random
Tail wags through the air,
butt follows closely.
Pure joy.
I’ve been having a rough few days. My partner thinks it’s because of the Daylight Savings switch, and maybe she’s right. It’s true that I’ve had similar rough patches at around the start of spring, and historically I’ve attributed them to the sudden change in the pace of life around me. Being an introvert partnered with an extrovert, March usually feels like a whirlwind as my partner seemingly emerges out of her winter hibernation and starts going out everyday, either maintaining old relationships or building new ones.
One of my favorite quotes of all time is this definition of insanity:
Insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results. It’s thinking - “this time it’s going to be different”.
I don’t know where the original quote comes from (Benjamin Franklin? Gandhi?) but I heard it for the first time from a villain in the game “Far Cry 3”. Here’s the clip if you want to watch it, I still get goosebumps from the voiceacting and motion capture: https://www.
I ran into several issues when trying to create a Fedora CoreOS template on Proxmox using Packer, so here’s how I got it working.
Overview Using Packer, we will boot a VM with a CoreOS live cd ISO attached. We will then run coreos-installer to install CoreOS to a disk attached to that VM, and finally Packer will convert that VM to a template. The Packer VM needs to boot up with qemu-guest-agent installed for Packer to read its IP and run commands on it for further setup.
I remembered recently that this blog has been sitting around idle for a while. I figured that the continuous deployment solution I’d set up (CodeShip + Amazon S3) might’ve died by now (well, the CodeShip part anyway) but no, it’s still around. Those folks seem to be going strong, much to my surprised and delight.
However, a lot has changed in the past two years. For one, Github now supports unlimited private repositories with a free account.
Time to pull back the veil a bit. I’ve been absent for the past few months because I couldn’t write about what I was up to. And that’s because I was busy applying for college, getting admitted and then working out the logistics of paying fees, finding a place to stay and moving to a whole new country.
Now that all that is done and I’m sitting in a lounge on campus, I can write about it.
They say that it’s better to be a small fish in a big pond than a big fish in a small pond. That way you’ll look around, see all the bigger fish and be inspired to better yourself so that you can become one of the big fish and then move your family to a house in an even bigger pond.
But what do you do if you’re a kangaroo in a pond?
At my previous company, I would typically wake up at 9 on a work-day. At my current company, I’m forced to wake up at 6.30 instead so that I can beat the morning rush hour and reach the office in a timely fashion. As a result, my brain is typically zonked from sleep deprivation by the time I leave the office and I find my thoughts wandering down weird paths in the cab ride back home.
Amazon’s office happens to be pretty far from my place of residence. The distance via the shortest route is about 24 kilometers, the distance via the fastest route is 28 kilometers, and during non-peak hours it takes a car about 45 minutes to cover that distance on Bangalore’s roads. During peak hours, it typically takes more than twice as a long.
To help its employees commute easily, Amazon runs a cab service.
As most of my close friends know, I’m a big fan of post-apocalyptic scenarios. If I saw a zombie shuffling towards me with bits of gore sticking out of its mouth and its entrails trailing on the ground, I’d probably yell for joy. No surprise, then, that a fair amount of my dreams (the sleeping kind) involve similar settings. What was unusual about last night’s dream was that it took place on the cusp of the apocalypse, not after.
Today my teammates gave me some presents as a farewell gift. And a couple of them pressed me to give a speech. Since this was just a group of friends, I coudln’t exactly give the speech I have planned for the actual, official farewell. I demurred several times but they kept insisting, so I gave in against my better judgement. I’m sure they were expecting me to narrate a humorous incident, but non-situational humor is not something I’ve historically been very good at.
Chandrika - a college junior and a dear friend - visited Bangalore over the weekend for some work. Since we haven’t met since graduating from college four years back, we naturally decided to touch base once her work got done. We spent a couple of hours at a restaurant called “Punjabi by Nature” in Koramangala catching up. I was taken aback back how much she’s changed, both physically and in the way she thinks.
All my life, my mother has been telling me “You need to get out more! Why do you sit at home all day and play video games? You’re getting desensitized! You live in society, you need to maintain relations with other people!” To which I’d reply “I have mad social skills! Look at my CHR, it’s 9! Everybody in The Forgotten Realms loves me!”
Kidding aside, I always disregarded my mother’s advice, mainly because she tends to be somewhat more obsessed about maintaining a decent public image than I ever have been or will be.
Today I lay half-naked in a dingy room while an old man groped my privates.
Or maybe I visited a middle-class hospital and had an ultrasound doppler performed on my testicles by an elderly radiologist.
Perspective matters, does it not? :)
Been having mild pain in one of my testicles for the past couple of weeks, so I went and got a bunch of tests done so that I could go see the urologist well-prepared with everything ready.
Last week (I think it was the day after the lunch non-encounter with her) I got a brilliant idea for kicking off my “relationship” (by which I mean that she doesn’t even know I exist) with this cute girl at the office: I would get her to join my hackathon team! Of course, till that point I had been very adamant about not participating in this year’s hackathon (this obstinate attitude stemmed from the general frustration I feel at the office these days) so I had to come up with an idea and form a team first.
Last week (I think it was the day after the lunch non-encounter with her) I got a brilliant idea for kicking off my “relationship” (by which I mean that she doesn’t even know I exist) with this cute girl at the office: I would get her to join my hackathon team! Of course, till that point I had been very adamant about not participating in this year’s hackathon (this obstinate attitude stemmed from the general frustration I feel at the office these days) so I had to come up with an idea and form a team first.
Quite a few of my female colleagues went and had babies recently. Now whenever I run into them they feel the need to whip out their phones and show me the new cute thing that their kid just did. Most of the photos depict kids in diapers busy drooling.
An ex-colleague and friend, let’s call her Lucy, who went to the US to pursue an MBA visited me recently after spending two years in the US.
It’s 1:45 AM over here, and I just got back home after stepping out to yell at some kids.
After getting off my computer at about 12.30 AM, I took my headphones off and went to bed, only to realize that there was a party happening in another apartment inside the apartment complex, and the resulting noise wasn’t letting me sleep. In addition to loud music, there were also a couple of girls yelling and laughing, and to my unmarried and single brain, the sound of girls laughing so late at night pretty much guarantees that any drowsiness goes away completely.
I was planning on reading up on Bloom filters today, but then I came across this reddit thread, so it looks like today is my day off. Plus I woke up with a swollen lymph node, a huge-ass pimple on my neck that hurts like mad, a mild fever and light-headedness and still went to the office in that state, so I’m just going to chill out for a bit. It’s been a long day.
I’m visiting Beijing for a week to assist in the training of the Beijing team with respect to a new unit-testing framework developed by one of the guys in the India office (who is also with me). And as you can probably tell from the title of this post, I’m experiencing somewhat of a culture shock. Right from the airport to my hotel, I’ve seen girls/women wearing only either shorts or short-skirts.
…will be a Galaxy S3. I’d originally planned on getting a Nexus 4, but the lack of a removable battery and microSD storage combined with Google’s messing up the whole shipping process and making me wait patiently for a whole month without any updates have led me to cancel my “Pending” Nexus 4 order and settle on an S3 instead. I’ll be getting it sometime this week or the next, pics incoming.
Well, I did try. I tried really hard.
But nothing other than #gamedev excites me. Everything else just feels old, boring and dull.
But, while I was experimenting with non-game-related development, I realized what it is about programming that makes me tick: it’s the high I get out of learning something new, and putting simple building blocks together in new ways to make something totally new, unexpected, and just plain beautiful.
And so I’ve resurrected this site, out of the hope that I will be able to blog more regularly than before. I’ve been cowering behind the excuse of having writer’s block all this time, but it’s time I left all that behind me, so.. here’s to a fresh start!