Rajiv’s Personal Blog

I have now officially been in the US for a decade. I still remember the day I first reached the US - 11/18/1998. As I start to think about the 10 years some good memories and some frustrating situations are flashing by. I arrived via Singapore on 11/18/1998 some time in the afternoon and my good friend Vikram was the airport to receive me. Leaving from the airport for the corporate apartment and stopping at Amarin thai for lunch - it was my first time outside of the country I was born and brought up in - India. I started working for Sun Microsystems as a contractor pretty much in a couple of weeks and after a year and 2 months I officially joined Sun Microsystems. I still remember being part of the first release of J2EE - J2EE 1.2 and the kind of team and schedules we had. That in my mind has been the best team and the best experience of my life in the professional world. As of this writing I am still with Sun Microsystems and still with the same group - Java EE and working on the next revision of the platform. A long time for a most people in the valley and have been through the ups and downs of the company.

On a personal front I got to travel the world both for work and for personal vacation both in and outside the US, got married to my beautiful and loving wife Preety and now we have a 20 month old daughter that is the apple of our eyes. My brother also moved to the US first to study for his masters and then to work

Some of the frustrating things personally has been the process for greencard processing. Most people who have lived in the US that long are citizens or on the way to becoming citizens. However for both me and my wife we have applications that are filed in June 2001 and February 2000 respectively and are still waiting for the USCIS to approve the application.

All in all I would say it has been an interesting ride and an interesting learning experience of living here in the US.

I came across snappyfingers.com website today. Basically SnappyFingers is a Question and Answer search engine. It indexes FAQs from all over the web and provides a search interface. It seems like an interesting site and not only is it useful for finding answers but also for researching common queries surrounding a topic. Looks promising but still in it’s early stages though. For more details about the company click here.

It’s been a while since my last blog. The 2008 NBA finals between Kobe Bryant and his LA Lakers and the “new” big three (KG, Ray Allen and Pierce) of the Boston Celtics. The Celtics have made a big turnaround from the previous season to one with the best record in the NBA this season. Great credit goes to Danny Ainge who made the right trades at the beginning of the season to take the team to the NBA finals on the verge of winning it’s 17th NBA title and for the first time to the finals since 1986. I hope that the Celtics will not collapse from this point and will win this championship. Unlike my hatred for the New England Patriots I actually like this Celtics team and am rooting for them. I hope that there isn’t going to be another “Tim Donaghy” incident here. As for Phil Jackson stop complaining about the discrepancy of the free throws.

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The New England Patriots “path to perfection”, “19-0″ season has come to an end in a rather uncanny fashion - perfection and 18-1. Relax 1972 Dolphins. you’ll still are the “only” unbeaten team in a season thanks to the New York football giants. I also want to highlight David Tyree the rookie receiver who made an excellent catch on an even unbelievable scramble by Eli Manning on 3rd down and 5 to go with 1:08 left in the game. As for the New England Patriots they will have a long off season specially given that they had to give up their first draft pick with the spygate scandal. GO NEW YORK FOOTBALL GIANTS!!!.

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Adam Gilchrist is a true gentleman in the sport. On his final tour before he retires, at his stop at the Gabba he was caught behind trying to pull. The ball snicked off his glove and carried to Dhoni and he did not wait for the umpire’s decision. He could have probably gotten away had he waited, but that’s what makes him a gentleman in the sport and in the Australian team.

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As per Justice Hansen’s report the incident was initiated by Andrew Symonds when he took offense to the fact that Bhajji patted Bret Lee on the back and started an unnecessary incentive laden attack. When asked if he had an objection to that Symonds reposnded - “My objection was that a test match is no place to be friendly with an opposition player, is my objection”. Symonds what do you have to say about this. However Bhajji was fined half the match fee and Symonds was let go? Is this real justice? Yet Cricket Australia, Ricky Pointing and others are “furious” over the decision. What makes Symonds so special that he isn’t even being criticized for initiating the whole thing? Pointing get Symonds in control before being furious about the decision.

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In one of my previous post about cricket I said that Australia is the best team in the sport. However after seeing some of the current series between India and Australia and the way the Australian team players, in particular Andrew Symonds has been in the series I need to rethink that statement. A best team in sports isn’t one that just wins but does so with class, one that Andrew Symonds for sure does not have. In the second test match between Australia and India in Sydney Andrew Symonds was out not once, not twice but thrice and still wasn’t judged out by the umpire. One of the three was a clear caught behind by the wicket keeper to which Symond had to say -

“Apparently, in the eyes of some critics, I should have merrily walked after nicking one to the Indian wicketkeeper. But I have never once walked in my career and I’m not about to start now. And, barring Adam Gilchrist, nor will anybody else in the current Australian team”

If this is really true then the only true sportsman in the Australian cricket team is Adam Gilchrist aka Gillie. I tip my hat to you Gillie if this is really true. As for the rest of the team - being the best isn’t about just winning but also being a true sportsman.

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I am currently visiting my in-laws in Bombay (Mumbai) for a couple of days and they live pretty close to the airport. The one thing that bugs me the most here is the fact that there is a lot of air traffic at night. Want to know why? India is one of the few countries that lets planes land and take off during late night / early hours of the morning. I feel that a lot of international airlines actually misuse this and make the flights either land or take off late in the night / early in the wee hours of the morning. India, like most other countries, should ban take off and landing of flights late night / early morning. The occasional delayed flights should be fine. However flights schedule should not allow flights between 11:00 p.m and 5:00 a.m in the morning. A lot of the European countries and US cities don’t allow flights later than 10:00 p.m or allow them to fly out only in a certain flight pattern so that it does not affect the local residents as much. I wish India would also put some such rules in place.

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Preety, Rhea and I just reached India last night traveling from San Francisco via Newark, New Jersey and here are some thoughts and traveling tips with infants specially long distance like the one we just did.

Our trip started from San Francisco in the morning. We had a Continental flight from San Francisco to Newark at 8:30 in the morning. So we needed to get up and get to airport on time. I had checked in online and when making the reservation for the flight I was assured that I had a bassinet seat from Newark to Bombay so I was happy. I even reconfirmed that at San Francisco airport. The flight from San Francisco to Newark however we did not have any bassinet or even seats with leg room . We thought given the grander scheme of things it would be ok to have Rhea in our lap for the first part of the trip.

The surprise came when we reached Newark. At the gate we were told that we did not have a bassinet seat and it was a common mistake that the reservation folks make in thinking the flight from Newark to Bombay is a Boeing 747 while the actual aircraft is a Boeing 777. At that point we were just annoyed with the airline and we tried to argue a lot with the ground staff (which I must say at Newark was NOT AT ALL courteous or polite. On the contrary they were outright rude in some cases) about getting a seat with the bassinet but they couldn’t do that cos it was already assigned to other infants traveling on the flight. Then we found out that the first class bassinet was not occupied and asked them that given the situation they should upgrade at least Preety to that seat so we could use the bassinet for Rhea. Of course that didn’t happen. So we boarded the flight and the seats we had at least had leg room. So that was a positive. Preety and I were both wondering how we were going to manage for 15 hours with Rhea in our laps. It turned out ok but both of us were dead beat when we reached Mumbai. Another thing that I noticed with the airline is that the staff weren’t as helpful specially with an infant as I would have expected. I have heard really good things about the staff on oher airlines like Singapore airlines and how helpful they are with infants. On the contrary when I asked them if I could use the crew rest area since no one was using it so that we could put Rhea on the seat and sit next to her while she was sleeping. They outright said “No that is reserved for crew only”. So disappointed I didn’t bother to ask them anything else for Rhea. Bottom line make sure that you SURELY have a bassinet (don’t know how though) for traveling with an infant.

Some tips -

Travel light. Make sure you have enough clothes, diapers, wipes and another essentials for your infant. Do not take more than you need in your hand. We made the mistake of carrying 2 laptops, diaper bag a hand bag and some food for Preety (which was necessary as she is on a restricted diet).

Plan on traveling without a bassinet. Another couple that were traveling on a flight to Delhi carried their car seat so that if they didn’t get a bassinet they could use the car seat. While not ideal it is definitely an option at least to get some rest yourself.

If possible try to find out the bassinet seats on the various aircrafts and make sure that you get those seats.

I attended the CommunityNext over the weekend and here are some observations. A lot of applications are available today for Facebook users. The best one that seems to be getting funding as described by one of the VCs in a panel, Naval Ravikant, are ones that are “Simple, Social, viral, Gather user data and universal”. If your Facebook applications have these features then you don’t even need to go asking for funding. He will come “begging you” to take his money. There were a lot of the application developers that were presenting what they do with their apps, what the strategy is to take it forward as well as “monetize” it. The common theme seemed to be advertising. In some cases there were partnerships with some companies. For example Universal Studios partnered with the “Free Gifts” application developer to make the “Sydney White” gift available via his application. The common message from all the application developers was that “Invites are dead”. People don’t pay attention to applications where users need to be invited.  Some of the applications that developers talked about were - “Grow a Gift, Where I have traveled, Food Fight and Rock U”.

Lot of the “companies” developing applications for Facebook have 1-10 people companies. More likely 1 or 2. They don’t want to run and manage all the infrastructure by themselves and are all looking for hosting. Most of these applications use PHP and a database like MySQL. Very few applications use Ruby or RoR. The more popular ones that are growing rapidly need scaling, load balancing and storage space that can grow over time but don’t necessarily want to pay for it upfront.

Overall, there seems to be a lot of excitement about the Facebook platform. A lot of angel investors to some seed funding companies are putting money into it encouraging people / new companies to build applications targeted solely for Facebook.

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