thecruisemaniac.com

Two years back, this time around… I’d just resigned from my previous employer at pune.  I was packing up stuff to leave for Bangalore and join my new workplace.  4th September, 2006 would still be remembered as one of the most dreaded days in my life.

When I had time to take a coffee break, I had this sudden flash of thougths that ran across my mind and hence this post…

Till May 16th of this year, till I landed in Turin, Italy, I had nothing on my track record to prove that I was a useful, as the corporation calls it, “resource“.  Since then, Life has come around so fast and so full that as I gave more thougt into the whole sequence of events, it did seem not only gratifying… It also felt extremely complete… the whole scenario connected!

I actually got a pay raise! and transitioned as a Senior Engineer in the organization! Special credits to my Manager for making this happen!!!

I got into a high-priority team at work! Apart that being a huge incident in itself, I also realised that I’ve not lost a lot of symbian in the last 2 years of not coding on symbian! I’m not the sharpest… but I’m still sharp… Probably the late night coding sessions with @daaku paid off finally!

That apart, the team I work with has so much of electricity (OK, I am not accepting any lame jokes on this pun) in it that work becomes a breeze… I’ve started falling in love with code once again… Irrespective of how painful it is to take a crashlog, figure out one bug among about a million or so lines of code that my team uses, fix it, ensure that it doesnt get repeated on other components that might use the code, et. al. et. al.

As I was writing the previous paragraph, I was reminded of Chetan Bhagat’s One Night at a Call Center.  In the book, when God speaks to the people stranded in the Qualis at the bottom of the pit, he mentions to the main narrative Syham that a Bad Manager is the root cause of all evil :).  And God also tells Shyam and Vroom about getting a bonus in the process of setting things right!

That just happend with me! The very same damn thing happened with me :D!!!!!!  I’m sure more than half the industry is ruined by people like Subash Bakshi!  My first year and a half at work was totally ruined by horrible managers!!!

Well, turning back, it was overall a bumpy ride… some really big potholes hidden under water, getting caught unawares many times, and at the end of the day, coming out of it all…

Life has come a full circle for me and I must thank you all for putting up with me for whatever I’m worth!

P. S.: I love twitter!!!!

Delayed post, nevertheless an important one!!!  Its been close to 3 weeks since I touched down in India after completing my first stint abroad in Italy!

Italia was lovely… India just leaves me speechless…  I’m not going to do the Italy has this… India doesnt have that kind of a comparison post…

But I’m definitely compelled to answer a few people that I met and keep meeting time and again with a “perspective” about MY country…

The answer is straightforward… The math is simple… When you dont have population, you dont have scale, and you can micromanage more effectively.  Europe as a continent has just about the population India has as a country!

India is never about micromanagement… Heck, India is not even about management.  India is just about scale… The scale of a billion and more heads… and counting… And still running strong…

And on a post that comes on the Independence day weekend… I can always still go back on the sentence I wrote a couple of lines above and say thus:  Europe may have a truckload of things indians always dream of… But come august 15, no Italian ever has the pleasure of listening to A. R. Rahman’s rendition of the country’s national song!!!

Vande Mataram!

&
Jai Hind!!!

This update must have been here a couple of weeks back… But then, other things have kept me away from my blog for quite sometime now… And when Himanshu Bhai left a comment on my blog, it spurred me to get up and post an update… So here goes…

Cinque Terre was 3 days of awesome holidaying on one of the most amazing coastlines I’ve ever seen in my life!  Awesome treks along the coast.  Again…  Some of gods best art executed in total true colour…  Enough of explaining… A small sneak preview of the photos that I’ve uploaded on Flickr! here.

A small sneak preview, if you could call it… is here:

So many colours in a single photograph

My Kodak camera can do this??? Whoa!!! :-0

Photo credits Optical Illusion

The Cinque Terre — five picturesque fishing villages perched on Mediterranean hillsides, splendidly brushed in sun-washed colors.

Or so say websites and it truly a paradise on earth…  Ever since I saw this place on the way back from Rome, I’ve been soo wanting to come here and spend a couple of days and trek along the cliffside.  And this petty dream has come true today… with my generous PM offerring to give tomorrow off!  Friends heading to Rome and I’m headed to the Liguria province where Cinque Terre is located.

For those that’re not really comfortable with Italian, heres what Cinque Terre means: Cinque (Chink - kweh) meaning 5, and Terre (Therre) meaning land.  And it is… the paradise consisting of 5 small villages from south of the coast to north namely: Riomaggiore, Manarola, Cornigilia, Vernazza, Monterosso al Mare.

I’ll be spending 3 days at Riomaggiore and covering as much of the rest of the coastline by foot and by train.  This is gonna be an awesome trip!!!  Expect some good photos when I get back.

’til then… Ciao!!!!

This trip I have to definitely blog about!  Innsbruck’s a place thats long been on my bucket list and finally it’s a strike!  Two lovely days at Innsbruck! The alps is just too lovely to look at!  And getting caught in the Euro 2008 football frenzy is just too incomparable!!!

A few snapshots:

The rest of the innsbruck story is here on my flickr stream.  Its a quick and small post, but then yeah, Pictures would be better in explaining the experience!!!  I’m at a complete loss of words!!!

The plans this weekend: Innsbruck, Austria!

Image Courtesy stetre76 on Flickr.

No Euro 2008 matches happening this weekend! Nevertheless, its gonna be a cool B-) weekend! Pics will be uploaded to Flickr after I get back!

Until then, Chao…

A quick update on the activities over the last 3 weeks!

Week 1: Rome, Pisa

Week 2: Basilica di Superga, Torino

Week 3: Venezia

That has been it! A lot of touring, some very interesting places, Some cities held back in time (Roma), Some interesting incidents, Some very lovely people for Company!  It has overall been 3 awesome, out of the world quality weekends!!!

Some of the photos are here.  The rest are at home… and I will upload them as I find time!!!

And oh! I’m visiting Innsbruck, Austria this weekend!!! B-)  And sadly, I dont have the tickets to any football match of the Euro 2008 cup!!!

The Colosseum, Pic courtesy tjsuresh

Off to Rome tonight! I will be spending 2 full days at rome and then visiting Pisa on Monday on the way back to turin.  Lucky us, Monday is a National Holiday for Italy on occassion of Foundation of the Italian Republic (I) .  So, advance wishes for a Happy Birthday, Italy!!

Thanks to colleagues at work, we got the Trenitalia tickets at dirt-cheap rates! 65€ per person for the entire Turin->Rome->Pisa->Turin trip! Thank you guys! Grazie!!!

Thejesh a.k.a. @thej pointed us to Youth hostels in Rome which was again a total boon! Dirt cheap rates for quite decent accomodation!  Thankyou dude…

The Leaning Tower of Pisa, Pic courtesy dgmfotos

Thanks to @Netra, who patched me up with @hanisha who stays in Pisa, we have a guided tour in the works!  This is going to be a good weekend!!!

God bless Social Networking!!! Roma, I cometh!!! Let the Race begin!!! B-)

Yeah, I know, my twitter page has been updating things like this for a long time (9 days exactly) and yeah, I’m in Torino, Italy!!!! My first ever Foreign destination!!! W0000000000t!!!!!

After 2 failed and futile and lossy attempts to get here, I finally got to Turin last friday (16-May-2008) after a 10 hr flight to paris, 6 hours of wait and another 2 hours by air to the Casselle International Airport, Torino.

I’m here for the next 2.5 months and am gonna definitely enjoy every single moment of it…  Oh, but the language is a serious PITA issue… Its very very very rare to find an italian that speaks english!  This goes for situations in the office too…  With your manager saying “I go take dump and mail you!“, ROFL’s and LOL’s are always around

And then there’s italian women!  Ooh! Mama!!! Whoa!!! w0000000000t!!! Bling!!!  There… that says it all!!!

Oh! Oh!!! There’s pizza vegetariana… 10 inch radius of awesome goodness!!! Shmmmmmack!!! I just luuuuuuuuuurvvvve it!!!  Oh yeah!!! The best part, getting up in the morning, and having a fight with your roomies on what to make for breakfast and lunch and then deciding that we’ll cook only for lunch and have conflakes for breakfast. Everyday! Thats’s definite fun!!!

And… a truckload of sight-seeing, no… not the women part! the historical monuments, churches, architectures part!!! Sheeesh!!! you dirty people!!! ;-)  We’re already done with the women part!

Had the chance to attend a rock-concert by a local band from Torino called Supsonica… And they played some of the best electro-rock that I’ve heard!!! Loads of electronic, Loads of Guitar and Awesome percussion!

Yeah, its turning out to be a whale of a trip! Plans are on to go to Rome this weekend… Probably to venice the next and the to Hokkenheim for the F1 race thats scheduled next month. And then come back and attend 3 continuous nights of rock-music! This is gonna be loaded.

As far as work goes, the “thing” that I was sent here to do… we’ll I cant work if I cant login to the servers can I???  So that pretty much sums up my stay so far in Torino, Italy.

For quick updates as I feel them, check them out on my twitter page here.  For photos, check out my flickr page here.

And till then, Grazié, and Chao!

Catchup with life post…  Lotsa things… quick entries on all those!!!

Lots of things in the last 2 months… the most nerve wrecking thing being the loss of my mom… Something that none of us have been able to come out of…  It so happens that when someone shares a relationship with you thats deeper than being a friend, and suddenly, that person gets sucked out… the void is too hard to handle… neways life moves on… and so do have us…

The next topic of the post: the ever lovely and awesome BCB a.k.a. BarCampBangalore is back!!!  BCB-6 summer edition is happening on april 19th and 20th… The venue is IIM-Bangalore… Be there!!! I’ll be running around fixing up wifi for you peeps… Tats for sure…

The next most important topic of the post: Moto-dead… I’ve spoken about this for a very long time… And mentioned in my blog a couple of times too… This was bound to happen… Motorola Handsets Division being royally kicked out of the Motorola stable… atleast that’s how I choose to see it…

You cant be a blood-sucking leech in this age… you have to contribute or else you cease to exist.  I’d go by Motorola’s top brass’ move to do this… but it could have completely been averted.  They didn’t have to screw up. And screw up with so much perfection that nothing can correct it ever again…

Motorola is perhaps the only company thats been practising the jack of all trades in the mobile segment for quite a while. And guess what! It BACKFIRED!!! What else would you expect??? I may not be Trump but I can see through the lining to say that in today’s age where competing takes balls of steel, you had better not be playing around on the highway!!! You’d definitely get run over!!! Many a time..

And I’d say this with a lot of sadness that a Mobile giant simply went ahead and committed suicide!!! RIP Moto!!! The Razr was an awesome show… nothing else after that… Not one single mobile after that was even worth picking up and holding in my hands…

Coming to the next important topic, my conversation has actually changed places… Keeping in touch with poeple on twitter has become the in thing and the easiest thing in life now… A conversation, although asynchronous, is definitely conversation worth it when the whole discussion is available anywhere and althemore better when the participatory limits dont exist!

Twitter just takes chit-chat to the next level… The erstwhile Yahoo chat rooms concept with a bling from technology… converse from anywhere… anyhow…  Follow me on twitter to know more…

And there ends my hiatus…  Chao…