I met Venkat and his family this weekend and got an autographed version of his latest book - Practices of an Agile Developer. Its been a fun read already. Fun as in pragmatic fun. Thank you Venkat!

I passed my Yellow belt test and earned it this Saturday. This is but a beginning onto the quest for black.

I put together more furnitures this weekend. Finally our home is coming together. This was a busy weekend. Friday was Tamil New Year (Tamil is my mother tongue). We started our tradition and among other things kids got U-Dub tees. They all looked great in gold and purple Husky wear.

Easter was a lot of fun with kids hunting eggs filled with inedibles. Stef also had put together great baskets and the kids made out like a bandit.

Sam and I did Math together - he was doing his homework(fact-families) and I was doing exercises in Concrete Mathematics text book. It took me 2hrs to do 3 problems, but still…

I also started on GEB - (a very tough and frustrating read so far..)

The weekend is almost over and I still havent packed for the week.. so let me go take care of that..

I mentioned a few posts ago that I had started Karate at the local YMCA. This past Saturday was the first class in which our Sensei let us try breaking wooden slabs. I broke couple using side kicks (mostly using my heel) and the side of my hands. It was awesome to see the concentration and power the human soul possesses. We had a 8yr in our class do the same and it was very humbling. Now onto cinder blocks..

NOTE TO MYSELF:Need to keep in mind that the IKEA furnitures I am putting to gether are not for these excercises..

I was waiting for some big news from the JBoss folks and hoped it had something to do with Larry “GOD” Ellison, but turns out the folks from ATL (JBoss) will stay on the east coast and marry their RDU brethrens in Redhat.

You can read all about it here. Not sure if I am excited or ambivalent for  what this means to Open Source.

Would be interesting to see if Jonas or any other flavors that Redhat might support in the J2EE space will be shadowed by this. It also shows that Redhat is serious in competing in the J2ee middleware space.

I know, I know, I am a glutton for punishment..I managed to attend the second lecture of Dr.Gowers. This lecture was centered around Friemans Theorem and Roths Theorem. The only thing I got out of this was this - taking two simple things and combining them produces enough complexity and wields enough power to solve the most complex theorems…

I am in awe of the genius behind these things and as much as application mashups on the web is cool (like mixing Craigs list and Google Map), the way Mathematicians come up with this stuff is freaking awesome..

I had the fortune of attending a lecture by the famed Fields Medal recipient, Timothy Gowers at UWA. He is presenting a three day lecture as part of the Milliman Series. Most of what he talked was WAY above my head. I knew this was going to be the case, but made it anyhow. This experience is similar to that of hearing Rachmaninoff playing his own Concertos or Nikki Giovanni reading her own poetry. Dr.Gowers was humorous, absent minded and brilliant. My interests in Math is renewed and although I feel like a complete IDIOT, I know why I am one…

DHH of rails fame had the world fooled…

one of the best April 1st joke…

I am sore from picking up furnitures (a mini u-haul truck load) and then transporting them, and then trying to assemble most of them this weekend. Seemed like all I did was unpack and screw

I will feel a lot better in couple days..right now I am hurting every which where and havent even looked at my Math problems the past two days

I will be glad when all the rooms are put together, which wont happen for another 2 weeks. I am off to build my coffee table for the living room…