 Dear all,
Over the past couple of weeks, I have been flooded with invitations from various colleges and organizations, to speak at events taking place in March and early April. I have to state that I am absolutely honoured by these invitations, and I am thrilled at the amount of interest shown in FOSS and Mobile Computing (the two topics that I focus on the most).
Unfortunately, real life makes it impossible for me to attend most (if not all) of them, and since there are so many requests flowing in, I thought I'd post this entry to clarify things:
First of all, for anyone in business, March is a very difficult month. Financial year end, tax filings, accounts, etc., inevitably mess up things. Certainly do for me!
In my case, I have additional problems as well - my daughter is in the middle of her 12th standard board exams, and on the 30th of March, just after she finishes her exams, turns 18 (a kind of milestone, I am told, though I suspect it is is simply an excuse for some kind of earthquake of a party :). And on the 5th of April is her school leaving ceremony. Clearly not a good time for a father to be dashing all over the place if he expects to have a home to come back to.
Things don't end there - in early April, I have to move houses, leaving the place that we have called home for seven years. While we don't have to move far, it is still going to be a very stressful exercise (there will be a separate diary entry about this).
And just after we move, another of life's milestones happens (more on that later when the time comes).
And then there is good old work - my company is expanding rapidly, with new products and services lined up for release, and I got my finger in a lot of pies there. :) That's keeping me busy as well.
And finally, there is FOSS.IN - planning for this year's event has started, and while it won't go into time consuming mode for a while yet, there are a few things that are deadlines for end March and early April.
All this means that March and April are months where I simply cannot free up time to travel to various events. This hurts me more than you can imagine, since I love speaking about FOSS and mobile computing, especially to students, but I have no choice.
I have been terribly behind on email, and may not have been able to get back to everyone. Also, spam being what it is, many mails land in my spam folder, and sometimes get seen only weeks later. That may mean that I come across as very snobbish by not replying. Please forgive me - I receive hundreds of email messages a day (post-spam-filtering!) and I do not always have the time to go dig into the spam folder as well.
So all of you who have been writing to me - please forgive me if I have to let you down in this period of time. And if you are planning an event to which you want to invite me to speak, please keep in mind that until late April, I simply can't promise to be there. I can possibly make it to events in Bangalore, Mumbai and Chennai (places where I am frequently on work, and only if dates coincide), but any other out-station event is probably ruled out till end-April.
Thanks for understanding.
Atul
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