A day without gym - Sunday

I get to write again. These days, I have nothing to write or rather, I do not find time. I have topics in my mind, but they just fade away, reason being, work, exercise takes a back seat. I haven't played my PS 4 in a while. I was supposed to complete GTA 5, but I am stuck in the game and with so much work, it has taken a back seat.

Moreover when I sit to write something, I think of social network sites, browse for songs, check mails, check others' blog etc etc and I fail to write, reason being distraction.

Now I turned off the music, turned off my official laptop, cannot concentrate on office work for the day, switched off social media sites, and here I am only to write something.

Tomorrow being rest day, I could wake up with no qualms about exercising. The thing is I have gained weight in the last 3 months, though people say it doesn't look much, I got a mouthful of words from my gym trainer as its anti to what I used to do.

I am supposed to control what I eat and therefore yet again, I am back to where it all began. Work at office too happens to be dull, with more people being released from account/project, what can you do? If there is no work obviously people are going to be let go. There is no such thing as free lunch.

But I'm happy no exercise tomorrow, plain rest! I get to work, get to do somethings at leisure.

Cheers,

Sins of joining a service based organization (offshoring)

One thing straight, after joining my current organization, I have spent multiple weekends working.

Even as I write this, I am writing source code on the side.

There are many reasons as to why I work on weekends. What do I do during weekdays?

- Meetings/management meetings.
- Giving daily status to the dumb indian management (aka Micromanagement, which team member of mine spent how much time on what, what time did they go to loo out of office etc etc).
- Answering queries of team members, reviewing their work.
- Taking part in meetings with Europeans, can run into hours sometimes.
- Infrastructure issues.

Given all of the above, I hardly get time to do technical work. Considering that I am more experienced than most of my team members, I am supposed to do the most complicated work, like most difficult work. Whilst most people stop coding after say 5 years, I am coding even after 10 years, and I love it.

But what I don't love is the fact that I get less time to do what I love to do, instead attend Indian management meetings on how to improve process via Agile.

Well, each time, I get to ask myself is it really needed. Need of the hour is to improve skillset of Indian people to tackle technical problems, instead our Indian management seems to be taking interest in Agile to hide their arses :).

Reason being our Indian management understands, no matter how much you invest in training, Indian engineers won't scale up to the European standards / expectations, not sure which river water is the source of their lacking interest, but its straight as an arrow, Indian people lack interest to do anything technical atleast in my current organization. (sorry for stereotyping)

So, to do tough technical work, I need more time to concentrate and that never happens at workplace. The overcrowded floor where most people are on bench and jaywalking, never allows me to concentrate.

Whilst I do manage to work peacefully for sometime, to ensure more productivity, I need to work a bit more and this can happen only during weekends. So whenever there is tough work to be done, I rely on weekends, and also I am planning to take leave tomorrow.

My German architect shall go on leave from wednesday and I need to check in some very important code and get it reviewed before he leaves. All this I cannot expect to happen in that noisy workplace.

So tomorrow I am absconding from office to work :)

Cheers,

PS - I don't get to read as often now, play on my PS4 - travelling is less. All this until I find a new job, or until some people in the team get laid off due to budget cut. (sorry for early prediction, but can't help a lingering team in any other way :))

I am not boasting about myself doing hard techical work, but, I'm just trying to tell you my current situation!

Growing up in the 90's, growing up with ROXETTE

As a kid who grew up in the 90's, I could identify one band distinctively apart from Eagles and MLTR or U2. It was Roxette. The song - she's got the look was being used in the reynolds pen advertisement, if I'm not wrong.

I was always wondering which band sung it. Years later when internet became accessible and radio play was much more fun with all those good songs, less ads, I got to listen to Roxette a bit more and I believe, they are amongst the best. Its sad I didn't get to listen them more as a kid in the 90's

The lead singer had to go through a difficult period but yeah, they have left us a legacy of great songs. One of which is as below :)

Trekking on a empty stomach - TTTT 59

I have trekked few places in the last few years, but each time I was atleast fed, well fed infact before the start of the trek or even through the trek. Generally on a two day trek if we are camping in the forest, we carry sufficient rice to feed us for a night's dinner plus day 2 breakfast and/or lunch.

So this time, too was no different, we were in the middle of the forest out camping, and we cooked day 1 dinner. But the thing is, instead of bringing in aluminium cooking vessel, we had taken a pressure cooker this time.

This caused a hinderance in cooking. If we had taken aluminium vessel, we could have cooked lots of rice for dinner and left over could have been consumed as breakfast. But instead it took 2 turns too cook up rice for 12 people using a pressure cooker, plus, this meant the next day we had insufficient time to cook, as we had a good 8 km trek to and fro to the waterfall plus a 6 km trek back to the mainland.

Next day morning we prepared tea in the middle of the forest with full milk and tea power and water. And we set off for the waterfall. And we reached the waterfall after around 3 hours and we were back to tbe camping place by around 4pm. So we again ran out of time as we had to reach mainland out of the forest before it could be dark, hence thought of not cooking at all.

Meanwhile we had consumed whatever biscuits we had chocolates etc etc. I had consumed a packet full of electral and still was losing salts and getting cramped like there was no tomorrow. This left me with only one option to drink a litre of water filled with table salt!

Yes, I could never drink water mixed with salt before, but this time body just took it. And by the way, my cramps vanished 20 minutes later, I could trek the remining 6 kilometers pretty much comfortably.

We made it to out of the forest by 7pm and made it to Hotel Kamat Honnavara by 8 15PM. Finished dinner and started to bangalore by 9 30 pm.

Thats how I trekked this time , with almost an empty stomach :)

Cheers,