Been here all day and all night. Mainly hacking my sawfish config. And some browsing. Discovered some cool stuff for sawfish: Service Menu - NeXTish service stuff. Truly good. Should've gotten into the whole sawfish scene earlier on. Anyway, hacking sawfish means that now I get to stay back and write the code I should've written last evening. Sigh. Better get to it...

I was excited about the project I've got. Sounded like some real work after all this time. Well, it is just some brain dead changes to some part of an API. /me feeling crushed and down again.

Sigh, maybe I should give up all hope of getting good work. I'm watching myself getting sucked into the ERP domain. Somehow or the other. Wanted to quit a long time ago, then thought 1 year. And then was almost ready to quit at a moment's notice.

Somehow it all fell apart. Just carrying on with living the same life. Get up, come to office, do some boring work on pl/sql or forms interspersed with browsing, eat lunch, work some more, browse some more till late in night, eat dinner in office, head home, crash on bed, sleep.

Is this how it was supposed to work out? Man!

Still lemme put some effort into this and get it done by end of day. Don't want to come to office on weekend to meet this deadline.

Woke up at 5 *AM* today. Wonder why :-/. Just woke up and couldn't get back to sleep.

So took some photographs of the darkness outside. Then read practice of programming for a while and then design document for an enhancement project I have. Watched the movie 'Shrek' for about an hour.

At 8 am it felt like half the day was already over. I could get a *lot* done if I could daily get up this early...

In other news I got a hike from my company. Nearly 12% or 40k bucks. Pretty neat sum, considering I'll get the back dated difference from January onwards. That'd be nearly 10k. Sheeesh! Now it'll be more difficult for me to quit and join a startup, as I planned to do. Now where will I find a startup company ready to pay me three and half lakhs? :-/

The infy deal is not going to work i think. This is what I got from the manager there:

I would be thrilled to have you in my team. I will answer your one-liners (in the end of your mails) once you are in my team. Till then, let "good manners" prevail. I will let you keep your OS as linux only if you prove me that you know what the OS is doing at any given point in time.

*shudder* is all I do. Man, good this happened before I landed there... The one liners this mail is talking about are my fortune signatures (which are generated randomly). Here are they:

1. "He flung himself on his horse and rode madly off in all directions."
2. Over the shoulder supervision is more a need of the manager than the programming task.

So after that I haven't heard from them. Good thing too.

Had a telephonic interview with the Infy people on Friday. Went pretty well (and I realized I'm still more or less good at C :-))

They asked me about my simulator. Explained in detail. Then some C. Heh heh. Good I had started hacking the sim again, got the mental edge.

Coincidentally my friend was in the next cubicle there while the interview was on. Tells me they were impressed :-D

But I'm not sure if I want to move to infy. Bad HR practices, people tell me. And no web access (there goes my apt-get!). Strict dress code (no jeans certainly). Wonder if I could survive...

Talked to a FoF (friend-of-friend) in banglore, who has been working in a couple of startups. Maybe I should shift to a startup: I do want to learn and get some stuff done before my GRE (hopefully in 2-3 years).

Hmmm, let's see where all this ends up...

It seems to me this blog has been getting melancholious off late. Hmmm, gotta fix that :-)

Things have started looking better. Even at work, which came as a surpise to me! And I finally had enough gumption to start coding my long held 8085 simulator. The poor thing always struck some disaster or other after every coding run, so I'll be sure to keep some backups this time [Once I had a backend, a GUI and a scheme interface ready but lost it to a hard disk crash].

The Infy people haven't gotten back to me yet, so all is quiet on that front.

This weekend, btw, was pretty great. For one had some good chinese food on friday night with V (um, forgot the name of the place). Then on saturday hacked on the simulator. Even tested some scheme code from SICP. Sunday had lunch with Tony and spent the afternon yakking with him. For dinner was invited to a friend's place in the army cantonment area. This friend (a woman) was a neighbour back in my native place. Had some good beer with her husband and again yakked with them. The dinner was excellent. Came back exhausted and collapsed.

On monday it felt as if friday happenned eons ago. Only if all weekends could be this agreeable...:-)