The trip that was

I had a total blast in Bangalore !

Work was great , it was wonderful meeting my team finally !
My manager was down there last week - and he is this uber cool geek who just happens to be a manager (till about last year end, he was a senior staff engineer - he coded most of the server !)
We were discussing the specs of the next release - and some of those meetings were awesome fun : learned in bucket loads !
I think I should seriously reconsider my decision to continue in Bombay , not only did I not have any problems with food (hmm , maybe Mohanettan was more responsible for this than my stomach's resilience) , but the amount of work that I could get done was huge ... So maybe this is the time to consider shifting back. (In case anyone comes across a nice small house near Sun office in Bangalore , please let me know :D)

On personal front , met up with most of my friends ... except for very few (for various reasons , including mismatch of when either of us were free , some goofy animal messing up/not arranging a potential meeting ;-) , etc ) - will try to meet them on my next visit if possible (which might be when I relocate back , or around July 31st - Aparup's wedding).

Caught up with Anoop and Pandi after like ages ! Both are doing great !!
By the way , Anoop is rumoured to have a blog (he told me the url too ... but I forgot) , someone let me know if you find it.
Considering the opinions and "vision" he expressed for his blog to me, it is going to be something worth reading :-)

Books - what is a visit without buying books !
Bought heaploads of them. Ok , ok , wont exagerrate , got some nice ones - some of which I wanted to buy for a while.
* Raided Blossom's (in Church st) and bought all the "Doctor Who" books there that I have not read.
* Got a couple of nice old chess books also from there - Blossoms is a veritable gold mine people, maybe someday soon it will rival Premier !
* Bought all three volumes of "The Art of Computer Programming" ... if only finishing them was as easy as paying for it *sigh* - focus man , focus ! (I have this fantasy that I will finish all three in about a year , atleast basic concepts expressed in them .....).
* Got "Design Patterns" by GoF ... finally I own it , my preciouusss ! I have read it in parts from various places , but I will revisit the book as a whole ... maybe it will give me better/newer insights !
* I found Tanenbaum's "Distributed Operating Systems" ... I have read it a while ago (really long time ago !) , it will make better sense to me now , more so since I was looking at ExOS and similar ideas a few weeks back and my semi-serious forays into OS design in general sometime back - this will be a right time to revisit the concepts.

I am a sucker for games , and when I saw Doom 3 expansion pack , just could not resist ... initial 10 mins of play was promising (too tired today to play much) , will update as it proceeds :) Any opinions about the exp pack?

Went for Alok's wedding reception , It was really great being there !
My best wishes to both Alok and Jenny - will definitely cash in on the Scrabble invitation that Jenny gave to me next time I am in blr :-)


In short , 2 weeks of extreme action I say !
I did not get time to post anything here , neither did I get time to visit most of the blogs and sites I normally visit ... busy couple of days coming up for that !

Not elaborating on more stuff like NY's visit to blr , Rai's "camera tricks" , etc .... too sleepy to put all those into coherent sentences :)

PS : This post became a pseudo personal post , not something I wanted it to become ... but kinda grew into one so leaving it as that.