H to the S to the B to the C - HSBC

My relationship with HSBC dates back to almost 7 years now and they have kept their word not to charge me annually. Few years back when they shortchanged the bonus points, I felt absolutely cheated. A bonus points of 1000 that fetched 750 bucks now gives only 250. They never kept their promise of increasing the credit limit. That was the second shock.

I did inquiry around to immediately looking for alternatives. I mean what the heck why should I keep losing the goodies? The other ones I tried were HDFC, Axis itself and of course the Citi. All these demanded a mandatory clause of 15K spending per year. The reward points too I saw that were actually same across the banks. I stuck to this. On top of all this I am making great effort to stay away from credit.

Excepting for the months expecting variable pay,  we were able to achieve it quite well. For good number of months there were absolute zero transactions. I hope to continue on that.

Anyways the sudden interest in bank has come about because of the latest new security device that the bank has delivered. After completing all the PIN generation and security set up etc. I realized that with the new set of security I would first need to enter my username, password, then enter security device password get the security code, and then enter that number to finally enter it.

Its frustrating to the tilt. Suckers.

The Extras that matter and hurt

First it starts at the outer layers on the face, on the cheeks, near the chin. It then builds up on the stomach, then it takes over your thighs and before you realize, it then creeps on your hands and legs. The once fit body becomes a constant irritant and taking two steps at a time walking a staircase makes would start feeling as if you have done an hour of trekking without a break. Deplorable and absolutely pathetic.
Deep within myself I know tomorrow is the day and I vow to keep it.This extra bit of fat hurts the most and matter the most. 

Dangers of Pass-By Date

Among many things I have been reading (a lot actually) be it on web, quora, twitter, zite, flipboard and so on, one of the comments in an article caught my attention. The commentator talks about the idleness and the complacency exhibited by millions of working Indians post marriage. I can just look at myself in the mirror and give a resounding stamp of approval for the theory.

I look around among my colleagues and friends its the same story. Excepting the times when someone looks for a job change, the zeal and the desire to excel and gain knowledge is sorely missing. This quest for knowledge need not be in one's own field. It also may be related to some other professional courses that one can take up like the hundreds of MOOC's that are available free of cost. With a baby thrown in after few years one can as well forget it. Doing one's work in a day itself will tire them out leaving not much scope for further development.

I am without a doubt in this dangerous zone and it's really scary. On top of that being part of support all I am able to help is in troubleshooting issues occurring in Prod and not adding any value to myself in terms of learning. As the Dev team keeps building components here I am languishing lethargically doing nothing of significance. It's as if my pass-by date is stuck on my forehead and having nothing new to bring to the table.

I have to set this right and I have to do it right now. I shudder to think if I leave my brain to rot and relish in this 9-7 lifestyle will be extinct by the next cycle. I have to start setting targets, giving presentations, learn new things and make this habitual.

"Don't take medical seats, your life will never set. You have to keep on reading and writing exams for ages together before you settle. Even then you would need to upgrade" This used to be my oft-repeated quote to many a post-intermediate folks. Thing is this basic motto extends to everyone. This kinda reminds of one of the recent advertisement for Kaun Banega Crorepati where a guy refuses to study further thinking all that was needed to learn was over only to find himself losing out entirely in his profession.

I pray I don't bccome that guy. The things I need to set out to accomplish would start with mastering of XQuery, SQL Server Replication, SQL Server MDX and the biggest of all - Hadoop with BigData.

Godspeed.

Movies and what not

Doing night out in office yesterday in office, not for the first time and not certainly for the last, I began to regret for not having my phone loaded with some movies with which I can utilize the full powerful HD capabilities of my iPhone.

More than movies/series some funny clips or some action scenes at least. Here in comes Revanth, with whom I am in awe for ever for uttering the words "Exorcist em movie ra. Idi horror aa. chi.." after watching the Exorcist in iPod shuffle sized screen and earphones. He had this habit of having a good collection of nice funny clips and enjoying it watching it on his iPod or even his then Nokia phone, which I used to envy but never really bothered much about. Back then I was more than occupied catching up with latest movies, cataloging the ones to see, ones to download, whom to ask , how to get and so on.

Things change and after marriage they change in supersonic mode. I have such a huge list of pending movies to see and I am so darn outdated with the latest and the best I am now clinging to the idea of having the nice funny videos or some best movie scenes in my phone.

Top of my mind that I can think of -

1. Brahmanandam comedy scene from Athadu
2. V for Vendetta - Message of Hope
3. 300 Movie war scenes
4. Up movie scene of Ellie and Carl
5. Minion scenes from Despicable Me
6. Sri Devi's tearful speech from English Vinglish

Such is life that I can't think beyond this right away. Not to be too pessimistic though. I know this is a ongoing process and movies come and go and there are helluva lot more things to be put.

This and music would be keeping me occupied for a while. 

Organizing Music Collection and More - I

Scene 1-

Hari, Nikmo and I were gathered at Niks house. I don't remember the occasion. What I do remember is me sitting at his MAC looking at the album covers that was set as a screensaver. These album covers for flipping over arbitrarily and when the songs had to change the album to which it belongs flips. I am not cent percent sure on that. Anyways I was fascinated by this.

It feels always good to flip through covers of the albums as it gives out lot of details. To start with the main actors in it, the age of the album (old/new) and sometimes the memory you associate with the movie in itself. Of course all this within the realms of songs from Telugu or Hindi films.

Scene 2-

Nick, a colleague of mine had come to India on business trip and told me he had brought along his hard disk in a casual discussion we were having. Immediately piqued I asked him to bring it over next day. To which he replied "Dude, it doesn't contain many movies man".
"Come on dude, with 2 TB hard drive it should have some movies at least. If not are there any series/documentaries in it then?" I asked.
"Nope, nothing of movies or series. It's plain music. The other stuff I have it on my server back home."

That blew my mind away. It took me some time to digest. Then he went on to explain how he had setup a kick ass server at his home in Montreal which makes his collection accessible wherever he is. He even showed me how he accesses it. The only glitch here being it would take hellava time to copy bulk loads of it over the net.

A month ago my hard drives were choking. I had no space either in my 1TB hard drive or the two other 500GB hard drives. Just to note the two other 500 Gigs hard drives aren't accessible any more. Some sectors have gone kaput. My computer drives too were full. I started by deleting the odd movies that I had seen and didn't wish to see again. When I come to the drive that had songs in it, it showed the three folders Hindi, Telugu and English all combined together was comprising a full quota of 18GB!

Both the above mentioned scenes hit my mind and first question that popped up mind "Are all these songs really necessary?". Such humongous songs collection was always a thing of pride for me when I used to give my hard disks and never forgot to make a mention of it. Now it looks like a dead weight. I mean, what was I even thinking lugging them around.

Even the album artwork of the movies that appealed to me sounded a possibility. Just the thought of flipping the albums on my iPhone was setting my heart on race like giving a juicy candy to a 5-year old. All the times on ads for mobiles or Apple events one clip at least would contain the albums flowing in and out. That was what I wanted.

Implementation -
Getting the cover art proved to be more tedious than I thought. Here are the methods I tried -
1.Select an Album in iTunes, search the net get the cover flows and paste it.I had done this for almost 20 albums before losing the steam.
2. Jotting down the movies without cover arts and proceed with step 1. The main hindrance was deletion of the albums you don't want to have from iTunes and then from physical folder and in parallel doing the pasting job.
3. Delete all the goddamn tracks from iTunes. Every single track. Go back to your songs folder, start cleaning the junk right out from the folder locations and be selectively choosy about the ones you want. End of Story.

(3) is what I have been doing and am proud to say I am done with 128 albums in Telugu folder. I know there is another round of revision but that's for some other time. My next task is to pounce on the ones in Hindi. On cursory glance everything looked good and deciding on what to delete is hard task.

My idea of choosing good or bad is like this - Do I know this movie? Did I hear any songs from this? How was the talk about this during the time of release and what my impressions were? For example there is a movie by the name Raju Bhai in Telugu of which one song I know is good. So I kept the album with this one song. Will I listen to this anytime? Even a remote yes gets my vote. Examples include Avakai Biryani, Anumanaspadam etc.

The English songs folder itself had almost around 8 GB of songs of which I might not have listened to more than 10 -15 songs. Hello? These were always in the category of someday I will listen and get to know some English music artists better, be cool etc.

Suck It Biatch! I also saw Wake Up Sid and I don't think I like Jazz either. So that's that.

Will be posting a sequel to this post about the progress and thereof.
P.S. - Quite frankly, this cleaning up has given me some perspective on what I need and what I don't and to keep things simple. Is there any goddamn point in having junk in your life?
P.P.S - This post is dedicated to Nikhil a.k.a Niks.

Random Thoughts

A popular saying goes "Half the problems in this world are solved if people do half the things that they want to do but never do". Someone must have kept me in mind before writing that. This is what I guess they call control, control of your mind your body and your soul. Accomplishing your tasks no matter how small they are or how menial they are just adds that much confidence in you. I have decided to name them as Mental blocks. Not long ago I had to work on a task that demanded extensive focus but my mind just wasn't into it. In order to punish myself and also for self-motivation I decided I wouldn't jog, nor blog nor mail etc i.e. other mental blocks in my mind. This instead has boomeranged very badly. Not only have I become lazy in not doing things, I have just let things move on in a slow pace.

Jogging. One of the best things that happened to my life. It really was. Last year for almost 9 -10 months I was full into it and it was so darn refreshing. I had lost hellava weight and was feeling very upbeat. Just checked my weight recently and I see that I have now touched 81 kg, 4 Kg increase in 4 months time. Not bad by usual standard but really that's worse. I have been trying to revive it on and off. Here is what I have decided now. I am gonna eat junkiest and fattiest foods on the day I don't do jogging, starting from today.

Distractions. New found discovery - Serials takes your mood off on anything. Over the last few weeks I had been watching Dexter and Breaking Bad. With them in place I hadn't been able to do anything else at all. First I wanted to put one mail to Jash, second was to look at the videos that Niks had sent, third was to speak with Ranjit regarding his beautiful daughters and to get in touch in general. None of it has happened. God knows why.

Blog, well what can I say about the Blog. It just hasn't kicked off the way I wanted it to be. There seems to be no time at all. Even this very thing that this post mentions has taken me 3 weeks to write. Don't wonder too much if it lacks any coherence from start to finish.

New Beginnings..

Deal is done. All set for a year and a half wait to get into our first ever house. 

Back to Circle One

After almost three and a half months (a month of which I was in Canada) I have started jogging again and it was the hardest jog ever. The pain in my legs with each round was intense and I am pretty much sure this wasn't the case when I first started my 10 rounds with even bulkier body. I wonder what changed.

I am very much tempted to revive my Kar Chronicle series but I know the end result of continuation in the series wouldn't cheer me up. So let me just note today's jog. The weather was perfect neither too cold, nor too hot. The park has changed quite a bit. Lot of herbs, grass has been cut down and almost half of the garden was left barren.

Among the people around there weren't familiar faces except one uncle with the same purple T-Shirt jogging around. The actual jog as noted above was very painful and a perfect indicator that I should stick to my routine.

My reason for stopping my routine was first due to monsoon, then winter and sheer laziness. I was reading somewhere in the paper about motivations to jog. The article notes that people jog either for reducing weight or being fit. It stresses the point that it is important to stick to the reason of staying fit.
For me every jog is really about the adrenaline rush, the excessive sweat and the joy of panting. This is what I strive to achieve.

Of course, not everything starts without any reason. It was my recent Kerala trip that prompted me to jog. There are two things in the world that shows a person's true picture - photos or buying a new dress. Sadly in this case of my discovery of my new body shape it accounts to both.

Indicating the indicator

Upon my recent trip back from Canada where you hardly find anyone honking and absolute silent roads,  I felt this is something we also should be able to implement. Given the density of vehicles on the roads and the vast number of narrow by lanes that we have, this wouldn't be possible as most of the people do not have traffic sense. It left me to think at least why not we avoid sound pollution by removing the indicator sound get to hear the for two wheeler. What purpose does it serve? I used to have argument with Sammu that it IS essential for two wheeler as during day time people wouldn't be able to notice the lights. Shouldn't the same be applied to four wheeler as well? Apart from the honk, indicators are the most annoying sounds.

Basic google search hasn't been helpful as the only results returned were of Bajaj 2 wheeler buzzers. I will be checking more on that. Fellow readers do post in the comments why you think it is necessary to have.

Re-visting the past

Coming back from Canada yesterday, I slept undisturbed the whole day yesterday from morning 11 to evening 6:30 which is what is resulting in this blog. I couldn't sleep beyond 2 in the night and from then on have been doing a catch up of old habits. Opened my ever favorite blog of Jai Arjun and spent almost 3 hours through various posts. It then hit me to write one as I see that there is almost an hour and a half to go before my mom or Sammu wake up.

Over the past month at my stay in Toronto all by myself in the hotel room alone and sometimes during the days, I have these strange thoughts going through my head. I feel random lines pouring out of my mind of the thoughts going through, constructing and deconstructing themselves and begging to be heard. Its like calling a helpline and stuck to listening a voice operated machine doling out automatic responses. Only in this case both the caller and the receiver are the same and every time I hang up the call I do so with some sadness awaiting the next call. All I am trying to say is the urge to blog has gone overboard.

Of so many things that are pending to be blogged about, the one I want to focus are my visits to Chandan's place over the weekends. With not so great companions this time around on my trip, I looked forward to going to Chandan's place over the weekends to spend my time. The place is not actually Chandan's but is shared by two others Joe and Hari, both of whom I easily get along with especially Joe (link). The only reason I refer it to by Chandan's name is that I have worked with him for over two years now and recently he has shifted to Ops team and operating from Toronto office. My purpose of going there were two reasons - one for access to really great internet speeds and most importantly to spend time with them talking about nonsensical things or idle bantering about colleagues, project life etc.

There was a pattern I have observed being there that forced me to revisit my past. Let me just describe the place. It is a one bedroom flat with a accompanying storehouse. There is hall with open kitchen as you enter and bedroom adjoining the second half of the hall. Hall is where Joe sleeps and the other two have their own separate beds in the bedroom. Once I go to their place and settle down finishing saying hi to all, the first thing I do is to remove the laptop and earphones from my backpack and settle down in one of the beds. I plug in my charger and log on to my netflix account to resume my movie watching. (Oh! The joy of netflix-needs whole new blog for it). All the other 3 in the same setting, each to their own Netflix until dinner time when either Chandan/Joe do the cooking. The same continues post-Dinner. This scene reminded me of Matrix movies where people are just plugged in to go to the 'real' world. It felt scary and isolated completely devoid of human interactions. The scarier part being this is pattern is repeating pattern with no end.

Thinking bit more on it, the realization hit me that this was how my bachelor life too had been post Nikmo-era either with Murali/Hari. Coming back from office, logging on to computer and playing the latest film/series that's been downloaded. I was in the same state. I look upon this as the effect of not having other pursuits such as reading books or not pushing hard enough to mingle with crowd to have fun outdoors. That's the difference I see being in Banglore and Hyderabad. At Bangalore, with six people in the room the life was more outward going. Going to movies, dining out at restaurants, playing cricket, these things made me have the best of both - the love of watching movies or reading books (I did a LOT during that time) and at the same time having the much needed social fabric of mingling with people and having fun. That's not to say more the merrier all the time as being Nikmo was equally enjoyable with likes of Nikhil, Raja Vardhan, Sindu , Divz for company.

Coming to back to the stay, I realized at some point these people would definitely need to move on. I did find out that this hasn't been this way initially. During their initial months, they had a carom board and played on it for days together finally getting over it and the current state is what they have come to after that. Maybe they are moving on through different periods of pre-occupations or may be not, but they are a happy lot. I for one realize this part of my life has moved on and I strongly feel, as an outsider now, that it is important to have certain pre-occupation/hobby or whatever it is called be it books or going out to movies, dining out occasionally, get together of all friends is a very essential part of life.

My movie-watching or book reading have reduced considerably and so has my zeal to look for the latest ones to download. I don't have any complaints though. Coming back home from office, I look forward to spending some nice time with my wife and mom discussing about day's activities or plans. It makes me happy to find such nice companionship and one of the sweet joys of marriage. The life of being hooked to end of the cable for endless days is for all purposes over.

Just to finish of this isn't to say what is good / what is bad and I am happy with the maturity of understanding that keeping balance in life with what you love, your passions and the society around is the best way of living and am glad to be with it.