On LJ. Wow..never thought it would be this long :)

Should update more often!

Yes, it's that time of the year again...when I look at LJ and go, "About time I update the journal.." AND have information to share ;) so here goes...

Starting today, I'll be working for Mozilla Corporation a.k.a MoCo for short. I will continue to be based in Singapore and will be working as a sysad, providing on-call support during the wee hours in the US. I'm their first hire in Singapore and their first IT hire outside the USA :D

I had an opportunity to meet (almost) the whole IT team and a bunch of other excellent folks during the Mozilla All-Hands held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View between the 27-29 April this year. It was great fun and it really helped validate my decision to join them...even if I'll be working remotely. The energy levels are just amazing and I can't wait to get started! :D

In other news, I've also just moved in over this weekend to a nice two bedroom apartment. Most of the unpacking is done, about two boxes to go and a while to settle down I guess. The internet connection is up, so that's super cool.

Time to crash, first day at work (again) in a few hours! :D

Here's to more w00tness and joy, more travels, more fun, more love, more kickassedness, more f1, more letters and more writing.

Here's to 26 and 2009 :D

PS : Greeting cards sent the good old way, especially when they're from your parents are just super cool!!

It's been a while since I put down something worthwhile here, so here goes :)

Sometime in early November 2008, I bought myself my first road bike, a Giant OCR3. I began riding quite regularly and slowly increasing the distance over December.

Then I found out that there's a cycling event on February 22nd, and I thought I could take part & signed up for the 40km Challenge and prepared over the first 3 weeks of Feb.

Come raceday, I managed to finish the 40kms in 86 mins 45 seconds w0000t! :D Not bad for a first time I guess. That time put me 92nd out of 302 participants in my age group (25-29). Full result sheet is here, search for bib number 1626.

I've uploaded some photos on Flickr and a big round of thanks to my roomie, Isaq for coming along, supporting me and taking the photos :D

On a side note, I'm absolutely in love with Nokia's Sports Tracker. Absolutely kickass and I use it quite regularly. Tracked the race as well, clicky if you're interested.

I'm really starting to love cycling and here's hoping to shave off 20 mins before next year :D

2008 has mostly been a kickass year, in quite a few fronts. Wishing everyone a wonderful 2009 (as I'm rushing off to the Siloso Beach Party @ Sentosa) and seeya all next year! :)

It's been a while since I've written anything here, and decided that this was as good a time and opportunity as any :)

I follow Playstation.Blog on Flickr. Simply because well, all their interesting entries have pics and if there are good pics, I go read up on the corresponding entries. The other day while I was casually going through my emails, the daily one from Flickr with the pics uploaded by friends had Prince of Persia on it.

My reactions were something like : Whoa. Hold on. WTF!!! Prince of Persia??? PS3??? Elika???? WHAT!!! and that obviously led to Your Questions Answered : Prince of Persia and then Prince of Persia Review and obviously I wanted to know when the game was coming here....so off to GameScore and voila! December 5th. Bliss.

Obviously, if you're not one/all of these :

1. Gamer


2. From my era (early 80s :p)

you sort of don't understand the excitement or what the big deal about Prince of Persia is :D

Back in the days, when there was DOS, Prince of Persia was the ONE game (apart from say Dangerous Dave or Transport Tycoon) that was on EVERYONE's lips. If you had a computer and you didn't have/play Prince of Persia, you had to be a loser :D Levels were dissected, strategies discussed, cheatcodes revealed...all to save the lovely Princess from the evil Jaffar. I've played so much PoP (yes, typing the whole name is getting painful now :p) that I still remember the theme song and can hum it all out. Insane? Maybe :D

And then I had relatives egging me along. Cousins and Nieces...just to show them how the Prince wins and saves the Princess...and some of them would even cry if the Prince died. Nuts!

So yeah, Prince of Persia is very much a part of my gaming life and life itself..it's something that I cannot forget and that is why I went rushing to Gamescore after work yesterday to pick up PoP for the PS3 on the day of it's release here. And I was blown away by the graphics right at the first level. The scenery, the desert, hills, canyons, the blue sky...just.simply.WOW. Oh and Elika is surely an added bonus. She helps you along and the Prince himself is an easy-go-lucky chap with a ready wisecrack in hand, all the time! The game is no where near the story of the original...and has a little bit of a learning curve. The fighting is just brilliant in terms of visual representation and graphics. I still remember hitting the ctrl key on the old game...haha. In just about 19 years...we've had SO many changes to computers/display systems/controllers and what not, that the first PoP in 1989 and the current version in 2008 are just eons apart.

Gamespot says you can finish the game in 12 hours, I think I'll take a LOT more :) Just soaking in the various scenes and umm there is real life and work in the middle anyway!

Shameless plugs for Gamespot (I've gotten all my games for the PS3 after reading their reviews and I'm yet to be disappointed....every single one has been spot on!) and Gamescore, who've been an excellent source of everything gaming here, atleast for me.

Oh, and I picked up Fallout3 as well. The queue now reads -> Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2 - Ep 1, Half-Life 2 - Ep 2, GTA4, Fallout3 (and more of Portal, Civilization : Revolution) because I think I'll finish PoP before the rest of them :D Time...if only a day had more time ;)

So, finally louiswu is the third Gentoo developer from India. woohoo! This calls for a major partyyyy. One more to the Indian Conspiracy ;) Welcome to the brotherhood, dude :D

PS : I heard of Gentoo from him and can now stop needling him about giving back to the community :p

PPS : Time to grab some more sleep before getting ready for work :p

I was back at Melbourne Park for the ladies final, and this was taken when Maria was well on her way to winning her first Australian Open title. The match was good, as was the lighting and the crowd was mostly behind Ana Ivanovic (she is surely a darling of the cameras as Alan Wilkins rightly put it during a Wimbledon telecast).

Rest of the set : http://www.flickr.com/photos/fox2mike/sets/72157605851583844/

I still have a metric ton of photos to upload :p

Date : Jan 23rd 2008
Time : 2245 onwards...(local time)
Location : Melbourne, Australia

My flight from Brisbane was uneventful. Virgin Blue is pretty cool, you have (small) screens right in front of you to watch what you want and all the good stuff is pay per view :) The rate I guess for movies and channels was something in the range of 7-9 Australian Dollars. I didn't bother, since I was enjoying the lovely skies past sunset and the cities below. The first thing I noticed when I landed in Melbourne was the big notice that warns people against joking (yes you read that right) about bombs in baggage or terrorism. The notice went on to say it's an offence and that people do so will be arrested. Eeeks. Paranoia and more Security Theatre :)
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And that brought to an end, a very interesting Day 1 in Melbourne :)
Rest of the snaps : http://www.flickr.com/photos/fox2mike/sets/72157604290718622/

Wooohooo!

Had a pretty good extended weekend and a lazy Sunday at home, watching Kimi get back to his winning ways at Sepang.

Life's been mostly good and exciting the last year, I have nothing to really complain about at all :)

Hoping for many more good ones ahead!

PS : If I need to get in to work on time tomorrow, I should head to bed now ;)

2007 was amazing in many aspects. Here's wishing everyone an amazing 2008 :)

And finally, I got my FOSS.IN pictures up... Click to see.

In the past two days, I've been asked by two different girls if they can be my girlfriend and that too in front of my parents.

Fun :)

Hope you all had a fun-filled and Merry Xmas as well!

Taken during a trip to the Island of Palau Ubin, Singapore during the month of August this year. Unfortunately, there seems to be some dirt on the CCD :(

We had a fun trip, a decent amount of mountain biking, walks by the sea and just generally relaxing. I took this shot when the clouds were rolling in.

Another one I liked - http://www.flickr.com/photos/fox2mike/1498521773/

The set - http://www.flickr.com/photos/fox2mike/sets/72157602287565610/

One more not so nice thing to strike off my to do list, experience an Earthquake.

Crazy. We felt the office sway, slowly from side to side....for a full minute. It was almost surreal. You sort of didn't know if it was your mind or if it would stop.

I hope there is no loss of life in Indonesia, considering this was a 8.2, I'm afraid I'll be wrong about that :(

More info over at USGS -

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/Quakes/us2007hear.php

Update : They revised the magnitude to 8.2 from 7.9

Update 2 : They revised the magnitude to 8.4 from 8.2


$ uptime
03:33:29 up 551 days, 3:27, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00


On one of the production servers at work ;)

In other news, this journal has been up for 4 years now. I'm grateful to Livejournal for the many friends I've met here. It's been amazing even though my posting frequency is like once a month :)

Thanks a ton! :D

So, finding a place these days are made easier by using Google Maps and/or Wikimapia. I found a couple of places I needed to go to in Bangalore using Wikimapia. Although there is significant noise thanks to the numerous people who seem to love marking out their houses, it still works. I successfully plotted a driving route to a place using both and well, managed to reach it fine. The route back wasn't as easy (thanks to a zillion one-ways) but that worked out as well. w00t!

In other news, Ferrari finally managed their first 1-2 of the season today at what is touted to be the last race ever at Magny-Cours. Seems the new aerodynamics package that both Kimi and Massa were confident about really turned the tables on McLaren this weekend. w00t!

A close friend got engaged and another got married and I was lucky enough to make it to both :)

Had a lazy weekend, looking forward to the week ahead....

Just as I thought I'd gotten over Sepang, vyshnavi kindly sends in an email with this link : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi1EQBVA2Lc

And the memories came rushing back. As did the sounds. I still can't get over the V8s.

I'm going to own a Ferrari someday. That's a promise to myself that I really intend to keep.

Taken with code_martial's Nikkor 18-200 VR lens. It's quite breathtaking....the tallest building in the world till it was unseated by Taipei 101, you don't realise it's true splendour until you're right below it.

These shots were taken around midnight.

( Another one I liked... )

Rest of the Petronas shots : http://www.flickr.com/photos/fox2mike/tags/petronastowers/

Thanks to Codie for lending his lens (which he'd almost lost earlier hehe) ;)

Like teemus said, after watching F1 on TV since 1999, I'll be in Malaysia over the weekend for this year's GP. Awesome. And yeah, I blew up some money on Grandstand seats right on the start-finish straight.

Looking forward to doing some catching up with teemus and code_martial there.

Sepang, here I come :D

Time really does fly :) Turned 24 on March 24^th and the weekend was a blast. Spent the Saturday lazing and stepping out in the evening for some "exploration", photos and some awesome Turkish/Arabic food. Had Falafel after almost 12 years!!!. Thanks to everyone who wished via Phone/Email/Orkut/IM. Sunday was spent with friends and had a blast. Had been to the Jurong Bird Park a few weeks earlier and tons of photos are now up on Flickr...so thought I'd post a few I liked the most here :



Somehow, the feeling that these birds aren't free is still playing on my mind. They're well cared for, probably better than most places in the world, but it's freedom that is above everything else I guess.

Have a few things to write about...so I guess I'll be making a few posts in the near future.

And so we were heading back home from work by taxi and I managed to snap this beauty on the road :)

A couple of days later, I saw a red Spider 360 convertible on the same road, but didn't have the cam with me.

Oh well.

Life's been good (and busy) on the whole, tons of new pics up at http://flickr.com/photos/fox2mike/

Yup, I made it in one piece to Singapore :) Seems the IC flight from BLR - SIN is usually the one having all the problems, the one I flew left Bangalore 2.5 hours late and caused a good number of people to miss their connecting flights from Changi.

The first few days were a daze, nice hotel room, new smells and sights (photos shall follow later). Moved into the condo towards the end of the first week and love the place as well.

Office is on the 34th floor, giving us a fairly good view of Sentosa Island and surrounding areas.

Singapore is better than I last saw it in 1990 (obviously), the public transport systems are just fabulous (I'm a sucker for MRT systems and I love the ones in Madras just as much). Little India is aptly named, you'll find a copy of India there on weekends...tons of Indians in a place :)

Since Tamil is one of the official languages and also since quite a few people know the language here, I find myself using it quite often. Yay!

Yet to do some sightseeing, since work has been generally on the tighter side. Have been jogging and swimming and yes, it does feel good to have some regular exercise.

My T630 phone locked here and Sony said they can't do anything without losing my data. If you'd like to keep in touch, please leave your number here, I'll add you to my phone book. Comments are screened.

PS : Felt very homesick for an hour a few days back. Wanted to head back home...but the feeling passed, things are much better now.

PPS : Oh yeah, Schumi won the Chinese GP :D Awesome race, managed to watch it all live here and enjoyed every moment of it. Nice to see a sulky Alonso, I'm sure I'll see more of that next season when his McLaren doesn't finish races ;)

Okay, so a lot has been going on in life since July....and I guess it's time to update you all about the same.

I'd planned to join Portland State University to do my Masters this fall. Everything was fine until the visa officer at the American Consulate in Chennai saw that I was born in Dubai and had spent 12 years of my childhood there...reason enough for them to push my application into "additional adminstrative processing". Did someone say something about man proposing and god disposing?

Anyway, I was told that the processing will take upto 4 weeks and if it does extend beyond that, I'll need to check the website to see my status. It has been well beyond 4 weeks, still no status change and basically, I'm not going to be able to make it this fall.

In the meanwhile, I was offered a job with Ness Technologies at Singapore & after a wee bit of thinking, I decided to head to Singapore, since my US visa is just sitting for now.

I'm leaving for Singapore tomorrow night. Yeah, slightly short notice and a lot of things need to be sorted out before I leave. I'll be there for at least a year, if not more & am so looking forward to a lot of things, like the Malaysian GP 2007 as well as maybe a trip to Australia or atleast a few SE Asia trips (Cambodia, Thailand...)

I have less than 48 hours to leave and I've not started packing. Oh and if you're in/around Singapore, do drop in your details, I'll screen the post, try to call/meet up when I get there. Same applies to folks transiting through Singapore (I'm sure there'll be quite a few).

Oh and I've met a lot of wonderful folks in the last 6 months at HCL EAI. You all know who you are, thanks for everything and I'll miss all of you.

The moment he crossed the finish line, he didn't celebrate as much as he always does. The moment the race was over, Jean Todt was almost in tears. The moment he got out of the car, he was subdued, but made it a point to go over to almost every cluster of Ferrari team members and hug/shake hands with them. He didn't jump on the podium until he received his trophy. And just when the anthems started, he probably told Kimi (he spoke a few words in his ear) "The next year, I'd like to see you on the top step at Monza."

And then Micheal Schumacher just when into the press conference and in his new "drift off the question" style, announced that he was leaving Formula 1 for good at the end of the season.

God damn it. He could have been there for one more year. First Agassi and now Schumi. I've always wanted to see Agassi play a grand slam match and Schumi in an F1 race. Neither of that is going to happen now.

Bye Schumi, F1 will never be the same without you. And when you leave, take the championship since no one deserves it as much as you do.

Lots of life updates in the pipeline, will let you all know in a day or two.

Wow, what a race. I guess it ended up being fair to both Schumi and Alonso in funny ways...with both of them being penalised before the start.and then both of them adding nothing to their respective tallies. Since Kubica was disqualifed, both Schumi and Ferrari scored points.

Did nothing much over the weekend.

Oh and yeah, OpenTTD is nice.

Well, back in 1994, when I got my first ever Creative Multimedia set..it was a big deal. Having a 2x CDROM Drive was an even bigger deal. Along with that pack, came a set of nice games (didn't realise they were nice until quite a few years later). One of the CDs was a combo pack of Syndicate, an awesome strategy + rule the world sort of game based in the future, Strike Commander, about which I've written before, Wing Commander II : Vengeance of the Kilrathi which was a space based game and finally a Diablo style game called Ultima III.

Cutting a long story short, I actually managed to finish WC2 & Strike Commander (somewhere in 1997-98-99) and Syndicate in May 2000 (I know because I've actually written this down in the game manual. I have got to be nuts.).

The other day, on #gentoo-dev (freenode), someone brought up Syndicate. I think it was robbat2 and a couple of us joined in....and well..ferringb pointed me to dosbox. And the rest as they say is history.

I dug out my 12 year old Creative CD, copied stuff off it and am now playing Syndicate (sadly Strike Commander won't work for some silly reason) and have plans to play WC2 again. Finally I can play Transport Tycoon without having to reboot. Finally I got my hands on Fire and Ice for which I've roamed the Internet since 1998 (and then forgot about it till today), after I lost my only working copy.

In this age of Doom 3 and Half-Life 2....I'm quite content playing good old DOS games. It makes for a nice change. Amazing to see the amount of work that went into these games as far back as 1991 (Origin brought out WC2 in 1991) and SC as well as Syndicate were 1993 releases.

fugney, I know you're not the violent types, but you should take a look at Syndicate. And surely Transport Tycoon (I guess you would have, already).

Off to play now, and then catch up on Germany Vs Italy.

About 2 weeks back, theju, rattle_snake and myself had been on a trek to Kumaraparvatha (called KP in short). The last time I'd been on a trek was sometime in 1998 and the last time I was physically fit was I don't really remember when. Sucketh.

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My legs and thighs hurt till about Thursday or so :D. Overall, we really enjoyed the experience and the rest of the pictures are up at http://xinetd.accosted.net/gallery/kptrek2006/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/fox2mike/tags/kptrek2006/ . The next time, we plan to do this via the Madikeri -Somwarpet side and come down via Kukke.

It's been a long time since anything disturbed me as much as the F1 Perished Heros video from YouTube.

prashanthks had sent this link along quite sometime back and I watched it only today. Sad. The worst ones were those where the fuel ignites and the car burns with the driver still inside...the marshals are unable to stop it since the flames are simply too much to fight with fire extinguishers.

I still remember Senna...the others I was too young to know about but Senna is etched forever in my head.

12 years down the line, I'm extremely thankful to those who made Formula 1 as safe as it is today. No driver's life has been threatened post 1994 although there have been some very nasty accidents.

I hope it continues to be this way. No one should die racing in F1 again.

Righto. An excellent way to start the weekend, is to go watch X-Men: The Last Stand, especially if you're a fan of X-Men. I am, and I absolutely loved it. Yeah, there are a few sad moments, but I guess this is a pretty nice trilogy. Well done. I'm impressed. Xavier, Pheonix, Cyclops, Magento, Mystique, Wolverine, Storm, Beast...

Just when I was sort of getting over it...I decided to catch up on the season finale of Lost. And boy-oh-boy, yeah, that was so worth it. The only downside now is waiting for Season 3 to begin. Really. Lost has always been fast paced and well written for the most part and now they've really turned the heat on, just like they did at the end of Season 1. And just when you were starting to think that things can't get better, they just stepped it up a few more notches, answered a few questions (yeah, just a few) and managed to leave the viewer hanging and craving for season 3.

Go watch Lost and X-Men 3. Worth spending sometime on ;)

rsync is a lifesaver. x11vnc is nice to have around.

trinity is currently a Dell Inspiron 4100 and yeah, I'm kind of attached to that name, so all my work boxen (the ones I use) have always been and probably will be named trinity in a salute of sorts to Carrie Ann-Moss aka the real Trinity (Matrix). Heh. Clicky for a screenie, maybe I'll post some photos later.

Work in the new place has so far been a learning experience of sorts, which is good. I've picked up more Java related stuff in the last 2 weeks that I've done in the last 2 years (prolly because I never had to/tried). Overall coolness. Yay.

louiswu, I now have Software Suspend working flawlessly on the laptop. Took like about 30 mins to setup, the maximum time being moving my stuff around to create a large enough swap space. Tested once with only command-line and once with X and works like a beauty :) w000t!

Oh, I almost forgot. I now have Wireless at home. Grabbed a Linksys WRT45G (yeah I know, I can't put OpenWRT or similar stuff on it, but hey, it works ™) and a D-Link DWL-G630 PCMCIA card to go with it. Wireless is quite addictive and well, mom's quite happy I'm not drawing cables all over the place. Getting the card to work with Gentoo was a walk in the park with net-wireless/madwifi-driver and net-wireless/wpa_supplicant. Thanks to Joshua Jackson for the recommendation (of sorts) for the card ;) Feels nice to be walking around the place and remaining connected.

Had a small get-together on Saturday evening arranged mostly by rythm in sekrit collaboration with the others. Wow, it was fun. I mean, I don't even remember when the last time I cut a cake for a B'day was...hehe, maybe when I was 9 or 10.

Thanks guys, I had a blast!

Pics are up on Flickr, thanks to rattle_snake for those.

So, I'm doing n things online when I get a belated B'day wish from teemus. Since he'd already wished me, I was wondering if he had forgotten and well...then I see this little email that went...


(the following is a gift from LiveJournal user "teemus")

2 months of paid account time have been added to your LiveJournal account
"fox2mike".


Wow. Yay!

Thanks Dude(s) and Dudettes! You all rock. w0000t.

Spent like the last couple of hours fiddling with the local network setup (that I'm working on at home) only to find out the new LAN card is kaput. Yay! Fixing the LAN card (temporarily) doesn't seem to solve the issue, so there's something beyond just the card and I don't seem to heading towards solving that part just yet.

Fun. Or not really that much when it isn't working :D

Shall be fixed, soon.

For the record, being 23 seems no different than being 22. Yet.

Update: Soon turned out to be about 2 hours after this post :D Figured out that I'd messed up the iptables FORWARD chain rules...and once rectified, everything started automagically working :) Also, seems the LAN card is okay...since there's a 1 year warranty on it, I'm not getting it replaced unless the problem happens again.

I'm joining HCL tomorrow.

So what if you're at work and missing all the fun of the Australian Open? There's always AO Radio which covers all the important matches live :)

Fire up a console, and hit mplayer -nocache mms://203.89.193.98/ausopen2006 to enjoy live commentary. The -nocache ensures that mplayer doesn't cache the stream...can be pissing off to hear commentary from the first set when the second is going on.

IE/Windows users should be able to listen to it directly, since it's Windows Media Player stream.

In case you've not been following this year Australian Open, you've missed some really good matches...in no specific order:

1) Andy Roddick Vs Marcos Baghdatis
2) Martina Hingis Vs Samantha Stosur
3) Roger Federer Vs Tommy Haas
4) Nicolas Kiefer Vs Sebastien Grosjean
5) Ivan Ljubicic Vs Marcos Baghdatis

And Martina Hingis is playing Kim Clijsters right now. Clijsters won the first set 6-3 and is down 2-5 in the second. Awesome.

PS : Thanks to louiswu and teemus for helping LiveJournal test out their Nudge a friend feature :)

Wishing you all a wonderful and prosperous 2006!

Link of the day - http://www.stwing.upenn.edu/~jenf/writing/rant04.html

:)