Happy Tamil and Malayalam New year 2010

En iniya Tamil nanburgalukku iniya Tamil puthandu valthukkal (Happy Tamil new year wishes to all my Tamil friends around the globe).

Orayiram vishu asamsakal(happy vishu greetings to all my malayalee friends around the globe).

Vishu brings fondest memories of my maternal grandparents. Nikhil will be missing the sweet traditions of vishu like kaineetam from grandparents and relatives.

We used to give kaineetam to little kids in the family in ten paisa denominations. Imagine the joy of 5 year olds getting handful of 100 mint ten paise coins .oh they felt so happy like they won lottery : ).

My mom and dad used to do the vishu decoration after we went to bed as a surprise. My mom used to wake us up early in the morning and lead us to vishu decoration spot blindfolded to get the glimpse of vishukani . It's considered very auspicious to see vishukani decorations when we wake up .

I used to love vishu's kaineetam since it meant more pocket-money to spend during summers on ice creams and hobbies. Those were the good old days where every kid from our neighbourhood was happy with simple things like camel water color box or playing hide and seek or some pretend play .

Most of my summers were spent drawing lot of pictures from my favorite story/comic books especially the folklore/fairytales books from Russia. We sent most of the illustrations  as birthday/festival greeting to our friends and family. Both me and my sister were good painters.I really wish they had saved all my drawings.   I always had the privelege drawing some art on the board during our first art class after summer holidays since my art teacher loved my art work. Reminder to myself: I need to go and meet her in person during my next visit to India.

My father is a self made book binder , so we had good supply of good quality card board, stock paper (we used call them binding wrappers) and calico. I loved doing pop up books and 2D animated drawing boards like King Arthur castle with characters popping out. I used to painstakingly draw, paint and cut each character then add a board backing. My earliest memory of doing a model was making different styles of miniature footwear using chart paper and sketch pens during my fourth grade vacation. 

End of summer meant getting new books for school and my dad binding all our school books. I learnt the art of binding from my father and I can still bind a book like a professional.

IGot IPad

Guess who is the happy owner of a brand new IPad ?.  I got an early birthday gift from CB last wednesday. I love every bit of IPad and the WIFI amazingly faster compared to our laptops.

I have never felt this excited about tech gadgets lately. Having worked for telecommunication/semiconductor giants , I am trained to find the flaws quickly. IPad is so amazing though fewer users has reported some issues, overall experience overrides any technical flaws. Apple has taken a giant leap in the industry giving priority to customer experience - "An amazing user experience". The form factor is sooooooo cool and I am sure it setting a a standard for future laptop GUI.

I felt this excited about a hardware/software product twenty years back when Microsoft introduced MS-Office.  Having used Wordstar, Lotus 1-2-3 and Dbase III Plus couple of years prior to using MS office, I personally know that pain of using those products. Users need to remember million commands just to type document, or create a worksheet or worked with data storedin a comma separted structure in a file (still so many apps use comma separated data and it's such a pain to parse the file ) . And only people trained can only use those products. MS office came and changed the way normal users used productivity software. "Easy and simple" were words to describe MS experience. Well, today MS has completely deviated from this philosophy and the new OS comes with so many unwanted software bundled into core OS which the users hardly use.

Qualcomm BREW platform had mobileshop even before apple introduced iStore. Have you ever paid attention to the mobileshop when you bought new ringtone or a game app from phone especially CDMA phone running BREW ? Probably NO. Mobileshop or latest one called (mshop) has such amazing business model and storefront to sell such apps where the apps can be upgraded over air and doesn't require internet .  As a person who has worked on BREW mobileshop /mShop and knowing the technology behind it , qualcomm was not able to woo the customers like Apple iStore (I mean billion of customers around the world since CDMA technology is from qualcomm) . I hope they attract great innovators like Apple. I loved working for qualcomm .

Apple has proved yet again amazing technical innovations can succeed even in the middle of recession. Check out the Apple IPad review here .

My current FB status

Thru our children we live our dreams. I have a dream of having a new clean crispy sheets on my bed everyday . Thanks to water works by NR I am fulfilling that dream lately.

Junior mimics Senior

NR is getting up early demanding milk and plays around for two hours  and goes to sleep in wee hours of the morning till 10am . I just don't have a heart to wake him just to change his diaper. So much for pampers overnight diapers .

NR follows me like a pup . He runs infront of to reach the destination first ( Destination as in kitchen or restroom ). His dad's fav song  is this and he used to wait for hours together to meet me during our courtship days like a desparado though I never turn out as promised most of the time. I usually chicken out because I can't lie to my mother about where I am going .  During first year of our marriage we used to have silly disagreements (over my MIL's plan of action for us) and I used to just walk away to our guest bed room.  Guess who will be there just after 5 minutes? So even my fake angers can last only for 5 minutes.  My way of handling disagreements is just walking away not arguing with words(Well that has changed into full on verbal/emotional outburst after NR thanks to my hormones).I just don't like to argue .  There are days where I just wanted to get away for few moments and shut the door to focus my thoughts on what making me so upset . What do I hear the same song. CB is a hopeless romantic still.

After nineteen years  Junior is trying to mimic his dad in every possible way. Eagerly waiting for me everywhere. I could see his future . Waiting for hours together for his girl . Pavam entha ponnu vanthu matta poralo theyreeyalai : ). She will be the one lucky girl to have a loving in laws and ever so affectionate NR just like his dad.