It was a great weekend! Insanely great! Silvermane (aka Noufal) was down here and we had fun :-). He was supposed to arrive sometime early saturday and give me a call. I kept getting up every 10 minutes from 6'o clock onward worrying if my mobile's switched off and why doesn't he call? All this after I had slept at 3'o clock grokking some perl. Anyway he called up finally, and I started to head out.

He was supposed to be at this IBS bus stand. I had NO idea where that is, but I decided to wing it. First mistake. Then I apparently decided it is somewhere in the direction of Secundrabad bus stand. Second mistake. The Big FSCKING mistake. So I finally end up at Secundrabad railway station and ask a traffic policeman where the hell is IBS? It turns out it is like kilometeres from where I am, and no clean way to get there. So I start to start going. Stop every half kilometer and ask someone. On the way I found out IBS stands for Imlibund Bust Stand. Interesting name. After about one hour of going round in circles and blind alleys I reach the place, but only after a kind auto driver tells me to follow him through a narrow passage of twisted little alleys, all alike. So Thank you auto guy! :) And there was silvermane, in all his glory.

Now we were supposed to head home, get some breakfast and get cosy. Um, the universe had different ideas. We had to, you see, get home to begumpet from somewhere in Imlibund and I had no idea about the spatial (or even temporal) relation between them. So again winging it, this time only since I was already chatting with silvermane, I'm asking people very infrequently and just randomly deciding left or right every junction. Kinda like hoping if we make enough turns we'd finally get somewhere I'd recognize (a million monkeys on a million typewriters...), aka if we ignore a problem it'd go away. Unsurprisingly after approximately an hour we end up on something which vaguely looks like the bombay highway with huge trucks passing us by. At this point both of us realized (I suspect silvermane knew it all along) that I need some serious advice. So shedding my studly ego aside I start asking people frequently. After something like 10 mins I realize we are somewhere in Banjara Hills and I know the road. After another 15 mins, we are passing through Panjagutta and finally reach Begumpet. Home! Sweet Home!

(to be concluded...)

I'm feeling really down. I have these stupid bugs where all I have to do is to go and change some stupid field in a stupid file and recompile and test it. I feel like fscking crying :`(

Mebbe I should have joined that startup doing website work. Heck, it couldn't have been worse than this. No, really. But then again, one must (is constrained to?) live with the choices one made (or did not make).

I'm just feeling blue. More than my usual share of the color infact. Today started off well, and was okayish till evening, even relatively good. Then I guess a small tiff with V kinda ruined it for me. And V turned taciturn. That really got me down (that always gets me down). Or maybe I was getting the blues right from the afternoon (hmmm, about what? bugs?). No point brooding about it...

In the good news section silvermane is coming down for the weekend. Well, that definitely cheers me up, and the weekend promises to be fun :-) Lots of talking and things to do. Catch a flick too ("Catch me if you can"?). He'd be here tomorrow morning, and I have to go and pick him up. Knowing as much as I do about Hyderabad, that should be one interesting adventure ;-) Heh heh.

Anyway, let's just head home and grok some perl before crashing for the day...

Today was a tough day. Manager's asked me to try to mung 3-4 bugs by this weekend, and that is way more than my current rate (more like 2 or 3 bugs going in parallel taking 4-5 days). Panic time!

So today, I killed my gaim (a yahoo messenger replacement for gnu/linux), didn't check email for a long while and didn't talk much to people either. Made decent progress, methinks the targets look acheiveable :-). What I am worried about is if this will set a bad precedent. If this is what will be expected every week. I need time to goof-off, keeps me sane ;-). Let's see...

I've settled down into a nice rhythm: come late to office (after 11 am) and leave late (around 11 pm). Makes more sense since I tend to leave late even if I come in early. People do give me weird looks when I walk in, but then "conformity is the refuge of the unimaginative"! My hair (which I haven't cut since august) also tends to attract glances. Can't say I don't like it, the shock value is fun ;-)

Finally got gnu emacs cvs using this cool program called desproxy . It also allows me to irc via erc (the emacs irc client). Infact mailed the author Miguelanxo Otero Salgueiro and thanked him for writing such a wonderful program.

It is interesting how much time I can spend in pursuing personal activities while still getting the work done. Very amusing. I spend quite a significant amount of time playing with gnu emacs, and making myself more productive in it. I guess it does help the company in the long run, but I sometimes feel guilty about it.

OTOH one has to just watch someone editing in Vi to realize how much of a productivity booster emacs can be. There are amazing amounts of things one can do. And it is not easy explaining how powerful a tool emacs is. Kinda like trying to get someone to understand how powerful calculus is: usually ends in frustation...

A recent incident: I was in the training room, and a couple of guys were following the cricket world cup match going on. I, as usual, wasn't paying much attention. The guy sitting next to me (a pretty cool guy) asked if I was interested in the score. Trying to blend in with the guys, I said yes, I was. And then asked what the score was. He told me. I said ok, and got back to my work. He then asked me if I also wanted to know which team was batting. A group guffaw followed. Oops!

And what was I trying to do? Blend-in? Which obviously is not going to work out, since usually I don't know dice about the random things people talk about. I'm totally lost. And then I fake it.

Thinking about it, why must I fit in? I'm totally not into the stuff people are into. I just like what I like, which happens to be computers and programming. And I can't find many people who are excited by that. Come to think about it, I was a misfit right from school. Most people didn't grok at all what I was talking/thinking about. Very few friends did. Even my folks had no idea what I was talking about most of the time (a situation which has mercifully changed for the better in the recent years). And I didn't understand what these grown up people or my classmates were talking about. Ok, maybe not that bad, but I do remember being pretty mystified by what was going on. By how most people behaved, or what they talked about. It was only in college that I met up with some kindred souls.

And now, years later, I'm still trying to fit it. Which is kind of sad. I should have realized by now there is no way I can fit in and still be interested in the things I am interested in, or be the kind of person that I am. Sigh. Anyway better late than never.

Here is an article which talks about something related: Why Nerds are Unpopular .