Work - its smell, sight and sound - part 1

right in front of your eyes.. a pathetic engineer, slogging over the nights in front of his workstation.. writing, correcting, compiling, testing, debugging and fixing code.. thats all that you get to do when you're ill fated to be a kernel developer.. you can either consider this enjoyable, or a curse.. only time will tell what you really think of it, feel about it.. and no one else can, cos, after all, its YOUR mind thats at work n no one else's.. a kernel developer forfeits sleep, food, drinks, pleasures, and at times bathing.. today being one such day.. or rather, tonite.. a kernel dev doesnt give his precious attention to trivial stuff.. (or kernel developers dont smell themselves..) all they smell is code.. and the smell can at times get rotten, and obnoxious - buggy code.. sometimes, you only get to smell that part which has been overcooked/deep-fried/burnt.. coredumps/crashes/asserts.. this was the smell that i was talking about.. but remember, never does the smell ever turn so bad that you ever wanna get out of it.. the smell is kinda intoxicating and addictive.. you'll want more and more and more of it, not realizing its filling you from inside, making you incapable of smelling other smells..

i guess the smell/sight/sound has filled me enough inside so much that i dont feel hungry/thirsty for anything else except occasionally..

Entry

Its been quite long since i ever sat to write anything. Of late, i should admit, that i've also been a lot of writing of an other kind - coding. Been busy with work and also with my TKD stuff. Gotta get up really early in the morning (~by 5:15), get ready and leave for classes (6 - ~7:45) and then come to office from there directly.

I really hate to get up in the morning that early, especially if i hadn't got enough satisfying sleep the last night. I almost have started thinking of dropping the TKD idea completely. But i stay fresh and great the entire day after the workout/practice - which is a feel-good factor about it. Maybe you shoudn't completly live in the present. If i do (which i most of the times strive to do), i think i miss the point completely. Aspirations motivate one to live better, but they are always based on future - hope. And to aspire to become/acheive something is always in relation with the past - betterment of oneself. And of course, food for ego.

[[And one more thing to be recorded here: i dunno why, i somehow happen to be ever-non-failingly operating at at 35% effeciency. I know i can do better, but i don't do things that way. Somehow, since some time, in the past, this indifference and apathy has set in in my life. Or maybe things have ever been like this in the past, and only recently did i start taking note of how i've been living. But things used to be better, at least i wasn't too much complaining about life and the world, now i have started to. I mean, in school days and a first few days in college, i used to feel proud of what i used to do, bubble with enthusiasm etc etc. I shouldnt be talking about all these things here.]]

We (colleagues and ts) had recently (last weekend) been to a fun trip to Shivanasamudram and Thalakkaad. We had a blast and it was one of those tours which i thoroughly enjoyed (after a long gap). Thank you, Vishal, Jaggu, Satya (and your cousin), Mano, Gaurav, Vipul, Prem, Suvendu, Rathish (and your friend) who made this happen. This was one of those tours which we had nothing to complain about. Flawless fun and shear excitement. We should do more of that.

[[ Heck, i should have written a travelouge here!! ]]

Reading habits

Of late, i have been doing considerably less reading than in the normal times. I've been busier with work - wasting around much time when there was enough of it, pitching in extra hours while nearing the deadline. Its kinda fun though to be active after a long time - a respite from laziness.

Howsoever i justify what i have been doing for not reading, i wouldn't accept those as valid excuses. ZMM has just got less than a hundred pages to go, and its aching to be read and finished. BTW, ZMM is one of those really good books i have ever got to read. Prisig is one of those authors who really knows what he's talking about and he strives really hard to get it into others' skull. Maybe i should also get Lila.

Talking of books, the head-first/head-rush series of books is really good. I've got two of them - Design patterns and Ajax. And both are fun reading. Reading those books is like a kindergarden level book - lotsa pictures, lotsa activies and less of dull text. They can be deemed technical comics.

And quite painfully, my prep has been off-track for a while. Its been sidetracked by work and internet. Damn the internet, damn the computer. I should get square with them sometime.

How lousier can it get

Today was one of the most awful days of my life. I mean, can it get worse than this? I caught a cold, fell prey to my whims, fucked around the entire day, and stuff. Can we do better?

After a long day of laziness and and having wasted much time in front of the idiot box, at the bed, and at the internet, its time to return back to work. Gotta ramp up the pace and quality of life.

The real first

And after nearly three hours on customization effort, here it is - my first public blog. I wouldn't call it picture perfect, but its no less than that. I had to manually edit the HTML template a bit to get the blog to what it is right now. I'd say worth the effort. Love it. I was also thinking of removing the blogger navbar on top of the site, but later found out from one of the blogs that doing so would be a violation of TOS of blogger, so later resolved to retain it.

So, this qualifies to be the real first post in my blog. The first post was a beta post which was put in to test and set the look-n-feel of the site.

The reason for having started this blog is to keep a track of what things i've been doing of late and how. This would serve to be the answer if i were to ask myself: "wassup".

So, today morning i had been to Kanteerava stadium, eagerly to wall-climb, after Pratap had managed to kindle my interest on the activity by mentioning about it and inviting me to give it a try. It was fun and good, although i din't make it to the top even once, at the plainest simplest easiest wall, in four of my attempts. But those kids who'd come there were easily able to make it to the top. How badly have i been void of physical activies these days!! I want to, hope to, and aspire to improve. I'm going there tomorrow too.

And a small note on the modifications to the HTML/CSS template i had made (for the record):

1. I dint like the way the dates appeared on top of posts, so i removed it, and moved it to appear on the footer, besides the timestamp.
2. Removed the footer label: "Posted by" and hardlined the "thought so" before timestamp.
3. Inserted "|"s between the links.
4. I dint like the way the heads of "Archives" and "About Me" appeared. So, modified the captions, and later made them appear in the same style as post-titles.
5. Removed the "Navbar", read that its illegal, and later, removed the code that removed the navbar.

And later a few changes to fonts and colors. I love Trebuchet font. I think i should write about how i wasted nearly half-a-day on it once. When i get time..

First post

Not necessarily my first blog, but my first post at this blog.