Hold Open The Glass Door...Please

Ankita has been making ambigrams for sometime now and she made one for me too!






Thanks Ankita!

Ever since I was Delhi bound for freed.in, I have been encountering t3rmin4t0r lookalikes quite a few times. First at Mumbai airport, there was this guy whom I overheard speaking in fluent bengali. Now, the chances of the real t3rmin4t0r speaking bn_IN is quite remote, hence any suspicions were easily discarded. After enjoying 3 days at Delhi, sankarshan and me boarded an Air-India plane to return home. The plane was on a Varanasi-New Delhi-Mumbai route and when we boarded there were already a few passengers inside. So, we located our seats and I nearly gasped. In the row behind us, 3 guys were fast asleep. Aisle and Window were sporting the same hairstyle as you-know-who-by-now. I sat down, fastened my seat belt and turned towards sankarshan to say something. There again...across the aisle on the same row. Yet another t3rmin4t0r.

Apparently 6-7 guys (somewhere between 25-35), including all the hairy ones, were travelling together. They were saying pretty rude stuff about the air-hostesses and doing mischiefs (like not following the instructions during take off and landing etc.) to get their attention. Initially, I thought they were a group from some high-paying IT company and were returning from a holiday after blowing up some good amount of money. Overall, pretty disgusting. However, after the meals had been served and everyone was settled in, a steward comes to them with a sheet of paper and a pen. He tells them that his friend follows their music and it would be really great if all of them could autograph that piece of paper for his friend. All of them quietly sign the sheet and then for the rest of the journey things were pretty much uneventful. Neat! They are a "hindi rock band", based in Mumbai. Not too famous I presume, but googling does help. :-)

Tazz, unfortunately, they were not performing at Eastwind Festival, but thanks for the list

Looks like TechKriti '08 at IIT Kanpur was a blast and louiswu - the dude who had a big hand in making it happen has blogged about it here.

And here is to the new r0ckstar - our very own Ankita Garg - who spoke for 6 hours during her workshop on "Basics of the Linux Kernel". The other session was about LinuxChix India and we are all waiting for her to return and fill us in with the details. :-)

Albeit late entry about the event that was held at SCISR (Pune) last weekend - GNUnify 08. Besides the fact that the chirpy volunteers always make me wish that I was back in college and part of such a nice event, it was a nice occassion to meet up with friends, talk about stuff and generally have a good time. This year, I had a talk+BOF on behalf for LinuxChix - India. I started off with a general introduction about the group and then we moved onto the proposed agenda for the BoF. After the CityMeet last month, this was another nice brainstorming session. The session notes are up here, with a huge list of To-Dos that can be taken up during the year. Some of the tasks would be done locally, but overall the ideas are easily reproducable elsewhere too. Perhaps, the gang in Pune could lead the way. :-)

Another fun bit was the proposal to have the group's presence at various social networking sites. Barkha also seems to have received the same request at another event, where she was talking the very next day. Well, if the not-so-traditional forums help us take forward the idea amongst the youngsters, then it sounds like a pretty much fun idea.

A few of the *tireless* volunteers:




Even Karunakar turned up with the LC tee to show support. Really, sweet of him. He has been helping us all in the indic l10n community for a long time now and is a wonderful mentor. :-)



And Barkha, real sweetheart, brought us lovely home-cooked-her-mummy-made-yummy-stuff..



..travelling 10 hours on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway.

Ankita's talk is up next at TechKriti - IIT Kanpur.

Thanks to Anuj's Mom...these days we (read hungry-for-home-made-food-maniacs) are getting the yummiest of food that we have tasted in a while. Thanks a lot Aunty and have a nice stay at Pune. :D

Also big thanks to Anuj for getting the tiffin boxes as well as for dragging us out of our seats to ensure we all get generous helpings.

Thanks to Sayam and his dad for digging out an old book and sending it across in reply to the RFC call for bug 247233.

As per an extract from this document, the symbol looks best to be positioned as below:



The above reference is from the book titled Bangiya Shabdakosh by Haricharan Bandopadhyay published by the Shahitya Akademi. Right now Sayam is gathering a copy of the complete three volume set in Kolkata.