Alive, I am.

Busy. Yeeeees busy.

Forgiveness seek I, for catering not to addiction of yours for diary updates.

Slight cold I have, but force (and Crocin) with me is.

But good stuff doing am I.

Linux rulez.

’nuff said.

After much deliberation (it was raining, my jaw was aching and I am not into progressive rock), I decided to go to Styx to watch Cryptic (starring Mrinal aka “Munnu”) perform.

This was my first time at the Styx pub, and despite all the rave reviews by others, I was less than impressed. A place that refuses to serve you a coke just because they have limited stocks which they need to keep for the rum and coke guys, and who refuse to take an order for any snacks if you don’t order *some* form of alcohol, is not a place I am likely to visit often.

Luckily, I had company – Kalyan, Gaurav, Ashwin, etc., and of course Mrinal’s family was there in full strength. Good company always makes up for obnoxious house policies and rude waiters.

Which brings us to the music.

First up, let me explain that I am *not* a progressive rock fan. While I know the music, it really works for me only under ideal conditions – conditions that one is not likely to encounter in a place like the Styx pub

Cryptic is without doubt a tight band. Their drummer Durga very clearly leaves nothing to chance – providing a platform so stable and so perfectly timed that it almost acts as a straight-jacket for the rest of the group (I mean this in a good way!), with no scope for goofing up. Nothing amateurish here – this was drumming that rivals the best I have ever seen.

The group’s sound overall was *very* professional. No needless playing around with effects, no overdoing it on balances for the most part. Chris’ vocals came across nice and clear, Trinity’s lead guitar was right on the button when needed, and Prakash’s bass was solid enough to walk on.

My single complaint about the sound was that (as usual) the keyboard volume was too low in most cases. Keyboards “fill” the sound with contras and atmosphere – keeping the volume so low that you can only hear the notes when the lead guitar wasn’t playing effectively defeats the purpose. This clearly wasn’t the group’s fault – I guess the guy at the mixer desk needed some education – possibly with a hockey stick.

But it wasn’t that Mrinal on the keyboards didn’t shine through – he sure did. In a total contrast to his performance at the Rust gig, he very clearly had a role to play here as part of the group, and he played it well.

And I can say this – even though I am not into progressive rock, the crowds at the Styx clearly were. And they enjoyed themselves *thoroughly*, singing along (when there was scope for singing), headbanging violently (Kallu in full head-bang mode is quite a sight to see, especially after he had consumed the better part of a pitcher of beer , and encouraging the band to give their best – which they obviously did.

An amazing (not often-seen) effect was the videos being shown while they were playing. These were the results of a week of hard work by Mrinal and friends – and they were so apt and sometimes even informative that the overall effect was *very* professional.

But for me, the highlight of the evening was something altogether different.

You know how you sometimes close your eyes while listening to a CD, and imagine yourself on the stage, with adoring crowds roaring along? That is the dream of every up and coming performer – connection with audience, recognition, acknowledgement by your fans and friends.

I know how hard my young friend has been working on his music, and how difficult it is to make a mark in this world of “instant Britney Spears” (just add water and serve). Mrinal literally spans three generations of music – the dino-rock stuff with Rust (and sometimes with me), the contemporary and peer-kind of music with Phenom, and prog-rock with Cryptic. I have seen him on keyboards, guitar and drums (and on the mike, though not on stage), and I know how important this versatility is to him, and I also know (from personal experience) how difficult this is.

So, for me, the evening was made when, every now and then (and in full hearing of family and friends), the crowds broke into a solid, thumping, full-throated chant:

“Munnu, Munnu, Munnu….”

Hmmmmm – looks like Mrinal does *not* have a new girlfriend that is keeping him away.

Yesterday (Wednesday, 19th June) Anjali thrust the Bangalore Times supplement to the Times of India in my face, and find myself looking at an ad for his prog-rock band Cryptic, who are playing tomorrow (Friday, 21st June) at Styx. The ad was complete with photos of the band, and *yes* – our up and coming rockstar was there too! Dunno why I should feel proud about it, but I do.

Mrinal has been busy as a beaver getting rock videos and stuff together – read more about it in this entry in his journal.

Question is whether I can make to that show tomorrow. Things are really up and down for me right now, and I find myself battling many things on many fronts, and I don’t seem to have the time that I used to.

Thankfully, things are looking bright on the workshop front – registrations have started coming in even before we have done *any* advertising, so I guess I needn’t worry on that front.

Shanu, Sony and Vaibhav have been hard at work making their current project come to life, and I am very happy to see the results, despite the various twists that fate (and a lackadaisical vendor who is seeing his last involvement with us if he doesn’t smarten up his act soon) have been throwing them.

Groan again. But this time not from pleasure.

Had a major tooth extraction session today. One particular molar had decided that this was a particularly good day to die, and quietly self-destructed. So I trotted off to our family dentist, who assured me that it was a small job, and that she would have the thing out in 10-15 minutes.

Famous last words.

More than an hour later, I heard her whispering to her associate to ask other patients waiting outside to disappear (or something to that effect) since this operation was going to take some more time.

IAC, about 90 minutes into the 15 minute operation, she pronounced the job done. Whew!

I should have warned her. Several dentists before her have fallen into my “tooth has extra root, hangs on for dear life” trap in the past.

Bottomline – I got late to office, missed the RedHat Advanced Server launch party in Bangalore (Vaibhav and Sony went, and came back slightly less than impressed).

Lunch was mush, as was to be expected. Curd-rice in one dabba, curd-rice in yet another dabba and (hallelujah!) Aam-ras (mango pulp) in the third one!

Watched Shanu do some magic in office – stuff that is mission-critical to us right now.Spent the rest of the day coasting along on painkillers and antibiotics.

Had a yackety-chat with a girl I know, trying to wrangle a lunch-invitation to sample her well-talked of cooking, but her jealous blockhead BF seems to have a firewall up and running around her. Bah! Hey, I am just trying to get some food!

Spent some time redoing my site here. Hopefully, people will like it. Bouquets/brickbats here .

Grooooaaaaaannn!

Today was mom-in-law’s mutton biryani day, and the gang (Sony, Shanu, Vaibhav and Khader) came over to gorge. Mrinal couldn’t make it, as usual (either he has a new girlfriend we don’t know about, or he is genuinely busy).

We hogged like we hadn’t eaten in days, then sat around, trying to breathe shallowly to avoid any disasters caused by too much pressure on bulging waistlines. Major meal! Diet gaya bhaad mein!

Later in the day, the gang and Anjali chose physical exercise over the more sensible playing cards, and were tromping all over the lawns playing frisbee. Judo managed to catch it and destroy it, so a new one had to be acquired.

While these insane people were sweating it out, I was in the basement, attaching PC to main PA system to finally get jamming at mixed volumes with the PC. Using an old version of Cakewalk and an extremely cruddily made MIDI file of “Comfortably Numb” as a base, I got to work giving it a proper rhythm section, knocked off the lead and guitar bits, then cranked up the volumes, and played and sang along. Sounded good, felt better. Repeated the process with “Learning to Fly”, with less spectacular results, but not bad.

Later in the evening sat down to watch StarTrek TNG, which was actually quite interesting, when half-way through the episode, there was a loud bang, and the power went off. The transformer down the road had smoked.

Resigning ourselves to a night filled with mosquitos, we crawled into bed, but were pleasantly surprised when the power returned at around 10pm.

Which means I get to see StarTrek Voyager now, and possibly the remaining bit of the TNG episode.

So I am off.

Ah, good fun. I am finally doing stuff I thoroughly enjoy doing.

Naturally, it involves Linux And it has two fronts going – both linked together.

Next month (July), I go back into the seminars circuit, as promised a few months back. And I start with The Exocore Professional Linux Administrator Workshop – a workshop aimed at professional corporate sysadmins whose organisations are deploying Linux.

This workshop isn’t your usual “let’s ride the Linux wave”, “what is Linux” kind of seminar.

For one, it includes virtually zero philosophy and ideology. This is pure practical stuff – the kind of stuff my team and I excel at.

While most people these days know me more for my corporate Linux advocacy, I am as comfortable (if not more so) with sharing knowledge with people. After all, that is what I used to be known for, and the stuff I enjoy doing the most – sharing knowledge, getting people productive. That is what COMversations was all about and that is what all my Linux articles in PCQ have been all about.

If all goes well, this workshop will go on the road later this year, to be held in key cities around India.

Linked to this workshop is our annual Linux distribution. For years, the PCQuest Linux Initiative has been the Linux distribution that all others are measured against. Few people realised that the entire PCQLI was actually created and run by us – and this includes the highly customised Linux distributions (known to people as “PCQ Linux”).

We haven’t heard from PCQuest about this year’s issue, and there is a solid need for an updated distribution, so we are working on it.

The distro (provisionally named “Exocore Linux” or “exolinux”, but codenamed “that thingy” by Shanu is based on RedHat Linux 7.3, but RedHat will instantly disown it after they see the changes we have made. Already the betas are something we can crow about, and things are just getting better every day.

“That thingy” will debut at the EPLAWS – in fact, it is being built for exactly this reason – to support the workshop. So if you look at the course contents, you’ll get a hint at the numerous goodies and changes participants will encounter.

Will this CD set ever be distributed by PCQuest? We don’t know yet. You’ll have to check with the PCQuest Editor.

In other news – Gopi has successfully invaded the USA, where he will be speaking at the IPv6 Deployment Summit 2002, before scrambling back to India to get ready for his sessions at the EPLAWS.

On the music front, we have silence again. I am honestly way too busy to do anything serious right now. I did fix the stuff my dog had chewed up, and spent a few minutes jamming by myself this evening, but it isn’t quite as much fun alone.

On the family front – my parents-in-law are visiting, which means way too much good food! Tomorrow, i.e. Sunday, we get my mother-in-law’s patented mutton biryani. Yum! (And if you are reading this from the USA, and are related to me – eat your heart out, kids

On the 7th of June, I said:

” There is nothing I can really say, other than that I am disappointed, feel betrayed, used and (if my suspicion of the final destination is correct) stabbed in the back. “

I’d just like to put on record that I was right about the final destination.

Woah!

I just finished something utterly and completely weird.

For the past two hours, I have been jamming with Mrinal.

“So what else is new” you may ask?

Simply this – Mrinal and I were in our respective homes, dozens of kilometres apart.

It started with my wanting to test out GnomeMeeting, and since I knew that Mrinal had it installed as well, we connected to the net and did our usual “hello mike testing 1 2 3″ stuff.

Now the issue was – Mrinal doesn’t have a mike. So to answer back, he plugged in his Yamaha keyboard, and played back!

Woah!

Not to be outdone, I yanked out my mike from the socket and plugged in a cable that just happened to be connected to one of my guitars.

In no time at all, we were doing good things together. As a test, I started playing the tune that Mrinal and I had composed a few years back called “Linux Can!” (click here for a 1.6 MB MP3 of that original recording), when all of a sudden, a second guitar joined in!

Mrinal had decided to go one step further – he had plugged his electric guitar into his distortion unit, and the output of that into the mike socket of his keyboard (which was connected to the mike socket of his PC, that was connected to me) and started shooting major guitar licks down the wire – all to the beat of his keyboard’s drums.

“Ah!” sez I, and quickly rewired my connections to feed the output of my mixer desk into the PC connection. Now my guitar was coming in through my (major buzzy) echo unit.

Unfortunately, the dog had wrecked my singing mike cable, so no voice could be added to this. No issue – swapping lead guitaring and rhythm between us, we managed to produce a satisfying jam.

“Hey you”, “Comfortably numb”, “Every breath you take”, “Message in a bottle”, some noname jams – we had a ball.

And before you ask how many mbps of bandwidth we had between the two of us, let me explain to you that we were both dialled in at less than 50 kbps.

Nearing 11 pm, I almost called it a day to go and see Star Trek Voyager, when a very familiar tinkle came down the TCP/IP stream – Mrinal had started playing “Another Brick in the Wall Part 1″.

“Voyager be damned” sez I, cranked up the echo levels of my setup, and joined him. He then fed his output through the electronics of his keyboard, adding effect after effect.

Oh man! We had a *ball*!

While we were at it, my mother came online, and I briefly chatted with her, telling her what we were doing. She froke! Poor Kalyan didn’t get that courtesy – Mrinal was just deep into the Comfortably Numb solo, and there was *no* way I was going to stop playing along to tell Kallu what was going on!

Finally, we called it a day – Mrinal’s fingers were hurting, and I had vowed to myself to get this all written down.

So here I am, all sweaty, with my finger joints killing me (my doc is going to kill me tomorrow for this!), but happy as a pig in the mud.

Sure, it wasn’t perfect, and it was more for laughs than anything else, and I missed taking visual clues from Mrinal as we played, but after the events of the past few days, this was *exactly* what I needed to get my head into working condition again – a weird use of technology to do the thing I love to do the most.

Thanks, Mrinal!

Started Sunday with a visit from Gopi. We discussed business matters for a while before Gopi whipped out a CD by Norah Jones. We sat and listened for a while and *God* is that woman a great singer or what? I *love* that CD!

And I was quite surprised to read later that she is the elder daughter of Ravi Shankar (something she downplays completely).

Lunch was a completely non-spicey Butter Chicken and Naans that Shubha cooked up. Since neither Gopi nor I are too happy with overspiced stuff, we froke (and pigged) out.

The rest of the day went by with moving all computer related equipment down into the basement, where I have now set up my little nook. Phone cable was extended, machine set up, music systems inter-connected, and I am now finally ready to start recording.

Hope to put up some MP3s soon!

Late in the night, we (Sony, Vaibhav, Shanu, Khader and me) watched the Lewis-Tyson fight after a massive dinner of chicken kababs, coke and cheese cake. We had originally assembled to watch Star Wars (A New Hope, the original one) to settle a few disputes on details that Sony and I have, but Tyson caught our attention, so that was what we ended watching.

Hmmm, that is quite a battering Tyson got. After all the big talk, he finally showed his true worth. That man was a legend, but now he is history.

Very late at night, I ran across an old song by Don Williams, which sort of goes with the theme of the past few days:

Fairweather friends, fairweather sailors,
Will leave you stranded on life’s shore.
One good friend who truly loves you
Is worth the pain your heart endures.

–Fairweather Friends (Don Williams)

Well, the thing that I suspected (back on the 5th) would happen – happened. It is a huge blow to me, especially in the manner it was done. Just goes to show – trust is more often than not misplaced, and only the paranoid survive.

There is nothing I can really say, other than that I am disappointed, feel betrayed, used and (if my suspicion of the final destination is correct) stabbed in the back.

There is nothing more that I can say, other than that if you can do it to someone as close as you were to me, then you will never be trusted by anyone ever again in your life.