Soccer was cancelled cuz of rain. Urgh.

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Here's some kickass personal news. Just day before yesterday I joined this new community website called What The Dilly. I joined because my friend Derek told me to join so that he can find me a hottie. Yesterday he made me a Gold Premium member of the site. And today the owner of the site Jeff made me an admin. As of today, I am the official design/code guy for What The Dilly.com :) This means 2-3 hours of coding every night and lots more on weekends. I'll be involved with creating new features and maintaining existing code for this humungous site!

All of this may not mean much to a random reader but trust me this is big. The Dilly has hundreds of thousands of users and at any given time, thousands of them are online on the website. I have to learn to write the code for 10 servers. Right now everything I do is in small scale. Now I gotta think big!

And of course, that's just like me. I joined a dating website and ended up as one of their lead programmers. Haha!

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Sometimes little thoughtful things almost bring tears to my eyes. Here's a postcard from my friend Becky, on a trip to Hawaii with her family:

Aloha!
Hawaii is more amazing than I could ever have imagined. We are on the big island now. Parts of it are very "tropical" as one would expect. We went to a botanical garden today which had more diversity of brightly colored flowers than I have ever seen before. We also saw this waterfall. As a result of the 13,000 ft volcanos there is a rain-shadow and the other side of the island is dry, and even has cactus. The terrain is also very steep. There are many sheer 500 ft cliffs which drop straight to the Pacific Ocean. Tomorrow we are going to see the active volcano at Volcanos National Park. Can't wait to show you pics! :) Becky

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Song for the day: "Sunday Morning" - Maroon 5

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One year later, Nick is still cool.

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It's not everyday that you can look at the big picture of your life and proudly attest to the fact that things are good; everything is going as planned :)

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One thing I've learnt while programming over the years, that applies to life in general as well, is that if there is no way to fix something, there is always a way to bypass the problem and find another method to do it altogether.

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Proof that my parents are loaded: For their 25th anniversary, my parents charted a 50-person yatch just for themselves (and my sister and our chauffeur)! Wow. Just wow.

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Happy 25th Anniversary Daddy & Mummy!!!!! I wish I was with you right now :)

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Ok so what do I look for in a girl, asked my good friend Tamara. Here's the list:

• Likes computers, even if only slightly
• Likes the Discovery Channel, The Learning Channel, and National Geographic Channel
• Loves Standup Comedy
• Goes to college or graduated
• Has a job or is seriously looking for one
• Independent - lives by herself or with friends
• Loves her family and adjusts well with her parents
• Decent looking and athletic - I hate girls who are lethargic
• No smoking, no drugs. Drinks socially
• Not a big religious fantatic
• Extra points for being a vegetarian

As most of my friends know, I don't mind if she's not Indian, especially considering where I live, there's hardly any Indians. So that's about it I think. As my HotOrNot profile says, I've met enough crazies, psychos, and sluts. It's time I met a nice girl that my mom would be proud of :)

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I've been working a lot last two days. Basically setting up a few computer systems after work hours, since during the day those pcs are in use. Very tired right now. G'nite world...

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Here's some great news. I got my non-immigrant work permit!!! That means I get to stay in the US till Sept. 30, 2007. This calls for some celebrations!

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I'm sick of ironing my clothes.

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My awesome friend from Jersey came to visit me today - Tamara! It was so good seeing her. I showed her my apartment with the new furniture. We talked for almost an hour but it seemed like just a few minutes. Oh and best of all, she bought me a house-warming gift - an awesome Buddha-head for my baker's rack!

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Another long day @ work. Attended the Bay Area Manufacturers Association meeting 6-9 pm. Learnt quite a bit about document managing in the corporate environment. Very tired right now. Going to bed soon.

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Had a pretty decent day today. Work was good as usual. After work, Brian, Scott, and I went to Olive Garden for dinner. They came over to my apartment afterwards to check out my awesome new furniture. We watched some funny videos on my PC and just talked. It's great that we're all bonding as buddies. We're prolly gonna hang out more often in the weekends, hopefully at my place since it's equidistant from Brian and Scott's house.

I can't wait till this weekend. Tamara (my awesome friend/coworker from New Jersey) is visiting family in Clearwater, which is like 10-15 miles north of where I live. So if things go as planned, she's gonna come visit me :) I can't wait!

Life is good. I am quite excited about my work too. Too bad I can't write much detail because of confidentiality agreements.

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Here's a 'blog entry that everyone other than me and the girl involved is going to laugh at. I don't know if she's ever going to talk to me again or not. So here's the background info. I've been talking to this really sweet, smart, and funny girl online for about a week now. For her privacy, I'm not gonna name her. We've talked from computer stuff to philosophy. After a week of chatting, we decided to meet up and get to know each other more. Tonight was supposed to be our first "date."

I was willing to drive up to where she lived but she insisted on meeting halfway. Since I've only been here two months and hardly know the cute little date places, I figured, we could just meet at the big Parkside Mall/Theater. So I gave her the directions, we chatted for a while on the cellphone, and she drove over. I left my apartment, talked to her one last time to make sure she got the directions correct. She was slightly ahead of me and reached Parkside before me. I called her up to confirm if she reached safely and that's when all hell broke lose.

Parkside mall was closed. The movie theater was shutdown. And the area was under construction. From her point of view, I had lured her into a desolate parking lot with construction trucks all around. I reached there and told her to follow me to the Olive Garden restaurant nearby. In the Olive Garden parking lot, I tried to explain to her that I was sooooooooo sorry and that I had NO idea that the goddamned Parkside was closed down! I just went there two weeks ago with Lynn!

Guess she was too mad at me to even talk. She told me we'll do this sometime again once she's in a better mood, possibly in Tampa, where she lives. I'd really like to believe her. I think she just added tonight to her list of "worst dating nightmares."

From my point of view though, it just stinks. She'll probably cool down in a day but I don't think my feelings are gonna heal anytime soon. It was NOT my fault at all! How the HELL am I supposed to know that a whole movie theater that I went to FOUR TIMES in the past two months had closed down for some reason? I think it's God's way of keeping me single forever. Here I was about to meet such a sweet girl and bam! Things blow up in my face, she leaves thinking I'm some creepy pervert, and I'm home by 7:10pm! What's funny is that she asked me why I'm single. I guess I can add this incident to my list of why I'm single...

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If you are a girl and you find the following pickup lines attractive, let me know... I just might marry you ;)

• You are the hit ratio to my cache performance
• You are the buffer overflow to my Win32 subsystem
• You are the catch clause to my try exception
• You are the boot loader to my active partition
• You are the root account to my admin server
• You are the heap allocator to my MergeSort algorithm
• You are the priviledged user to my shared folder
• You are the allow restriction to my group policy
• You are the cumulative patch to my Internet Explorer
• You are the DOS ipconfig to my network connection

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Just bought an insanely cheap computer from Walmart Online. It cost $258 with shipping/tax and has AMD Duron 1.6Ghz PC, 128 DDR RAM, 40GB HDD, CD-ROM, Keyboard, Mouse, Speakers, and an Ethernet card. Now that I have a decent living room, I will hook this PC up to my TV so that I can watch Divx movies on my TV :) This is gonna be fun.

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I saw Dirty Harry today for the first time. Loved it.

Quote for the day: "You've got to ask yourself a question - Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya punk?" - Clint Eastwood, Dirty Harry.

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And this is what my awesome new living room looks like! But for some reason my apartment looks so small now...

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Happy Independence Day to all my fellow Indians :)

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Yay!!!! My new furniture is here!!!! The guys are just loading it off the big Rooms-to-go truck. And I'm already 'blogging about it. What a dumbass!

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Boy are we glad the hurricane didn't hit us. Wanna see what happened where it did hit? Hurricane Disaster Pics - see them. Then thank god it didn't happen to me.

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Happy Left-handers Day to all my fellow lefties :)

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So we survived :) The hurricane hit land about 100 miles south of us at Fort Myers. There's nothing to worry about anymore and hopefully all my stuff is safe. Now I gotta go home tomorrow and set up my computer back again. It's gonna take a lot of time. Oh well... there goes this weekend.

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Looks like the eye of the hurricane is going to hit land south of us and might miss us algother. Let's hope...

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I'm at my friend Taylor's house with his family. His friend Daniel is here with us too. We're preparing for the major hurricane slowly but steadily. The news reports say the hurricane is going to pass through our entire city - St. Petersburg, from downtown area in the south up to Clearwater in the north. The 10ft storm surge is one of the biggest threats. Almost a million people have been told to evacuate the entire region. I am in the "safe" region right now.

The storm is supposed to hit land at around 2pm. Let's see when my next entry will be. This 'blog entry brought to you by Mac OSX.

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That's it. I'm scared. I've evacuating too. Going to my friend Taylor's house RIGHT NOW. Taking my computer with me in the car. Hopefully everything will be alright :-/

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WE ARE SCREWED. The hurricane is 99% going to hit my county the worst. Winds will be upto 115 mph, 4"-8" rain, 10ft storm surge!!! The eye of the hurricane is supposed to hit land exactly where I live! Such an event hasn't happened in decades and just two months after I move to Florida (tomorrow being the two month anniversary), we get hit by a major category 3 hurricane.

Over 800, 000 people are being evacuated in my county!!! There is no regular gasoline available - had to buy premium grade. I've filled my bath tub with water just in case there is no water for the next few days. Half the people in my apartment complex have left. I guess the other half like me are ignoring the mandatory evacuation. I'm gonna stay in my apartment and weather the storm. My two biggest worries are my car and computer. If there is a storm surge in 10 feet, my car is absolutely screwed. Storm surge is when the ocean level rises and rushes inland. So basically with the predicted 10 feet storm surge, my car will be under 4-6 feet of water!!!

I've stocked so much food that I can survive for months. I have water and my UPS has enough juice to power a light for a couple of hours. Since the storm is hitting land 2-4pm tomorrow, it's slightly better than a midnight storm.

They say "if you don't like the weather in Florida, just wait five minutes, it'll change." I hope they're true and tomorrow turns out to be a no biggie. I really don't want this storm to hit us.

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I just found this hurricane map. You wanna know where I live? Exactly in the path of the hurricane, where the black line touches the coast of Florida! From what I can make out of the news, we're basically screwed.

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In the news right now: "A state of emergency was declared for all of Florida on Thursday as the one-two punch of a tropical storm and then a hurricane raged closer, the first time the state has faced such a potentially messy plight in almost 98 years." Basically, there are TWO hurricanes that are coming towards Florida right now and should hit the land by tomorrow afternoon. Some are predicting serious disastrous weather while others are saying it's just a normal hurricane. No matter what it is, it's gonna be scary. I just hope my computer is safe :)

Oh and there's no way I'm getting my new furniture this weekend :(

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Ran 3 miles tonight. Very tired right now. Going to bed.

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More boring computer statistics. At work I'm been working on a major e-commerce website for about 4 weeks now. That's about 21 business days. Of these I mostly program for 6 hours a day. So it comes to 126 hours of raw coding. In this time I did a lot of non-coding work, like setup the database, graphics, and consulting my co-workers. I say I've put at max 100 coding hours into this project. The total lines of code I wrote in the meantime is slightly above 7,000. So that's 70 lines per hour of debugged error-free (almost) code. Since I don't comment my code, there's not a lotta filler text in it to lengthen the code.

The code is about 285kb in size. That 48 characters per minute. My lines are on average 40 characters in length. While they say it's not about lines of code, they also say that productivity CAN be measured by the number of "clean, simple, correct, well-documented lines of code per day." While each programmer has his/her own style of coding, I'd say mine is very clean, simple, and easy to understand. Hence, un-documented :) Cuz everyone knows, real programmers don't comment.

Quote for the day: "Strong typing is for people with weak memories." (If you're a girl and you understand this quote, email me :))

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I just realized that I spend 8 hours or one-third of my day making sure that I close my brackets and parantheses.

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This is going to be a very different 'blog entry than usual. For the first time in four years I'm regretting my decision to come to the United States of America. This isn't something that has been nagging me for weeks or months. This isn't something that is troubling me a lot. But it is something that I think differentiates what I think of myself and what people see me as. Right now everyone who knows me, thinks I am on the way to 'success,' whatever success is. They see me as standing on my own two feet, set in life with respect to career and education, and on my way to making it big. I'm not denying the fact that in four years I got two BS degrees, worked 3 different jobs, found an apartment and a car, and settled down in Florida. What I disagree with, is everyone's definition of "set-in-life."

Four years ago when I left India, I had the love of my family and friends right next to me 24/7. I had a pretty good job at my dad's friend's company (Rajda) and if I had stuck there, I'd prolly be "set" by now. Or maybe not. Who knows. But anyways, in this last four years, while I've gained a lot of material things, I've also lost a lot of important things. Right now I'm living in the middle of nowhere and know nobody. No family, no friends, no love. It's as if I suddenly woke up and everybody I knew had disappeared. I walk out of my house and I just see rows and rows of strangers. I smile at them and our interaction often ends after they smile back.

My work life is great. I can't believe I actually found such a homely loving company to work at. I think that has been my experience since I came to US. I find the greatest people to work with, those who truly appreciate my efforts, skills, and experience, while on the other hand, my social life has been full of disappointment and worst-nightmares-coming-true. When I finally made a bunch of great friends in Jersey, I moved on to Florida where I'm back to zero.

What I HATE right now is everyone from Jersey telling me to go out and make new friends. How exactly am I supposed to do that? It was easy in college, you just make friends talking in class or living in dorms. It's absolutely different out in the real world. I can't just walk upto a bunch of people and expect them to befriend me. So ya, things get kinda lonely on weekend here. I dunno why I'm so angry right now. I think it's most probably because I couldn't go running today.

So anyways, back to regretting coming to US. Yes I'm having doubts right now. Why? Because in four years, nothing has improved, rather gotten worse. I'm alone, single, and far away from everyone who loves me. Don't email me saying I should deal with it because I chose to take this step. I already know that everything I did, I did it consciously and with enough forethought. But what I'm realizing now, is that I over-estimated my capacity to deal with loneliness. I thought I blossom in solitude. Turns out, after a while being alone 24/7 gets kinda crazy.

Picture this, I came into my apartment at 6pm on Friday. Next time I get to go out of my apartment is 8am Monday. In that duration, I've seen no people. There's nothing to do when it's raining so bad outside. I'm literally house-arrested and it's one of the worst feelings ever. My dad's probably smiling right now, thinking I told you to stay in India. Maybe he really was right. America is a great country and I have nothing to say against it. But right now, I'm holding on to a shattered American Dream. I'm probably decades away from money, power, fame, and love. Isn't that what constitutes the American Dream? Somewhere in the middle of all this, is lost my desire to further my education. Maybe that's what is bothering me so much. I love the working man's life, the routine, the schedules, the meetings, but I also miss the learning, the new people, the well-versed teachers.

I know this 'blog entry is all over the place and I'm probably not thinking straight right now. But I dunno what to make of all this. Is this really what I came to US for? Sure, I have a great place to live, but I had it 4 years ago too. Sure I have a nice car, but I had it when I turned 18. So I work in a great place, hell I loved Rajda a lot too. I never complained. So why exactly did I leave India... I don't know... Somebody please remind me why I am here...

Maybe I'm just very homesick right now. It's been over two years since I saw my family. I think it's just that. I miss them a lot and there's nobody here to make me forget about them. Before I start crying I must end this 'blog right away.

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How can I go running when there's lightning every 30 seconds?! I waited all day so that I could go running at 6pm. Doesn't look like it. It's still raining :( The sidewalk I run on must be under 6-8 inches of water by now. Urgh. This sucks. My training is being affected so badly. Last week I was supposed to do my first 10 mile run but couldn't because of rain. Same thing this weekend. Urgh. And I can't run in the rain because the sidewalk becomes very slippery. I tried once and would never do it again. Here's hoping it stops raining soon.

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Yes. It's 5:50 am and I didn't stay up all night. I just woke up so that I could run 10 miles. But it's raining outside. Urgh. I'll wait for a while and then go running anyway. Who knows, maybe it'll rain on the Marathon Day and this is just good practice for me.

Anyways, Happy B'day to my awesome friend Kathleen & my little cuzin Jenesha. I miss you both a lot :(

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Been a while since my last 'blog entry. Life's been good. Just the same old story. Had a decent weekend. Saw Harold 'n Kumar go to Whitecastle with Lynn on Friday. Then next day went to Brian's party and drank a lot :) Life is good.

Had a long day at work today - 8am to 6pm! Then made some Indian-style beans with tortillas. Tired and sleepy now. Bed-time approaching fast...

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