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...