2008 started with a dark note this time around for me with Mom being admitted to hospital for a Bypass surgery.  The surgery was succesful, mom started recovering her health and January went by quite fast… and then hell broke loose!!!

On the afternoon of February 2nd, mom left us all!!! A shock that none of us was prepared to take! So there went February 2008, down the frigging drain!!!

March and April went by pretty dullish… Nothing interesting in life… Except to mention that I was no longer associated with Nisarga from that point on…  I dint see the same commitment levels coming out of me…  I dint see any point in anything else in life at that moment.

Life did a steady climb from May onwards, when I was asked to travel to Turin, Italy for 3 months.  Lovely trip, amazing places, awesome beaches, serene hills and fields… That was the best 3-month-period of this year.  Met some lovely people in life! Had some of the best Tiramisu and pizza in my life.

Back to India in August, Sasken started dipping down the scales… Motorola was dying… things in my life were however moving good… Got to work on the Media player for Motorola’s Symbian series of phones.  The sad truth however is that not one of the devices I worked on lived long enough to hit the market!

And then on the 1st of October, Teleca happened.  They were opening their operations in India and wanted Symbian developers! Took an interview, got whooopped!! and was offerred a job there… Lovely salary… and most important of all, the power and responsibility to create the India team!!! Joined Teleca on the 10th of November and things have been great since then!!! I am finally going to be able to realise my dream of working on a Nokia phone!!! Double w00t for me

So yeah, Things rolling good after a very very bumpy and rough ride!!! As 2008 draws to a close, heres a list of highlights in life in the year:

1. Saw a live football match for the first time in life!!! Juventus vs. Inter Vs. Milan @ the swanky new stadium in Turin.
2. Learnt italian!!! Personal best for me! Proves that I’m still wired tight and right!
3. Got promoted at work. Yippeeeeeeeeee!!!! I is Senior Engineer now B-)
4. Shifted to Jayanagar from CV Raman nagar.  I now have a crowd at home… Its back to living with a group
5. Bought a 500 gig hard-disk and managed to fill it up to its brim!  Im now busy trimming it down!
6. Got myself an eee-PC – I picked up the eee-PC from jace at BCB7 for an undisclosed sum .  Good company… Ultra lightweight stuff!!! Totally awesome thingy thats running a fullblown Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) distro right now…
7. Got myself an iPod nano – Finally into the apple family… I would never pick up anything more than this from the apple family!!!  49 grams of uber-ultra-light-weight goodness!!!
8. Did a bike trip to Ooty with scorpion032 a.k.a. Laxman Prasad and swaroopch a.k.a. well… Swaroop. C. H.
9. Travelled to Nandi hills on bike again!!! With my roomies…
10. Got a new job… Got more responsibility and got to meet some uber l33t peeps @ work!!!
11. Managed to do a looooooot of reading!!! and a lot of listening to music!!!

Pretty positive outlook I have eh??? Well life rocks… thats the rule… and we live on to die another day…

There goes the post for the past year!!! Lots of new things learnt… lots of pain felt… lots of love lost… and lots more of love gained…

I guess this is what is called a roller coaster ride…

Chao… and Wish you all a very very happy and prosperous new year!!! Have truck-loads of fun…  If life’s giving you the kicks, take it, and enjoy it all…

Lots of things in the last 2 months… the most nerve wrecking thing being the loss of my mom… Something that none of us have been able to come out of…  It so happens that when someone shares a relationship with you thats deeper than being a friend, and suddenly, that person gets sucked out… the void is too hard to handle… neways life moves on… and so do have us…

The next topic of the post: the ever lovely and awesome BCB a.k.a. BarCampBangalore is back!!!  BCB-6 summer edition is happening on april 19th and 20th… The venue is IIM-Bangalore… Be there!!! I’ll be running around fixing up wifi for you peeps… Tats for sure…

The next most important topic of the post: Moto-dead… I’ve spoken about this for a very long time… And mentioned in my blog a couple of times too… This was bound to happen… Motorola Handsets Division being royally kicked out of the Motorola stable… atleast that’s how I choose to see it…

You cant be a blood-sucking leech in this age… you have to contribute or else you cease to exist.  I’d go by Motorola’s top brass’ move to do this… but it could have completely been averted.  They didn’t have to screw up. And screw up with so much perfection that nothing can correct it ever again…

Motorola is perhaps the only company thats been practising the jack of all trades in the mobile segment for quite a while. And guess what! It BACKFIRED!!! What else would you expect??? I may not be Trump but I can see through the lining to say that in today’s age where competing takes balls of steel, you had better not be playing around on the highway!!! You’d definitely get run over!!! Many a time..

And I’d say this with a lot of sadness that a Mobile giant simply went ahead and committed suicide!!! RIP Moto!!! The Razr was an awesome show… nothing else after that… Not one single mobile after that was even worth picking up and holding in my hands…

Coming to the next important topic, my conversation has actually changed places… Keeping in touch with poeple on twitter has become the in thing and the easiest thing in life now… A conversation, although asynchronous, is definitely conversation worth it when the whole discussion is available anywhere and althemore better when the participatory limits dont exist!

Twitter just takes chit-chat to the next level… The erstwhile Yahoo chat rooms concept with a bling from technology… converse from anywhere… anyhow…  Follow me on twitter to know more…

And there ends my hiatus…  Chao…