Yesterday they announced their very generous ThanksGiving offer: Free 1-for-1 license. So I can give away a Free 1Password for Mac license – and since no one else in my family has started using a Mac full-time yet, I will give it away to you!

Just add a comment here – saying why I should give it away to you and wait for a few hours. I will pick one person here and send them the license. Make sure you leave some contact so I can get back to you. How will I pick? The most entertaining comment of course. But yeah – don’t hold me to it, I might just randomly pick someone.

Thank you for playing!

Posted via web from arnab’s posterous

The first album consists photos from Hamilton Park and Alki Beach, a beautiful area in West Seattle. Because of it’s location, you get great views of Seattle and the Harbor from here, specially great in the evening.

Hamilton Viewpoint Park: See details here and the Seattle gov parks page.

The full album (only 26 pics – easy to click through and to add comments too) is on my smugmug site: http://arnab-o-scope.smugmug.com/gallery/9163956_kwkf7.

Here are a few excerpts:

I usually do. And a lot. In fact my friends say that I tip too much – whether in restaurants, in saloons or in cabs. Today was different – and I honestly did not think that the driver deserved even a cent. Moreover, I actually wrote down a big “$ 0.00″ in the tip section of the receipt. Here’s what happened, from scratch.

Got down at Sea-Tac around 9:35 PST. The Seattle Metro bus 194 had just left and the next one was a 30 minute wait. BTW, the Metro 194 route is a real nice transport to/from the airport if you are in downtown Seattle. The route is via I-5 and it takes about 30 min to get there – hassle free. And after you read what I am about to write, I hope you will also rate the Metro 194 as a good service – at least better than some cabs.

So we decided to get a cab home – and got into one. I have taken cabs from SeaTac to my house 7 times in the last 1.5 years. And I am positive that it was always around $34-$36 – and I would mark it up to $40 and a nice “thank you”. Today it ran up to $41.

Anyway that’s not the problem – I wanted to know if the fare had increased (I remember that there is a flat rate of around $33 to/from SeaTac and downtown). So I asked the driver if there was a flat rate from SeaTac. He said that it’s $35 flat from downtown to SeaTac but not while returning. And I thought they have a card in every cab that states the flat rates – so I asked for it. The guy was pissed off. I don’t know what crime I committed (as far as I know, I asked him in the most polite way possible – I didn’t want to come off as a cheapo).

He got agitated and said that there’s no such card, the fares increased in October and I can pay him $41 now. So I asked him if he can swipe my card (I was carrying $40 cash – as my previous experience had thought me to to). He took the card, swiped it and asked me to sign my receipt.

It was all okay till this part – here’s when the fun started. I was giving him my autograph when he started off in Hindi – “Tum saale Desi logon ka yahii problem hai”. (for my non-hindi-speaking friends, that means something like “This is the problem with you Desi (Indian) people”) hmmm… I was not gonna take that sitting back – and I thought it was a racial slur. As far as I am concerned, the situation or my behavior did not warrant a racial slur (really, nothing does. Or should). I had never heard (or maybe I never recognized it) racial abuse so far – and that too from another Indian/Pakistani? . So I told him, in English, as I didn’t want to go down this path – that, this was uncalled-for and was really bad.

By now he was out of control – shouting and enraged (and I swear I did not call him any names at all). So I said, I am not going to sign the receipt if this goes on. I asked him to shake hands, take the receipt and go home (Ok, even I was not the most polite person by now, but I was not bad-mouthing). His reply was – “Pay and get out of my cab.” He tried to threaten me by picking up the phone and starting to dial someone. I thought it was the police – and that they would be fair mediators So I said, “Who are you calling, the Police? Ok – let’s wait for them – I am not signing the receipt till then.” And then he gave in, again shouted me to get out of his car.

Anyway, I got his badge number and details – and he asked me if I was going to file a complaint. On hearing “yes, obviously” he shrugged and muttered something.

So – I just left all the details of the complaint on the Seattle TaxiCab complaint hotline (BTW – a nice IVR system. I initially expected them to call me back during “working hours” – the number’s 206-296-TAXI). Also left a voice mail with STITA cabs complaint line.

Maybe the fare has risen and is now more than $40. Maybe the sites that Google turns up are still not updated with the latest fares (they still say the fare should be around $35) -
http://www.engr.washington.edu/epp/icders/transp.html
http://www.portseattle.org/seatac/ground/groundrates.shtml#d

Or maybe the meter was rigged? Maybe STITA cabs really deserve the bad bad reviews they have on yelp (oh and they are going to get another one in a few minutes).

But what I am sure of is that it did not deserve all the rude behavior, racial slurs I got from the driver.

Let’s see what turns up – both complaint lines acknowledged the entry and said that they will get back (in fact I have heard good things about Seattle Cab complaints) within a few days. Will update the blog when I hear from them.

What a year it has been! At first I had some doubts about leaving all the people I know (at NYC) and coming over to a new far away place and to a radically different organization. But, now that I look back on it, and I hope I am not speaking too soon, it looks like it was one of the best decisions in my life!

Thanks to Amazon and my colleagues (special thanks goes to Ali Rizvi) and the awesome community of brilliant engineers at Amazon I have gained a totally new view of technology in the large, programming to be concise.

It’s a world I am loving and living every moment. And the Stocks that you get after a year helps too

And I met Ujwala here! Bet you’ll be hearing a lot about that!

So what do you think? Hasn’t it been an awesome year?

Anyway, I always wanted to get my own domain. And play around with Rails, Capistrano etc. to launch it. So here it is. I did spend a lot of time creating it. But finally, I think I am going the low-hanging-fruit (agile?) way – so right now it’s the simple, easy and open source WordPress running on my host.

I am planning to add some dynamic mashup content (like my activity list from all the services I use, and some news that I feed in all mashed up). Let’s see where it goes.

A few of my early 2009 goals were to learn Dvorak, master vim and Rails and then use all that to prototype my site. Status

• Dvorak – home row + 4 top row keys done – progress is slow – but it’s good
• vim – well I have been using it for a couple of years now. But now I am really learning it. I really like Swaroop C H’s A Byte of Vim. And with some snazzy plugins (rails.vim, project.vim, surround.vim and fuzzyfind.vim it is really becoming the best editor ever)
• Rails – I have been using it for a year now. And I can do the “good stuff” – but now I am learning in-depth. Feels great to learn the details of the various components

Along the way, git came. And I got hooked to that too. But anyway, things are moving along and I am happy about that.

So one of my goals (getting my site working) is done. Here it is – www.arnab-deka.com (bye bye blogger – will miss you)

Now it’s up to improving it. Will keep you updated!

We did well in the 2008 Summer season. We won 6 out of 9 league matches (and the first was a very thrilling tie). In the last league match we even scored 102 for 1 wicket (the highest and only 100+ opening partnership) – and I scored 47 there. So we came out 3rd in the league and got promoted to the next level for 2009.

See my earlier post regarding this.

So last Saturday, Jan 24th, we had the ARCL prize distribution ceremony (at Microsoft Cafe #43)


View Larger Map

It was good. But
1) we reached late – so didn’t get food
2) we came third – and got a nice team trophy. But the 1st and the 2nd spots get personal trophies with names engraved! Well next year!Here’s the link to the ARCL site 2008 Summer league – it’s one of those sites that work well only on IE (or IE tab, for hardcore FFox-ers).

BTW, is the site screaming for a scrapping-goodness?

Update on 02-Feb-2009 – Bharat took an iPhone pic of the trophy – it looks damn good!

ARCL Summer 2008 3rd Place Trophy (Eagles)

If you are not this type of a person – and like to live in your own shell (nothing bad with that) – you can stop reading now – and use your time well doing something else. Like living in your own shell.

Back to the topic – I do skim most of the info dished out at me. Some I keep in my “hmmm” folder of my brain (you guessed it – doesn’t stick long), some I delicious-mark. The rest are the really interesting ones – I find it hard to not share with people I know.

Like this – http://bit.ly/17q25 written by @zen_habits
(this article is on how to use twitter well – I have a truckload, or maybe a trainload of people I know, who tell me – “What is twitter anyway? Just another Social Media Platform? Why would I want to go to yet another site? Is Facebook/Orkut/MySpace/insert-your-fav-social-media-network not enough already?” This is an excellent article on why and how twitter.)

How can I not make my friends read this?

Now if it was 3 months ago, I would have snapped the link up in an e-mail and sent it to all of you, hoping that you’ll also read it and like it and apply it. This group of people would include at least all interesting folks I know in India, NY and Seattle – that’s a lot of people right? And most probably won’t even read it (yeah I know – it’s ok)

No more – I just twit it now – with the knowledge that whoever wants to eat info-blurbs like I do will follow me and read it.

That’s why I urge you my friends/social-beings/netizens, give the article above a read – here it is again for effect – http://bit.ly/17q25

If you do get convinced that twitter is a big idea, can be useful to you and actually help in reducing spam, get an account fast.

You can follow me if you like – http://twitter.com/arnab_deka
Or check out the people I follow – there are some interesting folks – and follow them instead.

And finally, here are some interesting/info on why/how etc. of twitter: http://delicious.com/arnab.deka/twitter

If you are still not convinced and take nothing else from this blog, take this back – you can rest assured that you’ll get spam from one less person now on.

I find that twitter adequately satisfies my urge to burp out bits of info effectively… and thousands of other excuses… So lets stop that thread right there and concentrate on how the year was instead.

At the start of the year, I had just moved into a new city. Another 2000-3000 miles away from home. And at least another 1500 miles away from anyone I could call a friend with an honest face (so that takes out Social Networking Online pals). Agreed I knew Diganta (from college) here – and he was a cool guy to hang with. But he lived in Bellevue (10 miles from Seattle) – I did not have a car and we probably met once in 2 weeks. And he moved back to India in Feb! I had moved from the safety and security of an Indian company into an entirely different kind of organization (I moved from Infosys to Amazon.com in Dec/Jan).

Looking back – it wasn’t a such a bad decision after all -

1) By now I have made a group of good friends – ok – you can’t make college buddies after starting work – but these are a cool bunch of guys. Apart from other things, playing cricket with this lot will be a memory to treasure. The feeling of doing consistently good in a sport is cool (our team, Eagles, finished 3rd in the Cricket league this year – and got promoted to the next division for the next season starting in Feb. And (to a bit of my surprize) I did really well!

2) No regrets about my job – actually with each passing day, I am liking it more and more. I think Amazon and the bunch of incredible enginners have opened me up to a new world. I always knew I loved tech – but not how much. It is definitely an experience to work in such an energetic company and work with such geeky (no offense at all) brilliant people.

3) Got exposed to Ruby! For me, getting exposed to Ruby was by pure chance. The group that I joined was heavily into Ruby and was probably in a handful of Ruby-pro teams in the company at that time. I was open to experiencing a new technology while joining but did not know that it will change how I think about programming. Ruby is now mainstream and by no means I am an early adopter – but I am thankful that I joined the boat early. I was thrilled when I had started to play with Java and all the cool stuff with it (Unit testing, Continous build/integration etc.) – but Ruby has fundamentally changed the way I think about Programming. It is a joy for me now – I think I am a better coder now and I am making the right moves in my career.

4) And most of all – I met this beautiful person – Ujwala. If there is such a thing, she definitely fits me! And the happiness is doubled when she also gives back as much as you do… (We are getting married in summer’09)

I could probably come up with a few other things – but these are the highlights. So, all in all, not a bad year at all. In fact, it could be the turning point of my career/life – time will tell when I revisit this in 5/10/15 years from now!

So -signing off on 2008 for now!

View the full smugmug gallery: http://tinyurl.com/ArnabAlbumGC

This weekend we (Maa, Ujwala and me) are off to Grand Coulee Dam – the biggest concrete dam in North America – generates about 6500 Mega Watts – the highest for any dam in the world.

The drive from Seattle is beautiful – it passes through the Seattle hills/lakes, the Snoqualmie area (water falls, snow-capped mountains and passes), beautiful farm-lands and then on to the arid eastern Washinton area. The route follows the Columbia river and there are some really amazing viewpoints over the gorges along the way. There is a sound and laser show on the dam every evening from 8:30 PM (May-September) – the lasers use the dam as the screen! It is supposedly the largest such sound and light show in the world! The Columbia rivers history is depicted – so all that this weekend.

and the trip weather looks good: weatherbonk link