Nirmal Jayasinghe

used to do this alot for christmas [not only] and now miss so much. must start again.. [photo by Grundlepuck]

I think from ages this is the first Christmas I’ve been able to spend normally, since about the start of the new millennium. I remember always being kinda stuck in exams or studies or a wait for results or something. But thank goodness not this time, I’ve finished school, scraped something together, and happily sitting around doing something I love. This indeed is a holiday.

Before this I think the best free Christmas vacation I got was on 1999. I remember listening to music on never-ending sunny mornings, fooling around the place, doing nothing and the like. Before that the vacation was always spent out of Colombo at my grandparents’. That memory is sadly long gone.

Other stuff included eating more chocolaty stuff that whole life, partly courtesy of the darn box of grandma’s chocolate-chipped cookie box I hastily got as a present for my parents and the almost equal and more spoiling thing they gave me back. My poor teeth… And today at work was a huge chocolate cake again, courtesy of Shash. We were bugging him for a Christmas treat since ages and guess it backfired: D couldn’t stand for about half an hour after gorging down on a huge piece complete with a cherry.

This post is almost nothing and boring, just because I wanted to write something. 2007 has been superlative, thanks, not the least due to happenings in December alone. This can very well be an isolated tranquility assuming grad school looms next year, and possible complications, etc, etc. I’d better make the most of this, then.

Last week was one hell of a week. So much stuff took place I have difficulty in remembering and believing that they actually took place. Kickoff was on Tuesday: I graduated. Next on Thursday our undergrad paper was presented at the college research symposium. It was technically an awful bore but fun-wise kinda fine, met people, hopped around and sat at technical sessions of my choice, and grabbed a copy of the proceedings (although I’m yet to read it).

Then without a space for a breather came the much-awaited camping trip- historically the fifth one organized and executed by a select close clique of pals at college. Despite having participated only once before, I loved it from the first day. I’m forever in debt for that first invite I got on a lazy late afternoon at office from R.

This time the destination was the KDN national park complex, a southbound lowland rainforest, i.e. ‘the Jungle found by N’. We got together at the public library and D’s dad brought their jeep to be the luggage carrier. On our way there we hopped down at the Richmond Castle and ‘Dust Falls’, one of the coolest waterfalls I’ve visited, esp. the second and first step falls were brilliant. The topmost step was absolutely stunning, visible at the end of a rocky corridor. Everybody agreed on that. I do hope we have some photos safe from what we took from there.

We had had our ritual hotdog lunch on our way and reached our destination around mid afternoon. The lodge had a superbissimo stream running right in front, which invited us at once. We dipped and swam and water-fought until we got outof our breath. The girls, not daring a direct dip, did the crucial mistake of walking down to the bank thinking we’d ignore them. They were irrevocably wet in seconds, and ran back uselessly cause we did the courtesy of dragging them back in for a proper bath (guess it was better else they’d have all caught terrible colds :-)).

That night we had an open forum. D kept insisting we played ‘Kageda Mokkadda’ (Who’s What?) instead, which apparently was a game which included everybody getting packed into a single darkened room, reaching out and squeezing someone, and then guessing out loud which person’s which body part was that [the innocent example given was like 'Nirmal's hand']. Unfortunately the girls vetoed it. Then, as newcomers to multi-day trips, I, Lakshi and Tharu had to act out something. Lakshi came out with a brilliant plot of an educational ‘mature-rated’ mini drama, which was hilarious. What we bowed to was remarkable applause. Then everybody sat down and gave the girls the usual ragging, like interrogating on their love lives, past and present, other stupid detail, and the like. It went on til around midnight.

Next day dawned with a planned trek into the forest complex. We visited some waterfall, all the time fighting off leaches. Nels’ salt spray did a cool job, as well as Dinu’s ‘Cinderella oil’. There followed another dip, albeit disrupted by rain. Then Lakshi, Kush and Thush had to leave early with D’s dad and we missed them alot. That night was a bit mouldy. The girls wanted to return the last night’s pranks on us, and I don’t think we didn’t even hear :-). Next we had a brawl and they walked out on us. Undaunted, we sang alone merrily til past midnight.

The last day’s morning was the coolest. The boys went for a dip and somehow N, D, Tharu and I managed to get R into his primitive bathing suit!! There followed a helluva lot of jeering, photography and what-not, all the while him sitting in the crystal clear stream. Outraged R returned the favor by dumping our towels and stuff in water, formatting D’s SLR memory and shutting himself in the room. We sat murmuring about what’d happen to our possessions (while N sat in a cozy dry Dad’s trouser, Grr..), thinking for sure they were getting dumped in water or worse, only to find out later that he had simply been washing and dressing! Anyways in a sense we deserved that anxious few minutes.

Return was through Galle with some another fantastic SLR photo ops, a watched dip in sea, outdoor lunch and icecream courtesy of R, and a cool seaside drive back home. It was awesome in all sense of the word. N said it has become the ‘family’ trip, with the usual mock brawls and stuff as well, and we planned we’d keep the tradition up after graduation, even when we have kids :-). Although they were newcomers, Lakshi and Tharu got along with everyone like wildfire, and secured their obvious places in the oncoming episodes of the event. The event had alot more memorable moments, like Sara getting dipped in water by D, Nel getting leeches on her socks and screaming, D getting caught red-handed by his dad while attempting ‘Kageda Mokadda’, R episode and aftermath, playing cards after dinner, N having to intervene in all D meal plans, Sara begging N and D to delete the made-up photos, us attempting to ‘darken D’s future’ and him running off screaming out into the night, Tharu’s hair-raising horror stories and me and N’s longtalk on governance oh.. the list just goes on and on.

I simply just can’t wait for the next. Perhaps I’d be a panelist myself.

Coding has so far been more of an activity of hacking than engineering to me. Perhaps its one of the perks of being a new grad code wrangler. Whatever the reason it was, it couldn’t persist. One major project was enough to get a bit close shave and think about engineering: understand the prob, design a workable solution, implement solidly and test thoroughly.

Software engineering or SE [both I and II] used to be one hell of a boring subject back at school. Rather than sitting at a desk poring over diagrams and documentation, we liked to do a quick hack at the nearest lab, i.e. McConnell over Pressman :). It was so much quicker and interesting. But from our first programming class, the instructors tried(perhaps in vain) to get us into some engineering perspective in coding, that means at least to get a notepad page of pencil-driven English of how our code would work from start to end. Think that was the closest we got to it. Software engineering at school meant theory-only and almost no hands-on stuff(atleast any I can remember) other than some CASE tools, but it remained as boring as ever.

Now at the real-life code-shop, things are different. We strive to engineer, while the management approach usually is to get into code as fast as possible cause what the customers need is ’something to look at’. I know of shops that don’t have engineers, but coders only, and do serious projects. No architects or designers either, they get stuff together with sheer experience. But it can be misleading.

It’s somewhat amazing how I never owned any SE texts during college, but I do now. Still construction is my undoubted favorite, but my experience tells me to enjoy the construction cake to the fullest extent it should be part of an engineering bakery. Resisting the urge is all about it, like..

shopping cart wheels by brookem_danno

I thought it was only I who went on to give ‘congressional testimony’ equivalents on projects under my wing in sleep. Now it seems even more enthusiastic and super engineers do, as explained by D [my mentor, idol and superhero] over lunch. He had gone home and was having forty winks according to the story when his sister came up and tried to wake him up for dinner. He had stared at her a few moments sleepily, before saying “..put up an ID in the cart” or something similarly bizarre. Of course the sister didn’t know what he was mumbling about and had stared back at him in disbelief, at what time he had gone on to the extent of stressing impatiently “The cart, oh the Shopping Cart!!”

We deduced that D’s sister left the room thinking that her brother had finally gone off his rocker.

Oh, sleep engineering..