Last week, Jo and I completed our Seventh wedding anniversary. All these years have gone by so fast, it’s hard to believe we’ve been together for so long. The pandemic has been quite hard on us. While I moved to Bucharest last year, we were waiting for Jo to get her paperwork done. And just as we got her paperwork done and submitted to the Embassy, the Indian govt imposed the lockdown in India, and accordingly the Embassy shutdown, cancelling all appointments.

So I just got my passport reissued this week and I’m amazed how far things have come. I got my passport done close to a decade back when I had to fly to Austin. Back then getting a passport done was a pain - I had applied from Mangalore in Tatkal and since Mangalore didn’t have a tatkal processing system, it was forwarded to the Bangalore passport centre. I still vividly remember the day I visited - I stood in queue at 8am (was told to go early because the counter was open only till 12pm), stood there for hours after some initial confusion on where to go(which lost me a whole bunch of spots) and when I was 2 spots away from reaching the counter, the guy at the counter shut down saying they’re doing for the day even though it was 11:45am.

I’ve always wanted to go on long road trips, but with both Jo and me working, trying to find a contiguous block of holiday has been rather difficult. With me taking a break and Eid holiday coming during middle of the week, we got a chance to do our road trip. Part 2 continues.. Come Tuesday morning, we woke up earlier than usual and started packing for our journey. Sat down for breakfast and gulped down buns made by Mom.

I’ve always wanted to go on long road trips, but with both Jo and me working, trying to find a contiguous block of holiday has been rather difficult. With me taking a break and Eid holiday coming during middle of the week, we got a chance to do our road trip. With a date set, we next wondered which route to take? We considered Coastal Karnataka(Bangalore - Goa - Mangalore - Bangalore) and Tamil Nadu(Bangalore - Madurai - Kanyakumari - Thanjavur - Chennai - Bangalore), but eventually decided upon Coastal Karnataka after consulting with resident travel expert Ashwin.

I was going through Google Photos' Rediscover This Day feature and realized that over the past couple of years, a lot of my trips seem to have happened around this time frame. 2016 This year I was at Goa for a weekend meet with Jo’s cousins Full gallery 2015 Last year, my family and I were at Belur and celebrated my sisters' birthday Full gallery 2014 We seemed to have done nothing in 2014, though I guess this was mainly because we had been to Goa with my folks in May.

Part of this was originally posted as a comment to Nithin’s facebook post about today’s news article stating that Cops will send you legal notice if you block an Ambulance. There’s a well known law called Parkinson’s Law which states work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion There are various corollaries on this - and the one which I resonate the most is

I had originally wanted to publish this back in late August when I shifted from Borg Cube to Borg Cube Grande.. ie, my new home.. but #lazybhat happened and I never got around to finishing that. Since shifting to Bangalore, I’d been staying in a tiny 1BHK house in Murugeshpalya, off Old Airport Road. Back then, I’d chosen this place mainly for it’s proximity to my workplace - at about 4.

Attending an interview tends to be a scary, nerve-wracking event for most, me included. It’s like college exam 2.0 - you don’t do anything building up to the event, panic & do a splash and dash the previous night(though in my case, it’s more like “ah, fahgettaboutit”), start wondering and worrying what’s about to be asked prior to the event, with your mind racing about - “what if x comes, oh shit I forgot about y”, the big moment where you stammer, blabber and spit out something and then keep worrying till the results are out.

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.

… for a fortnight, that is. Although, I was not strictly Bangalored, barely a week after joining Logica I was asked to come over for Bangalore for 2 weeks for some training sessions. Now since this was a company sponsored training, my travel and accommodation was handled by them. Reached Bangalore on Sunday, May 1st morning via the Jan Shatabdi Chennai-Mysore train at 10:45am. Ashwin was kind enough to come over to the railway station to pick me up.