Do you know the way to Chandigarh?
After college I made some very good friends in Chandigarh. Chandigarh can be covered in just half an hour. Its very small city. Too small. Too urban. No one knows who lives in adjoining home or worse in the adjoining room. I met my sweetheart in Chandigarh. Too many things in my life happened in Chandigarh.
The Bhatura King, pop corns and “expresso” coffee around fountain plaza, Deepak radio, Indian Cafe House still beats Cafe Coffee day and Barista, having tandoori paranthas at midnight at bus stand, weekend carnivals, Woodland showroom, my Levi’s and Wrangles jeans, my T-s, shopping with bhaiya, bhabhi, Titli aka Navneet, Bhawu 
, Nitin, Shikhs, Bunty and even with Naga, and then my endless trips to Sukhna Lake with Shubhranshu for NSTP or in short bird watching, and Fried rice with Rajmah at Stu C with NSTP, and oh that coffee after the meal at StuC never kept me awake, (-|, Dr. Khosla’s dinosaurs, and museum in sector 10, PGIMER,22 sector and Shikha’s fetish for ear rings, and my darling’s inability to find any dhang ki item in Shastri market, where her roomies used to go for shopping…
…I miss Chandigarh 
I Chandigarh.
Dionne Warwick is not so common name in India(sadly Metallica is). Here are some lines of a song written just for her:
Fame and fortune is a magnet.
It can pull you far away from home
With a dream in your heart you are never alone.
Dreams turn into dust and blow away
And there you are without a friend
You pack your car and ride away
The songs is “Do you know the way to San Jose?”
Did you know?
I have been told time and again that I have a flair for writing, That I can write. Encouraging words. I can. To be able to do some thing that is not a common trait makes me happy. Amuses me.
In 1995, our English teacher asked us to submit an article. Each one, write one, she said. So every one wrote an article and I did too. It turned out that despite my handwriting she was able to read my article and I was selected for a competition. Surprise! 
It was easy when it ended. But in starting the competition looked challenging. The best guy from my class, two from humanities who were studying English as a primary subject and one more from commerce department. I was not confident that I will be lucky 2nd time. We were given a set of articles and were asked to reject some and write a reason why we were rejecting those articles.
Hmm… Tough job. I didn’t want any one to feel bad and wrote a diplomatic reason.
Guess what? 
gt; I won the competition. 
Other guys kind of felt bad. They all had wrote a lengthy page and mine were just two paragraphs, first saying, oops, I didnt want to do this but I had to reject your article, I feel sorry for you, and the second one saying, come on, this is not end of the world, give it another shot.
That year and next year, I appeared in my school magazine as “Chief Student Editor”. 
Intelligence questioned
I did spend some time trying to figure out, think, assess, estimate, and all other possible analysis I could do to title this post. But unfortunately I failed and hence the title. This can be classified as a paradox. May be. May not be.
We all live among people who make us believe we are smart and intelligent. The definition of smartness and intelligence changes from person to person. I call a person smart and intelligent who can use his or her brain and understand that using computers is as easy as reading and understanding a manual. I dont consider myself as a great developer but I can read the manual and I can write a computer program. Hence I consider myself enough smart and intelligent to call my self as a developer, who can RTFM and develop a computer program.
But this is not all. There are people around me who strengthen my believe and confidence. I am not so confident about my looks but I am confident about my smartness and intelligence. But my intelligence have been questioned numerous times. Like, how to prove a Thermocol is not bio degradable to a person who claims to know more than I know on any given topic? Or how to encourage your team mates to adopt HTML standards. I can force my team to adopt the standards, they are “junior” to me. But I can’t do the same with my team. They all are at my level and at any given time they are as smart and intelligent as I am and if the mess up HTML its quite right. They are smart and intelligent. This brings up a notion that intelligence is only questioned at work place.
No.
My driving intelligence, which I always agree is still under development, was questioned when I first drove a car on freeways, expressways and drive ways of US of the A. Why do people in this side of the word drive on right hand side? Intelligence questioned. But why do people call a liquid or a fluid, “gas”? Intelligence questioned.
People who has watched Bollywood movie “God tussi great ho” and Hollywood movie “Bruce almighty”, mostly Indians, must have
questioned themselves, why and who copied which movie? Damn it!
And talking of Bollywood movies, is Harman Baweja a clone of Hrithvik/Hrithik/Rithik/Ritik/Whatever Roshan or is it other way? And how?
I feel quite intelligent, in fact a genius, when I have answer for my wife’s questions, which is very rare.
Maximum number of characters in URL
I ran a quick test to find out how length a URL can be. The result turned out to be browser dependent. Another browser compatibility issue. I have Firfox 3.5, Opera 9, Safari 4.0.2 and IE7. I don’t have Google Chrome as I feel its a (cheap bollywood style) rip off of Webkit. I create a dummy URL quite lengthy, around 3012 chars long. My intelligence said no browser will support a URL lengthier than 256 chars. How intelligent of me? 
IE only supported 2083 chars. I tried copy pasting the whole 3012 char long URL in address bar but it only accommodated 2083 chars. Have a look at this MSDN link. Damn it!
I used strlen from PHP and String.length from old faithful JavaScript to find the length of URL and both returned same results.
What about FF, Opera and Safari?
All three were OK with 3012 chars. I didn’t try to find the max length of chars. Still majority of web surfers depend on IE. Anything that is not accepted by IE is a possible risk. So I decided to end my research here.
browsers just ain’t no good,
a thing that’s well understood,
you can see it everywhere you look,
browsers just ain’t no good…
– Lyrics by Kumar Chetan Sharma ripped off from wonderful track “People ain’t no good”, sung by Nick Cave from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.
Day 24 - Pizza!!!
Nothing special. I debugged JS code and shortened everything. I am “Genius”. 
Following my healthy meals idea I opted for an apple in lunch. Ankit needed some thing else and he opted for a Pizza. Why? Coz we were near the parking lot of a Pizza place.He ordered a totally veggie Pizza which I also tasted. The pizza was tasteless for me but according to Ankit it was near to authentic Pizza. He had been in Germany and have tasted authentic Italian Pizza, which as per his statement will be “bakwas” for me.
In the evening I decided to go for a walk. Healthy idea. After a 30 minutes walk I opted for more fruits in dinner, this time melons and mango juice.
