thecruisemaniac.com

I’ve come across more than a couple of instances in the recent past (the most recent being prashanth) where people had trouble setting up Mail For Exchange (MFE) on their Nokia S60 devices.  So, I decided to do a step-by-step howto on how to get it installed, setup and running on your S60 phone.

I have used a Nokia 6210 Navigator (S60 FP2 device) for supporting this blog post, but any other S60 3rd edition / 5th edition device would conform to more or less the same process.  Now, here goes…

There are two ways you can start off your setup of MFE on your S60 device:

1. Hunt down the MFE icon hiding somewhere in the Installations / Applicaitons folder and start off the setup process…
2. Start setup from the Messaging app and move forward to install MFE and continue the setup.  We will be looking at this approach in the blog post.

The only difference between the two approaches is that in the first one already has MFE installed on your device and you just go ahead and type in your magic keywords and it just works!  In the second case, you type in the parameters and then it proceeds to install MFE (whose sis file Nokia has happily stored somewhere on your phone) and then apply the magic and get going!!!

So… starting with it…

1. Open the messaging app -> New mailbox.  Select Yes for the question it asks.
   
2. You should now be presented with the E-mail setup wizard.  Start it off… we’re just a few more steps away
   
3. The wizard will then show you a disclaimer.  Just accept it to move to the next step.  It will then check your GPRS (NOT WAP, GPRS = DATA = THE COSTLY WALA CONNEXUN ) connectivity to the internet and then the setup part of your process starts.
   
4. Continuing on… The next set of screens prompts you to enter the Email ID, password.
   
5. At this point, we’re halfway through the process.  The wizard will now show a list of protocols that are “possibly” supported by your email id.  One of them is POP3 / IMAP4 (which is the defacto thingy, but not what we’re interested in) and the other being, Mail For Exchange.  This is shown in the screenshots below:
   
6. Once MFE is selected, you will be presented with dialogues to enter your Windows Username and the Windows Domain Name against which you authenticate yourself in your organization.
   
7. In the next dialog, you have to enter your mail server URL.  This is the URL of the exchange server you have at work.
   
8. At this point, the installation of MFE starts on you system and proceeds to show you the Sync settings menu.
   
9. Pressing the center softkey on the Content synced settings item brings up the detailed settings for your MFE setup that you have done.  Here, you can tweak your Peak, off peak settings, Sync when roaming settings, and all the works…I’ll leave it to the screenshots below to do the explanations…
   
10. Once you are satisfied with the settings changes you have made to the profile, Select Options –> Full resync.  This will clear out any pre-existing sync data and refresh it with the latest data from the exchange server.
    
11. Once the Full sync is done, the MFE profile you just created gets saved and you can see the status of the sync process as it happens.
    
12. After closing the wizard, you must be able to see a Mail for Exchange folder in your Messaging application.  This indicates that you have an MFE profile setup on your phone.  Once the sync is complete from the previous step, you will see a new mail indication on the Home screen as indicated by a small ‘@’ icon in the top right near the battery indicator.
    

    You can haz push corporate emailz!!!

    

13. Another feature that MFE provides is the Company directory lookup.  This is basically the Addressbook feature that Outlook provides when you type the name of the recipient and press Ctrl + K.  The app is named Comp. Dir.
    

So there ends the step-by-step walkthrough for setting up MFE on your S60 devices.

Now comes the interesting part, Troubleshooting.

• If your sync has suddenly stopped working, chances are that your backend has cut you off for a while a.k.a. maintenance.
• Another common issue is the MFE not working after a FOTA upgrade.  This is rectified by deleting your existing MFE profile and creating a new one with the same settings.
• If your MFE setup keeps harping about the server being wrong (step 7 in how-to above), try it with the https://mail.yourmailserver.com url.

I hope this helps someone with regard to setting up MFE.  Until the next post… Chao!

Yesterday (Jun 3, 2009), I completed 4 years in the IT industry.  Its been a wonderful experience starting from TechMahindra (Erstwhile Mahindra British Telecom) back in June 2005 all the way to Sasken to Teleca and Nokia now in 2009.

This landmark achievement in my life definitely deserved a blog post… So here goes a list of experiences / learnings that I hold close to my heart and have mattered to me the most.  I’ve just jotted them down with out any structure / format blaming intensive lack of energy to sit and “compose” a blog post about my historic and memorable achievement:

The initial days in TechM as a fresher have been the most amazing days of my life till date. PERIOD.  Training, Practice, Tests, Training, Practice, Tests… In mellu speak, simbly oosssoome!!!

And when I look back at what I’ve done in the last 4 years, there are moments that give me a lot of pride and there are some where I’m going: “Dude!!! WTF!!! You god-freaking-seriously did that???” :-O .  But as I’m ME, I’m just gonna blame everything on fate and let the WTF moments pass and leave them for laughing at myself waaaay ahead in the future.

There is one important learning that I’ve kept steadfast and very close to my heart for all these 4 years… Something very simple, yet amazingly effective. And that is to NEVER SAY NO TO INFORMATION.  Of any kind…  A lot of people who know the cruisemaniac would agree to this…  I’m not talking about rule validation and sanity testing here… I’m just talking core-dump!

That was something I learnt from my first ever PM at TechMahindra.  Keep searching, keep learning, and it will all come back and help you one day.  I’m still waiting for that “One day” though!

Coming to the next learning, I’ve learnt to fight where its necessary and be subduinng where necessary.  People skills play a huuuge part in corporate life.  Being frank may first offend people… but it sure helps in the long run.  If i can commit to a deadline, i commit whole-heartedly.  If I cannot, I make sure my seniors know that I cannot!

Which brings me to the next very important gospel…  EMail is for record keeping! Not only for fooling around with silly forwards!  I’ve learnt not to take work from my managers unless the specs of what I have to do are written in an Email and sent to me!  Lets face it… IT takes its toll on everyone… All of us want the short way out… But remember, the short-cut always fucks you up! ALWAYS!

Next up, Always experiment… I’ve always wanted to figure out things on my own…  Make mistakes and fuck things up… thats how you learn! Atleast, thats how I learn…  I’m sure this mentality has brought me a full circle in Symbian.  Starting off from Apps, I went down to the Subsystems and Frameworks, dirtied my hands on multimedia engineering, user interfaces, Platform support and Integration, and currently handle Build and Release Process management, whoa!!! That felt good when I typed it in!   The crux, its there for the taking… Go Ask… Show interest, show commitment, it has happend for ME! It can happen for you!

Shifting jobs is not a bad thing!  You get another chance to make a different set of mistakes in the name of work! That has helped me tell my managers upfront what I’ve done and what my goals are… It gives people a window to fit you in and experiment…

And of course… the last but not the least part: Its a totally unrewarding rat-race… you win some, you lose some… keep your spirits up and keep running.  Rat or not, it doesnt really matter!  You’re in it for the money and the perks… Figure out your path, and walk it!
<<<Something more must come here>>>

<<<apparently it wont>>>

Chao…

A lot of us have a multi-PC setup these days. Be it at work or at home, the cables and the multiple mouses are surely a confusion!  Well, a way out exists… infact, an open-source and completely cost-free way out of the mixup exists.  Say Hello to Synergy, the opensource, multi-OS compatible Keyboard and mouse sharing application.

Download Synergy from the sourceforge website here.  Install it and have it running without a reboot.

The configuration for Synergy is very simple.

1. You choose one of your multiple PCs / laptops on your table as your server.
   
2. Next up, you would need to configure the positions of the other PCs with respect to the PC acting as the Synergy Server. Eg: Laptop is to the left of PC.  EeePC to the left of Laptop.  Laptop is Right of EeePC, et al.
   
3. Start off Synergy on the server
4. Hook on the clients to the server by providing either the hostname of the server or the IP address  and voila..
   
5. You can haz one keyboard and one mouse for multiple peeceez!!!
   

With respect to my setup as above, synergy runs on the Ubuntu desktop.  The Keyboard and mouse from the desktop is used by both the laptop and the eeePC.

For the ubuntu fellows, synergy is available in synaptic package manager. Just apt-get it as:

sudo apt-get install synergy

The package manager installs both the synergy server (synergys) and the synergy client (synergyc).  Synergy server needs a configuration file named synergy.conf which needs to be pointed to when starting the synergy server.  A very detailed help document for writing the synergy.conf file and for starting the client and server on ubuntu is here.

Well… thats that about Synergy.  Looks like i covered an app I liked a lot in pretty much good detail… and oh… yeah, you can share the clipboard across PCs… Ctrl+C on ubuntu and Ctrl+V on windowsXP! Kickass!! B-)

There’s about a couple of weeks left for the Nano to start hitting showrooms and the streets… There does not seem to be a lot of excitement in the market about the 1 lakh rupee car other than for the reason that well… its a one-lakh-rupee-car!

What however spurred me on to write this post on the Tata Nano is my analysis on the thought process put in behind the vehicle.  The nano is not just about a car that costs one lakh rupees… Its about a huuuuuuge time-bomb thats gonna go off the moment Ratan Tata says Go!  A time-bomb thats going to start ticking in every CEO / MD’s office when they realise that the market is no longer theirs… The rules to the game they started just got re-written… The processes and manufacturing setups they had just got a royal trip down the drain…

Here is my statement of reason:

The Target Market:

The nano is being targeted at a market that is extremely price sensitive.  When you bundle this with international grade quality, you get a direct WIN!!!  The nano is also targeting a segment that is already booming, the small car segment, but here, they’re changing the rules of the game.  Same quality merchandise, slightly smaller quantity, but perfectly priced to just touch the lower segment.

The same technique a vegetable vendor uses to compete against retail stores.  Same quality, more or less same source for the commodity, easier availability, lower price.  I’d go with the vegetable vendor for tomatoes and paalak as opposed to walking into an air-conditioned Spar supermarket.

The Volume Game:

From what I understand of selling commodities in a market, there are two distinct ways I’ve noticed people do it with:

1. Sell it at high prices because of quality and brand value and make the cut based on profit per commodity sold a.k.a Mercedes, Honda, Apple <AND>
2. Sell it at low prices at lower profit margins and make the cut based on volumes moved a.k.a. Bajaj, Nokia, Saravana Stores, et. al.

Tata, as we can see, is playing the game using strategy no. 2.  “One Lakh Rupees” is an amazing price point!!! They have been able to achieve this in a way no one else could imagine.  They have reduced cost of production by bringing all component vendors under one roof (a.k.a. one production area / SEZ) thus reducing transportation costs.  They have also convinced component vendors to operate on a volume based margin and make smaller but numerous profits rather than making one big million dollar sale and taking a 15-20% profit margin out of it.

The Pricing Model:

The pricing of the “One Lakh Rupee” car is directly attributed to the afore mentioned to points.  But hey, This for me is absolute ingenuity.  The teams inside Tata have hit the nail bang on the head with the pricing and in addition to it, they have also looked into making the one-lakh car easily affordable for people that would want to own one.  Their tie-ups with numerous banks offering loans is a gimmick they picked up from Bajaj ( the guys who started with Zero % Auto-finance) and pushed it across to make sure that the work put in does not go to dust.

The concerns:

This is a very important point.  Yes, the Nano is hitting the roads in a couple of weeks from now.  Hyundai and Maruti must be peeing in their pants right away!  How they would handle the uproar is something i cannot fathom citing lack of business sense!!!

But what I’m more concerned AND interested in looking at, is, how Two-wheeler manufacturers are going to respond to it.  Bajaj, TVS, Honda, and the likes are now going to get kicked in the nuts.  This is how Tata is positioning itself in the market:

Hey, you’re buying a bike, you are taking a loan of 65k+ and getting two wheels.  Here’s the thing: Take a loan from us, We’ll give you a nano, it has 4 wheels instead of 2, you can pay us back at the same rate that you’d pay back for your 2 wheels, and guess what, 4 people can travel at the same time and you wont get wet too!!!

Bajaj is already in the news for planning to make 4-wheelers but there is a lot that needs to happen before they can compete with such a sound business plan!

The forgotten JLR:

The nano has created so much of news for Tata (good, bad and otherwise) that the 2.3 billion dollar Jaguar – Land Rover has slipped to the sidelines…  What Tata would do to get Jaguar into the market is something we would have to wait and see…

Closing Note: Will I buy a Nano?

The answer currently is NO.  My reasons:  Well, they are personal.  I have never been comfortable with a small car.  I am used to the larger ones and that would be what I would pick up.

DISCLAIMER: Nope, I am NOT a market analyst.  Nor am I a business guy.  I’m just another lame Software Engineer who put in a bit of logic to the equation of the Nano to come up with the post   This blog post came out as a result of the conversation Saurabh Minni a.k.a. the100rabh and I had this morning.

Chao…

The answer to the question: “Wordpress”.

Well, thats about one of the main reasons why we moved away from the system of the Wiki that has always ruled the BCB systems till BCB8.

The other main reason why we felt that wordpress was better suited than Wiki is thus:

A wiki, is a collection of documents linked to each other.  There is only one hierarchy to the structure… and its FLAT.

Wordpress on the other hand is multi-leveled AND allows for a relationship that has always ruled the Barcamp like scenario:  A content provider AND the content provided.  Which when translated to the BCB scenario relates to:The Speaker and the content associated with the person’s talk / discussion.

So there goes, wordpress it was!  And then started the work of tweaking it to make the Content Management System manage the content and the content-providers and participants the bridge.  And what resulted at the end of it is what we have on the BarcampBangalore website currently.

The best learnings out of working on this whole thing, in my opinion is thus:

1. Mixdev IS GOD!!! He is one of the most complete and most awesome of coders I’ve come across!!!
   
2. There is a plugin to achieve every conceivable functionality in wordpress!!! <<  Tip from @mixdev and @the100rabh.  And yeah, I vouch for it!!!
3. There is no touching the subsystem that has been done in making this website.  All that you see on the website is completely delivered by just the theme! <<KICKASS>>
4. Following and achieving point 3 hence makes sharing the code that much easier!!! And that much less code to understand and modify.

The code of the barcampbangalore theme (for lack of a word for the theme name, thereof) has been put up for download and further work and development on Google code here.  There are some bugs, as there is always with very good quality code and since it is open to all please feel free to spread the word around and have people use it and do leave comments and tell us how amazing we are

And there goes 2 hits with one stone:  My first wordpress theme AND my first Opensource project! W0000t!!!

Disclaimer: I have no intention to offend anyone / anything as a result of this post. These are totally my opinions and is posted on my website held against my domain hosted on someone Else’s server. If you seriously have a problem beyond this point, you need a life desperately!

AND Oh!, Warning… Long post!!!

Layoffs are happening everywhere… People dont have a jack’s clue of whats happening… Everyone is mouthing the same set of words, more so like hashtags: recession, layoffs, cost-cutting, downsizing, rightsizing, et. al.

But yeah, if we all have to face the truth, we have to… don’t we??? This post is not going to be yet-another-recession-reasoning post. I’m going to more so crib about it and probably try to see what we can do about the stark reality we are facing right now and are going to face for some more time to come. So, here goes:

First off, The recession syndrome:

Every single organization is talking about cost-cutting. This basically means that employees in the hard-hit Information Technology and allied ITES sector need to face one or more of the following:

1. Job cuts. Well, they right-sized… and… you’re out!
2. Lesser Perks. No more Organization sponsored Birthday parties, team lunches, team outings / trips, et. al.
3. No more free coffee / tea / lunch / breakfast / dinner. [More on this later]
4. Lesser number of buses / cabs
5. No more free outgoing calls from the desks / cubicles or reduced free telephone bill limits
6. Frozen salary hikes
7. No salary / virtual salary if your case is a really sad one, like the folks at Satyam!

Now that the cost-cutting-list is made, I have a few questions for the organizations, all of them:

1. What is your meaning of cost-cutting / down-sizing / right-sizing? [Personally, my question would be: Why dont you have left-sizing? Why does it have to go only in the "right" direction?]
2. And yeah, if you’re right-sizing now, were you not of the right-size back then??? How were your profits coming in so beautifully??? Quarter on Quarter on Quarter… Did you also muck up your numbers like Satyam did???
3. Why do you have to do it because someone else is an ass??? Did You not do your job right then?
4. If you were interested in saving some money back then… You wouldnt have to do all this shit right?
5. How do you choose who do down-size? The slave who clocks 20 hours per day at work? Or the doofus who licks-your-a$$ clean irrespective of whether you take a dump or not?
6. How do you weigh these options?
7. What if YOU get thrown out in the process of downsizing?
8. And the most important question of all, What should an employee do to protect himself from getting booted out? [I'm guessing girls are safe from this market effect... They either dont get shown the door or they retire as housewives]

Well, the sad part is, none of the good things happened… and we all live to bear the brunt… I want to go hunt down the management guy who taught me to “Make hay while the sun-shines” and kick him dry! It was in all probability him and his boss that were busy eating the hay. Aaargh!!!

Part II of the post – What can YOU do?:

First off, I’m no management guru / PM guy, bigshot-whatever. But I still continue with this part of the post because of two reasons:

1. I have seen / am seeing people live through these “harsh times” and more importantly,
2. This is MY goddamn BLOG!!! I have an opinion… Just about like everyone on this planet has an a*&hole!!!

Yeah, getting along… The first thing I would like everyone to realise is thus:

The world has not come to an end! It is not doomsday. Not YET!!!

Its just a market slowdown… Organizations are introspecting on the moves they made… The markets are introspecting about the stuff it traded… Managers are continuing to eat and give the bullshit they always ate and gave!

So yeah, what can be done about this??? Truly, nothing… The industry is working itself around… and it will take time… What can YOU do in the meanwhile??? Lets talk about that now:

Lose the fear: This is a statement that my mom always told me whenever I had a problem. I advocate this to a whole lot of people who are in a state of absolute panic.

Face the stark reality. You are at the bottom of a pit. You cant get any deeper. The quicker you realise this and gain confidence, the better and more easier it is for you to walk out of the trap!

A person who has lost his job has definitely lost quite a lot of things. All plans have definitely gone awry, Financial security is at ground-zero, the future is a huuuuuuge Question mark… but hey, you still have YOU! You still have your friends… You still have a gazillion others in the same scenario.

This statement is from hard-personal-experience:

The moment you lose faith in yourself, you lose the race. Period.

Hunt for a new job: This is the simplest way out of the situation. Simple… Get a new job! If one organization is not doing good, there are others that are… Try to pump up your resume, apply and get hired. [I am not going to do the how-do-you-get-recruited part of the story here. That is out of scope of this blog post. I'll cover it later].

There is always someone who’s in need of a person to share the workload. Look to freelancing, look at startups, look anywhere… But… LOOK! And look some more…

Now IS the time you look at using the internet for doing something other than “Hi, I wnt 2b ur frnd… Plz b my frnd” bullshit on orkut! There is more to the internet than orkut.com!!! Seriously! Websites like linkedin.com, and other useful websites exist for this sole reason!

To prepare your legitimate network that can help you in times of need.

Experiment with your ideas: If you are of the kind that knows has atleast attended one barcamp religiously in his / her life, I think its time you put that knowledge into action. Think of doing something on your own. Work up an idea thats been hitting on you for quite sometime… Team up with friends / colleagues and code it up… and presto… you could be on your way to doing something really good and really useful…

Theres nothing wrong in giving an idea the chance it deserves. You never know what the payback could be. And, you’ve got all the time in the world sitting at home.

Dignity of Labour: This point is specifically for people who are low on resources. Time, cash, anything… How about, we consider you giving up the “I am the fricking king of the world because I’m a techie” label and say you get yourself a job that just about feeds you and keeps you running…

• Something like Job-typing for someone for some cash
• Teaching at a school / college / university
• Working as a network admin, cable guy at an organization
• whatever else fits the bill

I have noticed that Indians are the hardest hit in the economic recession because of this main “thing”… This stigma we all have in our heads… The feeling that we need to be doing only something that fits our levels of respect and self-esteem… Well, here’s what I think…

If you dont have a job… you dont have self-esteem, do you??? What you need is money… not arrogance! If you were worth that much in the first place, you would still have a job!

Now that I’m done with the things I wanted to write about… I’ll end this sober and long post with this one line… err…. paragraph:

The world is not ending… You need to be concerned… not lose your head. You need to be confident and the most important thing of all

Stay Hungry… Stay Foolish…

P.S.: I’m not plain advocating stuff to people who are reading this post… I have been in the same situation… My friends and family are in the same situation… and yes, I have come out of this situation by doing more than one of the things I have listed above there… Comments and suggestions welcome…

A lot of people down here in India did not even know of the Security flaw in Nokia devices in all probability.  The company called F-Secure, that makes Antivirus software for Symbian phones had demonstrated an SMS based flaw during in Nokia’s devices during the 25th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin.  You can read about it here, here and see a video of this exploit in action here.

The flaw, named “Curse of Silence” was demonstrated on Nokia’s Series60 2nd Edition, 3rd Edition phones (FP1 included).  It worked this way: People sent a carefully and very very painstakingly typed series of messages to an E-Series / N-Series phone.  And voila, the affected device would stop communicating  with the outside world using SMS.  You could only make / receive voice calls.  And the only known way out for this hack was to hard reset the phone.

What happened as a result of this was the noise in the Nokia forums, which obviously happens…  And then, F-Secure chose to act.  They released a patch for the flaw saying that they could protect the devices if users agreed to shell out 60$ USD for it.  Crazy!

And then the noise level in the forums grew even further, and people started to blast Nokia for making such a mistake in their production devices and then Nokia chose to act.  They just released a free application download which would clean up your phone if your device is infected. And keep you secure.  This also probably answers the various firmware upgrades Nokia has been pushing out for most of its models lately.

What I particularly wanted to point out with this post are the following:

1. The fact that Nokia actually listens to its users.  The security flaw is not major.  If you take a look at the video from the link posted above, it shows how strenuous it is to actually hack into the system.
2. People will always complain.  Listening to the complaints and having to put up with all that noise AND take what is important for both an organization and its customers (loyal and otherwise) is real mastery!
3. It shows one straight thing from the management perspective: You may have the first mover advantage for a situation.  But, when the playground is not yours, you dont get to play according to your rules. F – Secure!
4. F-Secure sucks!!! Nokia needs to stop teaming up with F-Secure and stop listing them in their Download! application.
5. Nokia rocks!
6. Nokia rocks! and, lastly
7. Nokia rocks!!!

So yeah, all is well in the Nokia and Symbian and Smartphones world!   You can continue to send out confidential mail, love-ka-mail and all other sorts of yeee-mail… and listen to “?? ?????? ?? ???? ???…” or any other song of your choice on your cool Nokia phone while getting traffucked in any city that you are in.

But do remember, you do need to periodically backup your phone.  There is the software part that Nokia and its team of hard-working, dedicated, engineers can take care of… And there’s the “idiot using the box” that you can choose / not choose to be.

And, in other unrelated news, Apple’s multitouch patent got through…  I feel really sorry for the Palm-Pre!!! They need some really awesome magic from the Harry Potter world to rewire the stuff!

Last, but definitely not the least, thanks to Ricky Cadden of SymbianGuru for the update / info.

There! Another lovely blog post done!

Well… how do I start this post???  In twitter style, the title says it all…

But then, here’s the extended version:

Last week, Bengaluru’s popular techblog controlenter had a post on requesting for twitter usernames that were inactive.  Link to post here.  So, as the process goes, You send a mail to username [at] twitter [dot] com with the following data:

1. The twitter username you want
2. Your current twitter username
3. Whether you want to use the username (if allocated to you) with the current account or you want to use it as a new / separate account.

I dug around twitter and noticed that the username @ashwin was unused until that moment with just 2 tweets and about 3 follows and 1 follower.  Typically – UNUSED as per twitter’s terms.  And off went an email to twitter requesting that they give me the twitter username @ashwin.

And five days later, today, when twitter stopped logging in with my username @cruisemaniac, I thought I’d been “phished“.  But then, surprise! surprise! My username had changed.  Twitter had actually allocated @ashwin for me. Thanks guys for that!!!

To be the only @ashwin on twitter is awesome… and so with this tweet, I changed my twitter handle on twitter:

My Tweet indicating change of twitter handles

I did receive a lot of mixed reactions… @the100rabh paid homage to @cruisemaniac! @dkris and @pcsbox felt that the change was good… Some more tweets happened that are on twitter search.

And there ends this happy story

But yeah, the post is not over… The technical part of the twitter-username-change still remains:  If and when you are allocated your new username by twitter, the old one is lost.  If you want, you can register again using a different e-mail ID and hold your old username till someone else feels that you’re squatting on the username and requests twitter to release it for him / her.

I do have @cruisemaniac booked and held tight… Fingers crossed!

For all that followed the @cruisemaniac and felt that the tweets were worth listening to, @ashwin will still rock the show and rule the roost! B-)  And for those who dont know me yet, I’m @ashwin on twitter.

-Chao…

Im back to writing on the blog after quite some time…  Things at work have kept me quite busy!!! And as 2008 draws to a final closure, I thought I’d write up a post on the yearly roundup… Something that I missed last year for reasons that I’ll mention below…  So yeah, here goes nothing:

2008 started with a dark note this time around for me with Mom being admitted to hospital for a Bypass surgery.  The surgery was succesful, mom started recovering her health and January went by quite fast… and then hell broke loose!!!

On the afternoon of February 2nd, mom left us all!!! A shock that none of us was prepared to take! So there went February 2008, down the frigging drain!!!

March and April went by pretty dullish… Nothing interesting in life… Except to mention that I was no longer associated with Nisarga from that point on…  I dint see the same commitment levels coming out of me…  I dint see any point in anything else in life at that moment.

Life did a steady climb from May onwards, when I was asked to travel to Turin, Italy for 3 months.  Lovely trip, amazing places, awesome beaches, serene hills and fields… That was the best 3-month-period of this year.  Met some lovely people in life! Had some of the best Tiramisu and pizza in my life.

Back to India in August, Sasken started dipping down the scales… Motorola was dying… things in my life were however moving good… Got to work on the Media player for Motorola’s Symbian series of phones.  The sad truth however is that not one of the devices I worked on lived long enough to hit the market!

And then on the 1st of October, Teleca happened.  They were opening their operations in India and wanted Symbian developers! Took an interview, got whooopped!! and was offerred a job there… Lovely salary… and most important of all, the power and responsibility to create the India team!!! Joined Teleca on the 10th of November and things have been great since then!!! I am finally going to be able to realise my dream of working on a Nokia phone!!! Double w00t for me

So yeah, Things rolling good after a very very bumpy and rough ride!!! As 2008 draws to a close, heres a list of highlights in life in the year:

1. Saw a live football match for the first time in life!!! Juventus vs. Inter Vs. Milan @ the swanky new stadium in Turin.
2. Learnt italian!!! Personal best for me! Proves that I’m still wired tight and right!
3. Got promoted at work. Yippeeeeeeeeee!!!! I is Senior Engineer now B-)
4. Shifted to Jayanagar from CV Raman nagar.  I now have a crowd at home… Its back to living with a group
5. Bought a 500 gig hard-disk and managed to fill it up to its brim!  Im now busy trimming it down!
6. Got myself an eee-PC – I picked up the eee-PC from jace at BCB7 for an undisclosed sum .  Good company… Ultra lightweight stuff!!! Totally awesome thingy thats running a fullblown Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) distro right now…
7. Got myself an iPod nano – Finally into the apple family… I would never pick up anything more than this from the apple family!!!  49 grams of uber-ultra-light-weight goodness!!!
8. Did a bike trip to Ooty with scorpion032 a.k.a. Laxman Prasad and swaroopch a.k.a. well… Swaroop. C. H.
9. Travelled to Nandi hills on bike again!!! With my roomies…
10. Got a new job… Got more responsibility and got to meet some uber l33t peeps @ work!!!
11. Managed to do a looooooot of reading!!! and a lot of listening to music!!!

Pretty positive outlook I have eh??? Well life rocks… thats the rule… and we live on to die another day…

There goes the post for the past year!!! Lots of new things learnt… lots of pain felt… lots of love lost… and lots more of love gained…

I guess this is what is called a roller coaster ride…

Chao… and Wish you all a very very happy and prosperous new year!!! Have truck-loads of fun…  If life’s giving you the kicks, take it, and enjoy it all…

If you’re reading this post, it means that the host migration that I decided to do has gone through successfully.  I’ve moved on from bluehost’s platinum hosting plan to a simple yet effective hosting solution by expertrio.com.

Special thanks to preshit for making things happen pretty quickly And yeah, the cruisemaniac continues to roll…

One small quirk that I had to go through was to login to phpmyadmin to upload the database backup that I had of the blog at the older location.  I would love to have this feature built into wordpress… This would be a total dream thingy to have

And before I sign off and retire for the night / early-morning / whatever at 2.30 AM, a quick update on life: Things have been going good!!! I’m loving it!!! Every moment of this rollercoaster ride that I’m riding… And oh, I will come out with some good news pretty soon…

’til then… Chao…