The Bangalore trip

After long discussions about suitable time for all, me and Barkha made a short trip to Bangalore last weekend i.e. 22nd -24th August. The occasion was the last meet up before Aanjhan and Barkha flew out of country for their post graduation. The trip was fun all the way. :-)

The arrival -

After finishing the work on Friday and filling up time sheets at office I started from Pune around 8 pm by KSRTC volvo bus. A bit afraid of hectic bus journey of 18 hours from Mumbai, Barkha decided to fly in on Saturday morning. I must say that my journey from Pune was not hectic at all. The bus was very comfortable with leg room between seats the largest I have ever seen. Kudos to KSRTC. :-)
Arriving in Bangalore at 10:30 on Saturday, I went straight to Ashish's place in Koramangala where Aanjhan was staying. After a good amount of chit-chat, a cold water bath and some aloo parathas we decided to visit Ashish's office (Aanjhan's ex-office) as his family for the occasion called as open house. In the office, Aanjhan grabbed a bag by conveniently hiding the fact that he is an ex-employee. Then we visited their sports complex where all had fair share of fun. Ashish and me played carom for an hour where I almost won 2 games. Aanjhan and Amit tried to play tennis and spent more time picking up the ball than hitting it. :-P

In the evening we visited a shopping mall called Forum in search of someone to repair power adapter of my ibook. The guy at Apple store that there was no way to repair it and I had to buy new one priced at Rs. 4700. :-( Not interested in spending that much money we returned empty handed.

Then it was time to visit my sister's place at J. P. Nagar. It was a surprise visit to her. Me, my sister Yogita, her husband Wilson and daughter Vilina had dinner at a hotel called Pai. Vilina is very sweet and smart than most of the kids at age of 2 years. She doesn't talk much but she smiles a lot. :-)

After having a typical South Indian breakfast on Sunday morning Roshan joined me and we returned to Ashish's home. It was now time for an unofficial Ubuntu-IN meet.


The hackathon -

We went to Parthan's home around 1 pm and Barkha arrived soonish.
After having lunch at Nandini we decided to do some hacking.


I really don't remember what she was laughing about



The almighty tuxmaniac


It was time for Ubuntu installfest on Barkha's new Dell laptop. Unfortunately The Ubuntu installer on alternate CD couldn't repartition NTFS drive. So we had to resort to gparted live CD. Meanwhile Barkha decided to book tickets for Chennai next morning. Utterly confused about when to start in morning, she booked two train tickets although she already had a bus ticket. While all this mess was going on Roshan was reading a python book and I was trying to port gnusim8085 to windows with help of mingw cross compiler following the instructions here. It worked fairly well but we had no access to Windows machine to test. And when testing with wine it was giving some weird font problem.


Barkha, Parthan, Roshan, Aanjahn and Onkar (with a glass full of coffee)

After loads of leg pulling and laughter, me, Aanjhan and Barkha went back and joined Ashish and Amit. The hard drive in Barkha's laptop took almost 2.5 hours to repartition and finished just before we went for dinner. That is what you get for buying extra large hard disks of size 250 GB. :-P At dinner we had Chinese food and had some random chat about college time memories.


Amit, Onkar, Aanjhan and Ashish


The return -

I went to my sister's place again on Monday morning and after meeting another friend for lunch and some afternoon sleep I started for Pune in evening. Return journey was also awesome thanks to KSRTC.


In other news -

1. Aanjhan recently became Ubuntu Member - Meeting log
2. The windows port of gnusim8085 actually works. Aanjhan tested it at his home after returning to Chennai.

Now we have to port the application to gtksourceview2, write a windows installer and also ask for feature freeze exception in Ubuntu. :-D