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Tiger season is open

Further bulletins as events warrant

Thank you


http://www.123passportphoto.com/

Eww

Here’s a puzzle to puzzle you. Connect:

1) Guinness Book of World Records
2) Johnny Socko and His Flying Robot
3) Golden Gate Bridge

Puzzled?

Well here’s the answer to set your mind at ease -
Johnny socko and his flying robot constructed the golden gate bridge in record time, and thereby were inducted to the gold plated guinness book of world records.
This is a fact and you can take it to the bank.

Locomotive engines used low cost mochila tied venetians as fuel in the earlier days. Hence the name Lo-co-mo-ti-ve.
Government used to sell people from Venice with hefty sums of unpaid taxes as low cost fuel components to the railroad companies. The mochilas were thrown in for free, in a gesture to create goodwill so that high placed government officials could travel for free.

There’s a pub in south Goa which displays the heads of four drunk football crazy fools, who were fool enough to support greece just-for-the-fun-of-it during the 2004 Euro Cup final which was shown live in the pub in a giant screen, while the place was packed with drunk local portuguese supporting gigantors.
One of the heads in display is mine.

Deathly Hallows is the worst Harry Potter book published. The Voldermort in book 7 has been written so pathetically that if given a chance, Moaning Myrtle could have beaten him with one hand tied behind her back, without a wand using her left hand little finger instead, mumbling spells & jinxes half asleep.

Was Voldermort really the most terrifying wizard of our times, considering:

• Neville Longbottom cut off the snake's neck coiled around his Neck-Which-Must-Not-Be-Touched-While-Carrying-A-Snake-Around-It
• he acted so stupid the whole time without knowing what's wot
• he got himself killed with as simple a spell as an Expelliarmus?

Eww.

Chapter 1 - The Tester Who Tested

I’m working in a Wart hog’s company of offshoring and consulting.

In the first month of my software training, a dangerous Dark Bug, in an attempt to obliterate my yet-to-start-career, killed off my motherboard and a stack of pop music cd’s. I don’t remember much about the incident, but it seems the motherboard laid down her life protecting my career. In this most selfless act of love towards the user, the motherboard managed to reduce the dark bug to almost nothingness. The death of the motherboard and the following explosion of the pc left a deep lightning shaped mark on my ID card.

I was soon sent to an onsite location by a very old project manager. I was to learn the magic behind locating bugs and defects in costly software programs. For this I needed a few books, a mouse, a keyboard and an excel sheet. I named the mouse Handglouse. At the onsite location I learned a lot about the ways of software testing and soon could perform my own charms, jinxes and counter curses to locate bugs and report them in the bug tracking tool. Once the bugs were logged in the bug logging tool, the Department Of Magical Bug Fixers would perform some coding spells to destroy the bug.

During my first year at the onsite location, I made friends with a red-haired software tester of about the same experience as mine, and a girl who always behaved as an obnoxious know-it-all. And she knew it all too. She could even write complex test plans and test cases for functional, regression and system testing even during her first few months in Wart Hog’s. I was having a good time.

At the same time, rumors were going round that the Dark Bug was returning to power. Here and there I could hear stories of how the dark bug destroyed a lot of testers’ and developers’ careers. Towards the end of my first year at onsite, I successfully located and logged a very dangerous “squirrel” bug, which had turned itself to a software feature to avoid detection, using the inherent code of the Bug-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named in order to wreak havoc in the network servers. Even though my job was only to locate the bugs, I actually managed to destroy the squirrel bug, but somehow You-Know-What made itself disappear among the countless lines of garbled code.

You-Know-What made another appearance at another onsite location I was working during my second year at Wart hog’s. This time the bug possessed one of the modules being developed by my best friend’s sister (who was also working at Wart hog’s) making the GUI of the module to act rather funny– text boxes gulped down whatever was typed on them, buttons refused to be clicked and menus displayed non-vegetarian food items. Such was the power of the Dark Bug. The presence of a boisterous and idiotic (as most of them are) project manager did not help much in narrowing down the steps to locate the bug. But finally after much deliberation and slogging (I even had to disguise myself as a network engineer together with a couple of co-testers, to gather information about the bug) I did find the bug and a few developers from the Department Of Curing Funny Acting Modules were able to throw out the Dark Bug from the original code.

The third year went by without much intervention from the dark bug. I had by this time won countless games organized during project parties and had made a name for myself. The mark on my ID card always invited unwanted attention though.

Rain, Rain

Here’s a kiddy nursery rhyme that makes me nostalgic:

Rain, rain go away.
Come again another day.

Little Arthur wants to play,
In the meadow by the hay.

Rain, rain, go to Spain,
Never show your face again.

Well obviously Li’l Arthur is not in Spain – he would’ve been called muchacho Aureliano if that be the case. Or even muchacho Maximus Decimus Meridius.

In any case, artist Denslow depicts him as a grumpy little Scottish laddie sporting a kilt, cursing (in rhymes too) at the rain to go to Spain, so he can have a go at the 9 holes mini – logically located somewhere in Scotland:

But experts are of the opinion that Denslow was a fraud to make him Scottish, declaring that the artist had a natural inclination to portray fictional kindergarten rhyme celebrities as Scottish citizens, citing the fact that the artist’s full name is William Wallace Denslow.

*** *** *** ***

That’s enough of nostalgic nuances and art house frauds. Now for the main story -
It's started raining here. Here = Bangalore , recently renamed to Bengalooru in an effort to preserve the prized local culture – that’s prized Kannadiga culture for the uninitiated.

I was in the company provided, luxurious, public mode of transportation (bus) on my way home from work last Friday, and it started raining for no apparent reason. Needless to say, I was occupying a window seat (aisle seat are for suckers).

A seat by the window in a cozy moving bus is the best place to be when it is raining outside. After a hard day’s work, the sight of Thor, the god of thunder, electrifying the endless skies with his proverbial lightning hammer is always a treat.

No.
Scratch that.

A seat by the window in a cozy moving bus is the best place to be when it is raining outside. After a hard day’s work, the sight of Thor, the god of thunder, electrifying the endless skies with his proverbial lightning hammer is always a treat.

A seat by the window in a cozy moving bus is the best place to be when it is raining outside. The rain drops come splashing down against the closed window, they combine to form tiny channels of rivers and canals, and flow down the glass pane into rain-drops heaven. While you sit snuggly by the window watching the rain fall down harder, tiny droplets of water squeeze in through the chinks and pinholes, and spray across your face along with the cool breeze making you giggle.
(Giggle? Well I can't think of anything else. So giggle it is)

All this while I was looking out the window with the retiring twilight adding a spark of romance to the air. Of course this romantic air's got nothing to do with the adjacent 5'7” fair brunette wearing a flimsy-getup-of-a-skimpy-sleeveless-see-thru brushing against me now and then. She is a complete stranger and you my dear reader, may completely ignore her presence thank you very much. I couldn't help but smile an innocent smile being altogether immersed in this rainy evening romantic continuance.

And looking out the window, I saw people scamping about running helter skelter in search of shelters, two or sometimes even three specimens embracing each other under single solitary umbrellas, a horde of bikers waiting impatiently under a flyover bridge, groups of homosapiens neatly arranging themselves under enery kinds of available road side shades – from coffee shop canopies to corporation bus stands and construction site shacks. I threw a few sympathetic smiles and glances at them to let them know I'm sympathetic towards their sympathetic circumstances which I believe they welcomed as a welcome gesture (Suggestive glances, I reserved for throwing at the girl next seat).

Now it's not too far from my stop and lo the road gave birth to a tight traffic jam without any warning, and it turned to be major-than-a-minor but not-quite-a-Major-major kind of jam (I'd give it a 3 out of 5). Cars, bikes and other sort of short vehicles had taken over the road; covering the bus from all sides – ahead, behind, left, right. I bet some of them even managed to get under and over the bus as well – just to annoy me tightly trapping me in a tight traffic jam.

Back inside the bus, people started calling up everyone at the same time. I can almost swear EVERYONE including the driver and the reacher-stopper-shouter-stopper-namer were on phone at that exact same time (If you are wondering about the brunette, I told you - Forget About Her. She doesn't exist as far as anyone else is concerned. Besides, I got there first).

Bengalooru, being kind of a metro, there were all kinds of people telling their mobile phones that they were stuck in a jam in all kinds of languages – kannada, malayalam, tamil, hindi, marathi, hindi, english. Perhaps even in swahili in an interior Burundi accent.

So finally, I reached my place more than an hour late because of the rain. Shared my sympathies using sympathetic smiles and glances with countless number of unfortunate people because of the rain. Because of the rain, I've almost learned to say this in all kinds of languages: “Darling, I'm stuck in a traffic jam. I'll be late. No, not at the pub. In the jam.”

And because of the rain, I had a good time and a promise for a date with a beautiful Brunette (YES!! and no, no details here).

(I also got something to write in this blog, because of the rain)

Post note: Two days later, as I was walking down BTM 2nd stage, it started raining suddenly and heavily. I noticed that the raindrops were falling on my head, and in considerable amount too, smart guy that I am. I started running towards a small shed a few hundred feet away, and caught sight of a passing bus which was passing by. I can almost swear I saw an idiot by the window with a sick smile pasted all across his stupid sadistic face looking directly at me with that sick, sadistic smile.