Some pictures from my trip to China and Singapore

Some pictures I took during my trip to China and Singapore. The whole trip was a really wonderful experience, and these beautiful photos are just a few of the many I have taken. Will publish more of them some other time. Meanwhile, enjoy these pics.

A beautiful dragon boat at the Chinese Summer palace... 

At the world famous Tianenmen square 

A view of the orderly traffic in Beijing. Interestingly, Hyundai Elantras are the most common cabs there!! 

My cars in China ;-) And Audi A8 and Merc S class. 

One of the seven wonders of the world - The magnificent Great Wall of China. 

Conquered the Great Wall of China... after a steep climb ;-) 

A lot of fish and a shark seen at The UnderWater World in Sentosa Island, Singapore. 

Feeding birds at Jurong Bird Park in Singapore. Really nice experience. 

Phew... A breather at last.

Its been one cracker of a month or so for me. Every day was filled with loads of things to do and I had no time to even pause for a leisurely breath. But finally, I am glad that I seem to have found a nice break to chill out, starting from the Diwali holidays. Just before Diwali, I was down with cold and fever, but things are certainly looking up these days.

First of all, I decided to go to work today, and realized that there was hardly any body at office. I was joking to my only other team-mate who was present that we both collectively represent the 20% community of losers in town, who work on a "general" holiday ;-). But people who remained at home missed something very very special and rare... A blissful drive on Bangalore roads. It was almost like living in your dream. The drive from my home to my office, which normally takes more that 45 mins, took me all of 15 mins today, and I was not even trying to do a Michael Schumacher. Driving at a decent pace, I was able to reach office so quickly because the roads were so calm and peaceful. There were no traffic bottlenecks anywhere, even though most of the junctions were not manned. If there was a case of a long-cherished dream coming true surprisingly quickly, this was it. I did not expect to see such a state of affairs for the next 10 years, to say the least. If you missed it, too bad !!

What else? Yeah about my electric guitar and stuff. I did not "buy" a new guitar, but my sister's friend who is a famous TV music director was going abroad and gave his new Gibson solid body electric guitar to me ;-). I decided to practise on that and buy my own when he wanted to take it back. But I realize that playing the electric guitar is not as easy as it is made to look by our heavy metal heroes. In addition to moving your hands correctly over the frets (which is all you need to do in an acoustic guitar) you have to tune the amplifier and guitar correctly to get the right kind of sound. In addition, effects like vibrato, persistence and use of the whammy bar just make things more complicated. So I am planning to join a guitar class instead of getting bogged down ;-) Anyone interested in accompanying me?

I am also planning to make my home a little hi-tech. I am getting a broadband connection with a wireless router so that I can access the net from anywhere within my home on my laptop. I intend to make use of this by returning home early from office to beat the traffic and work from home after that. I have taken on a new part-time project to write a new Java GUI for a product. So I am reading up on SWT and GUI design these days. Apart from that my life is still full of bits and bytes, linkers and loaders, and memory errors and leaks. Believe me, its a fascinating world. You have to work at this level to understand what beautiful pieces of software the linkers and loaders are (of course, the compiler is too, but it gets its fair share of credit and visibility). The linkers and loaders perform SO MANY functions under the hood, and so transparently too. How many of you have ever actually thought of all that goes on behind the scene after you run the compiler driver and then when you execute the a.out? Hmmm... a really beautiful world, if you belong there.

I shall hopefully be writing more often now and I shall definitely upload the China trip photos asap...

Back after a long time...

Well, its been ages since I last posted ;-) Almost close to 2 months!! Thats mostly because I was away in China during the beginning of September. And after I came back, there was so much work that had accumulated that I had to work non-stop till it came to some normal state. That explains why I have not been doing much writing...

Hmmm, what else? It would take too much of time to write about my China trip here. I could just summarize by saying that it was a really wonderful experience. I did not expect a very positive experience in China, before I actually landed there. But its *wonderful* in terms of infrastructure, culture, hospitality, beauty and its very livable. The place is very beautiful with a right mix of modernity and the culture... The people are very hospitable, disciplined and friendly. I would not want to live there forever - but I would not mind going back there again :-) I shall post some pics that I took in China...

On the work-front, things are going pretty well. We had a release party today. Our team had gone to Indi Joe for lunch, and then bowling at Leela galleria. We had a lot of fun, and not much work was getting done today. So I thought of putting up a post here.

I shall be back with more interesting stuff to write here - I got a new book that teaches electric guitar playing techniques. Will try them out on my new guitar, and share the experiences - if they are good ;-) Keep dropping by - Adios for now

Question...

I have not been able to post here for quite a while, mainly due to lack of time. So thought of updating the blog with a question that I heard today. Its technical of course ;-)

Write a program to find out if the system stack is growing from higher address to lower address or from lower address to higher address... Pretty simple actually, but worth a shot.

Send your answers to me by mail (mailto: thisisgiri@gmail.com) and I will publish the answer after a couple of days...

P.S: This is very simple, and hence there are no prizes for cracking it ;-)

An ambition that was...

I had always dreamt of being a fighter pilot. The very thought of flying such a sophisticated machine, executing barrel-rolls and flying at supersonic speed used to keep me hooked onto Discovery channel and other sources where I could actually get to see these magnificent birds of prey. I have also been collecting pictures, models and videos of fighter planes from across the world. I even attended an aerospace quiz in school and won a prize... Somehow, I always felt that flying was the only thing that I was ever going to do in my life...

Well, things are oh so different now. There were so many factors that made me move away from the job of my dreams, join a engineering college, and become a techie typing away at the console. The closest I have ever gotten to these metal birds is in the Aero India shows that I have attended each year that it has been held here in Bangalore. I thought I'll post some pics of those beautiful machines here... I still look up at the sky when I hear a fighter plane roaring by.
Sometimes, it feels so sad, that the only thing that I ever wanted to be, so passionately, has just remained a dream. More so when I recollect the times in the past, when I have run back home from school, just to catch the program Wings on Discovery at 4 p.m. There was also a time when I had a cut my toe badly, and it was heavily bandaged, but I so badly wanted to go to Aero India, that despite the pain and discomfort I did end up going there. Such was the strength it would induce in me.

But like we learn so many times in life, you have to forget the past and move on... Anyways, I am enjoying my current job, fiddling with system software, doing the job of linkers and loaders, and working on a fantastic piece of software, that is Purify!! ;-)

But still, there is just a small particle of fantasy that says, someday, I just might get into the machine of my dreams...


A Mirage-2005 takes off from Yelahanka AFB


An F-14 Phantom executing a 90 degree roll close to an aircraft carrier deck



A formation of the Surya Kiran aerobatic team

Frustration...

This is terrible... I had taken a lot of time out to write a big post about my life in general and nothing in particular, and this site just refused to publish it once I was done with the writing... And I had not even saved the text in that post, and now I have no more enthu left to write that stuff back again :-(... Lack of enthu apart, I dont even have the time... I am at office on a weekend to complete my work on something, and one of our servers is down... So even that is not working out. Guess, I'll just leave all this aside and go back home... And if I have recovered the enthu to write again tomo morning, I'll drop a post...

I have been tagged too ;-)

I have been pinned/tagged by Naren, so I have to write some more stuff bout myself... OK here goes,

Names you go by:
------------------

Giridhar
Giri
Sub-Zero ;-)

Three Screen Names You Have Had:
---------------------------------------

I'll pass that one ;-)

Three Physical Things You Like About Yourself:
--------------------------------------------------

Height
Flexible hairstyle ;-)
Missing paunch/potbelly despite being a techie for 1 year and living on pizzas and other junk ;-)

Three Physical Things You Don't Like About Yourself:
--------------------------------------------------------

My hair
The scar on my forehead (Doesn't look like Harry Potter's ;-))
Hmmm... Nothing else

Three Parts Of Your Heritage:
---------------------------------
Locational
Bangalore

Characteristic heritage
Complex ;-)
Wary
Fun-loving / humourous

Three Things That Scare You:
---------------------------------
Scary code (esp buggy ones in PA-RISC assembly code ;-))
The traffic in Bangalore city
Nothing else

Three Of Your Everyday Essentials:
-------------------------------------
Play TT ;-)
Newspaper (Su-do-ku and jumble)
Blog-surfing (these days)

Three Things You Are Wearing Right Now:
--------------------------------------------
Light blue casual shirt
Blue jeans
Sports shoes

Three Things You Want In A Relationship:
-------------------------------------------
Trust
Respect for personal space
Very good communication

Three statements that are not all true or all false:
---------------------------------------------------
I want to blog regularly :-D
I understand the PA-RISC architecture and HP-UX linkers well
I'll buy a Skoda in the near future ;-))) (note the word near is subjective ;-)))

Three Physical Things About the Opposite Sex That Appeal To You:
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Smile
Confidence
Easy going and not talking too much

Three Things You Want To Do Really Badly Right Now:
---------------------------------------------------------
Get an electric guitar asap. Has been on the cards for a long time now.
Have a pizza for lunch - ages since that happened.
Complete work on the bug fix that I have been working on ;-)

Three Places You Want To Go On Vacation:
---------------------------------------------
Austria
Switzerland
Upper Himalayas ;-)

Three Kids Name You Like:
-----------------------------
Swee pea (Popeye)
Junior (Sylvester)
Eh - That's all, doc ;-)

Three Things You Want To Do Before You Die:
------------------------------------------------
Own a 4 X 4 SUV... Maybe a BMW ;-) (Dream on...)
Learn about stock trading and make money from the stock market (Bad choice ;-))
And enjoy life to the MAX !! Because thats what life is all about...

Three People Who Have To Take The Quiz Now:
------------------------------------------------
* ;-). Anybody who reads this post (And has not already done this)

Intro

This is my first blog, and I am doing this to see if this is a good way to get interacting with people. However, I dunno how long this will last. ;-) There was a time when Orkut was a big craze, and I was posting on the communities very often... But that died a natural death. ;-) Let's see how far this goes...