Life would have been so much more interesting if all the signs on our Indian roads would have been in what we call “Bambaiyya Hindi”. Some examples:
Exit: chal kalti maar.
No smoking: Cigarette nahi pine ka, kya?
(French) Vous n’avez pas La Priorité: Abey, tera number nahi, apun ka hai.
No entry: Andar nahi ghusneka.
Keep left: Baine baaju me rakh.
No U-turn: Wapas ulta nahi ghumne ka.
Can you think of some more funny ones?
Dear Lazyweb,
With all the idiots that I end up talking to, and all of them giving me different answers, I resort to you, O Lazyweb!
Q: Do I need a transit visa?
I’m travelling on a French type D visa, to Nice via London Heathrow. The time between the two BA flights (BOM-LHR and LHR-NCE) is 2h 40 mins. I don’t change airports, but I do change terminals and go from t5 to t1.
Quite a few people commented that I don’t need a transit visa, then some said I do. If you do know a definite answer to this, please leave a comment. You could also point me to some phone / email id that you think might help. Any help is appreciated!
Met Pradeepto and Missus, and Anurag at our usual hangout place – Pizzeria – to get the update on their Akademy visit. Need to try out the Bachelor’s ice cream next time, now that I know the location. 
I went down South last weekend for the Bangalore Flex User Group meet that Mrinal tweeted about. I reached halfway through Vandana’s OpenLaszlo talk. (Thanks to Bangalore’s famed traffic jams). The part that I attended went well, with flex users trying to grasp laszlo’s components and comparing similar alternatives available in Flex. Quite a few new people joined in too, I was told. The meet ended well with discussions on how should laszlo save its backside 
As always, coffee time is the best time to get a feel of the group. Met some people with brilliant ideas and trying to get them into action. Nice!
Headed to some shopping and thought of picking up something to eat at MG Road. Wasn’t hungry, so headed back with some coffee instead.
Next day was spent trying to figure out what OS to install on the new laptop, at Parthan’s place, after an awesome Thali at Nandhinee. A few hours later, I ended up buying two waitlisted tickets (both of which got confirmed btw – separate trains ofcourse) to Chennai for the next day, all the while having a confirmed KSRTC bus ticket. More has been blogged about this meet (and the goofups) by Parthan, Aanjhan and Onkar.
Next day was spent in Chennai. The flight out was delayed by almost two hours. Landed up at home at 1.45 am with Mom yelling. All attempts at breaking in quietly failed terribly.
Note to self: Next time, plan things out! (but unplanned trips like this one are awesome fun too! 
)
I head out to France to pursue a Masters degree next this month. Now, for the first time in my life, shopping seems like a daunting task.
And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last lone aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question “Whither?”
Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?
It all started one day when Akshay blogged about how he wanted to make a positive change in his life by starting to wake up early each day. I have tried a lot of different alarm clocks, and various ringtones (including a shrieking voice) and radio that goes off early at 6 am, but none seemed to work for me. Its not that this has been an issue since ages – I used to get up by 5:00 am and reach the station before 6 am a few years ago. But somehow, I got myself into the habit of sleeping at 2am/3am and waking up at 8/9/10 am.
So when he asked if anybody was game, I jumped in.
Akshay, his friend Anil and I took up the challenge of waking up at 5:30 every day for the one month that followed, in a very interesting way. It was decided to document the whole experiment on a wiki. Hence, was born 30each. One of the challenges that we decided upon was to capture 30 sunrises. I however, did not capture any. That needs a different post.
In the course of the days that followed, I realized I got up not because I had to, but because I wanted to beat the others at the proto-call. As days passed, not counting the days I slept late because I couldn’t help it, I realized reading before I hit the bed helped. I made sure I switched the laptop off by 11, and would be drowsy by the time it was midnight.
Although the month of May was a very hectic one with a lot of positive developments on the personal side (yes, this being one), I still managed to miss only 11 days, that too, because: one, no day was an exception, (as per my own rules set during the start of the experiment), two, a lot of days were spent on things which shall be blogged later, and three, a lot of Partying happened in this Month – especially night outs with cousins. So, all in all, it is a big Yay!!
During these days, my reading activity shot up. I completed reading A thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, Maximum City by Suketu Mehta and Why Men don’t listen and women can’t read maps by Barbara and Allan Pease. I am reading Chetan Bhagat’s 3 Mistakes of my Life these days.
It is June already, but last I checked, the wiki looks like it will keep getting updates from the three of us.
Location: a mattress at cousin’s place. We are all playing cards ruthlessly. Someone tries to cheat, others bully him. Suchi tries to cheat, and shows sanchi her thumb.
Sanchi: Cheating karti rehti hai, luchhi hai tu luchhi.
Suchi: Main luchhi nahi, Suchhi hoon..
And then follows another round of cards thrown up in the air and 7 kids (or grown ups trying to be kids) running around the house, up and down the staircase, throwing pillows and towels and bedsheets around.
Happiness often sneaks in through a door you didn’t know you left open..
- John Barrymore
The Freemap Mumbai workshop (in the series of workshops across India sponsored by FSF-India) was at HBCSE, Mankhurd on February 7-8, 2008. Dr G Nagarjuna introduced us to the speakers Eric Schuyler and Mikel Maron who gave an awesome two day hands-on to ~20+ of the workshop attendees.
Day one had us listening to Schuyler and Mikel talk about GPS and the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project among other things. Slides are available on slideshare. After the introductory session was over, they fielded questions from us, and introductions to the participants revealed most of them were from NGOs with particularly interesting needs – like Pukar Foundation, which plans to use OSM for mapping Social demographics – especially the Dharavi area, and others like SOPPECOM which plan to use the OSM database for ecosystem management. Interesting, really.
We headed out for a quick survey to do before we gathered for lunch. The 30-odd minute survey had my partner and I go around near the Sion-Trombay road right outside HBCSE and identify some POIs. Post lunch, we were introduced to JOSM (pronounced as `jawsum’) – the editor. The rest of the day went in importing data from the GPS devices to .gpx files and loading the traces on the OSM server and opening up the traces and waypoint files in JOSM. Schuyler used party render on the collection of traces of all participants. This video is the result of the first day at surveying.
On day two, it was decided to either correct the AND data (that was consistently erroneous for Mumbai) or start mapping parts of Mumbai again. A bunch of us, however, wanted some more serious surveying So post lunch, we headed out to the Diamond Garden area in Chembur and mapped the area, and some surrounding roads. This video should be an indication of the fun we had there.
We came back and mapped some restaurants, clinics, banks and other POIs and uploaded the data to the OSM database. Mikel writes about his experience at the workshop and with the Mumbai traffic – “Mumbai is actually pretty pleasant when you’re in one place, it’s the moving about which causes problems.”
KDE 4 had its release party on January 20, 2008. We decided to meet up for lunch at Mahesh Lunch home, Juhu. After an awesome lunch, we cut a cake, and then headed over to Juhu beach for a stroll. Pradeepto went on a clicking spree, and we had to snap back the camera from him.
After the stroll, we decided to head over to Barista and talk a bit about conferences, KDE and some more. Fun! More photos on flickr.