Plan for tomorrow's trek

Quoting from V's mail describing the itinerary:

Hello Everyone,

Here is the plan for tomorrow.
We have booked a 32 seat bus for the excursion.
The bus will reach B at 5:45 AM. Everyone should gather at the B main gate by 6:00 AM. Please try to come on time, as it would make the further journey much more enjoyable.
Bus will start from P max by 6:15 AM and will aim to reach Vai by 8:30 AM. We will have a tea break at Vai. And will then head for the final destination i.e. Vasola, and are expected to reach there by 9:15 AM. We will start walking up immediately. It would be approximately an hour and half walk. Let's assume we reach atop by 11:30 AM. We will spend about 3 hours there, including lunch, sight seeing, and general TP etc. We should start descent by 3PM, reach to base by about 4:30 and back to P by 7:30PM.
Things to carry:
1) Enough water (About 2 liters each).
2) You are supposed to bring your own lunch. (We will arrange for morning breakfast in the bus and tea at Vai.)
3) A good condition haversack
4) Cap and winter clothing
5) Plastic carry bags (to collect your trash)
There are a few seats available in the bus, as we couldn't get the but less than 32 seats. So, feel free to bring your friends/family members if they are interested.
People who haven't depoisted the money, could you all please hand them over to me or K?
Also, everyone please send me your contact phone numbers? This is very IMPORTANT (Reply to this mail, don't reply all).
My contact number is :
K's contact number:
Regards,
V

The start time of 6 AM sounds a bit far-fetched considering the winter season.

Darn the alarm

I missed gym today because the PDA alarm failed to sound. Last night, I knew that the PDA batts were very low when the backlight stopped working. I thought it would have enough juice to sound the alarm, but apparently it did not. So today I was woken up at 8:15 by Aai, who thought I'd overslept even though I'd told her yesterday that I would go to gym. I couldn't achieve my aim of 3 workouts this week.

Postponed!

A few more days of PSSP anxiety to endure. The meeting scheduled today was postponed to Tuesday due to lack of availability of a conference room on our floor. That was always going to happen since S asked us to book a room as late as 1:30 PM today. At least no more work from our side needs to be put in, so it's just a matter of waiting.

To trek or not to trek

The P Trekkers Association (PTA) had put out a mail a couple of weeks ago announcing that a trek would be organized on 18 Dec, and that they were looking for volunteers and trekkers. I had replied saying I was interested in trekking to whichever location was decided. After a few more mail exchanges, a trek to Kamalgad was finalized and announced. The organizers had sent the announcement to everyone who had shown interest, and when I scanned the list of people I found not a single familiar name. As usual, the self-doubts were sown and I debated whether to go for it or not, but finally I said to myself what the heck. I asked Babu Moshay if he was interested and he tentatively said yes, so at least I might have one familiar person for comfort. The trip is on Saturday. So far, 27 people have shown interest, and the list will probably grow. Let's see...

Blogger (S)FTP support down

That's sad, because SFTP publishing was the main reason why I chose Blogger. At first I thought it was due to an incorrect password, as I'd changed the password of my CS account. But it didn't work. Then I tried the Sun servers, then the GL account, but no success. A scan of the help docs suggested that if there's a change in user/password of the SFTP server, a logout and re-login to Blogger would solve the problem. But even that didn't work :(

Left with no option, I had to publish on Blogger. Let's hope this is only a temporary glitch.

PSSP... one more day

Yes, tomorrow is the review. Abhinay and I were updating the website, and both our limited web development skills were stretched bare. We put together a rustic-looking basic page - nothing more than a collection of links to relevant documents. We witnessed yet another display of artificial intelligence by an HTML editor, Netscape this time - earlier it was M$ Word. But that is another story...

Our desperate attempts to get Rishi and Aunty answer some queries went abegging, as both were away at some meeting. As a final recourse, Doctor mailed them the documents asking for review comments. A final perusal of the important documents revealed some dead links which we corrected. I hope it's all ok-done as I don't want to spend another minute on this shit. Tomorrow it shall rest in peace.

PSSP shit... almost done!

Abhinay and I had another review with Sheetal - this time for the one XL sheet that will be reviewed during the audit. We had slogged the whole day to make the PDCA and PDS correctly, and have all documents uploaded on the web. She reviewed our project, and was satisfied overall. The final review will be on Thursday, and on that day I shall be rid of the demon that is PSSP.

Gym in the morning

Starting from today, I'll be going to gym in the morning. Work now occupies my time in the evening, so I can't work out at 7 PM as I used to. I reached the gym this morning at 8:45 to find 7-8 guys working out. I had just a light session exercising my chest and biceps. Then I showered in the changing rooms. Unfortunately, the water was only luke warm resulting in a very short and quick shower. Due to the general stench in the change room, I was out of there as quickly as possible. Felt very refreshed though. Let's see how long I can keep this up.

The ThoughtLog is now on Blogger!

Blogger has this amazing capability - of using any FTP server of one's choice to publish the webpages that make up one's blog. It even does SFTP! So I gave it instructions to publish on linuxserver2, and now I have the convenience of just typing a blog entry on the Blogger website. It takes care of uploading the files onto the SFTP server, and also of generating the RSS feed. Very convenient, and very COOL. I also put in a few of the more recent posts.

I need to be very careful on what I blog about from now on, because all these pages are stored on the Blogger website along with linuxserver2. Even though I made the setting not to put up a link to the blog on the Blogger homepage, I'm not taking any chances.

Dodging work

There's at least one benefit with PSSP. I'd been assigned a patch installer bug last week, but PSSP has allowed me to dodge working on that dreaded bug. Manisha has been trying to get me to learn the configuration and other stuff related to the patch installer, but everytime I have said that I am busy with PSSP. I wonder how long this can last though.

Weekend update

Yes, it's weekend update time. Since I don't have the inclination to update the Thoughtlog on weekends, there may be a "Weekend Update" post every Monday. So here goes...

On Saturday, I didn't do anything else other than play AoE and FIFA at home. Oh yes, I went and had a haircut. Got rid of the locks flowing over my ears and eyes. Sunday was a much more interesting day. It all started with Sunday-morning Univ United football. I reached the ground at around 7:30 AM to find only 3 other people present, one of them with a huge plaster on his leg! Sameer Chavan came a few minutes later. It took until 8:15 AM for everyone to assemble and a ball to be brought in. Actually we had to fetch another ball, because the one brought in earlier by someone burst because it was over-full! We played a 6-a-side game, and my team won 9-6! I scored 3 goals.

I reached home at 10:15 and got a call from Ranjeet. He asked me if I was coming to watch the movie Rok Sako To Rok Lo at 12:15 PM. He said Tarun had suggested this movie becuase it might be something different. I knew enough about this movie to tell Ranjeet to look for other options. Ranjeet called back a few minutes later saying nothing else was on offer. I was sure there would be something better than this movie, but didn't complain. I reached City Pride at the agreed upon time, and we watched RSTRL.

This sorry excuse of a movie was a rip-off of Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikander, updated to suit Bollywood tastes. The promos said that Sunny Deol would have an inspirational role, but all he did in the first half was appear on a Harley-Davidson for all of 3 scenes in which assorted kids stare at him in awe. Oh yes, there was the one action scene in which he bashes up some goons trying to rape one of the leading ladies. The rest of the movie was pretty amateur stuff - both direction and acting - since the director and all protagonists were first-timers in Bollywood. So we had the usual dosage of pyaar-dosti, American-style high schools, cheergirls, sports rivalries, hanging out in cafes, shy-girl-dreaming-about-college-hero, college-hero-chasing-rival-college-girl, irritating parents and teachers, and PLENTY of skin show. Sunny's appearance had certainly inspired me - to leave the theater ASAP, that is! I repeatedly kept telling Ranjeet that I couldn't take it anymore, and might quit at the interval.

The intervals of this movie and another one in Screen 2 coincided. So the four of us (Tarun's brother was also with us) decided to step into Screen 2. This was showing Aitraaz. Since Ranjeet and Tarun's bro had already seen it, they went back to watch RSTRL, while Tarun and I hung on to watch Aitraaz. This was an infinitely better offering than RSTRL, partly because it was directed by Abbas-Mustan, but more because it starred the ravishing Priyanka Chopra. The courtroom scenes featuring Paresh Rawal were uproarious. What a good decision to switch screens!

After the movie, we had a late lunch at Nandu's Parathas in Koregaon Park. After that, Tarun said a new park had been opened near the Osho Commune. By the time we found it, I was exhausted due to the morning's exertions. Also, I didn't want to hang around in a park with 3 other guys! So I went home. The rest of the day was AoE and FIFA.