Surreal experience of the weekend: Sitting outside the Systems Administrator’s office and eavesdropping on a group of five girls and three guys who were practising their American accents. Practising, as in, the girls recited phrases from a sheet of paper, fumbling over pronounciation, and the guys ( who seemed to be the resident experts) correcting them from time to time. The girls weren’t too bad, I realised, after one of the guys took the piece of paper and gave a live demonstration of How to Speak Americanised English Properly. <\/p>\n
Second-most surreal experience of the weekend: Gatecrashing Jay’s farewell party and being offered a bouquet. <\/p>\n
I was in Bombay the last four days, working on a client issue, sitting in front of endless rows of 21″ flatscreen monitors and clicking on various instances of Web Application Performance Test. We needed 500 users to run a benchmark, and the evaluation copy of WAPT provides for only 20 users per instance, so we installed 25 instances of WAPT on 25 machines, and whenever a test was fired, we would have to start all of them one by one. Which, you will agree, gives a slightly different twist to the expression “running tests”.<\/p>\n
It was raining on Monday morning, so I could not go to Flora Fountain and hunt for books. I was not supposed to buy any books for the next two months, but the Strand Book Fair got a little too much. Found a nice collection of short stories by Kim Newman, he of the Anno Dracula<\/a> series, a couple of movie-books, and an interesting-looking book on songwriters of the 60’s and 70’s ( Dylan, Cohen, Baez, Carole King and all) They were also selling The Beatles Anthology<\/b> for 1500 rupees, and because I have sworn not to buy it for more than 1000, and because I was short of cash, and because the weight would have been prodigiously high, I ditched it.<\/p>\n