Deepanjan Nag's Magnum Opus

...or, out of Blogger. Click here to visit his blog.

That's an overstatement! Actually, it's only my name that's thus endowded. Slashdot article: NASA is preparing to send the New Horizons probe to Pluto. It will be the first earth device to get intimate with the icy planet. And you can be there too - or, at least, your name. NASA is asking everyone to send them their names, which will be attached in the space device. The New Horizons probe will be launched in January 2006 to explore Pluto and the Kuiper belt, in the outskirts of the Solar System. It is expected that the probe will return to earth in approximately 50 thousand years.

Last year, Microsoft had sent me an email promising to increase my Hotmail email storage space from 2 mb to 250 mb by the end of August, 2005. Microsoft seems keen on keeping its promise, sluggish though it may be. I was surprised to see the space augmented to 25 mb. This screenshot is the apple of my eye!

Even the pioneering Google didn't veer from firing an employee for his blog! I may be treading a dangerous line by being so liberal in my postings, but I believe the individual easily outstrips the corporate in terms of social value. Individuality should never stifle under the overbearing weight of the organization he subscribes to. Of course, trade secrets should not be infringed. Comments are most welcome. I strongly despise censorship.

It was so wonderful to hear from him, which came as a response to my SMS. It's always a pleasure to hear a familiar voice after a long hiatus.

We finally got the dreaded bond paper. It must be signed & submitted by the 12th of September. Gross Human Rights violation! I hate corporate slavery. Hail Open Source!

I scored 17 in the latest ABAP exam, but my instructor had mistakenly awarded me 19. Remembering an old adage, I informed her of the slip. She promptly made the corrections. What do I gain from the bargain? Will it culminate in a pay hike? Nope!

...but it was not to be. As I left from my new place for office, a passing bus splashed mudwater on me, dirtying my pantaloons & shoes. I reached office filthier than a miner.

I've finally bought my first CD in 4 yrs! I had to browse thru for 2 hrs in Landmark (The Forum) to zero in on this album. If only I had a CD player in Bangalore!

The Forum. This place makes me feel like a destitute...& perhaps that makes me loathe it as much as Osama bin Laden might despise Banaras!

Sittu @ home with Sherlock Holmes

Prateek just before his exam @ Wipro. He cleared it!

Yahoo! has mended an anomaly that was bugging its Firefox Toolbar. I'm relieved. I'm hysterical about flaws in either of these two fine products. I'm doubly hysterical about their symbiosis!

What sort of services these folks mete out can well be imagined. Their site is a nightmare, their servers are occasionally more sluggish than a turtle and helpdesk puts you on hold forever. To add insult to injury, they seem to have overlooked the fact that certain folks use a web-browser called Mozilla Firefox. In short, nothing seems to work!

Jim Reeves has always been my favorite country singer. I first got acquainted with his singing after a trip to Nepal, where Dad had bought a cassette each of his & Cliff Richard's. Of course, Cliff's wild screams appealed more to me then!

...with Santosh. I'll miss Sittu ,Prateek & their daily Wipro anecdotes! The only thing I hate about the new place is the high noise factor.

My first comment on a news article published in Slashdot has received some interesting replies.

Called Uncle Raddi just before I was on my way to the office. Mr.Raddi & family, as usual, were globe-trotting for the past 5 months and had only recently come back to India. When I reflected on Pune being a much better place than Bangalore, he quickly agreed saying that the latter is no longer what it used to be. Traffic, crowd, et al had ruined this once beautiful city. I learnt that Nayantara was now history. In its place a multistoried building is coming up. Many people had tried to dissuade him from razing Nayantara, but pragmatic issues pressed hard upon him and he finally took a decision to the contrary. I have a lot of fond memories associated with Nayantara. It's so sad that Bhandarkar Road has been stripped of one of its landmarks. So impressive was its facade that all passers-by would give it atleast a glance. Uncle, Aunty and his mother-in-law have now temporarily shifted to a flat near Kamala Nehru Park. They will shift to the newly constructed flat in 2 yrs. Uncl

I'm in my office listening to Felitsa, from Yanni's Dare To Dream. One of my favorite albums, it's no longer available in India. It invariably reminds me of Pune since I used to heavily listen to it during my early days there. That's when I had bought an AIWA walkman.

Who says ABAP is capable of a civilized dialog? For most of the time, it's a monolog. ABAP throws inexplicable windows at me, while I blankly look at them in utter bewilderment. Navigating thru the buffalo laden streets of Ranchi was easier!

Google introduces Google Talk .

What would happen if Visual Basic tied the nuptial knot with COBOL? A dreadful offspring called ABAP Development Workbench!

No one from Hutch showed up at my place for address verification. Is this how corporates in India function?

Contacted Chanchal. Wasn't sure of his id. So tried all logical domains. Sure enough, one of them hit the target. Chanchal was one of my close friends in Skytech Solutions . What would I have done without guys like him and Subhasish!

The scourge of spam comes to blogging. Just look at the comments of the previous post!

Vaibhav was the butt of a little prank we played on him! The poor chap was visibly shaken until we let him off the hook! Rajat was the mastermind while some colleagues & I were the minor accomplices. Using the office landline, Rajat sternly informed Vaibhav that his fortnightly time-report had not been received. Vaibhav was summoned to the Finance section. Wanting to view the spectacle a little more, I offered to accompany the victim. Halfway into Finance, Vaibhav received another prank call from our leader informing him that he was required at our training room instead. We retreated. Our hapless victim was in for a big surprise when returned!

Arindam's sifting mind thought of visiting my blog to kill some time. That's how he got to know of my phone number. He immediately emailed me, giving me his own. I promptly sent him an SMS once I reached home. Sure enough, he called and talked for a long time relating nice anecdotes of Fergusson college and life in general. It was thru this conversation that I learnt about Mrigayanka having done some course from NID, Amhedabad and presently direct a movie (???) in Assam! Dipanjan Roy is doing an MS in the US! Arindam's in Mumbai, working in Morgan Stanley. It was nice getting in touch with an old buddy.

Prateek's portable CD player goes bust! Apparently, the batteries got over-charged. The CD & the circuit board were fried!

Rohit, one of my best friends from school. Though a nice guy, I've been critical of his attitude.

Manilal & Santosh @ The Hutch Shop.

SMSed Dipankar. He was surprised to receive my message after so long an abeyance. So he called me almost immediately and we then talked to our heart's content. He's in Samsung. Dipankar will always have a very special place in my heart since he was my first school friend during my KG days. We weren't too intimate during most of the rest of our school years, perhaps because we had circles that were at odds with each other. Things turned acrid between us during my initial days in Fergusson College and I found his conduct not in the least bit flattering. However, we always found a way to mend our ways. We are again the best of friends now. I've a lot of fond memories to relate. I'll elaborate some other time.

I'm mobile...yet again. The Hutch guys had sent someone for address verification on Wednesday to my place during office hours! They couldn't locate it. They then tried to contact me via phone, but since we're undergoing training, I couldn't receive their call. That prompted them to sever my connection on Friday. Reasoning with the support guys at the Hutch Shop apparently made them see thru their fallacy. They promised to send someone for verification before 8 in the morning on Monday or Tuesday.

We met...finally! Venue: The Forum. Santosh was accompanied by Manilal. We spent most our time at the Hutch Shop, where I grilled the guys concerned for disconnecting my beloved phone.

I'm immobile...yet again. The on-again, off-again affair that the Hutch folks are having with me is taking its toll. Owing to their pranks, I wasted a perfectly fine evening after work @ The Forum, waiting for Santosh to show up. The rendezvous never happened. The mobile connection was fine till 6pm when my stint at the office for the day got over. It must have been between 6 & 7 that I discovered to my horror that Hutch had decided to pull the cord. Santosh had tried to reach me in vain to inform me that he wouldn't be able to make it to The Forum due to rain, a perfectly legitimate alibi. I thus ended up exhausting 1.5hrs for nothing. The experience left me sapped (no pun or fun intended).

SAP finally makes some sense to me! But my disposition towards it hasn't changed. The sky is still blue, the Sun still rises in the East...and I still abhor SAP.

Had a long chat with Sumit via Yahoo! Messenger. He's in Africa! Ujwal called. Initially, I mistook him for Santosh; but his ringing laughter was an instant givaway! It was wonderful talking to him after so long a while. Santosh called. He's at Manilal's. We are supposed to meet at The Forum tomorrow.

Dhyani spent a substancial part of today transferring files via Bluetooth.

My blog page was used like a public email. Now it's more of an IM! I like it!

It's now the turn of Artes to vex me. We are supposed to send our fortnightly time-reports to IDC.ARTES. Everything was working fine until last week. My time-report failed to get registered even after 2 attempts. Some colleagues of mine have met a similar fate.

Stayed back after office-hours to work on ABAP. After some meaningful moments, I ended up surfing the Net and chatting with Neeraj. Took the bus at 8:45pm.

My corporate bank account in HDFC Bank has finally opened! It took me a herculean effort. I'm yet to receive the kit.

I'm mobile...again! Called up Abhishek.

I've always had to walk the extra mile to attain things that have only been an arm's length away for ordinary mortals.

Sabu's back from his vacation.

Santosh leaves Ranchi for Bangalore tomorrow. He is expected to be here on the 18th. If only Hutch hadn't forsaken me!

Vanity Fair (William Makepeace Thackeray)

Inside The Forum.

I'm in a festive mood after work on fridays. So I treat myself to a Softee @ the Fabmall outlet in The Forum. It's the only luxury I can somehow stretch to afford.

This is my dilemma each time I try to navigate thru the SAP interface.

Just had our first test on SAP. I could have answered a paper on Greek or Latin equally well.

My blog was discovered by one of my colleagues a few days back. But it was only today that the discovery assumed alarming proportions. It attracted the curiosity of even my SAP instructor. To my chagrin, she closely scrutinized all the unflattering things I had written about ABAP. My blog is a ticking timebomb!

Google Earth If only all good things could be as good as this! Sameera (the good guy) cribbed about not being given due credit for reminding me about the Keyhole phenomenon! I'll swoop in on that son of a gun via Google Earth & teach him a lesson that'll mute him for life.

My first salary has been credited to my personal HDFC Bank savings account. The measly amount makes me sick.

I'm lost!

Very popular in Russia for obvious reasons, 1812 is one of Tchaikovsky's most famous compositions. I liked the overture and polonaise. The rest is noise.

Yeah...& I contributed 1 to that figure!

Paid my Hutch bill of Rs51 in the nick of time.

Friends (courtesy:Sittu)

In a major expansion, Yahoo Inc. said Monday that its online search engine index now spans more than 20 billion Web documents and images, nearly double the material scanned by rival Google Inc. Google bashing has suddenly become fashionable. Slashdot could easily vouch for that. But I like the idea of Alltheweb (one of my favorite search engines) being possibly responsible for Yahoo's index being augmented so heavily.

I hate flaunting my Employee Access Card. I feel like a bottle of shampoo with its own RFID tag! BTW, I forgot to carry the offending card on my way to the office today. Realising my folly near The Forum, I beat a hasty retreat back home that left me short of breath.

SAP/ABAP is worse than I thought. It's infinitely dull.

My enterprise id works! Tech support finally pays heed. But my computer still doesn't boot. My corporate bank account hasn't yet opened. I'm pretty battered. Would you dare disagree?

Suman, from Finance, was very helpful in getting the HDFC thing straight.

Great! Now my PC won't boot & the tech guys are totally indifferent to my situation.

Bangalore has failed to impress me.

My HDFC corporate bank account wasn't opened because I already had an account with them! How silly! Alibies can't get more ludicrous than this. The problem persists, however. How can a valued customer of 7yrs be penalized like this? HDFC wasn't expected to give such a shoddy treatment.

Just a few hours into SAP & I'm already bored to death!

Someday, all of this will be mine! People in India seldom buy Classical & Jazz albums. That leaves me with little competition!

It's our last day for generic training.