Fever 103.5

The title sounds like a FM radio station, its not... That was my body temperature when I was down with a viral fever last week. I couldn't think of any other topic today, so decided to write about the viral fever experience. Well... It started with slight cold and sneezing on Tuesday, so I took one sina-rest medicine and slept that night thinking that it will be fine by next morning. However, Wednesday morning was not fine, it was worse. I was having headache, body pain and high temperature. So I decided to take off that day and stayed home taking some paracetamol. By evening I was very tired and not able to bear the pain. So I called my sister and she took me to a nearby hospital. The doctor examined me and told that my body temperature was 103.5 degrees and that it was very high. I was asked to do a blood test, given an injection and loads of medicines and asked to take 3 days bed rest. The next three days were boring. I was fed up of sleeping and was wondering whether I had dengue as my platelet count was slightly on the lower side.I visited the doctor again on Friday, who examined my blood test result and told me that its a viral fever and nothing to fear. He asked me to take three more days bed rest. Now, the rest is over, the fever is none and now I miss my sleepy days ;)

Thank God It's Friday

Its was a friday night and my fiends wanted to go on a long drive to my new apartment.There was this buy one get one free offer celebrating the opening of TGIF on Bannerghatta road. So, the plan was made to dine at TGIF and take the nice road around Bangalore to my apartment. We started in a hurry from my house at 9:30 as the booking was for 10 pm, reached the place a little late. The food there was awesome and it was the first time I eat at TGIF. The pasta was good, the fish was great and the deserts were amazing. The pricing was on a higher side, so I would prefer my favorite wood stock for the same quality food at slightly lower prices. However, the ambiance was unmatchable, it has a retro american style interiors with kayaks hanging from the roof, disco lights and cubicle dining areas. It was when having dinner that I realized a big problem- I had forgotten to take the keys of my apartment :( . My friends were still insisting that we go there, but I felt it was better to go the next weekend. Finally we came back home with a small guilt that we were not able to finish the deserts :P.

Facebook application re-enabled

About a week back I had posted that my facebook application was disabled by facebook citing negative user feedback. In the same post I had mentioned how it was a bug in their mechanism for understanding user feedback. Today morning I got a mail from the facebook policy team that my app has been re-enabled and that they apologize for the inconvenience.

"Hi,
>
> Your app was temporarily disabled by our automated systems, but it seems to be up and running properly now. Sorry for the inconvenience.
>
> Thanks,
> Platform Policy Team
> Facebook"

How I killed my own facebook application

Last weekend I had developed a Facebook application which will analyze the movies liked by all the friends of the user and then find the three most popular movies and will publish an image into the users album having the cover images of those movies along with the profile pictures of all the friends who like those movies. The same image would be published on the user's wall as well.

Just about two hours after I made my app live and available to the public, I got a mail from Facebook that my app has been disabled because its automated system detected that there was negative feedback regarding my app. I was wondering how this can happen, The only users who use my app were me, my sister, my cousin and a friend and I am sure non of us had given any negative feedback. I was slightly disappointed that my first ever Facebook app was disabled, but was glad that I have learnt to develop Facebook apps and that I can make several more. However, one question was not answered, who gave the negative feedback?. Turns out that it was me. When developing the app, I used it several times to test the app, and when i found that there were some error, I would correct again and then try using the app again. Finally, when my app was completely ready, I made it available to the public. I then thought of cleaning up the extra images from my album which my app had generated and put into my album and wall during my testing of the app. I wasn't aware of Facebook's logic of collecting negative feedback. It seems that when an user deletes the post/image published by an app, Facebook considers it as a negative feedback and I had more than 20 of them deleted from my album and Facebook thought people are not liking the app and that they deleting the posts generated by it and thus disabled my app.

New Interests in Horoscope

I had never believed in Horoscopes. I didn't even know that they were based on planet's positions at the time of birth relative to the birth place. But now here I am doing extensive research on that subject. From my younger days, I was a kind of person who won't even read the subjects which I hated especially history and geography. I felt they were useless and that it was a waste of time studying them. I was interested in science as it was useful and the subject was exciting. It was the same with horoscopes when my parents started looking for a match for me. Whenever I felt that a girl could be a good match for me, the horoscopes wouldn't match. Hence, horoscopes were something useless in my view and I never used to show interest in them. So high was my disinterest in horoscope that even my parents had started getting some influence of my disinterest.

But, Now things have changed. For the first time in my life I am so interested in a subject which I feel is useless and I am spending hours studying and researching the subject collecting bits and pieces of scattered information from all over the internet. It may be that I am showing such interest in this subject because it can't be considered useless now as the path which my life is going to take in near future actually depends on the ancient rules and formulas defined in this subject. So vast is the information that many local astrologers won't have a hold on all the rules, formulas and exceptions. So, I have decided find every available information to be able understand these rules and formulas and especially the special exceptions which are very important but less known and used.

Though I don't believe in horoscopes, I do believe in God and feel that God is always there looking after and taking care of me and God will make sure that my wishes and prayers come true.

Pace of Life

About a month back I had put this quote as my face book status: "Life keeps changing so fast that, by the time I start realizing what's happening around me, things change....." . And its continuing to happen, By the time I slowly start understanding and absorbing the changes happening around me, things change and again I take my own time to understand and absorb these changes and yet again, things change. I wonder whether it’s just me or everyone else as well. Can our minds and emotions be agile enough to instantaneously adapt to change? I guess it’s not humanely possible. I think I’ll continue my slow way of absorbing the changes as usual.

On resonance, frequencies and wavelength

According to wikipedia, resonance is the tendency of a system to oscillate with larger amplitude at some frequencies than at others.

One familiar example is a playground swing, which acts as a pendulum. Pushing a person in a swing in time with the natural interval of the swing (its resonant frequency) will make the swing go higher and higher (maximum amplitude), while attempts to push the swing at a faster or slower tempo will result in smaller arcs.

Which means resonance happens when two waves of same or different wavelength act upon each other in such a way that one wave supports the other to reach the maximum amplitude.

This also applies to human thoughts and feelings. Two people are said to have good wavelength or lambda when their wavelength helps each other to achieve the resonance resulting in larger magnitude of happiness.

Time to set things right

I had thought of writing this post on 20th May, but I couldn't. As I had mentioned in my last blog, some things had gone wrong and had to be set right. So, after the morning meeting with my Chinese counterpart I had a chat with the leader in HQ and told him that my estimation for a certain component has gone wrong and developers are struggling to meet the deadline. He was a good friend my mine when I was in China and he was prompt in calling for a conference with the stakeholders to decide on what can be done. Thankfully in the conference all the concerned stakeholders agreed to drop the requirement which not only saved my ass but also saved the people working on implementing the concerned component. What I have learnt from my six+ years of working with the Chinese is that they appreciate honesty, which some of my Indian colleagues actually aren't are when it comes to reporting to the Chinese. Well, may be thats why they trust me more and like to give me more responsibility.

With power comes responsibility

I was looking back at my career at work where in I had joined as a developer fixing bugs in a reporting system. Just recently, I was assigned the lead architect role for a new product. It had been a long journey with lot of ups and downs. However, little did I realize that some things I do impacts lot many people, not only their careers but also their personal life. Yesterday, I saw a good friend of mine looking very depressed because her work was delayed by two weeks for which I had estimated the effort as one week and she had to miss her dance practice for the annual day. I felt sorry for her deep within my heart as I was very aggressive in my estimation and I talking to her manager also didn't help her situation as the dates have been committed to the dependent products in other departments and her manager told me that he was helpless. In another instance, a colleague of mine was telling me that a good member in his team was denied confirmation because of me. I was wondering that he was a talented person and I had never given any bad feedback about him. Later I remember the talk I had with my leader last day when I chose another member for a specific task for a new product instead of him (the reason was that the other member had already worked in a similar product before), little did I know that this would have created a negative impression about that person in the leader's mind. Guess I need to be more careful on what I do or say as I remember a dialog in one of the spider man movie "With great power comes great responsibility".

A Wood Stock Fan

I have been a fan of this restaurant in Indiranagar called Wood Stock. The food there is awesome and the ambiance is also great. It was first introduced to me by my friends when we had made our plans to have good food every friday. From then on we used to go to wood stock almost every friday and order the same favourite dish of ours, Algerian Fish and Chicken Pasta. I would recommend that to any foodie who reads my blog :).

I am also planning to give a try on cooking Algerian fish myself. I had figured almost all the ingredients and the way that’s prepared.
Ingredients
1) Salmon Fish
2) Onions
3) Olives
4) Basil leaves
5) Mustard seeds
6) Basmati rice (some thing similar)
7) Red chilly flakes
8) Olive oil
9) Buttton Mushroom
10) Lemon
Method which I am gonna try:-
Rice:
Cook the rice such that it’s still rubbery, fry it in olive oil with some red chilly flakes and some basil leaves.
The Fish:
Just steam the fish with lemon and salt marination.
Sauce:
Fry the onions in olive oil, along with some mustard seeds, mushroom and tomatoes.

7 million seconds of pure fun

When I had put this title as my g-talk status, many of my friends asked what it meant. However, no one was able to guess and I had also not revealed what it meant.

About a month back, I developed a game for Android based phones called "Hazard Gems". Although there have been only about 4,000 downloads of this game, I am able to get some statistics that those who have downloaded the game together spend around 7 million seconds playing my game every day. That gives me some motivation to develop some more games. But first I need to improve my artistic skills as developing games is not only about programming, it’s also an art. Hope, I manage to get my next game out soon...

Life is short

It’s been a long time since I wrote on this blog. Well it’s been almost three years and though many things have changed, I feel like these things have just happened. I still remember the events that have happened when I was in school, in college and when I joined my Job. Life has moved so fast L . When I look back at my life, I think how different my life would have been if I had made different choices and decisions. I look back at my past mistakes and would like to correct them given a second chance. It’s scary when I imagine myself going through the same thoughts when I am over 60 nearing the end of my life L. What I have learnt from these thoughts is that we need to stop worrying about future and enjoy the present to the fullest. These moments are never going to come back.