2008 and Happy New Year!

2008 was an eventful year for me, overall pretty good!

• Nishka born on 17 March 2008
• 10K run on 18 May 2008
• Quit my job, 3 months break(accidental)
• 21K Kavery Trail marathon
  
• 25K Bangalore Ultra
• Commute by bus(most of the year)
• Football Academy at Kannur
• 30" waist(down from 31-32)

It was a very healthy year with very few visits to the Doc, one for a fall while running, another for a knee pain during running and another to check my heart fitness for long distance running. Not even the Bangalore flu could catch me this time. Health metrics were under control, but still bumpy. Stopped all aerated drinks and limited myself to some good quality red wine(to improve my good cholesterol) and Tropicana 100% orange juice, which I want to get rid off. Made a good attempt at removing clutter, but not there yet. Running progressed very well with Galloway's run-walk method.

My retire-at-45 plans have gone bust with the market meltdown, so I have decided not to retire, but keep myself healthy so that I can work forever. Also my job switches didn't work either, though monetarily things were better, but job content wise it was a poor one. My attempt to join a startup also didn't work - they didn't really start either.

So I am gifting myself a Firefox Target cycle for all my achievements in 2008! I tried to get someone gift that to me, but all of them felt that it was way too much money(Rs.12K+ with accesories) to pay for a cycle, especially considering the history of my last 2 cycles! Hopefully this will keep me interested on the exercise train and may be improve my running.

Wish you all a happy new year, I will try to keep myself fit and enjoy my runs, rides and life!

Update: The Bangalore flu caught up with me soon after I was done with this post:(

Cloud Computing in Plain English

Good one!

Not running the Mumbai Marathon(half)

Despite the terror attacks making me wanting to go and being ready for the run, I decided to skip the Mumbai marathon. When I registered for the Stan chart sponsored event, I hadn't run more than 10K, but now with two 21K+ runs, it doesn't look challenging enough to go out of town and run. My plan was to run the first half marathon at Mumbai, but I have done more than that by now. While I was planning to target an improved timing(run within 3 hours), timings are not such a big thing for me. The goal is to keep on running and enjoying it. I am also not sure if I want to go out of town just to run - that seems like a waste of energy and money. But I am spending that money on a good cycle to start cycling as a XT.

Unfortunately, Bangalore doesn't have a city marathon though we have some of the best off-road trail marathons in the country. There is also this midnight marathon which seems a bit unnatural to me - you need to sleep at night, not run or work! Though Bangalore Marathon was held couple of years back, it looks like the event organizers don't really care much about running.

Cannanore Sporting Academy, Kannur

This is the latest and greatest academy in Kannur, once famous for its football culture and currently seeing a bit of revival of those football days. This is an initiative of my uncle, ex-footballer and retired cop, Vinod, who does all the work and supported by other well wishers. Former India player and a retired Police Officer, Balachandran also is involved in the academy. Both Vinod and Balachandran had played together for Kannur Police for several years. My brother Sreedeep, who runs a program on Sports events locally, Kickoff, in a local TV channel is also part of the venture and also played for the team though he is in the veteran league as far his age is concerned. At this point, I am providing remote support and also trying to see how we can take this forward into a full fledged club.

They made their debut in the C division football league in Kannur, though the results don't look really good, the boys had a great taste of competitive football. They are fighting a relegation battle at the moment, but they will not be relegated because they are right now in the lower most division! Boys are mostly school kids around 10-17 years old from the locality and some of them are really talented. So we are looking forward to a bright future!

Currently the academy is run on bare bones budget, practice ground is loaned free from an School, kit for the league was sponsored by Gemini Circus who were in town, and other things from well wishers and the boys do get some support from their parents as well. So we are actively looking for contributions from sponsors or individuals who want to help or get involved. Please do contact me if you are interested.

Work moved closer home

After an unsuccessful bid to be associated with a startup (which didn't really start), I joined Calsoft, a R&D Outsourcing company, whose Bangalore office is just 2KM from home. While it isn't an exact fit for my skills, I think I can live with it considering other aspects(location, location, location). I sure want to do something that I have more control of, but it looks like I am not there yet.

It is a BMTC commute to work, with cycling to work a good possibility, in fact this is as best it can get for me to start commuting by cycle. Or a morning and evening walk of 25-30 minutes should work(far less than any commute beyond this point by any type of vehicle). Lunch at home also is a bonus unless there are other things. There is good frequency of Volvo (365) and Suvarna and normal red board buses on the Bannerghatta Road routes.

Shopping for a Cycle

For a while, I have been thinking of buying a cycle, but couldn't make up my mind whether to buy an high-end(by Indian standards) or a cheap one. This was mainly intended as a cross training for my running and potentially going around home for shopping and other stuff(which I found it difficult and my cycle rusted). Cycling to work has been a dream and I could never make it practical because I am scared of the traffic and was suspicious about my stamina to go beyond couple of miles. But now with a 2K commute with an alternate road(but longer) to Bannerghatta Road to commute, this is as best it can get to start commuting.

I would have bought a Firefox/Trek before, but was worried about its utilization. I had already bought and not used two cycles and didn't want to waste another expensive one. I had kind of decided on a Hero Thunder, but it was not available in couple of shops I checked. Also the cycle shops are not where you can expect any descent service. So I kept buying a cycle in the background for a while till now. Recently, I went to buy a Hero Thunder again - but one shop which had it was a bit expensive and another guy wouldn't tell me the rates till I go to his shop. And this is a geared cycle of which I have no clue about - and the service would be dreaded once you make the purchase for sure. So finally I decided to pay a bit more for service.

Setup time with Rohan and Nikhil of BOTS and placed an order for Firefox Target finally. With accessories, it should be around 13.5K, big money for a cycle in India, but would be an entry level one in Europe or US. While I still worry about the cycle being underutilized, the fact of the matter is that you need to pay for better service and that too for a better one.

~5K run at Puttaparthy

The birds didn't wake me up in time for a longer run, so I did a 5K around Puttaparthy where we were visiting my sister. It was a moonlit morning and I had 3 kids for company for about 1K - they were practising for their school sports. We chatted up a bit, one guy could talk in Kannada and I tried a bit of Telugu with them. I took the same route as I did earlier, but returned from the 3K milestone. I pushed myself a bit, the route has good gradients and fairly free of traffic.

Though I was a bit low when I started out, it felt good running in the fresh morning in the country side. May be I should have done at least a 10K or more, but I was worried about my knee and the drive next day back. There were many runners this time, mostly visitors to Puttaparthy I guess, the villagers don't need to run to be fit. In any case I am requesting my sis to tell(pray) Saibaba to organize a running event there.

Another Puttaparthy Trip

Puttaparthy-11-12-08

It was a foggy morning in Bangalore especially around the airport where the visibility was very poor, so we had to slow down a bit till we reached Chickballarpur, the next town on the route. Nishka slept well till we stopped at a railway crossing. We had the child seat in a front facing position now that she is pretty active and sits comfortably though she is below the cut-off weight for front facing position. NH-7 is still under lot of work and it felt as if the roads had worsened from last time. We didn't stop till we took the detour to Puttaparthy. While it has become safer with a road divider, the highway has become a bit boring without the trees they have cut to widen it. It sure looks a bit foreign now. I guess Nishka was hungry by the time we reached there and many "strangers" scared her. We had a good time at Puttaparthy, mainly feeding Nishka who has taken charge of her feeding herself now.

I squeezed in a 5K run though I wanted to do more, but chickened out. The roads a bit away from the center of Prasanthinilayam are pretty quiet for a nice morning run. Drive down was smooth, no fogs in Puttaparthy and traffic in Bangalore was also less because it was a sunday.

Linux on the desktop

After the foss.in conference, I have been playing around with linux on my laptop and the experience has been frustrating to say the least. It is not that I am not a newbie, in fact I have used a Redhat desktop in my laptop office 4 years ago and hung on to it when the whole world was using windows around. The irony was that many unix OS developers in my group wanted linux on their desktops, no wonder unix OS development groups will be history soon.

On an HP Omnibook 6000, I had got everything working including the hibernation, which was working pretty well. I don't remember if sound was working and it didn't matter since I don't use my laptop for music either, but I could download pictures from my HP camera as well(yes, I was with HP then). But OpenOffice was poor, but I could make presentation slides with it. I had my emails fetched by fetchmail from an exchange server and read it with mutt! Calendar was not such a problem because that group didn't have a common calendar - so I could get by with my own one. But calendar synchronization from microsoft exchange did me in when I moved to a different group where everything including morning kappi was scheduled on the exchange server. Though I tried a bit with importing it into an evolution calendar, it screwed up many things. So I gave up my linux laptop and moved on to microsoft territory since then. And I was not in an unix OS development group anymore.

At home it was windows for internet because I couldn't get my riptide modem to work on linux, recently I added an ethernet card to that old box, but unfortunately that didn't work either. Also my wife needs Autocad software for her drawings, which was available only on windows. But I had linux partitions on it because command-line works perfect with that 64MB HP Pavillion PC!

So when I bought a Dell laptop(yes, I joined Dell and bought couple of laptops:), it came with Vista on a 1GB memory and the office(which was a microsoft country) laptop had XP. While I thought 1GB would be superfast compared to our 64MB Win98, I was grossly mistaken. Vista sucks royally and I made the mistake of buying MS Office, which is pretty much useless. I have been cursing vista and microsoft(it is amazing that they rule the world even after being clueless about many things), but didn't really take any action.

So I wanted to put linux on the home laptop, never got it done. In fact I had a Fedora 9 DVD from Linux For You magazine recently, but it was just lying on my computer table. So when my friend who still is fighting it out with a linux laptop told me that he could get mandriva on my linux laptop, I readily agreed - I was worried about loosing some pictures and documents, and it did give a scare when the windows partition didn't come up initially. But it created another entry which was the right one. This is in fact caused by Dell's utility partition(UP) that's on the first partition - so incrementing the partition should make it work.

We couldn't connect to the foss.in wireless - not very good. While these desktops are not really tested with a linux distro, I thought these things were pretty standard to have worked out of the box, not yet. So after reaching home, I tried the wired lan and the lan worked well, but the browser couldn't get anywhere. It connected to my.yahoo.com once, but otherwise everything was a bummer. It turned out that enabling ipv6 was the problem - disabling it made things work, not good again. Haven't yet figured out to setup sound as well. But installing any software delivered as rpms seems really messy, the dependency chains kill you most of the time unless it is a trivial utility. I was about to try Ubuntu as well, to see how the debian apt utilities fare compared to the rpms - I believe yum is supposed to solve the rpm dependency issues, but I couldn't quickly figure out how to get it working.

So overall, linux on the desktop sucks even if you consider that vista isn't that great either. But for my web surfing and blogging, linux on the desktop works far better than the vista. It is pretty disappointing that Microsoft has a free run on the desktop market with no challengers in sight - and the result is they churn out things like Vista, the humongous beast that needs a supercomputer to run well.