A Summer Wedding

Last Saturday evening, I attended my first American Wedding. The outdoor wedding was at the Garfield Park Conservatory. The conservatory is a magnificent place too decked out with stunning gardens. It is open after-hours only for special occassions. It was a beautiful small wedding with about 30 guests and had an air of intimacy. As I entered the conservatory at 6:00 p.m., my eyes fell on this beautiful lady clad in a gorgeous white bridal gown. She in no way resembled the woman I saw everyday.
The ceremony began at 6:30 p.m. when the bride and groom walked hand in hand and looked perfect for each other. The 15 min ceremony was conducted by a judge. It was nice to watch the bride and groom exchange vows and say "I will". This was followed by a photo session, drinks and dinner. The best toast was from the bride's sister who narrated a funny story about the bride's sleep-walking habit. In all, the wedding was very well planned, organized and executed. I felt as though I was seeing "A Wedding Story" in action. This was my favorite program last spring and these lines still play in my mind....


and when the spark of youth someday surrenders
I'll have your hand to see me through
tears may come and go
but there's one thing I know
love is all there is when I'm with you

AFI List of Top 100 Songs From U.S. Films

This list features the top 100 songs from U.S Films. Check out No.36 in the list. It is "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" - supposedly the longest word in English Language and is featured in the Oxford Dictionary. The word was popularized by th movie Mary Poppins.

The Formula 1 Experience

Is Indian fanaticism for Formula 1 an accident of history? Probably yes and yet another natural ramification of the colonial rule. The influence of European culture and sports such as Cricket, Football (yes Soccer ofcourse) on India need not be explained in length.

Anyways, so I've been following Formula 1 for the past 4 years. We were excited on finding out that 2004's 3rd race was going to be at Bahrain. We couldn't make it. So we decided to goto the 9th race of this season at Indianapolis on June 20th.

Our day began at 6:00 a.m. on Sunday. It was a 3 hour drive from Chicago. The excitement was evident right from the moment we landed at Indianapolis. The whole city of Indianapolis was geared up for the action at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. It was also a day for making quick bucks for the local residents. Signs that read "Parking available" were visible all over the town. We entered the stadium around 11:00 a.m. The weather was kind - as the 120,000 fans basked in the 78 deg sunshine. "Red" was the order of the day - 75% of the crowd was clad in Ferrari caps, flags, T-shirts. Ofcourse one could also see a few lone Williams and Mercedes supporters.

The test drive started at 11:20 a.m. and I heard the Ferraris roaring for the first time. Rubens Barichello (Ferrari) was at pole position followed by Michael Schumacher. As the cars started, it was a deafening noise. We were seated at the paddock. Paddock is where the race starts. The final action began at 12:00. It was a drama packed race right from the start. Montoya's car not starting, he rushing across the track to get into his back up car, only to be disqualified at the 57th Lap for making it 2 seconds too late in the formation lap was all a part of it. The most shockening one was Ralf's accident in the 10th Lap. It was a black day for Williams-BMW. Atleast 7 laps were led by the Safety car. Despite all the drama, watching Schumacher in action was a dream come true. He is in a league of his own - unbeaten this season but one race. For a while it seemed as though Sato and Button would bag the 2nd and 3rd positions. But Barichello caught up as always and he did push Schumi hard. If only he had overtaken Schumacher after his pit stop, he would have made it and Schumacher would have had to settle for 8 points.
Well, Schumacher went on to win the 2004 United States Grand Prix. He covered about 300 Kms (73 laps of 4.192 Km each) in 100 mins. He was followed by Rubens at the second place and Sato at the 3rd place. This time we saw Schumacher opening the champagne bottle and splashing on the other winners for real. Similar sights from earlier races on television was etched firmly in my head- this time it was for real only a few hundred yards away. The rest is history. I realise any amount of description wouldn't do justification to the experience. You've got to see it live, listen to the roaring sounds, be a part of the red fanatic crowd - in short its all about speed and you've got to experience the adrenaline rush!

Over 50 attempts to shoot pictures of the speeding cars went in vain. You see the cars approaching and before you blink they are gone. The only thing that crossed my mind then was what do these guys see ahead of them that they can drive at that speed. It really takes something to get into this sport!


Schumacher - Winner of the United States Grand Prix 

Schumacher starting after 2nd pit stop 

Wiki - Revolutionizing work place communication!

What is Wiki>
Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. Wiki supports hyperlinks and has a simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslink between internal pages on the fly.
Click here to read more about it..

Is Wiki the right choice for you?
Leading projects that demand daily communication between cross-functional teams to resolve issues?
Managing many projects simultaneously?
Part of a onsite-offshore or a distributed team setup?
Discussions

If the answer to any of the above questions is yes, then you are a victim of e-mail phobia. Walking into work every morning to see hundreds of unread e-mails overwhelms anyone. Especially when the responsibility lies on your shoulders to step in when a discussion is going haywire and your team is looking upto you. Common trend indicates that it takes about 7 e-mails on an average for a simple issue to get resolved. And if you are part of the onsite-offshore model it is another Herculean task to collate the discussion from various e-mails and send the relevant ones!

It is time to try WiKi then! This is where Wiki steps in. It collaborates content making it easy to follow a discussion than browse thr tens of e-mails to track a thread. Content is decentralized making it accessible to the relevant parties. Since the discussion is on a web page it is accessible from any where and does not require any additional software to edit the web pages. Different Wiki pages can be set up for different projects.

There are some disadvantages of using Wiki.
a) It is not the right forum where discussions require authorization or approval - but the final approval can always be done thr a e-mail.
b) The content in a page can be edited by anyone who is a user of the system. Certain WiKi systems provide administrators with the privilege to allow/reject edits to the pages. This however is less likely to happen when the users of a system are responsible. Moreover any content that is tampered with can be tracked down by viewing the change history.

All set to try Wiki?
Testing WiKi - Simple WiKi
WiKi Syntax
WiKiEngines- if you want to set your own WiKi

When I first read about WiKi, the first question that crossed my mind was, "How is it different from a group weblog?" Read this to see how

Yahoo! Mail
Mail wars have just begun. Anyone who logged into Yahoo! Mail this morning was in for a surprise. Yahoo! has upgraded its mail features with a cool user interface and 100 MB of storage. I don't see a reason why someone would now give up their already 3-5 year old Yahoo! Mail Id. I'm wondering if Yahoo! would consider giving 1GB storage to compete with Gmail. I really like this move of Yahoo! - clean sweepstake. Yahoo! has an edge over Google of not being shrouded by controversies such as breaching privacy.

Air Max - Nike Shoes

Air Max
Nike Shoes are THE best. They are so comfortable that the feel of anything else hurts my feet. I've been wearing these shoes for over 3 months now. Walking is no longer an activity, it is a pleasure and the urge to move forward arises automatically. They are so light weight that the feel of extra baggage on my legs is no longer there. I just remebered that dialogue from the movie "What women want". Mel Gibson presents his ideas for an advertising campaign for Nike- images of a lone woman running the highway. It has a punchline- Nike - No Games, Just Sports!

Favorite Five

These are my all-time favorite movies (in the same order). So it goes without saying that I can see them any number of times without getting bored -I've seen most of these atleast 10 times.

English

1. You've got Mail


2. One Fine Day


3. Stuart Little


4. Pretty Woman


5. A Few Good Men

Hindi

1. Dil Hai Ki Maantha Nahin


2. DDLJ


3. Ek Ladka Ek Ladki


4. Pyaar Tho Hona Hi Tha


5. Andaz Apna Apna

Good Bye Winter, Welcome Summer

The pleasures of summer are innumerable after the long cold spell. A very well written article on the numerous things one can do along the lake shore ..it is titled Lake Effect. Excerpts from the article about Lake Michigan,
Lake Michigan is 10,350 years old, 307 miles long and 118 miles wide; contains 1.3 trillion gallons of water; has a 1,638-mile shoreline and contains about 70 species of fish, including, of course, alewives.

Ironically, the term "Lake Effect" (as used in winter),adds to the miseries in winter making the cold seem all the more bitter than it already is! Anyways, now that summer is almost here, with temperatures soaring upto 90 deg, the Lake Shore is buzzing with activity - kids playing in the water, big cruises showing the spectacular view of the skyline from the lake, people sun bathing on the beaches and ofcourse the bikers and skaters along the trail. Waking up every morning to see the pristine blue waters is such a good feeling after having seen the frozen lake for months in a row.

In other news, my visit to the Printers Row book fair this Sunday was fine. There were too many people and very little space to move around. For the most part, only these categories of books were available (in the order of popularity) - classics/fiction, children, cooking/women and sports. Travel and Business/Non-Fiction Books consituted less than 1%.

Analogy between "directories/files in filesystems" and "packages/programs in programming languages"

The concept of organizing files into directories is an age-old concept. But also big enough to spark a discussion. It has provoked me to think and reflect on the different schools of thought. Here is the problem :

File naming convention to different formats - (viewable, printable and text only ) of a source file - Shrek_Characters.xml. How are these files used - In a website to display different views as chosen by a user.
Based on the 2 different schools of thought are the following 2 solutions:

Solution 1:

Directory
FullContent
Print
Text

File Name
Shrek_Characters.htm
Shrek_Characters.htm
Shrek_Characters.htm

Solution 2:

Directory	File Name
FullContent	Shrek_Characters-fullcontent.htm
Print	Shrek_Characters-print.htm
Text	Shrek_Characters-text.htm

Problem Definition:
As one can notice the only difference between Solution 1 and Solution 2 is the names of the files (solution 2 appends the format to the filename) . Both 'schools of thought' agree on the importance of segregating the files by directories (or atleast I assume so). The point of contention is group 1 feels why should a file name be called differently when the differentiating factor is already the directory. While group 2 feels what if a 'print' version file gets accidentally moved to 'FullContent'.

I wanted to offer an unbiased opinion though I feel strongly about Solution 1. Hypothetically, lets assume there could be thousands of such files. So I started thinking more about it, because it is not just 1 file that would be in each of these directories. This is when I reflected on the concept of packages in Java. A set of classes are grouped in to packages based on their functionality/purpose in the overall system. There could be 2 packages called com.movies and com.charcaters that have the same class called ListAllNames, for instance. The function of the class ListAllNames is to list all the names based on certain criteria. Just because they are stored under different packages, wouldn't lead one to change the names of the class. This class finally gets stored under 2 different directories called movies and characters but under the same name. To avoid class conflict is one of the reasons, the concept of packages was formed. The concept of packages can be seen even in PERL and any OOP language.
So one can see the analogy between directories/files and packages/classes.

Gene Hackman. Books.

Last evening, I saw Gene Hackman at Borders. Gene and Daniel Lenihan were there to sign their latest novel- Justice for None. This was the first time that I saw a celebrity so close.

The Annual Printers Row Book Fair event is scheduled for today and tomorrow. I'm looking forward to going there and for all you know the there will be a big addition to the collection of books @home.

Today was the worst day in probably 4 months. I was in such a foul mood when I got up this morning, mainly because even after 8 hours of sleep I woke up as though I hadn't slept a wink. The work and the meetings is not doing any good to me physically/mentally at all!

I'm all stressed and burnt out. Everyday, these 5 hour meetings and juggling my time between 3 projects - all of equal intensity is eating me up.

Anyways, I come into work and the day starts with this marathon meeting that goes on for 3 hours (POST DELETED...................)

All I need is this weekend 2 nights sleep without DTD's and tables swimming thr my head during my sleep.

Satisfying weekend

This long weekend was satisfying in all aspects despite the weather playing spoilsport.
Friday, we had a good dinner and ordered much more than we could eat. Well it was good in a way for I didn't have to cook Saturday.

Saturday morning, we set out to see the Baha'i Temple at Wilmette, Illinois. I'm told the Lotus Temple at Delhi is more beautiful architecturally. The Islamic influence to its architecture was very prevalent.

Gray and gloomy skies cast their shadow for most part of the weekend. Sunday morning, I woke up to see the enthusiastic bikers riding along the Lake Shore Drive, from my window. The event was "Bike the drive" - a 30 mile long event held very spring. Bikers of all age rode their bikes along the lake shore drive. What is significant is that there are no cars during this window and it feels exhilarating to ride the bike on the lake shore drive.

Late Sunday afternoon, as the clouds cleared up, we went to see Shrek-2. I must say it was worth every penny spent. Offers total entertainment and a lot of creativity has gone into its making! Felt good to see a good animation picture after a long time. This one, unlike the first part has a very pronounced American influence - it is more of a satire of Hollywood. Starting with FAR FAR AWAY in the style of HOLLYWOOD followed by GAP QUEEN, Burger Queen, Versarchery, something like Starbucks etc. The new addition - The Puss/Cat in Boots, was a good one. Donkey played it cool as always - maintaining its virtue of talking nonsense! This is the most memorable dialogue


Donkey: Don't I have the right to remain silent?
Shrek: Donkey, you HAVE the right to remain silent. What you lack, is the capacity.


Well, that was my weekend...