adarsh bhat’s blog

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 have been released, if you care.

software

Cold Wave Grips Bangalore

Ha ha. Very funny. The temperature now is a 16 year low of 12.2 °C for November. And it’s like -4 °C here.

chicago

Ha ha! Interwoven Chicago office gets a walk score of 98/100, just as much as Joel Spolsky’s Fogcreek does!!

chicago, interwoven

For the longest time, I failed to see the human side of Chicago. Until yesterday.

I took a walk to Macy’s on State Street and saw a huge crowd of people clogging the sidewalks. Kinda reminded of the crowds in Brigade road in Bangalore. Many people wouldn’t like it, but I guess I like having a lot of people around. The decorations outside Macy’s were awesome. I regretted not taking my camera with me.

I decided to walk back after a while. I thought it must have been something like 8:30 in the night, and I didn’t want to wait for it to get too cold. When I looked at my watch, I was shocked because it was only 4:30 in the evening. So I decided to hang on a little longer and walked towards Millennium Park. It was really nice to see all the happy people ice-skating in the ice skating rink there. May be I should try that some time.

On my way back, I noticed that many of the streets had been cordoned off by the police department and there were huge crowds of people on the street with some good band music blaring. I walked ahead and joined the crowds. Turns out there was some kind of parade going on. Later on I learned that they do this parade annually before they turn on the decoration lights on Michigan Avenue.

Once the bands were gone, we waited and waited for a long time in the cold. After waiting for 30 min or so, a bunch of lights came around. People were exhausted by then having seen nothing.

I was yet to see so many people at one place in Chicago. It was fun waiting there in the cold with so many people, although nothing much happened. After a while, the parade really started. All kids were up on their dads shoulders. There were a number of really pretty floats. The most popular were the ones with disney characters on them – mickey, donald, pluto and so on.

At the end, came the fireworks. Those were pretty good and well worth the wait.

Explosions do sound much louder in downtown, with the sound echoing between all the buildings.

One the down side, it was sad to see fear in the minds of the people, even the kids. When the first fireworks went off, one of the kids next to me was taken aback. She said, “Oh my God! I thought it was a bomb!”

chicago

And everyone at work is like “This is NOTHING“. OK, I can figure. But why do they have to keep saying it?

Clarification: That’s in the morning, and yes, its centigrade. I wonder how soon before its fahrenheit.

I had fun fooling David with my little Blue Screen of Death screensaver at work today. But little did I know that I was messing with cosmic forces I understood nothing about.

I came home after work, and first thing I saw on my laptop was a… Blue Screen! It even came with sound effects (hey, its vista). After core-dumping, the machine rebooted automatically.

I started the machine in safe mode (with networking). I liked the way Vista handled things from here on. It figured that there had been a blue screen and offered to figure out a solution to the problem. I clicked OK and it presented me with a report saying “This problem was caused by Windows Vista. Please install this patch” with a url to a patch that fixes some “USB-Core” issues. Very impressive. Not only did they already know what the problem was, they even had the solution ready. Great! But why they hadn’t already pushed it as an update is still a mystery.

What’s the catch, you ask? I mean come on, how can everything go well? The patch I had to download insisted that I validate my copy of windows (for the umpteenth time). Turns out Validation does not work when you’re in safe mode. So you’re pretty much screwed in such a situation.

I rebooted the machine in normal mode and luckily this time it booted alright. I downloaded the patch and installed it. Whew!

Yes, superstitious that I am, I also removed the Blue Screen screensaver.

software

The view from the apartment every morning is so pretty, it makes me forget that it is cold outside.

(A few backdated posts about my early experiences in the US are due.)

I have a television at the apartment. I find it really hard to watch any tv. I have a strong bias that nothing is good on television here.

The last time I was here, I watched Fox News for 15 min and could not watch television for a month after that. CNN is better, but news channels here still lack the neutrality that I could find back in India. As it is, they play only US and Pakistan news. I like the food channel though. I haven’t started watching soaps and sitcoms yet. Need to figure out what channel they are on.

NPR on radio is much better. That’s the station my radio alarm is set to. Each morning I wake up to news about the presidential candidates – for instance how Hillary Clinton didn’t leave the waitress a tip.

I use television mostly as a way to keep me awake. On occasion, I’m really bored at the apartment. When I feel that I might fall asleep on the couch before dinner, I turn on the television so that the noise distracts my sleep.

This confirms my theory that I can live without television.

society

The world’s biggest polluter says the world’s second biggest polluter says poverty is a bigger problem that pollution.