Ok, this post is way too late – but in my defense, I’ve probably never been this busy! I guess this is a good time to post, as today marks the 3rd anniversary of my blog. Wow, 3 years just flew by. As I go through some of my older posts, I can see how I’ve changed so much. I guess it’s useful to have a blog, some way or the other.

2008 was simply a phenomenal year for me: Glendix was born, I graduated from college, had an amazing summer at Mozilla, joined a masters programme at Amsterdam, and visited 9 countries. Phew

After winding up my only exam for the semester, a couple of friends and me headed out to explore Europe during the winter vacations. The experience was extremely overwhelming. Instead of writing anything, I will let some pictures do the talking. We visited 5 cities in total: Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Salzburg and Paris. Christmas was spent ice-skating on a nice, snowy night in Munich; New Years eve at the Eiffel tower. I wish I could say there were great fireworks, but I would be lying

After returning to Amsterdam I was greeted with deadlines for programming assignments, so I spent most of the month writing a lot of code. Now, February has come,  it’s a new semester, bringing a whole new wave of course load (taking 6 subjects at the same time!). I’m seriously considering cutting down on a whole lot of extra activity and focus just on the essentials: College, Mozilla and Glendix (in that order). Maybe it is time for me to retire from all the other FOSS projects, I just don’t have the luxury of time I had as an undergraduate student any more…

In other news, I am now pretty good at cooking a basic meal: rice and dal. I’ve also made Ghee from butter with acceptable results twice until now, and the latest attempt even resulted in some delicious ‘nei kasandu‘, a typical tamilian snack made from the remnants of the ghee-making. Oh, and I’ve also picked up a little Dutch; basic phrases like ‘Hello’, ‘Thank you’, ‘Pardon me’, ‘I don’t understand dutch very well’, and ‘See you later’.

I can’t even begin to imagine what 2009 has in store for me, so I’m not going to bother. Here’s to a great year 11 months ahead!

P.S. You may have noticed I’ve added links to archives of both technical and non-technical blog posts on the sidebar. This should help all my non-geek readers sift through to the posts where I don’t talk about programming or technology (for the most part, at least!)

Today, after roaming the earth for 21 years depending on someone else to cook my food for me, I made a giant leap: I cooked my own meal. Right from buying groceries to cleaning up the dishes afterward

Here’s a picture of the modest beginning:

It looks a lot more delicious than it really was: just boiled vegetables with garlic bread – dressed with salt, pepper and a dollop of butter – rather bland for an Indian tongue. But, oh well, it’s a start

The better part of my 4th week was spent in bed trying to recover from a 104.1 body temperature. Let’s back up a bit…

Some (well, most) of the interns decided to visit the Haight Ashbury Street Fair at San Francisco on the Sunday of my 3rd weekend in the states. It was a great idea in general, because I hadn’t been to “the city” yet and the fair looked like a fun place to be. After a pleasant 45 minute drive, we were in the city looking for parking, and with a little help from j4cbo’s phone we were ready to hit the fair.

The road had a stage for bands at either end, with a line of shops on either side of the street in the middle. It was what a typical fair would look like, tons and tons of people walking around, people advertising for a product, politician or right, people selling good food and drink, and lots of generally good shops selling everything from hats and sunglasses to sweatshirts and “medical marijuana”. I took my fair share of food, starting with small bits of popcorn from a HUGE bag someone decided to buy, finishing off with a double chocolate chip brownie sundae at the local Ben and Jerry’s. San Francisco was windy at the time, and I was glad I brought my Jacket along. We started winding up at around 5, and were back at the apartments by 7 after a stop at La Bamba’s for mexican dinner.

Somewhere along the whole trip, I caught a virus. Gah, I wonder what it could have been.

I started feeling a little off almost immediately but I shrugged it off as tiredness from the trip. I also managed to go to work on Monday and Tuesday, though I could feel my efficiency levels at a real low. I did manage to finish writing the server API for Weave, however, I think I could have done more if I were in a normal state.

Wednesday morning, I just couldn’t muster enough energy to walk after getting out of the shower, so I decided to stay in. The fever got worse through the day, and on Thursday morning I made an appointment with a doctor. He said it was a general case of viral fever, and that it would go away in a week, regardless of whether I would take medicines or not (Go immune system, Go!). But he prescribed some anyway, they were painkillers and some antibiotics, to make life a little easier in the coming days. (Note to Self: Medical care is expensive in the US! My travel insurance wouldn’t cover a ‘minor illness’ like fever. Next time, I should make sure to get an insurance that does cover these ‘minor illnesses’).

Anyway, as Sunday approached I got a lot better and was back to normal for work on Monday. Truly, there is always light at the end of the tunnel, because this week has been one of the most awesome ones so far. More on that in another post!

My first day at Mozilla was awesome. After a brief introduction session with Julie, during which I also caught up with Mary (I met her earlier at FOSS.IN, Bangalore) – I was shown the way to the ‘S’ building, which is were the labs people work. There are these cute scooters I’ve never seen before that can be used to ride between buildings ‘K’ and ‘S’ – they’re just too damn fun!

I met with my mentor for the Summer – Dan Mills (thunder) and he got me setup with this really huge monitor and power cables for my laptop. I’m still trying to get used to this OS X extended desktop feature, and it feels a little weird typing on the laptop keyboard but looking at the monitor (I’m not a touch typist, but I can type reasonably well without looking at the keyboard). Then, I met with the other folks at the Labs, a small but amazing group of people. Myk is also working at the Labs, and his desk is right behind me – Yay

Right now, the focus at Labs is to roll out a beta-quality version of Weave. As the Firefox 3 launch approaches, we’d like to make sure Weave 0.2 is ready to use around that time. One of the reasons is that Google Browser Sync isn’t going to upgraded for use with FF3 for an undetermined period of time. I’ve been going through the targeted bugs for 0.2 and am trying to fix as many as I can.

I finally checked-in to my alloted apartment yesterday, and since my roommates aren’t scheduled to arrive until next week, I have the entire place to myself for sometime. I saw an episode of How I met your Mother – hooray now I can watch all my favorite american TV shows at the time of airing (not weeks later, like before)

Ok, so my second day has begun and it’s almost lunch time. The american meal timings are a bit off from what I’m used to because most of their meals are compressed to be during the day, and then there’s a huge gap at night between 8pm and breakfast. I’m going to stock up on some knick-knacks for my midnight cravings.