Well, hello there! Do I know you? Have I seen you before? I have? Where? Here? Are you sure? It has been such a long time! That’s a nice axe. What are you planning to do with it?

OKOKOKOK, I am sorry, but this past week has been both a hectic as well as frustrating one for me, and at times like these, I don’t like writing.

I am still not quite ready to spill the beans on what has been happening, so I guess you’ll have to wait a little longer for that.

In the meanwhile, the den scene is on hold – I have been getting more proposals from carpenters – each of them has a complete and total absence of understanding what I am trying to build down there. They seem to believe that nothing less than a replica of a room from the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York would do. In fact, all I am trying to build is cordoned-off area that I can put my equipment in and work in without worrying about who is going to walk in on me. The lowest quote I have received so far is about twice as much as I am willing to pay. One guy quoted labour charges that are almost twice the material costs!

I am giving this till this weekend, after which I go out, buy the material, and do the work myself.

Bah!

Zero music scene.

Rumour has it that Mrinal performed last Saturday with his alternate group Cryptic. He didn’t let the fan club know, so we all missed it. No pictures, no sound, no video, no cheering. Bad Mrinal!

I guess this will have to do for now – any more time spent on this while I am in pressure mode, and I start taking it out on the diary, which will spoil everyone’s day.

When I was a child I had a fever.
My hands felt just like two balloons.
Now I got that feeling once again.
I can’t explain, you would not understand.
This is not how I am.
I have become comfortably numb.

–”Comfortably Numb”, Pink Floyd

Just a quick note – I am alive and well. Thanks to all who wrote in asking me whether I was dead or whether they should come over and kill me.

I am in overload mode, and hope to re-emerge sometime tonight. Until then….

Sorry – no update for 24-Jan. Way too overloaded. Watch for Friday’s episode for an explanation

Well – another day out of office. But this time, not my fault

Spent the morning attending the IPv6 Forum Global Summit being held here in Bangalore. Got to butt heads with some truely outstanding people who care deeply about the issues that led to the development of IPv6, and who are seriously committed to getting the world to switch over ASAP.

If the morning was all about network, the afternoon was all about notworking. Office informed me that our area was without power, and was unlikely to see any for the rest of the day. UPSs were drained, and by 3pm, the office shut down when even the EPABX died.

Headed home, since there was power there and Avi and I could dial into the net to get some work done.

Nice try. Within an hour of our reaching home, the power went out there, too.

Now we all know that when the going gets tough, the tough….

… go to bed.

That’s what I did. Crashed out by 3pm and when I next looked at the watch, it was 7:30pm. Power had still not come back. It eventually did at around 8:00pm, but the day was shot.

Didn’t play any music today, not did I do anything post-lunch that could be termed “productive” in even the most liberal usage of the word.

However, on the home front, there has been some action. No, not the den (still waiting for another carpenter), but our landlord has not only decided that he should provide us with a borewell – he swung into action and it looks like we will have one over the next couple days! This is serious good news – the water problems out here are not funny. And with the landscaping and garden development going on, we need lots of water.

Also learnt that Sabrina Setlur is in Bangalore this week. Maybe I will get to meet her. Would be fun.

The new FabMart is now active. Looks good, much easier to use, but as can be expected, chaos I guess it will take a few days for them to get it all right. The best feature I can see right now is the fact that you can publish your wishlist – makes it easy for people to pick a gift for someone whose birthday is coming up Real Soon Now (hint! hint!

However in its current form, this feature is useless because if you use it, it publishes your email address – which is (of course) a complete no-no. I hope they fix it soon.

Bah, it’s midnight, and I am not in the least bit sleepy. I can see that I am going to have a tough time getting back into normal sleep-cycle mode

Maybe I’ll head for the garage and play some music. On the other hand, I have to live in this neighbourhood for a while. So better not

Uh oh, a new tune stuck in the groove, replacing “Absolutely Everybody”…..

Actually not new, nor one I have not heard before. This one is “Tanha Dil” by Shaan. Not too bad lyrics, and a really great tune. I have seen it several times on TV (great video too, BTW), but I ran across the MP3 on the net today, and I was hooked.

Unfortunately, FabMart was closed this evening when I tried to do the honest thing and order the CD. Looks like they are into a revamp, and promise to be back tomorrow morning. Am holding breath….

Carpenter came in with estimates for the partitioning of the den. Grossly overquoted. He probably didn’t realise that I do have the ability to check on prices of things. What did he think he was – some dot-com or something, with me as his VC???

IAC, looks like I need another carpenter. Luckily, Shubha has already located someone.

Anyway….

The big news is that starting February, I am finally getting back into the seminar circuit.

For those of you who don’t know me that long – between 1993 and 1997, I (often in conjunction with Kishore Bhargava) spent a lot of time on the road, holding technical seminars that were aimed at dragging people online – whether they liked it or not.

Even if I must say so myself – these seminars were outrageous successes, more so because not only did our audiences enjoy themselves thoroughly – we did, too! The instant chemistry was amazing, and even today I often meet people who start a conversation with “you probably don’t remember me, but I attended your seminar in…”. I had mixed feeling there – I felt so old, but man! did I feel good!

Those were the days when I had a lot more time on my hands, and was also writing a column for PCQuest. Much of the content of my column came directly out of my interaction with audiences from these seminars, and this “instant feedback” mechanism was sheer magic.

Things changed a lot after 1996. I ended my column around the end of that year, largely because I was no longer comfortable with the direction PCQuest was taking then. It was (and always will be) a great publication, but as it grew in stature, us “early pioneers” felt slightly lost in the need to cover more products and less technology. The days of PKR’s “tech first!” were clearly over.

Also, somewhere along the line, I had been made to understand that my seminar successes were based on the success of my writing for PCQ. It was only years later that I understood that while this certainly was the case, it worked the other way round as well.

But by the time I woke up to this fact (and PCQ got back on track), a lot of things had changed both for the industry as well as for me. By 1997, C&B Consulting was taking up all my time. By 1999, that small company grew into what is today known as Exocore, and the initial years were hectic, leaving very little time for seminar tours.

In the meanwhile, vendors caught onto the seminar business big-time -with a serious twist – most of them were pushing their products rather than actually trying to educate the audiences. This quickly led to people shying away from these “tech seminars”. Desperate vendors then went down the “free seminar” route, which worked for a while, but finally that horse too was deemed as dead, and no amount of flogging would get it to move anymore. What was left was an empty circus ring.

It was a pity really. I enjoyed those seminar tours like I enjoyed few other things. Meeting so many people, being able to answer their questions, building relationships, meeting them again online, exchanging ideas….

All this was rammed home to me during LB/2001, where one my talks “Connecting to the Internet using Linux” turned the clock back for me by almost 5 years. Suddenly, I could feel that thrill again – that feeling when I was talking to an audience that not only felt it important to hear what I was talking about, but was clearly understanding and benefitting from what I was telling them. Even though I overshot my time grossly, not a single person left the hall, and when I opened up to questions, the interaction was amazing. God! What a rush! I knew then this is something that I wanted to do again.

Anyway – if things go well, I should be able to resume seminars again – in a small way in February, and then a full-fledged tour sometime after the madness that defines Indian business in the months of January through March.

All this is possible because of the great way things are falling in place at work. I have a really great team working with me, and things are just getting better. It has taken time, but today I have the confidence that the team will handle things the way they should be handled – even if I am missing in action. It does make me feel a wee bit redundant, but I’ll live.

One thing is clear – with these seminars, I am going to take up right where I left off half a decade ago. I have learnt so much since then, so much that I want to tell people. And so much that I want to learn as well.

I can’t wait to get started.

There’s no sensation to compare with this
Suspended animation, a state of bliss
Can’t keep my mind from the circling skies
Tongue-tied and twisted just an earth-bound misfit, I

–”Learning to Fly”, Pink Floyd

Nothing much happened today, so theoretically, I should just say goodnight to the diary junkies and call it a day.

But that would be a waste of space – I own it, and I can use it.

Reminds me of a funny story my parents told me – on a sightseeing bus during a holiday in Switzerland, my mom was reading a book, when my father poked her in the ribs and said “Look out of the window! We paid for it!”

I decided not to go to office today – combination of a Monday Mo(u)rning and an upcoming cold. Stayed at home and caught up with some reading, writing and playing music.

Carpenter came in as promised, took measurements of the quadrant in the basement garage that will become my den. Turns out that he does vinyl flooring as well, so looks like a package deal. Estimates tomorrow.

My daughter Anjali cribbed that I never mention our cat Honey in the diary. Well, I believe I did recently, and for good measure, I did so again

Honey is technically older than Judo, and came into the house first. Judo came later. They started off the same size, but now Judo is a wee bit bigger than her (like 10 times? . However, despite the fact that they are supposed to be mortal enemies, they get on fine with each other. You haven’t lived until you have seen Honey chase her “sibling” through the garden. Or until you have seen a cat who prefers dog-food.

IAC, it appears that Honey is in the mommy way. If anyone is looking for a kitten for the home, book now!

Spent the evening experimenting with mixer settings and extreme reverb/echo. Got all my guitars tuned to the same key. Spent a lot of time with the Paloma, and not just for sentimental reasons. Replaced the strings on my Cosmiq Active Acoustic. I was right – plain metal G strings on acoustics are evil.

Had a couple of emails asking about my guitars. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here you go. The three missing ones are back in Belgaum. Some day, I must go and retrieve the stuff. Lots of gear there.

Had an email asking me how good I am at playing the guitar.

The honest answer is – not very. While I can manage a riff or too, and used to play reasonably competent bass, I basically play rhythm (and fairly well, at that) to accompany my singing. I enjoy singing, and the guitar was an easy instrument to learn, so I did. In college, I played for a semi-professional band called “Agni” (no relation to various groups bearing that name today), but that is no certification of quality. While we were good, it was by the standards of the day. If you compare us to what guys like Mrinal and his friends can do today, we were beginners, and still are.

Which doesn’t bother me in the least. We played largely because we enjoyed doing so, and because the people who watched us enjoyed listening to us. And I suspect that the current generation of rockers is in a similar situation.

Anyway, music is my primary hobby. I enjoy playing and singing alone, for an audience, or just with a couple of friends. Which explains the jam sessions with Mrinal every now and then.

However….

A couple of days ago, I was discussing with an old friend and college-band mate – Abhijeet Rane. (I still refer to him that way, even though he is now married to my wife’s younger sister, Keerti. It is basically to remind our wives that Abhi and I were friends first – they came later.

In the course of the discussion, we decided that we were rather unique.

Millions of people watch movies (especially Hindi movies) where the hero stands on stage singing songs to his love interest, and walks off into the sunset with her, hand in hand. And millions of guys probably fantasized about doing the same thing, but never did.

Well – Abhi and I did.

We may not have been the best act in town, but try beating that.

Sunday. Traditionally a day of rest and relaxation.

Right.

First of all, I slept in till 10:30am. Woke up to an empty house – apart from Judo and Honey (the latter being my cat, in case you didn’t know), I seemed to be the only living thing on the premises.

Turns out that wife and kid had disappeared to (a) have Anjali’s ears pierced (something I have resisted since she was born, believing the choice should be hers, not ours), and (b) to attend a dog show! As if they didn’t have enough of doggy stuff at home! Judo was going around with a hang-human (as opposed to “hang-dog”) expression on his face.

OK, so I was alone.

Goodie! (Picture a purposeful rubbing of hands, with slanted eyebrows and an evil chuckle on the soundtrack).

Before I could do any major damage, the electricians came in to finish the wiring of the den, which proceded at a satisfactory pace. As promised, the wiring is done, overhead lighting installed, separate earth and circuit-breakers in place. If nothing else, the place has now acquired a higher level of usability.

While the women were absconding, I sat down, finished email and surfing, sucked several megabytes of raw HTML from the web into my Palm Vx, then grabbed a guitar and learnt a few new (read “old” – I am stuck in the 60s musically) songs. Started with an old favourite of mine – “Learning to fly”. Then, inspired by Phenom, I decided to try “Coming back to life”.

As I did, I felt a strong itch developing, and it took a while to figure out what it was. Turns out that I was hearing a guitar sound on the speakers that rang some strong bells down memory lane – a particular sound that I knew long ago, when my jeans were still size 29….

Yes, that sound was almost identical to what an old electric guitar of mine (a Cochin-made Paloma) used to produce – a very trebly, middy kind of sound. I knew that sound like I knew the back of my hand – after all I played that guitar for almost a decade before I acquired my current Ibanez. (My bandmates used to call it “Frankenstein”, which tells you just how much customising I was doing on that thing).

Now, here was the cause of the itch – I still have that guitar, rotting in its case for almost a decade, completely non-functional. This needed to be fixed!

Gesagt, getan (you have to understand German to get this). I dug out the old Paloma, and got to work.

Within minutes, I had that old thing in front me, completely disassembled (a warm feeling in the tummy – I prided myself at being able to strip the old axe down and reassembling it faster than anyone ever could). Over the next few hours, the smell of industrial-strength cleaner, varnish, solder and metal polish filled the air, along with a selection of curses and grunts. Slowly, from under the “gunk of ages” emerged my old faithful Paloma. It even had my trademark “A” logo on the headstock, stuck there long ago by a former girlfriend of mine….

Took the old axe down to the garage, plugged in mixer, reverb, amp and mikes, and hit a chord.

To understand what happened next, pull out an old photo album, and leaf through it for a while. Stop every now and then and recall a particular memory. Feel that lump in your throat? Feel yourself transported back there, when you were young and carefree? Feel that moistness in the eyes?

That’s what I felt. I ran through a few Beatles numbers – and they felt just right. My fingers quickly remembered all those quirks that the Paloma had, and even knew to carefully avoid the sharp edge around the 12th fret. The sound was exactly the way I remembered it (and as I had imagined I heard on the speakers hours before).

Memories came flooding back, and closing my eyes, I imagined Mario yelling encouragement from behind his drums, as Robert manfully tried to cover for my goofs with sharp riffs.

The Paloma isn’t a classic Les Paul (my dream guitar – I hope to own one someday), nor is it a Fender Stratocaster. Heck – it isn’t even a low-end Givson. But it is mine. My first professional electric guitar. And it plays just as it did back in 1979 when I first got it.

I am sorry for ignoring you for so long, old friend. It won’t happen again.

Lost in thought and lost in time
While the seeds of life and the seeds of change were planted
Outside the rain fell dark and slow
While I pondered on this dangerous but irresistible pastime
I took a heavenly ride through our silence
I knew the moment had arrived
For killing the past and coming back to life

–”Coming Back to Life”, Pink Floyd

Today was a day that did nothing for my resolve to lose some weight.

First of all, turns out that tomorrow (Sunday) is Biju’s birthday, so he showed up in office carrying a simply fabulous chocolate cake and two “super saver – Rs.20″ packs of chips.

Then, since it was the final meeting of the LB/2001 managers, Gopi decided to treat everyone to lunch – so FOUR Dominos Dominator pizzas (and a large one for the veggies in the crowd) ensured that nothing further got done after lunch.

Have you ever seen a stranded whale on a beach? That was Exocore & Friends, post-lunch.

God, I was “fed up”

Work began this morning on the den wiring, and it looks like it will all be done by Sunday. Kewl! To “test drive” the area, I am going to move my desk and PC from the third bedroom into the designated area in the den, and spend a day or two there. This will allow me to get a feel of the place and discover what else I need down there, including what kind of furniture.

It’s been almost two weeks since I began this diary. I have been getting a lot of feedback in email, and of course watched my webstats do a VTOL aircraft emulation. Several people have commented that now that I have found my “rhythm”, the front page has become really heavy. That I will fix by reducing the number of diary entries from 10 to 5. However, the archive is also groaning under the weight, and I need to do something about that as well. So I shall try and whip up some code that lists only the dates and titles of each entry, which you can click on to get the text for that entry. This will also make it easier to bookmark certain entries (yeah yeah yeah – lots of Phenom fans out there

OK, the Miss india contest is going on as I type. Good looking girls, but whoever thought of putting Malaika and Rags up as comperes should have his finger nails pulled – slowly.

Good to see my landlord’s niece (the fabulous Sabrina Setlur) as one of the judges. It is ironic that I live in a house leased from a family that has strong connections to Germany, with me being half German. And no – I have never met her.

Ah, diary junkies bugging me again. Should I keep them hanging a little longer?
Naaaaaahhhh!

Yesterday, I mentioned in the passing to my partner Gopi that we are pretty cut off from news and other stuff that happens on TV while we are in the office. This is fairly serious – we spend up to 12 hours a day there, and assuming that we sleep for another 8 of them, that leaves little time to catch up with the happenings of the day.

Gopi didn’t say anything, but by afternoon, a cable TV connection miraculously appeared near my desk, and by evening a TV card was in my machine. So today, I spent the day setting things up, sorting through some 60 odd channels. And, of course, getting the whole thing working with Linux.

TV cards are cheap these days – less than 3000 INR got us a PixelView TV tuner card that is fully supported by Linux. Beats buying a TV for the office any day, and has the added (dis)advantage of being on the whole day, tucked away in the corner of one of my many screens, either pumping out MTV or some news. If something interesting comes up, a press of a key brings the TV application to the foreground, and another keystroke full-screens it if I want it that way. I usually do not – sitting in front of a fullscreen TV image on a 17″ monitor can be painful. having it running in the top right corner at 384×288 on my 1600×1200 screen gives the effect of watching a 21″ TV form 6 feet, which just about right.

Added advantage – if I don’t have time to see a program at that moment, I just record it to hard disk and watch it later.

Net effect – I have been able to catch up with programs I do not normally get to see, such as StarTrek:Voyager (which really leaves me cold, except that 7of9 is something else…). Naturally, I am writing all this so that my friend Vinod in Delhi can writhe in agony, yelling “Not fair!”

Later in the day I caught up with PKR (you know him as the editor of DataQuest on Yahoo messenger, where we spent time discussing the merits and demerits of Instant Messengers. We agreed on the fact that IM’s save money for organisations by reducing long distance phone calls, but at the same time certain IMs can also hit bandwidth pretty hard. MSN Messenger, for example, seems to delight in contacting home (as in Redmond, USA) every few seconds. We decided that this is worth digging into.

Another issue is the managability of IMs. As already discussed and published in DQ, IMs tend to become stubborn beasts to manage when the numbers increase. Imagine a 100 people company, with each employee using an IM to communicate with the other 99. That means that each employee has to add all the others to his IM (a task that isn’t as trivial as it sounds), and if a new emploee joins, s/he has to be added to all the others, employees who leave need to be removed … a logistical nightmare.

Added to that the fact that most (if not all) employees could be behind a firewall, and still need to communicate with each other … including doing file transfers (which go peer to peer instead of via the servers in the USA).

That\’s where things break down. All four “big ones” (Yahoo, MSN, ICQ and AOL) are guilty of not providing options to corporates to handle something like this.

But then, necessity being the mother of invention, the OpenSource world provides a solution – in the form of Jabber, which exists both in its free form, as well as in a commercial (read – business mindset compatible) forms. And it happily talks to all the other IM systems. If you are a corporate checking out IM options – check out Jabber.

OK, tiring day. Luckily the weekend starts tomorrow. Electricians start work on my den in the garage tomorrow morning (I want to get that done first before partitions make things difficult for them). Monday the carpenters will come in to begin work on the partitioning.

Spent some time this evening uploading photos of the Phenom gig, as well as ripping the audio out of the video to turn it into an MP3. Pretty big right now, but I will clean up the audio a bit – there is some distinct phasing there, but overall the quality is pretty good, with lots of bass and treble. Amazing for a hand-held camera recording! Once I have things cleaned up, I will split it into smaller files and make it available for people.

Dropped a big hint to Mrinal that Phenom now needs a website…..

Update 11:55PM: Added some javascript to the menu on top of this page. I know you will hate me, but this is a place where I experiment, so if you have any issues with the stuff (other than hating it , let me know.

Not a very exciting day. I guess not every day can be.

Played around with my site a bit between bouts of dealing with clients, chewing through proposals and reading reports.

One of the things I added was a way by which people using Avantgo can pick up my diary and read it on the road. Well, when I say “people” I really mean myself, of course, but if you know what Avantgo is, feel free to add http://atulchitnis.com/palm/ (you can’t go there with a browser, because I currently allow access only from Avantgo’s servers – something that will change eventually when I have made some more additions to that section).

In any case, while I was working on this, I remembered a conversation I had with a friend who was visiting. He too carried a PalmOS based hand-held, so I asked him what he did with it. He answered “well, the usual – addresses, appointments…”.

I was aghast. This person had no clue what one can do these days with a handheld computer! In fact, to him, it was little more than a digital diary! So I sat down and showed him some things he could do, including loading entire books (novels, manuals, etc.) on it, picking up news and other information from the web, email, games, wordprocessor applications, spreadsheets….

When he left, he was visibly a changed man.

So I was thinking about this phenomenon – people who adopt technology, but don’t really use it. One cannot call them badly informed – they bought the blasted thing, so the very least one could do is find out what it can do!

I was chatting with another friend the other day about this. He too didn’t feel the need for a handheld computer. This guy is even worse – he knows what a handheld can do (since he sees me using mine so often), earns enough money to buy one himself, works in a job where such a thing would be a major asset in his work – yet he tells me he has no need for a “digital diary”.

Bah!

I have been using a Palm Vx for a while now, and before that I had a Palm III. I can honestly and without hesitation say that my cell phone and my Palm Vx are the two most important pieces of technology that I carry with me everywhere I go – even to the loo!

What gets in the way of using technology is perception. For example, one of the biggest fallacies I see people succumbing to is that a computer without Windows is useless. Therefore, a PalmOS based handheld is not for them – they need a PocketPC (formerly known as WinCE, and with good reason . But they don’t even invest in that. Why? Because the darn thing (a PocketPC based HH) is so expensive!

You can buy a decent 2 MB PalmOS based unit for about 6.5K INR these days, while the lowest-priced PocketPC based unit costs closer to 25K INR.

I don’t really care whether you use a PalmOS based unit like I do, or whether you use a PocketPC or Linux based one – they keyword here is “use”.

My friend V. is a Windows bigot – he doesn’t miss a chance to tell me how much better Windows is than Linux. But V. at least uses a PalmOS based handheld. He probably would have a nervous breakdown without it. He lusts for an iPAQ, but until he gets one, he is at least using the technology of a handheld! (He also uses Linux, but don’t let him know I told you!

That is more than I can say for many other people who just can’t make up their minds about it. They talk year in and year out about “getting one soon”, but in the end, they don’t.

And they don’t know what they are missing.

Wake up! The PC is out. Information access devices are in. The one with the most information at his fingertips is the one who wins the game.

It is ironic.

Once upon a time, handhelds were positioned as “PC companions”. These days, I consider PCs and notebooks as “Handheld companions”.