24 April 2019

Wishing happy birthday sometimes makes ME happy!!

I can’t even remember how many years it has been that I have been wishing people on their birthdays. It used to be mostly by emails – and that was pretty unique till Facebook came along and everybody started wishing on FB. That is when I had to up my game by moving away from email to making phone calls. Today, it is much easier for me to call and wish than email and wish.

It is a routine now – morning before going to office, I finish off the wishes to people in the eastern half of the world. After lunch or during lunch break, it is usually the folks in Europe. And after office or evening are the folks in US. Still averaging about 8 to 9 phone calls a day.

Today, I had two of the more interesting phone calls.

The first one was to a lady who I caught today in the middle of her lounging in the San Diego sun in her retirement years. She seemed genuinely thrilled to talk to me. She asked me how I had such a great memory. I admitted that I did not have a great memory – I just write birthdays down. We chatted for over fifteen minutes. She insisted that we meet two weeks from today when she would be visiting Chicago. I am going to test her and see if she remembers how we met the first time about ten years back. The truth is she was our customer and the only time I had ever seen or talked to her was when she had called me to her office to fire us!! I am sure we will get a great chuckle.

The second was a colleague that I had met once in Brazil. I had kept up with him thru my birthday calls and then one day, his numbers and emails stopped working. Later, I tracked him down to Utah – of all places!! Today, I called him. Took him two minutes to remember who I was. Then it hit him!!!

His follow up message says it all!!

Birthday wishes are about making the recipient happy. In a weird way, that happiness came back one full circle today!

Category: Musings | LEAVE A COMMENT
24 April 2019

Want to try a new puzzle?

Do you know the game Concerto? I did not. Just learnt about it today. The game goes roughly this way –
You start with a grid of squares – can be as big as you want it to be.

Now two players take turns to draw lines. Each turn can draw a line on any of the sides of any of the grid squares – provided somebody had not drawn there already – and it can be of the length of one side at a time only.
(You might remember a variation of this game where anytime somebody completes a grid square, he/she claims that square and in the end you count up who got how many).

However, in this game, anybody who completes a shape – any shape – entirely by his/her own lines only – wins. Note that it does not have to be a square or rectangle – it can be any shape. Also there might be lines drawn inside the shape by any of the players – it does not matter. It just needs to be a completed shape with one player’s lines only.

Look at the picture below as an illustration. The player with lines with black tips wins. Think of the shape comprising the four squares marked with red blobs – that is a complete shape built by the black tip lines only.

Here is the question. Just like the second player in a game of tic tac toe can always prevent the first player from winning, in this game too, the second player can come up with a strategy that will ensure that the first player can never win regardless of how big the grid is.

Can you come up with such a strategy?

(Send me PM with your answers; I will publish your correct answers in the Comments section later)

Category: Puzzles | LEAVE A COMMENT
15 April 2019

The second one outlived the first one!

In the 26 years that I have been in this country, I have owned two cars. The first one – the car I really loved – was my trusted Honda Civic. It lasted me nearly 11 years. I used it a lot. And abused it a lot more. In the end, most of the electronics had quit on me, the driver side window could not be lowered and in an incline, after coming to a full stop, it would inexplicably start rolling. I would have to furiously pump the brake pedal a few times to get it to stop and then it would start rolling off again. Which was not an issue in Dallas with all the flat lands. But in Atlanta, that was a serious problem.

The new company that I had joined in Atlanta spend more money moving it to Atlanta than the car itself was worth. The best part during the move was looking at the pockmarked diagram the mover had drawn (it had so many hail damages that I never bothered to fix and he was not in a hurry to take any blame) – it was worse than a kid’s face afflicted with chicken pox! Well, Sharmila forced me to give up on that car due to safety reasons. It was a few miles before 160,000 miles and I never got to reach it.

Now, my second car has successfully reached that milestone. This one is 12 years old now and is getting long in the tooth too. The company stopped making this model a few years back. To give you an idea how old it is … it has a CD drive and no USB ports! Which, along with a lot of the on-board electronics, quit working some time back. The tire pressure gives false readings all the time – especially when it gets cold. But the most infuriating part is that the cigarette lighter does not work. In case you were wondering… it is my ability to charge my phone that has gone up in smoke!

All the same, it has done the job of taking me from Point A to Point B for twelve years. Sometimes with panache and sometimes reluctantly. But the driver side window still works and it reached this morning that coveted 160,000 mile mark!!

[No comments on me taking pictures while driving at 20 mph, please 🙂 🙂 ]

Category: My Family | LEAVE A COMMENT
14 April 2019

Great Read

Rarely do I read a book twice. Certainly never have I read a book cover to cover and then gone back immediately and read it up a second time. Not of course, unless compelled by some school teacher or an impending test.

This book was that good for me. As again, Somshekhar Bakshi came up with a winner recommendation. I knew of somebody else who would be interested in this book. Sent him a copy in India and after a couple of weeks called him to discuss the materials. We talked for over 30 minutes over the phone on topics ranging from Higgs field to Dark Matter and whether there is a possibility of a fifth force in the universe.

That was my math teacher from school days – Dr. A.N.Roychoudhury!

Where did water come from?
How come the tiniest particles are comprised of mostly nothing (waves and forces are involved) and yet when the hammer falls on our thumb, it hurts so much?
Why is it very highly likely that there is another earth which has brown camels and Starbucks coffee and somebody looking just like me writing a blog?
Why is it that there is a vast part of the cosmos that we will never ever be able to see – regardless of progress of technology?
How does light determine the total amount of knowledge we will ever have?
Does time really exist?
What is the real shape of space? Could it be warped?
If all the known forces attract, how come the universe is expanding at a rate faster than light?

These and many other intriguing questions are dealt by Germany’s popular science author Stefan Klein in this book. The one challenge is that it is a little difficult to procure. There is no digital version and you have to wait for a few weeks before you get it.

For me, it was absolutely worth the wait!

Category: Books | LEAVE A COMMENT
12 April 2019

Friday evening wind down

“Yeh bhi andaz-e-guftagu hai koi
Jab karo dil dukha ke baat karo
Hum tadapte rahenge yahan raat bhar
Tum to aaraam ki neend so jaaoge”

“What style of conversation is it that you have
That brings suffering to my heart whenever I hear you talk
I will toss restlessly thru the night here
And of course you will sleep restfully over there.”

Category: Musings | LEAVE A COMMENT