Emergency landing and random encounters

Another fun travelling... My flight had to make an emergency landing in a small town in PA due to some smoke in the engine compartment. Believe it or not the smoke was caused by a trash bag stuck in the engine. Anyway when people around me were frustrated, it was yet another delayed/cancelled/diverted incident for me so who cares? Even though not clear enough in the picture, but what you see are the fire trucks surrounding the plane from a distance. It was no big deal just a few conservative precautions. I knew my family was worried for me too. Over a period of time I have figured it out, the lesser the instructions the more worried they are. Anyhow, We stayed overnight at a hotel and flew back to Chicago with a standby ticket to Denver for the next day. With sitting next to a Russian family who spordically spoke in English (only when getting chocolate brownies - a typical alien behaviour to show they belong), to an Indian who tried to avoid looking at me till he found me throwing a smile at him. Also met a bunch of overacheivers with backgrounds of Stanford and MIT. Each encounter has a funny story. Just over hearing the guy had a computer science degree from Stanford (SUN remember?) was even funnier. He kept mentioning "the school" again and again till the girl asked which one did he go to? The old trick of impressing girls I guess. From the talks of entrepreneurship to office jokes to the top of the world views, I did feel my flight had made an emergency landing. From the realization that the next flight will not have a place for me I was in the line to try for another one when I heard a voice "Mr. Srivastava". I was back in the saddle.

Novel Idea to find the car in a parking lot

It has always been you taking the remote and searching for your car. The better would be if the car has a sensor and tracks your remote. It can make a sound "Hey Ashish I am here", or raise a flag mounted on top of it or some other crazy way. How easy the life would become. Ford/GM/Toy/Honda? Anyone listening?

Heard of Manfume?

Courtesy Thinguy and Linda I found myself to be:

Obama announces his cadidature

Long awaited but Obamaannounces his candidature for the presidency. Now its yet to be seen if the country with 200 yrs of democracy that calls its' president the leader of the free world is itself ready for a black President, or a woman for that matter. I think the world is keener than ever before.

एक शेर मुलाहिज़ा फरमाइए

आसां हो ज़िन्दगी तो क्या मज़ा है जीने में?
क्या लुत्फ़ है ख़ुद अपना ही अश्क पीने में।
उड़ा के ले गई ये कश्मकश बदन के पानी को,
सीने का ज़हर उतरता है अब मेरे पसीने में।
दवा अब क्या करे ये इक अंगूरे ज़हर?
उतरा करें जो खंज़र हजारों, हमारे सीने में।

Any substitute for Rational Rose? Anyone?

Since Rational Rose became the tool for the Riches I have been looking for it's decent substitute. I have been playing around with Poseidon for a while which I kinda liked but its even community edition is not free. The 30-day free evaluation is more pain in the neck to renew. In the free world atleast the community editions should be free, but anyway. I started looking at the ArgoUML which looked pretty decent but its' code generator looks a little out-of-whack. I created a simple class A with two attributes int a; and String b. Upon code generation I see a public class int {} defined in the class A. C'mon there has to be a way to recognize these standard Java types. I do remember fiddling with Ambercadero and I do not recall why I stopped using it. Could anyone recommend some neat UML tool for Java? Code generation and Reverse Engineering would be a plus. Hmm... Or did I already find a Good One (StarUML)?

Veeru is no Dada, so beware!

Who the heck does Veeru think he is? Does he think he is some Dada? The next time he messes up, he should be kicked and thrown out to play gilli-danda in the streets of Najafgarh.