July has been a month of great changes.. I started my first job in July in Chennai - new city, staying on my own, earning my own money.. but that was about 9 years back. This year again, July is a month of change. After 5 years(and few days) at CGI(erstwhile Logica), I will be moving away and onto the new unknown. Reasons for moving are many - completed my project, didn’t like the new project’s commute/timings, tech stagnation and personal growth are some of the major ones.

2011 was a roller coaster year. Here’s the year in review, in bullet points Sold off my iPhone 3G and purchased a Nexus S Supposed long term US stay gets cut short. 3+ years of work on project gone down the drain. On the upside, learnt quite a lot. Met Manaa in person, after being a very close friend for 6+ years Was elected as Community Moderator for one of the Stack Exchange sites, Super User Wrote my first Chrome Extension to get around WebNonsense crap Bad security practice from the past comes to haunt me.

just put in my resignation — Sathya (@SathyaBhat) January 31, 2011 … and there goes the goodbye mail. — Sathya (@SathyaBhat) April 21, 2011 I had tweeted these 2 simple sentences, the former about 3 months ago, the latter yesterday. Yep, after nearly 4 years, I’m moving away from 3i. It’s been an interesting experience - I’ve ranted and raved about my journeys on twitter, and often blogged about my experiences and misadventures in 3i ( if you have same free time, go read through the archives - good stories there).

I’ve been absent in posting here - more because there’s hardly anything interesting going on. Well, there’s laziness as well. So here’s a recap.

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For the past couple of months, my colleague had returned back to India, which meant me having no company. With Thanksgiving around the corner, I decided to pay a trip to my cousin sis’ place in Allen, TX. With no car with me & bus service from Austin to Allen non-existent – I decided to rent a car from Enterprise.

Hard to believe, but it’s been two months since I’ve been in Austin.  Let’s rewind back to my flight details.

As mentioned in my previous post my flight was due to depart at 04:45, and I would have to reach at the Airport by atleast 2AM. Since I didn’t have a vehicle, I called up a call-taxi and arranged for it to come at 01:30. The airport was about 45 minutes from where I stay, and wasn’t sure about the traffic (if any - plus it was kinda stormy that night/early morning) so revised the taxi timings and asked him to come over at 01:15.

Well, I’m heading back to Austin for a second stint. Had an amazing time the last time I was there - was there for almost a year. Learnt a lot - technically & otherwise. Unlike last time when I had a flight from Chennai to Mumbai and then a direct Mumbai to New Jersey flight ( with a Mumbai International Airport to boot) - this time, the flight will be from Chennai.

Its been a very busy, hectic past few months. Besides my day night job( I work at US timings, PITA), I’ve also started contributing to techie-buzz, though my day night job takes a whole lot of my time, and I’ve not been able to contribute much. My Linux blog and as well as this blog has been lying almost in a coma state. I plan to start posting some articles now and then, got it in shipshape with a new theme, so watch out!

Most of the Ruby gang are very well aware of the “Stupid SMS series”. For the uninitiated, it was Nitin’s way of…. umm… timepass ? by sending SMS to all of the Ruby gang which made absolutely no sense whatsoever ( I hate to admit it, but it’s true, Nitin is a version of “The Amit").

Anyways back to the post,  couple of days ago, as I was spending time in morning, my iPhone started to buzz away. It wasn’t very surprising, since getting a message in morning isn’t something out of the ordinary. Opened the message only to see it was a blank SMS from an unknown number. Ignored it at first, but then the buzzing went on continuously. In a matter of few minutes my inbox looked like this:

Couple of days ago, I tweeted this little message. July 9, 2007 is a red letter day for me - for that was the day I started my career as a working professional. As I tweeted that, I was greeted over IM by few of my friends and colleagues. It didn’t strike me much as soon as I tweeted, but few hours later I was just amazed as to how fast time has gone by - and how far I’ve come. To think, I applied for this position as an afterthought (“should I really ? Well.."). That got me into nostalgia mode.

It’s been  a while hasn’t it, since I last blogged ? *goes to next tab to check last manual blog post* April 19. God! Hadn’t realized its been so long since I last composed. Yes, I’m alive (hey you’re reading this aren’t ya?). I can hear the collective yells of “where the hell have you been”. Well - work. Been drowned, swamped, overloaded - basically been busy with shit loads of work.

Next question - Am I in Austin ?