Category Archives: Food

2009 already?

February 5, 2009 By in Food, Fun, Life, Places 4 Comments

Ok, this post is way too late – but in my defense, I’ve probably never been this busy! I guess this is a good time to post, as today marks the 3rd anniversary of my blog. Wow, 3 years just flew by. As I go through some of my older posts, I can see how I’ve changed so much. I guess it’s useful to have a blog, some way or the other.

2008 was simply a phenomenal year for me: Glendix was born, I graduated from college, had an amazing summer at Mozilla, joined a masters programme at Amsterdam, and visited 9 countries. Phew :D

After winding up my only exam for the semester, a couple of friends and me headed out to explore Europe during the winter vacations. The experience was extremely overwhelming. Instead of writing anything, I will let some pictures do the talking. We visited 5 cities in total: Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Salzburg and Paris. Christmas was spent ice-skating on a nice, snowy night in Munich; New Years eve at the Eiffel tower. I wish I could say there were great fireworks, but I would be lying :(

After returning to Amsterdam I was greeted with deadlines for programming assignments, so I spent most of the month writing a lot of code. Now, February has come,  it’s a new semester, bringing a whole new wave of course load (taking 6 subjects at the same time!). I’m seriously considering cutting down on a whole lot of extra activity and focus just on the essentials: College, Mozilla and Glendix (in that order). Maybe it is time for me to retire from all the other FOSS projects, I just don’t have the luxury of time I had as an undergraduate student any more…

In other news, I am now pretty good at cooking a basic meal: rice and dal. I’ve also made Ghee from butter with acceptable results twice until now, and the latest attempt even resulted in some delicious ‘nei kasandu‘, a typical tamilian snack made from the remnants of the ghee-making. Oh, and I’ve also picked up a little Dutch; basic phrases like ‘Hello’, ‘Thank you’, ‘Pardon me’, ‘I don’t understand dutch very well’, and ‘See you later’. :)

I can’t even begin to imagine what 2009 has in store for me, so I’m not going to bother. Here’s to a great year 11 months ahead!

P.S. You may have noticed I’ve added links to archives of both technical and non-technical blog posts on the sidebar. This should help all my non-geek readers sift through to the posts where I don’t talk about programming or technology (for the most part, at least!)

My first meal!

December 17, 2008 By in Food, Fun, Life, Photos 6 Comments

Today, after roaming the earth for 21 years depending on someone else to cook my food for me, I made a giant leap: I cooked my own meal. Right from buying groceries to cleaning up the dishes afterward :)

Here’s a picture of the modest beginning:

It looks a lot more delicious than it really was: just boiled vegetables with garlic bread – dressed with salt, pepper and a dollop of butter – rather bland for an Indian tongue. But, oh well, it’s a start ;)

Of bears, landslides, powercuts and cancelled flights

August 3, 2008 By in Conferences, Food, FOSS, FOSS.IN, Life, Mozilla, People, Photos, Places Leave a comment

Bear with me for this long post (no pun intended) describing the awesome Mozilla Summit at Whistler. The short version is that it was supercalifragilisticexpialidoceous. Ok, that’s a nonsense word but there’s no way I can put the experience in just one word :-)

Monday
All the interns got up fairly early to catch a shuttle to SFO, and we arrived in Whistler after a pleasant 3 hour flight and 2 hour bus ride from YVR. The scenery was fantastic all along the way, and the hotel was overwhelmingly comfortable. Nothing much happened except meeting some familiar as well as new people at dinner.

Tuesday
First day of the summit started off with keynotes by John Lilly and Mitchell Baker. Mitchell’s analogy of what she thought of Mozilla was especially intriguing. A great way to kick-off the sessions that were to follow over the next few days. The UX talk on the history and future of browsers was especially a good one. Highlight of the day was Gary spotting bears. Apparently, there were a few that were brave enough to jump into the room balconies too.

Wednesday
I spent most of the early part of the day in the Emerald room, attending sessions on Mozilla’s Technology roadmap, Fennec and the Labs concept series. I ended the round of session-attending with Myk’s talk on Snowl, which is another cool labs project (well, all labs projects are cool!).

The big news of the day was the rockslide on the road connecting Vancouver with Whistler. ~350 at the summit suddenly had to change travel plans to accomodate for this… um… natural disaster. The contingency plan involved 8-hour long bus rides on a longer, more scenic route or float planes.

The labs team spent wednesday night hacking at Chris’ room, in preparation for our presentations the next day. Prior experience led us to believe that relying on the WiFi network in the hotel was probably not a wise idea for our demos, so I setup a local weave sever with a few demo accounts and changed the bookmark sharing code to not depend on XMPP to notify the receving user of the share. It was 3 am by the time I got to sleep so I responsibly set an alarm because the weave talk was the first one on the next day.

Thursday
Except the alarm didn’t go off, and I woke up 45 minutes after the scheduled time for the session. My first reaction was along the lines of oops, I screwed up. But as I became fully awake I realized there was no power in the entire hotel and breathed a sigh of relief because all the morning sessions were postponed. So the story was that a laundry truck ran into a transformer and it would take a few hours for power to be restored.

The Labs sessions were moved to a conference room run by our friendly neighbors (The Hilton), and we started off shortly after lunch. The Labs sessions on Weave and Ubiquity went off really well and I think they created a lot of buzz. Especially with ubiquity, some of the demos were mind-blowing!

Though I really wanted to attend the session on HG, I decided to take a nap instead and prepare myself for the grand dinner atop Whistler-Blackcomb (which are, incidentally, codenames for Windows editions). The dinner was a fine end to a fine summit, and I was especially excited to experience snowfall for the first time in my life :-)

My plan to get back home was to catch a Floatplane with the rest of Labs the next morning, in time for the YVR-SFO flight at 3 pm.

Friday
But NO. All the floatplanes had been cancelled due to fog and low tides, so Dan & Chris put me up on the last bus out of Whistler at 11 am, and kindly provided a goodie bag full of food and coffee for my 8 hour bus ride.

The ride itself was not bad at all, the scenery on the way was well worth it. As we approached Vancouver (around 6:30 pm), Melissa Shapiro found me on the bus and informed me that she would try to catch the 8:15 pm flight to SFO (which was the last one out of YVR) and recommended I do the same. The bus didn’t go to the airport, but to the Sheraton at Wall centre instead, so Melissa and I took a cab and rushed to the airport.

We managed to get standby tickets on the plane, and went through US immigration, customs and security check (where I was “selected for random screening”). We did make it to the gate on time, but not on the plane. Technically, I had to re-enter Canada through immigration, but I had a single-entry VISA. Thankfully, Melissa was there to vouch for me, so I was able to make it back in.

Chris had rooms for us at the Sheraton and we headed back. After a great dinner with Bret, Brad, Melissa, Chris and Dan, I tucked in for the night watching Vancouver’s great skyline.

Saturday
Quite an uneventful day, considering the last week, because everything went as planned. All of us had confirmed tickets on the 11 am flight to SFO.

Melissa, Chris and I stopped for a while at Stanley Park on our way to the Aiport, while Dan had to leave early because he had to pick up his bag and passport (which he left at the party on Thursday, there’s another whole story!)

Phew
Well, I’m back in Mountain View now; and only have a week more to go. I’m really going to miss everyone, and the summit just made it a whole lot harder for me to say goodbye. But as Chris Hoffman had said in a brown-bag sometime ago: “This is Hotel Mozilla – you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave!”

Just want to convey a big Thank You to everyone at Mozilla; especially Dan Portillo, Tiffney Mortensen, John Lilly, Julie Deroche, Melissa Shapiro, Maria Emerson, and most of all, Chris Beard, for making my experience at the summit an experience of a lifetime!

(Pictures up on Flickr)

Week 4: pwned by nature

June 20, 2008 By in Food, Fun, Life, Mozilla, People, Places 3 Comments

The better part of my 4th week was spent in bed trying to recover from a 104.1 body temperature. Let’s back up a bit…

Some (well, most) of the interns decided to visit the Haight Ashbury Street Fair at San Francisco on the Sunday of my 3rd weekend in the states. It was a great idea in general, because I hadn’t been to “the city” yet and the fair looked like a fun place to be. After a pleasant 45 minute drive, we were in the city looking for parking, and with a little help from j4cbo’s phone we were ready to hit the fair.

The road had a stage for bands at either end, with a line of shops on either side of the street in the middle. It was what a typical fair would look like, tons and tons of people walking around, people advertising for a product, politician or right, people selling good food and drink, and lots of generally good shops selling everything from hats and sunglasses to sweatshirts and “medical marijuana”. I took my fair share of food, starting with small bits of popcorn from a HUGE bag someone decided to buy, finishing off with a double chocolate chip brownie sundae at the local Ben and Jerry’s. San Francisco was windy at the time, and I was glad I brought my Jacket along. We started winding up at around 5, and were back at the apartments by 7 after a stop at La Bamba’s for mexican dinner.

Somewhere along the whole trip, I caught a virus. Gah, I wonder what it could have been.

I started feeling a little off almost immediately but I shrugged it off as tiredness from the trip. I also managed to go to work on Monday and Tuesday, though I could feel my efficiency levels at a real low. I did manage to finish writing the server API for Weave, however, I think I could have done more if I were in a normal state.

Wednesday morning, I just couldn’t muster enough energy to walk after getting out of the shower, so I decided to stay in. The fever got worse through the day, and on Thursday morning I made an appointment with a doctor. He said it was a general case of viral fever, and that it would go away in a week, regardless of whether I would take medicines or not (Go immune system, Go!). But he prescribed some anyway, they were painkillers and some antibiotics, to make life a little easier in the coming days. (Note to Self: Medical care is expensive in the US! My travel insurance wouldn’t cover a ‘minor illness’ like fever. Next time, I should make sure to get an insurance that does cover these ‘minor illnesses’).

Anyway, as Sunday approached I got a lot better and was back to normal for work on Monday. Truly, there is always light at the end of the tunnel, because this week has been one of the most awesome ones so far. More on that in another post!

First Day

May 21, 2008 By in Food, FOSS, Fun, Life, Mozilla, People, Programming Leave a comment

My first day at Mozilla was awesome. After a brief introduction session with Julie, during which I also caught up with Mary (I met her earlier at FOSS.IN, Bangalore) – I was shown the way to the ‘S’ building, which is were the labs people work. There are these cute scooters I’ve never seen before that can be used to ride between buildings ‘K’ and ‘S’ – they’re just too damn fun!

I met with my mentor for the Summer – Dan Mills (thunder) and he got me setup with this really huge monitor and power cables for my laptop. I’m still trying to get used to this OS X extended desktop feature, and it feels a little weird typing on the laptop keyboard but looking at the monitor (I’m not a touch typist, but I can type reasonably well without looking at the keyboard). Then, I met with the other folks at the Labs, a small but amazing group of people. Myk is also working at the Labs, and his desk is right behind me – Yay :)

Right now, the focus at Labs is to roll out a beta-quality version of Weave. As the Firefox 3 launch approaches, we’d like to make sure Weave 0.2 is ready to use around that time. One of the reasons is that Google Browser Sync isn’t going to upgraded for use with FF3 for an undetermined period of time. I’ve been going through the targeted bugs for 0.2 and am trying to fix as many as I can.

I finally checked-in to my alloted apartment yesterday, and since my roommates aren’t scheduled to arrive until next week, I have the entire place to myself for sometime. I saw an episode of How I met your Mother – hooray now I can watch all my favorite american TV shows at the time of airing (not weeks later, like before) :D

Ok, so my second day has begun and it’s almost lunch time. The american meal timings are a bit off from what I’m used to because most of their meals are compressed to be during the day, and then there’s a huge gap at night between 8pm and breakfast. I’m going to stock up on some knick-knacks for my midnight cravings.

New York in 5 hours

May 19, 2008 By in Food, Fun, Life, Places Leave a comment

The flight from Mumbai was delayed by an hour (we left Mumbai late), so I missed my connecting flight. The immigration and customs procedure, surprisingly, took only about 10 minutes – but I had to wait in line for almost 40 minutes to get my flight to SFO rebooked. I got a direct flight for 18:00, which means I had around 9 hours to spend in the big apple.

I caught the AirTrain (or whatever it was called) after a coffee at starbucks (duh) to Jamaica which connected JFK to the NY subway system. After purchasing a MTA MetroCard (apparently, this card can be used at all public transportation systems here), I proceeded straight to the Port Authority station. Don’t ask why, it just sounded fancy, and lucky me, times square was just besides it. After a quick walk on the street in lovely weather (around 20 degrees, mildly cloudy sky), went back into the subway system and this time got off at 34th Street Penn. station because some guy told me the Empire State building was close by. Sure enough, a quick walk later I was standing in front of the tallest building in New York. I would’ve liked to climb to the observatory, but was not sure if I had enough time, so I decided to skip it.

Then, I caught a bus from the building straight down to where the Staten Island ferry starts, going via the World Trade Center site, the City Hall, the famed Wall Street and a couple of other places that are supposed to be famous (but I don’t remember their names now). I wanted to take the ferry to the Statue of Liberty, but the queue was so frickin’ long, that I decided to be content with a couple of far-off pictures. Seriously, I’ve never seen a queue so long, no, not even in India! It must have been 2 kilometres at the very least…

I started to make my way back to the Penn. subway station, this time via the east coast of Manhattan. Got a good look at the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, Chinatown and Little Italy, apparently some of the most happening neighborhoods in town. Note: the sad part about sight-seeing alone is that you can’t get any photos of yourself :-(

Then, the weather started to worsen. It began to rain, and I could just see the disappointment in so many of the british tourists’ eyes. For me, it was not such a bad experience – after Chennai and Jaipur, this sort of weather is kind of welcome. But, I didn’t have an umbrella or a raincoat, so I decided to take shelter in the New York public library which happened to be on the way – which is where I’m making this blog post from (free wifi!). The content is not as good as the public libraries in Singapore, but it is certainly more grand and beautiful.

Well, I guess that’s about how much I have time for. After taking a good look at the library, I’ll probably stop somewhere for lunch before making it to the subway for a ride back to JFK.

Before signing off, I must admit that I’m a little disillusioned. America always seemed like such a great place and everything – but it didn’t seem all that awesome to me in first person. The subway system is old, and is not so clean as I thought it would be (I even managed to see a rat) – the New Delhi and Singapore ones are certainly much much better. The roads are just normal, like any other metro city in India (with the exception of Bangalore – there’s no comparison to the horrors of that city). The most notable difference is that every building in New York seemed to be atleast 20 storeys high – so basically you have all these similar looking avenues and streets surrounded by high-rise buildings. It’s easy to get lost :)

All in all though, a good experience, but certainly very different from what my expectations were. Let’s see how San Francisco fares. I’ll put up photos later (nah, what’s the point, I’m not in even a single one of them). I don’t want everyone staring at me for taking out a USB cable and a camera in a reading room :P

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