Yesterday was Dassera. We had a nice pooja at office, with Shanu acting as official poojari. I got some nice photos of that – shall upload soon.

Afternoon decided to crash out for a while, then got up to find the entire gang at my dining table playing Monopoly. Watched for a while, then took over Shubha’s position, and proceeded to decimate these losers

By the time I was through with them, I owned more money than the bank, all prime property, and sat in jail most of the time while Shanu, Sony and Khader committed financial harakiri (Anjali got hit thrice with $900 rentals before she caved in and merged assets with me).

By the end of it, I also understood Bill Gates a bit better – now I know why everyone appears to hate him – nobody loves a monopolistic, money-grubbing, property-grabbing, ruthless winner.

Now that was fun!

Today (Tuesday) the office is closed, so I will spend some time preparing for the seminar, then maybe jam a bit this afternoon.

BTW – over the past few days, I have been re-honing my Beatles skills. Since their music was always very uncomplicated (drums, three guitars, singing), my drum machine, guitar and me don’t sound too bad. Would have been nice to have a few more people joining in, but what to do, they are like this only.

Phone just rang – Gaurav@Phenom says he is dropping in this afternoon for a jam. Mrinal is still holidaying with his family, so we will miss him.

More later!

Help! That new Bridgestone tyres advertisement jingle is stuck in my head! The one that shows a car driving down a long and winding road, and starts with “On and on …”.

Is that a real song? Or is it just an ad jingle? If it is a real song, can anyone tell me what the song is, who sang it, where are the lyrics, what CD is it on and is there an MP3 available?

Help, that thing is stuck in my head and won’t let go!

Am kind of busy with various things. Will update when able.

My company is doing a workshop on Managing Networks on 24-Oct-2002. Let me warn you right away that this is *not* entry-level stuff – it is pretty advanced and will require you to have knowledge of how networks work. If you are a sys/network admin and need to manage your organisation’s network performance, then you might find this worth attending.

I feel an urge to do a lot of Beatles stuff – after all the phenomenon is now 40 years old this month. Let’s see if I can find anyone who is interested in putting a gig together with me.

Later, dudes! Have a great holiday if we don’t meet till next week!

Late last night, I lay in bed and finished reading Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead” for the second time in 20 years.

How different an experience it was from the time back in 1982 when I read it the first time, shortly before my first year engineering exams. I had “borrowed” the book from my mother’s huge collection of books a few weeks earlier, based largely on the impressive number of pages. Because of the way I speed-read books, page-count was as important to me as plot, genre and author.

One of the reasons why I wanted to re-read this particular book was to refresh my memories about Howard Roark, Ayn Rand’s “superman” in the book, to re-convince myself that having a goal, and taking the stoney road to it, is all worthwhile in the end.

It was an interesting experience reading passages I had before, but with a younger mind that still had to learn so much about the world. Today, the same passages took on completely different meanings.

Ah well, one lives and one learns, I guess.

Hmmm…. should I dive into “Atlas Shrugged” again, as well?

And now for something completely different.

Opening the newspaper on Wednesday morning, I found an advertorial about Document:Done playing at Guru Nanak Bhavan that evening, in a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi. A little later in the day, Gaurav of Phenom also mentioned this gig, and recommended going.

This I had to see, and for several good reasons:

1. I had never seen Document:Done perform, though I had heard good things about them.
2. I just *had* to see what a rock group would do in a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi
3. Christopher Avinash (the lead guitarist) is supposed to teach my daughter to play the guitar at some point, through her school (Mallya Aditi International School)
4. Santosh Gnanakan, the bassist, and I jammed at Allen Mendonca’s party a while back, and I had a great time.

5. There was nothing good on TV

So I grabbed Sony and Shanu and headed out for the venue.

Initial omens were not good – no snackstand at the venue, and we were starving. Alliance Francaise decided it was a good day to be closed, so we headed out to Java City for some lousy coffee and some excellent Chocolate Mousse Cake, which we packed and brought back to the venue. Sony drove, and I spilled hot piping coffee all over the place.

Back at Guru Nanak Bhavan, we were immediately besieged by people who wanted to know where we got the food/coffee from.

The show started a bit late. Not too much of a crowd, but then we didn’t come to see the crowd, did we? Grabbed front and centre seats and waited for the show to start.

A few minutes later, several big booms announced the failure of some equipment. Turns out to have been some lose cables.

IAC, by 7:45pm, things started to move. A giant silhouette of Mahatma Gandhi (that looked suspiciously like a silhouette of Santosh was projected on the backscreen, and the band came on.

Right, now what would you expect at a Mahatma Gandhi tribute concert? Metallica?

Nope – what we got was a narration.

Yup, ladies and germs, we were about to witness a concept concert.

(Before I continue, let me get this out of the way – the guy at the mixer desk needed brain surgery, best performed with a meat cleaver. The sound system was set up to drown lead singer Chris’ vocals, flatten Santosh’s bass guitar to go “tonk, tonk”, and blast Chris’ lead guitar in “bone penetration” mode. The fact that these guys sounded so good *despite* the nut loose behind the mixer shows how good they were. ’nuff said.)

The idea behind the gig was simple – narration about Mahatma Gandhi, with projected clips from the movie “Gandhi” (complete with Chinese subtitles , and original compositions performed by the group.

We didn’t expect Pink Floyd or Metallica, but we didn’t expect All India Radio, either. What we got was an astonishingly good mix of both!

As the narration continued, and the movie clips flashed (played off a laptop right in front of us, using Windows Media Player, without the use of playlists), Document:Done rocked on stage, performing a mix of English, Hindi, soft and hard rock numbers. Weird sound effects and fills were provided by guest star DJ Dheeraj, who scratched along competently.

Other guest performers like the cute looking Preethi (with a very capable voice) and the familiar RadioCity RJ Priya (who performed on flute) joined the band on stage every now and then.

A hilarious thing was that the guy manning the laptop for the video clips usually left the mouse pointer hanging around on screen – which (when projected) kept pointing straight at Santosh’s … ummmm… family jewels. Whether this was intentional or not I have no clue, but it had us in splits!

While the music was unfamiliar (what would you expect, original compositions for a *very* focussed topic), it was pretty good – we expected to be bored at some point, but amazingly 75 minutes flew by quickly, and before we knew it, the band was thanking people for coming. During this thank you speech, Christopher revealed that the whole event was conceived, planned, created and executed in just five days! My respect for these guys rose considerably.

Sure, the crowd could have been bigger (but with only 5 days of publicity, what would you expect???) and the sound more balanced (brain surgery!!!!), but all said and done, Document:Done delivered a very capable performance, and the whole concert concept was well executed and a fabulous mix of on-topic lyrics with very “today” music. (Sony thought they sounded a bit “old world”, but you must forgive him – anything older than a month is “old world” music for him

As an encore, the band played a scorching rocker called “Ctrl-Alt-Del” (I think) that seriously mocked Microsoft Windows – which of course went down very well with certain people in the crowd. I should get them to play this at Linux Bangalore/2002 as a event opener (the event closes with Phenom performing).

I’ll definitely try and catch their next performance, rumoured to be at the end of October.

Sundays aren’t quite what they used to be. So spent my day catching up on other people’s journals.

One of the fallouts of my turning 40 this year has been that I have become acutely aware of just how many things I *cannot* do any more, even though I want to.

For example, the Bangalore LJ crowd seems to have had a ball at their meet. Would have loved to be there, but it is one thing being part of a tech or professional crowd, and another when most people at the party are around half your age.

I mean, I wouldn’t have minded, but recent experiences have taught me that younger people do tend to feel a bit uncomfortable when they have someone twice their age around.

Mind you, I don’t blame them – I was the same at their age. What is strange is that just a few years ago, when they were younger, and so was I, this difference never mattered, but today, it appears it does.

“Hanging out” with friends tends to happen more with my own age group, but rarely with younger friends.

Music-wise, I am a dinosaur for most of them, so with nothing much in common there too, one tends to drift apart.

Unfortunately, I do not have much contact with the Bangalore live music scene, so finding people who enjoy playing the kind of music I play (well, try to play) is not always easy. Living on (what some people have referred to as) the dark side of the moon as far as Bangalore is concerned hasn’t helped much, either.

So while I’d love to have people over (or drop in on others) to play music together, I find that I have to rely more and more on electronics to accompany me.

Not a very comfortable feeling, especially since (apart from reading), playing music is really my only hobby. And somehow I think that it is a wee bit too late to switch to collecting stamps or gardening – the damage is already done in my mind.

The old Rocker wore his hair too long,
wore his trouser cuffs too tight.
Unfashionable to the end — drank his ale too light.
Death’s head belt buckle — yesterday’s dreams —
the transport caf’ prophet of doom.
Ringing no change in his double-sewn seams
in his post-war-babe gloom.

–”Too Old To Rock ‘N’ Roll: Too Young To Die”, Jethro Tull

Yesterday was the September BLUG meet. A quick poll proved what I suspected by the end of it – for many people, this was one of the best BLUG meets in recent times.

To start off, the meet was unsponsored. This meant that everyone had to pay their own way, at Rs.100 a head. I was really interested to see if we would hit an absolute new low in attendance, and therefore stood near Uttam Jaiswal as he informed each arrivee about the fact that they would have to pay.

“You mean the meet is unsponsored?”

“Yup”

“You mean we have to pay to attend?”

“Yup, Rs.100 per head”

“Oh, that isn’t worth it.”

Hmmmm….

“Come on guys, let’s go for a movie instead.”

Rrrrright.

“Who’s gonna pay to attend a *Linux* meet?”

87 other people apart from you, that’s who. All told, there were 90+ people in the hall (yeah, a couple snuck in without paying), making this one of our most successful meets in recent times – we normally top out at around 85 .

And they enjoyed themselves thoroughly, as the speakers (Udhay, Madhu and Sridhar) competently did their presentations on cryptography, followed by great food, and then the piece de resistence – the Birds of a Feather session after the meet.

OK, so what is a BOF session?

It is when like minded people strip the meet of the fluff and the formality, and sit down to have a good jaw-jaw.

When one says “GTK and C suck” and have the world cave in on you as you are challenged by God himself, in the form of Hanish Menon, the BLUG’s resident guru.

It is when agenda and program take backseat to friends taking friendly potshots at each other, when people really get deep into the tech of things, when you learn more in an hour than you would in a year of lectures.

When you get reminded just why you are into all this in the first place.

For the tech of it.

Some photos here and here.

Grrrrr….

Some prolific poster on Slashdot has linked to one of my old articles from his .signature, and the result (from my /var/log/ partition’s perspective) is not very pretty.

And of course it just had to be in an extremely heavy thread.

Ah well – I dumbed down the formatting of the page – let’s hope this passes soon…

Update: It never rains, it pours. Now some busy site in France has linked to it, too!

On Sunday night, we received a shocking phone call.

Our dog, Judo, has a “girlfriend” named Mona (a beautiful female German Shepherd just a month older than Judo) staying close by to our place, and who often visited Judo over the past year to play with him. She has appeared quite often in my photos section (see here and here), and was always a welcome visitor to our home.

Last month, her owner took the decision to have her mated for the first time, and chose Judo to be the sire. We were all very thrilled about it, especially when we were told that she wouldn’t let any other male dog other than Judo near her. They were given time together, and things went the way nature intended.

This was exactly a month ago, and we were all eagerly waiting to hear the good news about Mona’s confirmed pregnancy.

Sunday night we got the news that Mona had died of a cardiac arrest earlier in the day.

Worse, the post-mortem revealed that she was indeed pregnant, and (given the age of the three puppies) Judo was without question the father.

Mona wasn’t our dog, but she was very close to us, and the fact that she was, in effect, Judo’s only same-species playmate, and was going to be the mother of his offspring, made this a loss as great to us as if she was our own.

We are going to miss her terribly.

Rest in peace, Mona.

The second wave struck this morning (for context, see yesterday’s diary entry), and I am told a third wave will hit us tonight, bringing the total number of people staying under my roof from the usual 3 to 13 or more. The phone hasn’t stopped ringing, with lots of people wanting to talk to lots of people.

The dog and I spend most of our time locked away in the basement. I have been making progress on getting my new toy to make the weirdest of noises, which has Judo rolling in agony/ecstacy.

No peep from my mother, who is in Tunesia (that’s somewhere in Africa) for a weeklong holiday. I hope she is OK – I hear they breed swiss hijackers in that place.

Been watching with amusement/horror as George Bush battles on to cover up his failure to make any real, tangible headway in capturing Osama Bin Laden (or proving that he is dead) by trying to turn public attention to America’s faithful standby scapegoat – Saddam Hussain.

Wag the Dog, anyone?

Nelson Mandela, the man who represents the concept of freedom better than Dubyaman ever will, hit the nail on the head.