Dreaming of an Ideal World!!!

Burton Group Catalysts conference is an annual event which explores cutting-edge ideas, current challenges as well as emerging technologies shaping today’s and tomorrow’s enterprise. Catalyst Conference is renowned for its attendee-driven agenda, high-profile speakers, in-depth content and fiercely independent point of view.  This year, Novell is unveiling its Cloud initiatives through an interoperability demo in this conference.   This is a very important conference for us as the outcome and learnings from this conference will provide the right directions for our cloud strategy.  I’m one of the attendees from Novell with the objective of meeting with customers and partners and understand the concerns which are holding them back from moving to a cloud. 

The venue for this conference is the newly opened San Diego Bayfront.  You get a magnificent view of San Diego bay from this 30 story hotel.  I’m alloted a north-west  corner room on the  20th floor.  Here are some photographs from my room.

This is the view of the bayside.

View of downtown, next to the Bay

The train depot at the north side.

View of the Bay from level Aqua (4th floor)

We struggled really hard for a product release last couple of years.  It was more like 24 hr working through out.  However, I must say that company rewarded us with awards and an invitation to  presidents club.  Today, I noticed this site.  This is the product that we were working on.  Good to see some recognition.

It was Mahesh’s Birthday.  We started with our famous Fresh Fruit Cake. 

Mahesh and Priya suggested that we go to Kanua restaurant for lunch.  I’d never heard of this place. They guaranteed that the food is of Konkan style and we will certainly like the place. 

I couldn’t believe that this restaurant was here for the last 10 years.  The food is amazing and very homely.  This place is located off Sarjapur road, in a small lane.  It appeared that, the owner of this restaurant is not interested in much of publicity.  It was very earthy, with mud pots, wooden benches etc.  We noticed that all customers are in a very relaxed mood and enjoying their food.  We were one amoung them when the food arrived. 

Ashish is on his vacation in India.  He is visiting us on 8th and 9th.  After spending a day at our place, we decided to have a small get-together at KP’s house.  Priya, Mahesh, Giri, Rachana, Vijai and Rama were there in addition to us.   We talked about our old stories and remembered the earlier days that we spent together.  It was a good break after a long time.

We have been watching this grow for a while.
Today, we decided to cut it as it started becoming yellow. Here are some photographs.

Last night Mahesh asked me if I want to join them for a photography trip to Valley School. I couldn’t reject that offer.  It’s been a while since I used my equipments for bird photography, more over, Valley School is just a kilometer from my house.

Mohan and Deepa Mohan picked me up in the morning.  Mahesh and Anush were there with them.  We went a little deep inside the Valley School “forest”.We spotted Malabar Grey Hornbill, common buzzard, Blue-Faced Malkoha, Green Bee Eater, CopperSmith Barbet, White-Browed Bulbul, Tickell’s Blue Flycatcher etc…

Once you go inside, you  will never realize that you are in Bangalore until your cellphone rings.

True.  It was crazy at work as usual. Meanwhile, I visited two places as part of our department picnic, completed two books by Jefferey Archer and did some survey on mobile phones.  Our house construction is also started in parallel.  Quite an eventful time, eh?  I will write about each of them in a separate threads.

I lost all my pages and photos due to a server crash at my web server provider.  To  my horror, I learnt that, they were maintaining the backup also on the same SAN and everything is lost today.  I moved my hosting to another provider and slowly building everything.   So, this is an opportunity for me to start everything new.  Watch out for more….