New York, it is!

The wait was long, but it was worth the wait.

Oh Yes!

There are exactly a hundred reasons that I can give why I havent blogged. After a lot of thought, I don't think its worth enumerating it here. Operating systems was one of them. Ok, I had to say it despite all my attempts. The semester's been long and hard. Debugging race conditions are more than hard, at least if you are doing it for the first time. Sometimes its just fatigue that gets you. Persistance does pay. Six weeks of toil to implement a pre-emptible, multi-threaded kernel. There was user level thread library before that and boot loader after. In summary, we implemented that whole stack. (Oh, I forget to mention a few device drivers)

I don't know if have the strength to live through the course again but, it was something worth living through. The stress, the elation, the satisfaction that comes at every stage after hours of typing code, staring at log files, re-running tests, debugging macros, ..the list goes on. Everyone looks in to the void sometimes. There is still sometime to go before I finish the course, but I thought I'll be prejudiced if I write the blog then (depending on my grade of course) - so i decided to do this now.

Flights of Fantasy - II

I'm yet to find out the name of this Nectar drinker

A White Throated Kingfisher looking on - curiously!

Birds of Prey have always had an appeal, in their own aesthetic sense!
The Black Kite

Flight of Fantasy

For a lot of reasons, it was. I had been waiting for this day every since I left, and it was finally here. It wasn't the smoothest of flights I've ever had, but I'm back home in one piece - and that's all that matters.

For starters, kaku, and I had run across 5th avenue to get on to 71D (to reach the university - from where we took the bus to the airport). The trip to the airport seemed ever so long, and the wait at the checkin not half as we expected though we were there almost two hours before the scheduled departure of the flight. Kaku, and I took different counters for checkin - the agent at the counter took ever so long that it made me wonder why! And, when I asked him - he said, "There is something wrong with the ticket, I'm not able to check you in". What??? The ticket seemed valid? But, cant check me in? Beyond my comprehension! I wasnt ready to panic yet! The queue was already growing, he asked me step aside, as kaku was facing the same problem! Ficsh! Now, what! Well, the next guy was flying to Frankfurt, again - he had the same problem too. He couldnt check him in. It happened finally - reason why they couldn'y check in? US Airways domestic and internation were merging - and, like you'd bet there was software glitch!

Phily wasnt better, the flight was delayed by five hours! Here goes the listed ever appended reasons. Personally, I some of them - ridiculous! The flight was supposed to depart at 4.15pm.
At 4.00pm, there an annoucement:
- The flight has a mechanical problem (thank god, its not a software glitch!) - flight pushed by 15mins. Scheduled take off: 4.30
- Oops, we'll take a new airplane - move from gate A17 to A23

- There no food on the new airplane, SkyChef will take half an hour load - Scheduled departure: 4.57pm
- I'm hanging around taking snap of aeroplanes, staff and lots of other things ;) Finally, we board the flight without knowing the worst is yet to come!
All grimly sitting now, the flight is on the runway - There's an announcement - The flight has flat tire and needs to dragged backed to the hanger! Eh? Ever heard of an airplane with a flight tyre!

Boy, it took some time fixing that monster, and I thought fixing a car tyre was easy. I thought, we had enough. There was another annoucement meanwhile, 'The captain is ill - we need a replacement captain'. I couldnt believe it, this wasnt happening to me, I was too excited to get home. The fear of missing the dear flight from Franfurt grew ever so close! Eventually, we took off, and 7 hour 20 minute flight.
It wasn't bad flight, with all the wine and rhythm flowing. With the six hour layover at Frankfurt, and five hour delay at Phily left us with One hour to get between the terminals and checkin into LH754. (That flight brings me a lot of fond memories :)
The last part of the journey wasnt anything eventful, I had a German to give me some company for few hours. But, home was beckoning. Sure enough, it was there in few hours!
Welcome home, Happy holidays!

Who is the animal?

Who makes the rules? Are we the ones make it? What claims do we have, why do we claim anything at all? We aren't the strongest of the living lot, are we the smartiest, of that I'm not sure. We are the greediest! A greed of the killing kind. And, yet we don't have the courage to look them in the eye.

Eerie silence

Look around you the hustle, so many people that you are lost in crowd. You try to hear yourself, but you cant hear.

Choice

The best thing in life, is that you can start over again - if you chose to. Some changes are not revertible. Its the choice, what makes it most important. I'm here now. Lets see how it goes.