Roman god of Pizza ? Tony !

Acquired a microwave oven over the Sankranti/Pongal long weekend. With expired gift cards that had to be renewed by adding an additional 50% of each gift card. A strange quirk that was a result of a combination of gift cards not carrying the expiry date, retain outlets unable to confirm when the card actually expired and patently stupid enterprise business workflows having web forms for the previous era paper gift coupons but get translated to more modern plastic cards. The details could be another blog post - so we leave it at that.

The kids demanded to have a pizza made at home. Went and bought some pizza base and mozzarella cheese. Sunday brunch menu was to be pizza. Followed the instructions that asked for pre-heating the oven to 200 deg C. Literal following of the manual meant I missed the minor detail of keeping the crusty plate inside the oven during this pre-heating process !

Got the base ready in a bit of hurry with butter, toppings of tomato, baby corn, onion  & capsicum, grated the cheese on top and kept this raw pizza on the crusty plate. Asked the kids to pray to the Italian god of pizza. For usual South Indian food, we normally pray to Krishna (by saying Govinda !) - so by induction a Roman god had to be invoked. The kids came up the name Tony almost instantly.
Sounded Italian. So went with it.

Placed the plate on the high rack once the oven beeped mid-program. After 7 minutes, the pizza was not entirely ready so kept it for a few more minutes.
First home made pizza at our home was ready. The kids loved it. It was not great but not too bad either.

Jai Tony !

 हर किसी को मुकम्मल जहाँ नहीं मिलता ।
किसी को ज़मीन, तो किसी को आसमान नहीं मिलता ॥

Pool Shpool

It's day 3 without the car. No cars available is the message on the uber app.Caught an auto to the main road. Turned on the app again. Got an option on Uber Pool for Rs. 118/-.

Decided to go with that option. The cab arrived in about 10 minutes. Had 2 passengers already in the back seat. Had to occupy the front passenger seat which felt cramped with my 2 bags. The other passengers got down after 15 mins.

Thought had the car just for myself till my destination. But when the driver looked like taking a wrong route was when I realized there was one more pickup.
This was a car pool - so part of the package.
Reached office in about 1 hour 15 minutes - not too bad.

One after a billion

It is a Tuesday and the car still refuses to start. Wifey had called a mechanic but he did not turn up yesterday. Decided to try a cab aggregator service. Mostly influenced by a promotional offer that came my way after paying my broadband bill. Still wondering if that offer had anything to do the issue with my car. Far fetched  by any stretch of imagination. A random co-incidence is all it is.

So downloaded the Uber app and registered my account. Booked a cab today morning. Hit with the ominous surge pricing. Was asked to confirm 1.9 - surge factor at 8:30 am. Surge factor can go up to 5X as I got to know while talking to the driver later.

Proceeded and got a cab within a minute.

Got talking with the driver on the way. Better understood the cab aggregator business model.

Driver owns the fuel and car maintenance costs (including insurance, regular maintenance etc.).

They get paid a fixed amount for every ride. Yes, fixed amount for a ride, irrespective of what customer pays for the ride. Driver pays Rs. 300/- per week as device charges for the mobile phone and SIM card that Uber offers. Money gets transferred to the driver bank account on a monthly basis (Ola apparently settles daily). The driver mentioned that he has to do 10-13 rides per day to make it work for him. That implies starting at 6am in the morning and going on till midnight.

No wonder these unicorns are growing like crazy. 

Bill came to Rs. 498/-. Paid Rs. 0/- thanks to the promo code.

Uber just celebrated a billion rides. I have come late to this party.

Realization of the day - Cost of convenience matched by surge pricing.

Starting trouble

Monday morning struck unexpectedly. I was all set to leave for office. Put my bags in the car and turned on the ignition. But the car refused to start. Tried cranking the engine few more times but no change in result. Had to choose a different mode of transport to get to work.

Started walking up to the main road which was about 2 KM from home. Decided to catch an auto-rickshaw as I was getting late. First auto I approached, he asked how much would I pay as he refused to go by meter. Typical response. Stopped another one who agreed and off we went. Took about 1 hour to reach office by usual route. Got exposed to all the traffic smoke and dust on the road. Paid Rs. 192/-.

On the way back, caught a Volvo bus till Sarjapur junction and walked 4KM from there to home. Bus fare was Rs. 60/- and took 1.5 hours. Felt some nausea and got a headache. The walk back also involved lots of dust and smoke.

Reached home with burning eyes and a heavy head. Some corn and hot ginger tea helped pull through a tcon later in the evening.

Realized how bad the air quality was on Bangalore roads.
And the luxury of travelling by own car everyday with the windows up.

Web Architecture

We had an event last Friday with a meeting of minds of all software architects in my company. There was a panel discussion on Agile Architecture where some seemingly innocuous but deep questions were posed and discussed. A sample includes

What is Architecture ?
Who is an architect ?
Does an architect code ?
Is s/he part of a scrum team ?

These questions came back when I saw this in my front yard yesterday while plucking flowers.

You probably would have to zoom in to spot the spider and its creation - the web. Some of the same questions came back

Is the spider an architect ?
If so, it was spinning the web itself too. So is it playing multiple roles ?
If not, then who is ? God ? Nature ?
Wasn't it agile - built just in time when it needed it ?

Not sure about the spider species but have been curious to find out ever since I had seen it a few years ago. There is semblance of an architecture - the web was very resilient to the breeze, shaking of the bushes when I plucked flowers and many other scenarios.

The legendary persistence  of the spider was visible as well. A number of incomplete, shattered webs were visible around this web.

One web. Not a very social insect. A number of questions.

Windows 10

Windows upgrade is doing the rounds. My laptop got a notification and I added my computer to the queue of systems lined up for a "free" upgrade from Windows 7 to 10.  

Not sure I would bite the upgrade though.  

Recent feedback I got from a colleague who updated his phone OS from Windows 8.1 to 10 and lost all wireless connectivity makes me really wary.

However, another kind of windows upgrade was overdue at home.

 

The shutters on the first floor rooms had started rotting. Exhibit A above. As the group photo shows, over a decade of weather exposure had taken its toll.

 Last month, during an unusually severe thunderstorm, one of the windows broke off and fell down. Broken glass,  piece of roof tile were the result. Luckily no one was standing below and hence no human impact. 

That was the trigger for lazy me to act. 

My wife and father-in-law got a quote of about Rs. 26,000 for the 10 window shutters from a local carpenter. The carpenter was not very clear on what kind of wood he would use and did not sound very convincing. A competitive quote from a carpenter who had done some work before at our home came up to Rs. 60,000.

We went with the higher quote as the carpenter recommended using Honne wood which was more expensive than the Red Sal that the current set had. He challenged me to procure the wood and he would handle the fitting to bring down the costs. I did not take up the challenge. On hindsight, I should have.

About a week after the work started, the upgrade is over. Windows have been replaced and painted. Have paid Rs. 52,000 so far. The cost of wood is still under contention - the carpenter claims to have paid for 12.15 cft (cubic feet) of wood at the rate of Rs. 2100 per cft while my calculations based on the window dimensions come up to half of that. Here is the break-up of the costs.

Wood (around 7cft) -  Rs. 14000

Planing charges       -  Rs. 5000

Fitting Charges        -  Rs. 15000 

Glass                        -  Rs. 3200

Beading                    -  Rs. 2000 (200 ft. @ Rs. 10/ft

Painting [labour]      -  Rs. 2400 (6 days @ Rs. 400/day)

Paint material           -  Rs. 2500

Even though he calls himself a carpenter, he is actually a contractor who co-ordinates carpentry work. He has a number of workers including painters who do the work while he goes about finding customers and collecting money. Business development some would say. A good portion of the costs can be brought down by directly buying the wood, getting the frames built and fitted via carpenters. Fitting charges are around Rs. 160 per square feet.

A good learning in upgrading windows. Not a very pleasant experience though. Sounds like what is in store for the other Windows upgrade as well.

Ghalibiyat

निकले पर और लगे फडफडाने  तो लगा की कुछ कहना ब़ाकी है 

हुए वाक़िफ़ गालिबियत से तो समझे की तालीम अभी बाक़ी है ।।