When somebody tells you many things and asks you to not breathe a word about it to anybody else, it can get pretty tough. Especially when you happen to be a talktative person like me who meets so many different people and the temptation to squeal is so strong! I have to say that since it doesn’t matter anymore and since I have also received explicit permission, may I be permitted to announce that Ms. nOnda managed to perform quite a feat last weekend. Apart from graduating with a Masters degree in Health Administration, she also happens to be betrothed to Dr. Rahul Nanchal of Littlerock, Arkansas! I happened to be the official photographer at both events in addition to playing a number of other roles (for which I was thanked at the rate of 50 times a minute by both her parents) so if you are in the mood for some photographs, here you go:
With Nonda after the ceremony.
Nonda with Rahul
This last week was also the hotbed for a lot of other action. For one, Pavan, Angelo and I met with my advisor Ron and decided on a course of action for the upcoming PCES PI meeting where (to put it succintly) our funding for the next year gets decided 
Needless to say, a significant portion of my waking hours have been spent in polishing up our code, integrating it seamlessly with client code that makes use of the TAO Realtime Event Channel library. In addition, we need to come up with reasonable numbers for throughput performance so let’s see how that goes. During
the course of all this, sometimes we ended up against what seemed like a wall only to discover that all the random segfaults were because of including headers from the wrong directory ! You tend to think that that kind of silliness vanishes with experience. I assure you, age/experience has nothing to do with it. It quite simply is a matter of the levels of caffeine in your bloodstream.
Rahul has been upto a lot of interesting things of late. For one, his blog is all resplendent of a myriad of different feelings which I too have experienced in the past, especially in connection with visiting
Hyderabad and spending time with Amma. Two, he is going to be doing his internship at Mathura, UP, India, in (hold your breath) Indian Oil Refineries! It is no secret that I managed to sail through 4 years of Chemical Engg without knowing a thing at the end of it all but it looks like he won’t quite get away with that Anyway, in case I haven’t mentioned it already, his blog is a real treat to read. I have always marvelled at his stunning command of English and his amazingly artistic (and rather poetic) style of expression in prose.
It is said that men do not detect puddles of dirt in their living quarters until they are big enough to apply for the status of a separate nation with the UN and women on the other hand can detect dust particles at microscopic levels. As it turns out, I had a real chance to see how true that statement is when I saw the the absolute shock on Vidya’s face the other day when the conversation between Booze and her went something like this:
“Viggi, I cannot believe how dirty your house can get !”
“Really ?”
“Please! I saw the kitchen so dirty that I just
had to clean it up or I would choke”
“But I cleaned it just yesterday !”
Now you know why men need women to run their households
I also happened to join the gym near my home (‘St. Louis Workout’) for a number of reasons, the top one being, “I need to go to a gym outside Wash U so that the only way I can ensure that I am regular about it is the fact that I am paying so much for it !” I had my orientation session with the trainer just the other day and all he kept doing (instead of answering my questions) was trying to sell me packages of 10 and 20 sessions with him as my personal trainer.
“So, Rob, although I did train before, I really didn’t focus much on
my abdomen. Do you have some suggestions for exercises ?”
“Oh man, you are asking me way too much information – I have to
charge you for that !”
I ask you, is this what all this has come to – blatant commercialization ? I refuse to be taken in by any of it. Thankfully there isn’t a law against watching and learning so I learned the aforementioned exercises by watching a few people doing it on the floor.
My new desktop arrived this afternoon so now I have 3 computers on my desk – two desktops (one Windows, one Linux) and my laptop. The only problem of course, is that there is no space whatsoever left on my desk and this really has me quite upset. I decided that the two monitors and the two keyboards were really a criminal waste of space so I looked around and presto – a KVM switch made its appearance. The only problem is that it doesn’t have a power adapter so perhaps a trip to RadioShack is in order.
It’s been quite a long post already – time to end, my friends. And since I haven’t done this in some time, here is a C&H strip :
[C&H © 2003 Universal Press Syndicate]
