Unintended consequences

As a person working very hard to bring a new better memory to market.. lower power, higher density at lower cost etc. just to name a few attributes, I delude myself into thinking that this memory will make the world a better place. 

You can go directly alter bytes in this memory so there is not a lot of copying back and forth happening.. People will save power and if you take every pico joule saved and multiply it by a jillion copies, those things add up to Giga Watts in no time.  Used to think that all those twitter retweets and facebook shares are melting icebergs that this memory is going to change.

Then again, Enrico Fermi or Einstein did not think Hiroshima when they did the work on nuclear fission. Hiroshima happened anyways.

Why bring all this up?

A little more than a month ago saw this mami (aunty) on the flight from India to US. She was looking for a charger desperately.. think "Eastwood as Blondie crawling on the desert floor looking for a drop of water" desperate! Finally she found one.. 

Turns out you can download old Tamil serial episodes on an iPad and binge watch them at airports. Not sure what service they use or if Netflix now has megaserials like Chitti and all 1890 episodes of Metti oli! (not kidding.. that serial actually had 1890 episodes and my wife and MIL probably watched every episode). 

There was a time when Jr. would not eat her dinner unless she heard the title song of Metti oli. It was so pavlovian that I actually recorded that song on a VHS tape and took it to Australia with us when she was 20 months old. We had to play it there to be able to feed her! (these were pre-Youtube days.. now you can enjoy it by clicking this link... I am sure when Jr. watches this after almost 13-14 years, she will turn into the Winter Soldier)

To think that all my hard work bringing in a new memory for the people is going to enable replays of Delhi Kumar walking down the street to his house, while pausing a few times to try and remember what he forgot for a full 30 minute episode is heartbreaking to say the least. 

Delhi Kumar alone is responsible for a few glaciers disappearing, leave alone those poor polar bears desperately trying to find that next floating piece of ice to survive. 

By that token Radhika Sarathkumar has single handedly raised ocean levels by a centimeter over just a decade!

Apparently there is an age you cross, when these Tamil mega serials (Soap operas) start appealing to you, per mom, MIL, and dad. My FIL seems to have skipped this age. 

Hoping that someone euthanises me if I succumb to watching Tamil serials.. at any age!

Been away too long...

It has been almost a month and a half since the site saw a blog post. There is so much to write about.  Spent two and  a half weeks in India over four states, TamilNadu, Kerala, Maharashtra and Rajasthan. Went straight for a business trip from the vacation that turned out to be quite interesting. Flying back to the US and back within 48 hours... memories of people, places, the sights, sounds and smells that may or may not resonate because of all the hectic travel.. 

July came and went and a lot happened without me even getting to the blog. For the most part I chose not to check emails or Facebook during this time. Just let everything soak in.

For the first time exhausted the entire 32GB card taking pictures and started over! 

This trip also saw me go through 7 major airports in a span of 5 days, lugging suitcases on a business trip, navigating baggage rule incompatibilities on international flights on different routes, trying to figure out what day and time it was at any given moment.

Will start posting pictures and share some stories of experiences that truly touched me.. but first, more work!

Daddy gets a trophy.. among other things!

The blog has seen a long break. It has been a rollercoaster ride for the Traveling Narayanan's if we can say that.

First we had a nice Saturday evening last week with dressing up and going to a temple. Even clicked a gorgeous snap of the little one as she was shy and blushing when I complimented her on her paavaadai (frock).

Then like San says "Don't cast your admiring eyes on her.. bad things happen!" (what she says in Tamil is "kuzhandhaikku un kanne pattudum") and who knows maybe that is true.

San left on a business trip to China the very next morning and she pretty much took the family luck with her. The house has been seeing things like never before to the point where we look like the Indian village after the Sankara stones were stolen from it in the Indiana Jones movie! We need our Sangeetha stone back.. We demand it!

The little one came home Monday with a 103 fever and missed school for most of last week. She also passed on a cold and sore throat to daddy and grandma. Fortunately Jr. avoided her little sister for as much as she could and that saved her.  

To top things off, daddy went to the dentist with pain for the black tooth and ended with a double root canal and a bad prognosis for both front tooth. Apparently the last root canal was not sealed off properly and the black tooth was not black because it was dead. When my local dentist removed the plug, everyone pretty much reeled back from the rotten smell that came out of the tooth, except for me as I was in the chair and could not move my nose away from my open mouth! It was a small logistics problem that no yoga pose can accomplish. There is a 50/50 chance that I will lose both my front teeth in six months or so I am told. If things work out, the tooth will survive and hang in there.

Dentures at 40?! Not so looking forward to that. Again, we need our Lucky girl to come back from China..

Every morning the scene in the bedroom looks like this..

That and a big pile of blankets and comforters that need to be laundered, if the little one decided to throw up her dinner in the middle of the night. I figured that it was better to leave them in a balled up pile and do laundry in the morning than do 3AM laundry. Just got tired of it.. and believe me when I say this.. we do a lot of laundry in this house. Every week we wash 35 towels just for Yoga!

Finally we got to the weekend after making it on a one day at a time mode during the week and there was one bright spot. Yesterday, it was time for Daddy to go get his 60 day Challenge trophy! That was for doing 60 yoga classes in 60 days in Jan, Feb and early March. 

Daddy did make it to almost 73+ classes in 73 days and then it stopped early this week. Well, it will start again.

Jr. took this photo after the little one suggested "Appa, you got a tropy. But you should put a picture of you doing yoga now and show people how well you are doing, before putting the trophy picture". Well, have definitely redistributed weight around, a lot of fat is gone and new muscle is there. I am reasonably sure that if it were not for the Yoga marathon, would have fallen ill a lot more what with all the sickness going around in the house and everywhere in the bay area in general. At one point 8 kids were out sick in the little one's class including her.

Definitely recommend the 60 day challenge to all Bikram Yoga practitioners. We spent Saturday evening listening to the stories of all the folks who finished the challenge and it was truly inspiring. Daddy got to say his story also and he pretty much stopped short of doing a demo, throwing the little one in the air and catching her. There is still a lot to improve if you look at the picture above. Yes, the hamstrings and core are strong enough to lift the body off the ankle, but if you see the symmetry in the shoulders and the legs, it is clear that there is a lot of compensation going on to keep the balance. Well there is a lifetime of yoga left to correct these things. . .

 After we listened to everyone tell their story, there was a raffle and guess what? The kids won the raffle. I say the kids because at one point my MIL was worried about the kids going to bed late and the little one falling sick again.  They both insisted they stay for the raffle and I quote the little one "I think today my luck is going to change. I am sick but we are going to win!" and Jr.'s ticket was the winning ticket! We got a bunch of Yoga goodies as part of the raffle. The shirt which two years earlier would have been two sizes too small.. fits daddy perfectly! 

We really missed Sangeetha at this Challenge party. There was no trophy, if she had not pushed me to go. Three days into the challenge she even said "are you just going there and sitting down for a lot of poses or are you doing your very best?". While she was only kidding, that gave me the idea to track down how many poses I actually miss in the Challenge and was planning on doing one extra class for every 26 missed.  She also took a lot of the pick up drop off duty on days where my resolve was wearing down a bit so I could switch to evening classes instead of morning for a full week.  So technically she gets a tropy for supporting it.

We are just a couple of days away from Mommy's return trip back home.

On a funny note one of her co-workers asked her "I heard you are a vegetable. Is that true?" and she knew the co-worker meant "vegetarian" but was not sure how to answer.

Later in the week when she found out that the little one was sick, she went to some local Lama temple as part of sightseeing and prayed to the local god..

I am reasonably sure that her prayer went something like this "Dear Lama god, please make sure my little one stops throwing up fast. she has been throwing up too long" and the Lama god went "okay.. I got this one. Let me stop. You want the little one to throw up long and fast.. Done!"

It might have done us some good if she had a translator before she went into the temple.

Well, we are counting days and that is all there is to it. Our luck will change when she is back. We know it!

Once in a pink moon

This blog and my facebook account for that matter has had a "Separation of Work and personal life" policy that was maintained a lot better than the separation of Church and State policy by our government.

There were reasons for that! Very valid reasons.

Although many of my co-workers follow my travelog or see pictures in it,  they sent me comments to my gmail id rather than post comments on the site. Well, everyone has their own policy.

As for facebook, an incident two years ago prompted me to defriend 140 people in a single day and reduce my "friends" list from 200+ to 60. Why?

My then boss left my company and moved to St. Louis. As it so happened my sister relocated from New Jersey to St. Louis as well the same week and I had made plans to visit my sister for her son's first birthday function which tradition requires a maternal uncle be present. My brother was in India and I was the only maternal uncle within flying distance.... and I made the mistake of posting a comment on my ex-boss's facebook account saying "See you next week in St. Louis!". It was a harmless comment, as all I wanted to do was to say hi to him in the new surroundings.

It so happened that this was picked up by the rest of the workforce that was already deeply upset by his move to St. Louis.. what with him being the founder of our workplace and all.. as a message that I was going to join his new workplace. The rumor mill starts flying and folks give me the "et tu brutus" look for a couple of days. By the time someone was kind enough to tell me what was going on, yours truly had "had enough".

Cancelled the St. Louis plan, addressed the folks and kept going. Hindsight being better than 20/20, should have gone on that trip. That was a long time ago and it is water under the bridge.

Why bring all that up now?

Well once in a pink moon, it is okay to break that separation and post something about work. After driving to the same parking lot for the fifteenth year one gets used to the routine. Have gone to work by mistake in a trance so many times on a saturday when I was supposed to go somewhere in that general direction, find myself in an empty parking lot and have come back home. Have spent more time in the fab at work in terms of total time spent in any location in my entire life.

Seriously, kid you not. Have lived in many different homes as part of childhood, dorms in college, apartments as a bachelor, five different residential addresses over the last 10 years .. but one place that anchored me was the fab.

That place is expected to be closed in the very near future! Tempted to go on a rant about our current public policies, the fate of American manufacturing and R&D, etc. etc. but will refrain. That is another post for another day. We all know there is not much silicon left in silicon valley. There is going to be even less after this fab closes! Sad thing is over the last 18 months, started liking Austin and all those trips there, the wonderful folks there and another "fab" in Austin and that too gets the locks soon.

It is heartbreaking to see this happen and we still have to go through the motions of a person who has to perform his last rites while still being alive but that is part of the job at this point.

This blog has been an open letter of sorts to the world on happenings in our life and if anything warrants a post, this does!

A lot of things need to be done at work, at home, on the road. The mind is in pieces even after sleeping at 1, waking up at 5 and doing Yoga bright and early on a Saturday morning.  Have a lot of good leads and potential opportunities and am confident of getting jobs. Just need to know inside that "I am not settling" for anything but going for something that brings back those goosebumps on a day to day basis!

Now that most of those folks that were "defriended" (if that is what Facebook calls them) are not going to be co-workers in a short time, time to add them all back on facebook!

Last time, wrote them a note at work saying "My apologies for taking you off my friend list!". That from a guy who writes an open blog!

Now, it is just a post announcing to folks that they are going to get requests from me.. and they can send me one too..