Wow. Its been only 10 days, but it seems like forever since I last wrote anything here. Infact, for the past week I’ve been so cut off from the outside world, missing my lunches, not following the news (no, not even Slashdot). But its all finally over, and hopefully I will catch up with my life in the next couple of days.
In unrelated ramblings, I was really shocked by the Pramod Mahajan shooting incident. Some brother he’s got. Why is there so much violence in this world?
Asim mentioned couple of days back that lately my blog has been “slow”. Well, what can I say, it //has// been that way. I’m keeping busy with the daily routine and I just didn’t get around to write anything. Besides, nothing popped in my head in the meanwhile that just had to be penned, and so…
Anywho, this short post is just meant to be a I’m-here-but-not-dead shout to the [[wp>lazyweb|lazy web]]. I’ll be back later with something better to say.
The day is finally here! Yes, I’m going to India for slightly less than 4 weeks. I’ll be leaving this Wednesday. So the blog is probably going to be silent for the bulk of this month. Although, if I do manage to get a broadband connection at home, that might change :)
Strangely, I’m not as excited as I thought I would be. It probably hasn’t sunk in yet. But it should be fun nontheless.
I’m not going to be travelling a whole lot, and will probably spend most of my time in and around Gwalior, chilling out with my family. But I do want to catch up with a whole bunch of people, so we’ll see how it works out. If you’re in India and want to get in touch, do drop me a note!
On a side note, I’ve become bored with this site design. So after I’m back, expect a change. I’ll still be using WordPress, but probably switch to a different design. WP 2.0 should be out by then hopefully. Also (and this is a secret), I’m trying to hack up my own static website generation tool. No no, nothing against Forrest — Forrest is //awesome// — but I just wanted to dabble around some more with Python and this seems like the perfect toy project. Besides, at times I feel I need something even simpler than Forrest for my needs.
In other news, I bought a video iPod for my sister, and have been playing around with it the last 2 days. The iPod seems very nice, but I must say I’m truly, utterly disgusted and frustrated by iTunes. Its the //worst// music management software I’ve seen till date. I’ll post a detailed rant some other time.
We had a speaker from Goldman Sachs today for the [[http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/csep590/05au/|Homeland Security]] class. Pretty interesting talk. I was impressed by the amount of efforts giants such as Goldman-Sachs have to put in to be on top of things. And I was surprised by how knowledgable (technically) the speaker was. It seems they are really doing a lot of things to safeguard themselves against all kinds of attacks and catastrophes. They are trying to build what they call a **resilient enterprise**.
I liked one quote in particular from his slide: We need //secure// products, **not** //security// products. Its an interesting thought — if our entire hardware, software infrastructure was built ground up with security in mind, would we still need things like virus shields and spam filters and intrusion detection systems?
As you can see, I haven’t blogged in almost a week now. Its back to school week for me, and its keeping me pretty busy.
Saturday went away in the drive. By the time I got here I was dead tired. Then I went to Himanshu’s for a fantastic dinner and some time. Then came back and just crashed.
Sunday morning went away unpacking. Sunday afternoon we went furniture shopping to IKEA. I got a really nice corner desk and some drawers for myself, and Ragsy //finally// bought a bed. We ate at a mexican place and the food was **so** good… yumm… After that we did some more shopping, went for a movie (Transporters 2) and also enjoyed some ice-cream at Baskin Robbins.
Monday was just busy as hell. First day at school: finish some paperwork, get access to building and labs, try to setup my machine, meet with Amin, goto OGSR to grab extension vouchers. Came back home and spent 4 hrs assembling my desk and Ragsy’s bed. In between also went downtown to test drive a car for Ragesh. Phew!
Tuesday was just as bad. I had to finish assembling my drawers. Finally got my lab machine setup. Started setting up workspace. SOSP registration and flight plans. Talk to Lucy, try to do some HP work. Just too many small little but important things to take care of.
Wednesday was similar. Prepare for thursday meeting, my turn to took, called Himanshu over for dinner, SOSP registration etc etc.
Anyways, its thursday now and I think I’m almost settled down now. So trying to get back to work now. This is a dull post I know, hopefully there will be more interesting stuff soon :)