progress and low motivation due to that, we still kept going.  I have got better than when i joined. I kick more relaxed now than i began with. 

The instructor told me to continue kicking relaxed and more longer kicks not fast short ones that i currently do. Then i will move to do some breathing and then moving arms and then all of these in synchrony ..  to fultoo swimming. Not sure when that day is going to come :-D 

The last day at swimming was eventful. After the class and the shower, i come back to see my locker is locked by somebody else. We had to call the civic center people who came promptly and broke the lock with a cutter. Then i got my clothes and shoes which are for sure needed for the gusty winds which were waiting for us outside the civic center. 

Till advances in technology happen, i would be joining my beginner's swimming class next season as well :-)

Had an interesting thought on the way back. In future there will be programs which can be loaded to the brain (like in Matrix)  which give you the knowledge of swimming. All you need to know - keep kicking relaxed , longer kicks , breathing out , breathing in etc.. We capture all the information related to swimming from the best swimmer around and store it and be able to replicate it onto any brain. Everybody will be expert swimmers. 

Skiing was easy to learn. Swimming is not so easy to learn.  But liked the experience. I will continue to learn to swim. 

10 years since we began

On 15-Sep-1998, we (Vamsi Krishna KVS , Xavier Pulla and me)  travelled by the Golconda express to reach Kazipet to join RECW.  We belonged to the 1998-2002 batch of RECW consisting of 324 students who came from all over the country. The next 4 years we would spend together shaped our future and the bonds we made will last forever. The fun times we had will always be in vivid memory. Those 4 years were the best years of my life. 

Thanks to everybody who has been part of this journey. It has been 10 years since it all began. 

I spent whole day chatting with some college friends.  I stay in real good touch with a few. The others - an occasional chat , a scrap on orkut or a mail.  Some i have lost contact. Need to get back in touch with as many as possible and do have an occasional chat. 

Happy decade of friendship. 

Google chrome

I have been using google chrome right from day one. It is simple and brings the search like interface to browsing history / bookmarks / downloads.  The isolation provided with the multiple processes for the tabs is nice. You can kill a tab and still keep the browser running. It is cool. 

It has not crashed any time but has got hung multiple times when i have opened multiple flash videos. Sometimes the pages do freeze. 

I have not verified if it uses more memory than firefox with no extensions for the same number of tabs. I have stopped using firefox with extensions for my day-to-day browsing. I do have a different profile which has extensions which i use occasionally. 

It will be interesting to see how the chrome evolves as it is just a new entrant in the browser market and has made it's presence felt. 

Yahoo mail considers mail from google as spam

I have seen mails from @google.com going to spam folder in yahoo mail even though the header has the Domain Keys signature which yahoo can verify. Yahoo brought this anti-spam standard which google has also implemented. It is kinda strange. However my mail from my gmail id goes fine into my inbox. 

I dont know the reason behind this peculiar behavior of yahoo mail. 

Made a century

I scored over a hundred yesterday in bowling. I have tried many a time to cross it starting from 17 and reaching 99 couple of times. I try to throw the ball straight at the pins knocking none , few , some , all - at different times. Some amount of spin and the ball goes straight into the gutter.  But the balls keep getting heavier after the first game.  

Coming to the other bowling (cricket) , i can only throw not bowl !!

Ravi's bday

Today is Ravi Vidhani's birthday. Prashant Paliwal and I started to plan a surprise for him. It started with the buying of an extra bday cake box as suggested by Prashant. We returned to my house with the Chocolate Caramel  cake and an empty box. I assembled the empty box. Then we took  a cake lid (plastic one) and filled it with cake rusk. Then we thought of putting some (fake) money (Ravi is a Sindhi :-)) . The first option was some chillar (pennies) and then we put some houses/bungalows from the Business game

 (Monopoly). Then we thought of putting paper

 money from the Business game of Pratik Doshi. I had only coins in my game so we preferred the paper money. Then suddenly it came to my mind that we have a printer and we can print some fake money. It will be more realistic. 

Last week i got a printer along with 4 other friends and i was yet to open it. We started to look for A4 sheets and could only find some one sided ones.  So the paper was there. What money to print  ? We turned to google. I remembered reading about the inflation in zimbabwe and how millions of dollars of zimbabwe currency is of not

 much use. We looked for the pics and got theseand printed them.  Then we also printed some indian currency (1000,500,100,50,20). Then it was time to cut them. Mahesh Jadhav who was helping us all along started to cut them while i had my dinner (choley - they came out really nice today). Then Mahesh arranged the notes in a circular fashion (less hifi than this). Then we decked the millions of dollars on top. Then we put a big page with a collage of notes as a cover.  In addition i wanted to give ravi a 501 or 101 (ek sau ek). So i printed a big 500 ka note (which turned out to be exactly like the original one) and a big One (ek rupee) ka note. I put them in my purse. Then we were off to Ravi's home. We parked the car a little far on the road and walked and reached his house just in time. Right at 12. 

Mahesh J entered the house with the money cake. While Prashant and Vivek Garg were giving cover, i brought the actual eatable cake in and put it on the stairs. Then the money cake went into fridge with everybody thinking it is the cake ! 

Then the wishing started and he got a few calls. Then the kicking started. Three of us lifted him and there went the first round. Lot of kicking. I only held one of his legs up in the air while others held him. He is heavy and there is lot of body movement. I do not kick any body these days. The days of kicking in college

 are long gone. I was lucky that i got off with just a full body lift by Tarun Setiya on my birthday. Everybody spared me :-) . But for ravi it was not the case. Soon the second round started. I lifted him up on the leg side. Had i held him for some more time, i would have dropped him. Ravi is heavy. Bix came and gave support and i went back to holding one leg up. There was lot of kicking - some touching by Prashant , Kicking by Mahesh Mehta , Tarun. 

Then we got the fake cake. Then Ravi opened it and saw all the fake money. Surprise !! Then i seriously took out my wallet and took the 500 ka note. He thought it was real for a second. The big ek rupee came next.  Then he realised both were  fake. Then the real money showed up in the cake lid - the pennies. Beside them was the 'cake' (rusk cake). 

He even broke one of the pieces (cake cutting) and gave to Vivek. It was fun. 

Then the real cake came out.  After his face and hair tasted the cake, he was on his way to get himself cleaned and got ready for the third round. Then came Ravi Vutla, he wanted a share of the hitting - revenge time :-). Then the third round followed.  Now Ravi's body needs lot of cushioning for the next few days. 

While we were sitting and analysing who hit and how much, Abhyudoy sarkar made a comment.  He said i lifted ravi today and tomorrow i will get sick as my hands will be paining.  Funny. I actually took a sick leave after i went back to gym for two days and did more weights.  See my body is sensitive to too much of physical work. 

Then we dispersed.  I will attach the pic of fake cake when i get it from Mahesh Mehtha (our DSLR dude). 

Happy Birthday Ravi. Have a great day. Good night.

Update: Added the below pics

Four years

Today morning Sumit Dubey pinged me and Prashant Paliwal and said Congratulations. I was wondering for what and for whom. Then he said it's been 4 years since we met. 

It's been 4 years since i joined my current company, my second one after college. I realized after joining that if i planned to exit from this company, i should do it in the first year. If not i am going to stick around. I am still around !

The time has been good. It is a different work culture than my previous company. Met different people from different nationalities , visited places outside of India , having more work-life balance.  It has been an interesting journey. 

I dont know for sure how long more before i will be out of this company.  

One more water adventure

After the drifting experience in dead sea and scuba diving in red sea last year, it was again water time today. we went to do water rafting today. It was full day event where we had lot of fun. There were simple to comlex rapids where your boat flips and you just get carried away by the huge current of water.

It started with a nice drive in the morning from montreal. After bfast from Tim Hortons, we reached the place. As there was a slight delay, we sat down and started to play dumbc. Then we got briefing on what to do on the river. We were a group of 15, so we split into 2 boats. My boat had 8 people + guide. We got onto the boat with our life jackets. It was to prove a lot useful later during the day. He started off with basic stuff - paddling forward , backward , stopping , getting down while holding onto the rope. After the basics, we were off to a start on the river. It was a run of 8 kms with 3 rapids. Initially we got into water. I still was holding onto the rope of the boat while i was in water floating with the help of the life jacket. Then everybody hopped on again and we started to do rafting.

The weather was good , water was not too cold , the current was strong - very favorable conditions for a good day of rafting. We crossed through the initial small rapids with just the boat going up and down and lot of water gushing in and hitting us. It was nothing when compared to what was going to come next. The washing machine rapid - this was the 90 degree fall which causes your boat to flip and throw everybody out into gushing water. We navigated it fine and the boat did not flip. After that the guide asked us to flip back and then forward strong right into the washing machine against the flow of water. so we were climbing a mountain of water against the flow. Then the flip happened. The two people in front (Bix and Pratik) were thrown into gushing water when the boat started to flip. Chaitanya who was to my left also vanished. I got pushed to the other end and then boat flipped fully. I got down into water. My eyes closed , i had the paddle in hand and i was hit by two three things donno what they were. Then there was darkness for few seconds - i did not open my mouth or try to breathe - otherwise panice would have kicked in instantly. I was going down with the gush of water and then after few seconds due to the life jacket and me making my body straight up with head facing the sky , i seemed to reach up to the surface. After those dark few seconds, i saw sun light and the sky. Instantly i took some water into my mouth as i had to breathe then and then i hit a rock when i realised where i was and i was very close to the rocks on the right side. This is where we were to swim if we fell in the washing machine. I got up and helped myself out of water. I started to walk towards my guide and slowly more people from my boat started to be seen. Ravi and Harjot were no where to be seen. We saw Ravi far holding onto a rock happily. After a while he got on top it and sat there waiting to get picked up by a boat. All around him it was gushing water. Harjot got swept away even further and hit some rocks and got up and stood on the rocks. We picked him up later as well. Both of them got swept by the strong tide before the rope which is thrown into water for people to catch. It was a bit scary. After that we got into our boat - less people and less oars. Then we picked up Ravi and Harjot. It was a 'experience' for every one of us. Then we got out of water for lunch and then the second run started.

Now the water was gushing more and the initial rapids also got more bumpy. Pratik got kicked out into water in the Elizabeth rapid and he swam really nice with the life jacket on to the right side along the same direction as the strong current. Then we picked him back up and then proceeded for the washing machine. Some wanted to have the boat flipped others did not. But there was a huge wait as the boats had to go through the washing machine one at a time. Initially we were not aware of what we were getting into. Now we know and the waiting time increased the tension. We ventured in and did not get flipped. This time everybody held onto the rope. Then we tried to go through the rapid again without flipping. Then we did multiple drier flows around the same place. Then we got out of it and hit some low lying rocks and eventually went to a beach. There we halted for some time and then we started back to go to our final stopping point. People wanted to swim and float in water so some people got out and headed for the shore. There were only the guide , pratik and me paddling the boat. We had to stop and we were drifting away from the shore into the seven sisters rapids (which are meant for insane kayakers during low water only). So the guide caught and got everybody on the boat and we paddled hard to reach the shore. It was a nice team effort. Then we were brought back to base camp and we had a shower and a nice dinner.

After dinner, there was the video session for which everybody turned up to watch. The video session was fun. We saw all the boats go through the washing machine rapid. There was the team where the whole team got into water when the boat flipped except the guide - perfect execution. Then there was this guy who showed the finger to the camera and in few seconds he alone got flipped off the boat while crossing the washing machine rapid. It was funny. Then there were the kayaks whose flipping was interesting to watch. We saw how it all unfolded for my boat flip.

It was nice fun. I will be doing it again next summer. Hopefully i will know how to swim by next summer.

Truck driving

Last week my colleague Bixapathi Varaganti was moving. So he hired a 14 foot truck. We helped him with the move.

Luckily i got to drive the truck (Image). It was big. Initially it took a while to get adjusted to the height and the size of the vehicle. But after sometime, it was a comfortable ride. It was fun driving it. We did not hit the highway though.

One more vehicle adds to the list of driven vehicles after the 4-door sedans and mini SUVs.

Status update

Again i have not been keeping my blog updated.

After a flawless successful deployment of my last 5 months work, i am going little bit relaxed on my work load at office.

Life is moving on in montreal. Caught up with some movies. Hancock - just a time pass movie. Watched Wall-E - really really liked the pixar movie. The Dark Knight kept me excited all the movie but i dont think it deserves to be the top # 1 movie on IMDB. Mongol ended up to be a love story while we were expecting a war movie. Got to learn more about Genghis khan's life . The scenery was good though. Latest is Singh is Kinng , a OK comedy with not much sense in story. Atleast my visit to Egypt got refreshed. Never would the pharoahs have thought in their wildest imagination that Katrina Kaif and ... will come and dance a bollywood number on their grave.

Learnt a lesson - Never watch IMAX experience movie from the first few rows. We ended up little late (around 7 pm) for the 7 pm show. So we got to sit right in front of the big imax screen. A bullet shot from one end of the screen travels faster than you can move your head and see where it went on the other side of the screen. Also your neck starts to pain. The sound feels gibberish. The point to be taken is to reach the theatre half hour before and take your seat for movies which are going to be houseful.

Also went and met Kannan Krishnan (a prof. in univ. of montreal) here in montreal today. I was supposed to meet him around 4 months earlier. but today just happened to be the day. I went to his place and had a nice long warm chat about a lot of things. I look forward to meeting him and his family again sometime.

Joined gym again and after two days of hectic workout, letting the body to relax. Let's see how long i continue to go to gym this time - a week , couple , a month , couple ??

Six years

It has been six years since Ora0107 met and became friends. We all joined Oracle on 01-JUL-2002. Some of us are still with Oracle and some of us including me moved out.

It's been six years of work life. New people , new experiences all along. This last year passed real quick. I went home in november and was sick in jan/feb and then moved to montreal. It is already been 4 months in montreal !! Time passes by too quick.

All the best Ora0107 and keep flying.

Photo on Schmap

My photo of Harrison lake and hot springs was picked up from Flickr and used by Schmap as part of their canada travel guide (Lakes, Rivers & Beaches). I gave permissions for its use to them. It was initially short listed and then finally got selected.

I have get back to clicking. It has kinda come to a stop after summer came in.

Update: I modified the link as there were a set of images for Harrison lake. My photo is one of them. Thanks to Vikesh who tried to find the photo from the original link.

Moving weekend

It was moving weekend last week. Lot of people in montreal move around July 1st. You will see lot of stuff being sold/bought on craigslist during this period.

We helped our friends move to their new house this weekend. It was tiring. There was two truck (17'' U haul) loads of furniture being moved and i also got my sofa to my home as well during the same time. Still my body is aching from the hardwork we did on saturday. I need to get some rest this week to be back to normal.

Jazz fest has started in montreal. Need to listen to some live jazz before it is over !