Who me?

Born 24 25 years ago in the city of Ahmedabad, I now stay (and work) in Pune, New Delhi Mumbai. I like reading books and tinkering with things. My favourite colour is blue, favourite comic strips are Calvin and Hobbes and Piled Higher and Deeper and favourite poem is Robert Frost's Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. I especially love the last stanza. I want to write a book, get a PhD, become a professor, invent a thing or two and become famous. Of course I wouldn't mind having a little (or lot of) fun on the way.

NOTE - I no longer blog here. Everything on this blog except for this line is as it is when I stopped blogging here. I now blog at http://varun.net.in/blog/

Blah blah and more blah

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Submitted by varun on Mon, 06/03/2006 - 3:47pm.

I have been having a very interesting week till now. Interesting. Hectic. Confusing. Challenging.

We (my boss, a colleague and me) interacted with a group of Dutch students who had come to India on a study tour. Most of them were computer science students and a couple of them were Mathematics students. They were accompanied by two of their senior professors. My boss gave a presentation on Security, more specifically on some of the areas we are focussing on right now. Initially I found it a bit difficult to understand their accent but after a few minutes it was OK. We had a lavish dry lunch.

Continue reading "Blah blah and more blah"...

11 comments

My new mobile number

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Submitted by varun on Tue, 28/02/2006 - 12:11pm.

Hi people. I have acquired a local mobile number.

~~~~~~ Edit (4:33 PM IST on 28th Feb 2006) ~~~~~~

Just subtract 69454496 from my old number and voila! you have my new number. Idea patented by JhQuest.

In case you are wondering why I am doing this you should read the comments to this post. You actually need not read the rest of the post. I am not editing it out just because whenever I am confident of having found the 'right' solution and need to have my confidence shaken I will come and read this post. Sniff.

I asked you to stop reading, didn't I?

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Ignore the hyphens. I had to put them due to the way browsers render extra spaces in XHTML.

Old mobile number: [ 9--8--a----b----c--d---e--f--g--h ]

New mobile number: [ 9--8--b--(0.5g)-7-(2c)-7--d--g--7 ]

where (2c) is 2 times c and 0.5g is half of g.

Please update my mobile number in your phonebook. Also drop me an SMS so I can be sure you have got it. I was thinking of SMSing all the people in my phonebook but in Delhi SMS rates of all providers and plans is quite high. In fact mobile rates in general are higher compared to Ahmedabad, Pune and Mumbai :-(

28 comments

Another quick update

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Submitted by varun on Wed, 22/02/2006 - 6:15pm.

Another quick update. Have been having too many short and quick updates recently but have got lot of work to do so am short of time. Am still to acquire a local mobile number.

What do I write? My stay has been reasonably pleasant till now but not overly so. Have been having lots of small small problems everyday but nothing serious. Am still living at the company guest house and commuting from Noida to office takes a lot of time everyday. Luckily a friend Rajiv has been giving me a lift every single day till now but otherwise it is difficult to come to office from guest house. Will hopefully move into my own accommodation this weekend.

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5 comments

JhQuest starts blogging. Finally.

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Submitted by varun on Mon, 20/02/2006 - 7:12pm.

Finally the great JhQuest starts blogging. As is to be expected his blog is grandiosely named Apocalypse Watch... I hope he dedicates at least one post to the logic behind the name. The blog is powered by the mammoth known as Drupal. Lucky chap is already getting a few comments, the first one being mine... yay! And my way of welcoming him is by being the first one to link to his blog :-)

Starting a blog is (relatively) easy... blogging regularly is much more difficult. I sure hope he blogs regularly and knowing about his lazy nature and busy schedule I know that is going to be somewhat difficult. JhQuest by the way is very opinionated, stubborn like a mule and likes a good fight so I expect his blog to be quite interesting.

You can help him start out by giving him feedback, leave a comment on his blog or use the feedback form.

Quick Delhi update

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Submitted by varun on Mon, 20/02/2006 - 5:58pm.

I am still looking for accommodation. Plan of action right now is to shift temporarily into a PG for a month or so and meanwhile continue scouting for other more suitable accommodation. PG is actually a misnomer because here slightly sophisticated hostels are called PGs.

Today was my first real day at work. I have been assigned lots of work to be completed within a short span of time and I sure am going to be busy for the next couple of weeks. There are lot of new things to be learnt and lots of new things to be implemented.

I will have to work on different OSes (Windows and UNIX mostly), deal with code in various languages and frameworks and from various domains. In simple English that means poor me will have to work abandon Linux and work with Windows and .NET. No problem. I am looking at all this as a challenge. It has been almost 2 years since I worked on Windows and I have never ever worked with .NET before… for that matter I have never worked with J2EE too and very soon I will have to in both.

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