A Question of Balance

Quite a few people; including the ones who care, to the ones who really don't or shouldn't; have asked me what next i.e. what I'm gonna do from now on (this is one question that I've asked myself so often over the last years that I even thought of buying whatnext.com)? I still haven't figured out yet, and I don't want to jump into something in haste which doesn't interest me. All these years, relationship and sustaining the relationship was something which I was (the past tense is not by choice) passionate about, every decision of my life was filtered through my relationship and every thing which didn't matter to the relationship (including my day job) didn't matter to me; I was doing them just because I had to. Now that I have this window period, I want to make sure that I get involved in something which I can feel passionate about, something where I am not just doing it but also enjoying it....hopefully, I will figure out something soon enough.

Hot Indian Summer

It's been a week since I came back and since then have been experiencing the North Indian Summer at its peak; the last time I visited this part of my world during the summertime was about 4-5 years back, and the summers over here can be really hot and humid; with frequent power cuts adding to the woes. Anyway, am not complaining…it's an experience of its own kind! I want this window period where I am so called between jobs (in true sense, I am not between jobs as I don't have a job to move on to) to do some introspection and figure out what I really wanted to do with my life all along, I know the easiest way out is to do what I've been doing for past 6 years and find another "IT" job but then for past 2 years; I've been getting bored with my job very fast, either the quality of work has not been great or it's just me who isn't interested in doing the same stuff over and over again…but then, the biggest "issue" for now seems to be figuring out what I want to do.

Look Ma, no sound!

Ever since I upgraded Dapper to Edgy, I have this weird issue of no sound in Vista (yeah, I know it sounds kinda unrelated but this is what I've zeroed in on). The problem is if I boot into Vista after a previous session in Edgy, there's no sound in Vista at all and the only way to restore the sound back is to reboot the system, looks like Edgy updates certain register values of the sound card which Vista is not able to understand. I don't know whether the bug is with Vista or Edgy; but given how fast MS folks are at fixing the "bugs" due to incompatibility with other OS, I'll most probs submit a bug with Ubuntu folks. Edit: Submitted the bug on Launchpad, here is the bug link; in case you're interested: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/alsa-lib/+bug/121674

In other news, Vista also doesn't recognize my Pan-digital photo-frame; and I don't see any drivers for Vista on their site either.

June 18th, 5:30 PM

Sitting at the airport, about to board the flight to Delhi; listening to "Nights In White Satin" by Moody Blues and thinking about the last 3 years; it's been nearly 3 years since we met last; did I then think that it for next 3 years we won't even meet once? I don't know, maybe I did…today, are things according to my plans? Well, no…that's why I have stopped planning, things never go according to the plans, so the best is not to plan, at least that way you can blame yourself for not planning anything! Sometimes, I wonder is this a quarter-life crisis (I am not (maybe) old enough to have a mid life crisis, yet)? At times, I really am not sure where I want to head, what I want to do and I have no motivation to find out what is that I need at this point of time…at times, I feel I just letting my life drift away, and have this urgency to sort out things within myself and then at times, I feel life's gonna take me where it has to go, so there is no point in fighting it, let's just go with the flow. I guess too much thinking has really cluttered my mind, too much thinking about things that don't matter any longer to the ones who matter to me. Anyway, got to board in next 15 minutes; am I leaving nothing behind or am I leaving everything that defines me, behind?

A Sort Of Homecoming

Finally, I wound up everything and in another 6 hours will be catching a one-way flight back to India. It's been more than 2 years since I came to this country, hoping for the best; but expecting the worst and I can say now, that expectations always win over hope. Almost everyone has told me that it's a "bold/strong" decision or that I've lost my mind and other blahs but I don't really care: what's a rhyme or a reason; to a fool or a dreamer? I still haven't really figured out what I want to do once I go back, since I am going to be "jobless" and have no inclination as of now to find a new job in India, I know I need to think about something soon, you just can't sit at home and do nothing, when you are not sitting pretty on 1 million dollars in your bank account. Anyway, I remember somebody telling that I should save 5 grands and I made sure that in these two years I do save that much...money, never interested me anyway; perhaps, it has something to do with having Neptune in the second house in my birth chart! Lot of people also asked me, how do I feel about it? Honestly, I don't feel anything, maybe; the feeling is yet to sink in or maybe; I have spent so much of feelings/energies in the past; that I have run out of them. Will I ever return back? I will return no more; I will take my heart and let it fly....but then, if "somebody" needs me; I am with her, for her, always....

flickr & Popfly

I played a little with popfly to create a carousel stack of my images based on tag(s) from flickr, and well, had quite a few issues...firstly, the built in flickr block doesn't allow returning user images based on tag, so I ripped the flickr block and created mine. Had some issues with the block not allowing me to enter the flickr key for this block, so I hard-coded the key in the js file itself! The other thing is you can't pass querystrings to your mashup; so there is no way you can customize the mashup at runtime (well, in a way you can by using the user-input block; but that doesn't solve my problem). Anyway, creating the mashup was really straight-forward and given that popfly is in early alpha stages, I guess it will only get better.

Update 6/12: Played around with popfly a bit more and learnt quite a few things, which you might want to know:

• There is no way to pass querystring parameters to a mashup currently, this means that the mashup cannot be dynamic w.o. requiring user input: this will be implemented in next release.


• Some blocks like Carousel and Photo Sphere have rendering issues in fx and don't display at all on that browser: again something which will be fixed in next release


• You cannot really "rip" a block which requires a developer key and extend it, or more generically, you cannot create a block which requires a developer key unless you are willing to hard-code your key in the javascript itself.

Here's the link to the mashup.