My-Life

(Note: Unusual post, not about network routing or Linux systems. For purely technical audience of this blog, feel free to pass unless you have a young kid at home!)

In Sept 2021 - my wife and I were blessed with a baby boy (Avyukt). He is now around 1.6 years old. Since Oct 2022 he is wearing specs on his eyes. It’s not common (so far) to see babies that young with eye specs, this often brings up curiosity and questions across friends, family members and even strangers we meet outside on the road, on public transport etc. I am going to document in this blog post about his eyes, our interactions with the doctor and more.

No blog post since Aug 2021. Last few months extremely (and happily) busy. I got blessed with a baby boy in September and since then being happily busy.

Gotta resume blog posts here!

Blog post dedicated to my friend M Henri Day from Stockholm, Sweden. Today I learnt that he’s no more and passed away in the first week of December last year. He one of my few good friends from college days. We both were so called “power posters or top contributors” as Google named us in their different forums. I was one of top contributors in Google Apps (Gsuite / Google Workplace) and he was …..well to be honest I don’t even recall that now after 11 years about which specific Google product he was active on. I think it was Google bookmarks, Picasa and few other things. We were super active in those forums for no specific reason but because it was just fun helping people around. Plus that was the time I learnt how DNS works and was very excited to talk about it with everyone. I was out of school and didn’t perform well & got into a college which was ok. To be true college was less fun and life in Radaur was harsh but somehow I developed the taste of the life there. I documented part of that life in some old posts here and here.

Frugal living

Over the last few years, I have been travelling quite a bit as part of my job at Hurricane Electric. One of the discussions which come up regularly is “When did you arrive?” or “Where are you staying?” or “How many connections you had in your flight?” and whenever I answer such questions to my friends, I get a surprising look. I personally never understand the surprise about it but somehow it comes so often that I decided to blog and document my reply here so I can pass the link next time instead of explaining. :)

This week I worked on the paperwork to get on the board of E2E Networks as one of the Independent Director. It was quite an interesting process as this is the first time I am joining the board of directors of an organisation.

About E2E

Not to be confused by the “Networks” in the name, E2E is in the business of selling high powered, low cost compute (Virtual machines) hosted in India targeted towards Indian organisations. It’s one of the very few organisations of its kind which is listed at the National Stock Exchange of India (NSE) since 15th May 2018. E2E was started by Tarun Dua and Mohammed Imran. I know Tarun since a really long time (if I remember correctly, probably since 2010). It has been good to see the organisation grow from a very small team to where it stands now. While AWS, Azure and now Google Cloud are helping to grow the market of Cloud Computing, there’s still a gap of providers who can offer much more competitive pricing for the monster machines for lesser overbuild which large cloud providers do.

For folks from the non-networking world, default route means basically a path to send packets when you do not have a specific route. So e.g if you know how to send packets to Google, send it, for Netflix, send it, for say Amazon - no path? Well, no worries, just send via a default path. So default route is basically what takes traffic for everything else.

Returning to the post which is not about networking. It’s about default route for home routing table and that’s my mother. :)

Last week I was on way from Kolkata to Delhi after spending time at ISOC IXP workshop. It was Jet Airways 9W 946 on 10th March 2017. The flight took off slightly late and 90% time went just fine. Original arrival time was 16:30 though it was expected to be little late.

Landing time…

At around 16:15 pilots announced “to prepare for landing” and cabin crew started collecting waste and getting people ready. I was sitting on the window seat and looking at clouds on my right. It was a usual view from the window and I usually like when the plane crosses over the clouds. It was little bumpy by 16:20 and that is usual behaviour. As it proceeded it went from “slightly bumpy” to “very bumpy” ride. Somewhere around 16:25 or so plane gave the first feeling of “free fall”. It’s was the same feeling as we get going down the roller coaster but 10x of that. Few people screamed. It reminded me of one of my previous travels from Malaysia to India in 2013 after APRICOT 2013 when the flight was very bumpy and also faced free fall at that time. Next after 2-3 mins plane had another free fall and it went for 10-15 seconds. A Japanese gentleman sitting next to me wasn’t wearing his shoes. One of his shoes literally touched my chest and fell on me. That was the first time I also got quite scared.

So last week I couldn’t hold off my curiosity about world famous address “221b Baker Street”. I passed “Baker Street” tube station quite a few times and finally decided to just look for it. :) By time I reached the street it was lightly raining and I found few other (curious) people like me standing outside 221b Baker Street. It has got a museum for Sherlock Holmes (though was closed by the time I reached).

I just visited Moscow last week for attending ENOG 11. Some quick pictures from this short trip.

I had a nice two day trip to Paihia over weekend. Paihia is one of key tourist towns far up in North. It took around 4 hrs via bus from Auckland. Travel was quite comfortable and place was excellent. I would say Paihia itself was quite a nice place but travel to it was one of best scenic travel I ever had. [gallery link=“file” ids=“3895,3896,3898,3897,3901,3902”]  

I travelled via Inter-city bus. Outside India it’s quite common that just one person takes care of everything on behalf of bus company. Same person works on loading stuff, verifying tickets, and of course driving bus. Most of societies outside India are extremely cool & calm which makes overall service quite doable. Not surprising - same person drove the bus back to Auckland next day and the way he kept on updating, greeting all passengers was just amazing. I never had Haryana roadways folks greeting like that. ;) And oh yes did I mentioned of free wifi in the bus? :)   Although I have yet to upload most of videos I took on the way, here’s a quick video showing way from Auckland to Paihia.