resident evil

As my boys play the new Resident Evil #7 game, I have been laying around battling the evil bugs that have taken up residence in my body. Soon after reaching work on Monday I started feeling bad with my throat hurting and my head throbbing. I went to the company health clinic, but they did not help much. On Monday night my throat felt like I drank gasoline and threw a light match in my mouth. I did not get much sleep that night. The next day my head felt like someone was hitting it with hammers. My chest felt like a NFL lineman was sitting on my chest. In the afternoon I could not take it any more and went to our local family doctor. She had mercy on me and gave me antibiotics. By the time it turned dust my throat was on fire again. I tried gargling salt water, cough drops, some magic mouthwash stuff and nothing really helped. On Wednesday night I started cough uncontrollably. I moved into our guest room so my wife could actually get some sleep even though I had little hope of getting any myself. As the night progressed my whole body started hurting. My neck, my back and then my kidneys. When I got up in the morning I could only hope the medicine would start working so I could feel better. Finally after a morning nap I started to feel slightly better. Who knows when the evil residents will decide to leave, but I can hope that occurs sometime tonight.

Aradhna in Raleigh NC

For the last several months I have been planning on Aradhna coming for a visit to the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill triangle in NC. I ran an ad in the local Indian magazine called Saathee for the last three months. I ran the same ad in the local Indian movie theater called Galaxy Cinema. For the last couple of weeks before the event, the same as was run on Nazar TV, which shows Bollywood videos from 3-4pm each Sunday afternoon. Lastly, the NC State radio station has Indian music from 10-noon each Sunday morning on WKNC for a program called Geet Bazaar so they announced the Aradhna concert also. It took work and money to do this. So on Sunday night five days before the concert, I get a call from the president of the Hindu temple telling me I could not have the concert at the temple which was where all of the ads listed as the location of the event. So I have to make a mad rush to find another place in less than a week. It was very stressful to say the least. I felt like I wasted my time and money and energy. We finally decided to have the concert in the same location for both Friday and Saturday night on the NC State campus in the middle of the graduate housing buildings. I invited all of my Indian friends to the new location and was very disappointed when not a single friend of my showed up. On Saturday morning, the Aradhna tabla player told me the house would be packed for the second night and it was hard for me to believe it after the sparse crowd the first night. Sure enough the crowd kept picking up as time went along and before I knew it the whole room was full. That was a great feeling although quite different from my disappointment the night before. Because the crowd was excited, the band fed off the energy and the performance was special in many ways. On Sunday morning, I drove two of the band members to WKNC radio studios to meet Afroz Taz and John Caldwell as both of them had been in India and had not responded to my emails. I was beginning to panic that yet another planned event was going to backfire. We decided to drive to the studio and just show up. Thankfully, Afroz was there waiting for us. They had a short but great 10 minute session and sang parts of two songs. On Sunday afternoon we had several friends over to meet the band at our house. Our kids were so happy to attempt to play Chris' sitar and then play Rock Band with them. A sad start but a strong finish.

Andrew's drawings

Latest award winning drawings by our middle son, Andrew. It is a shame to be so good and not enjoy doing it. This weekend, I actually heard hints that he wanted to go to art school one day. That is the problem with being a teenager, you are trying to discover what you want to do with your life.

relaxing weekend

Friday was one of the worst days I have had at work in a long time. It seemed like everything I touched failed to work correctly. I tried to fix one problem and and would cause another. My co-worker was on vacation and obviously could not provide me with the wisdom I needed to solve the many problems I was causing. I was very frustrated by the time I got home. Plus I was running out of options in finding an audio engineer for the upcoming Aradhna concert. At least when I got home and checked my personal email account, I found a couple of people offered to help with the sound, so by the end of the day I had good news to make me feel better about my bad day at work.


Just last weekend it was snowing and was under 20 degrees, but this weekend the temperatures rose to 80 degrees. That was quite the 60 degree temperature difference in just a few days time. That meant it was time to get outside and mess around. I cleaned up the garage to celebrate the warm weather and then washed both of our vehicles. Not too exciting, but then the big event came on Sunday afternoon. I finally took the time to mount the painting of the children on our living room ceiling. We put it on a wall so the kids would not have to see it all of the time but my wife and I could look at it as often as we wanted to. Since it is so large we did not want it to be in our faces all of the time. It looks very nice up around 10 feet from the floor on the wall I filled in. I took a photo of the painting on the wall with our new $17 Logitech webcam which we used to talk using Skype with our son in Korea last night.

This is the meaning of the words on the painting:

Prema milana ko nai-na tarase
The eyes long to be united in love
Ghaayala mana tori nagari aawata
Wounded hearts come to your city
Saba eka chana mei swaagata paawata
All, in an instant, find welcome

Google Chrome vs. Safari 4

I have been using Google Chrome at home and at work since it was released. Today I tried using Safari 4 for the first time. I really like the Google Chrome "most visited" page as I can see what the page looked like last time I visited it. Plus it remembers the most frequently visited pages. The challenge in Safari 4 was customizing their "top sites" to have the same site I had in Google Chrome. It was definitely hard but I finally accomplished it. Two of the web sites I added will not generate previews, one of them being Bank of America's site, which I find really odd. CSS 3 is the secret behind both of these web browsers. Webkit is used in both of these web browsers as well as used within Flex/AIR. The thing I have always liked about Safari is the built-in RSS reader available in the menu bar. Nice to see iTunes CoverFlow being used for Bookmarks. At least they have a new style carousel for the "top sites" page that just looks too cool. You can make a tab become a separate window but I could not find a way to re-attach it. I find Google Chrome annoying on how easy it is to make a tab become an extra window but at least they have an easy way to just drag the window back as a tab. Somehow several times a day accidentally detach a Google Chrome tab as a new window. I am glad I don't have this problem with Safari 4. I have had Safari installed on Windows for a long time but only used it to double check browser compatibility as I found the fonts looked really odd on Windows. I found the CSS checker interesting as it shows how lacking IE and Firefox are and how far they have yet to go to catch up. For now I am a Safari 4 convert.