Waistline woes

As I was standing at the bus stop the other day, I realised that my right hand was resting on something very comfortably - my noticeably protruding paunch ! I kind of laughed to myself but realised the seriousness of the situation. Working out has always been a task that required great motivation (as most of you may agree with yourselves) for me. There was a time in my bachelor days when I used to be a regular at the local gym. Then, I setup my own gym at home and started working out on my weight-bench. I used to feel good about myself then but those were some golden years !

Over the last few years, I have found every possible excuse in the book to dodge the gym even though my waistline was begging me to go. I cannot figure out the change in mentality but I attribute it to the change in place. The golden years used to be in Atlanta. Now that I am in Pittsburgh, I find it hard to go to the gym in the cold during winters. If it is summer, I do not want to waste the nice warm weather by sweating it out on a treadmill ! So, my waistline was suffering silently until a few weeks ago.

A new gym opened up within the apartments where we live. The management wanted to charge $50 for a year. My wife, just recovering from delivering a baby, wants to get back in shape as well. So, we went in for the membership. That was motivation enough for me to get back in shape. So, over the last one week, I tried going in almost every day though I missed the last two days.

But, ironically, I have been eating so many candies and sweets after I started going to the gym, I do not see how this is going to help me. Just two nights back, I could not resist myself from eating a bowl of Caramel ice cream with fresh cherries, topped with honey and chocolate syrup. Tonight, I am planning to try the same with an extra addition to it - Rasgollas. It is an Indian delicacy soaked in sugar syrup. "Mmmmmmm" goes my mouth and "Groaaannn !" goes my waistline again. Hey, I do work out, right ? ;-)

My First Father's Day !

As much as I try to avoid falling into the huge trap set by Hallmark et al for celebrating 400 different things over the 365 days we have in a year, I end up being part of one or the other somehow. And to add to my list is my first Father's day yesterday. With the arrival of my son seven weeks ago into our lives, my wife couldn't help it but celebrate the occasion in my honor. I am no Ebenezer Scrooge when it comes to buying or accepting gifts but as I said, I hate to fall into the Hallmark trap of increasing the country's economics and my credit card limits just because we have to celebrate my sister-in-law's day or my step-cousin's day. My wife, as understanding as ever, got me a sweet little gift of a photo frame with a super-cute photo of my little boy smiling in it. The frame also says "Daddy Rocks!". Coincidentally, I had to do a lot of "rocking" to put him to sleep yesterday. :-) Now, the frame sits proudly on daddy's work desk.

My in-laws have been staying with us (that's a separate blog by itself !) for the last few months helping my wife with the delivery and post-partum. So, my wife and I wished her father for "Father's day" and gifted him with a perfume set. He was completely nonchalant about the whole thing. This was much better than the bewildered look that my parents gave me when I tried to wish them for "Mother's day" or "Father's day" some years ago. In India, such hallmark occasions were rarely celebrated in the past but are catching up real fast and now, my mom called up and wished me for "Father's day" yesterday !!!

The last few days have been very exciting to me since my son has started to recognize me and smile at me every time I talk to him. He has also started to play actively in his "activity gym". There is a monkey, a cat and a parrot that hang from a bar and they move up and down to some tunes every time he hits or kicks them. Somehow, he just seems to like (or hate) the monkey and so, he keeps slapping it consistently. He glances at the cat at times but completely ignores the parrot. Also, I think he may be left-handed (too early to judge, I know) because he seems to use his left-hand more effectively than his right-hand. Surprisingly, nobody in either of our families is left-handed.

Playing around

Spending time with my newborn son is my favorite pastime these days. Everyday, I seem to see something new in him. In the last few days, he has started to keenly observe our faces and move his lips as though to say something. He is also able to move his head and watch us when we walk past him. My wife and I thought the time might be just right to buy some toys to stimulate his visual and aural senses. So, yesterday, we took our little boy to ToysRus for the first time. Of course, he didn't seem to be too excited about it and he was asleep the whole time. But, I am always excited about toy shops. I am excited about massive train sets, radio controlled cars and complex Lego blocks. I am always tempted to buy some of the more innovative ones even though it may not be appropriate for my age ! My childhood was always filled with plenty of board games and books. My home was the favorite haunt for most of my friends during summer vacations. We spent hours playing such games. On the contrary, I also missed out on playing in the mud and experiencing the great outdoors.

As I grew up, computer games seemed to thrill me a lot. A couple of the very first games that excited me were Pacman and Digger. To me, playing them on the 640K 8086 machine with a green monitor seemed to be the best thing that had happened in the technology world at that time. Later on, I took a strong liking for 3D games. Wolf3D was the first 3D game I played and I loved it. Down the years, as my career grew, I hardly played any games. I am still turned on by the various XBoxes and Playstations of today but have never played even a single game on one of those consoles (What a shocker !). Last week, when a couple of my colleagues invited me for a game of Quake3 on the network, I thought that I will get back into the groove again. But surprisingly, 15 minutes of playing that game gave me motion sickness !!! When I went home, I was still feeling very sick. I lied down for a while and then felt better afterwards. It is a shame but a sure indicator that I am turning the corner (yup, the big 30) this month. I know that I will not be playing any more of those games but I would surely like to see the interest grow in my son.

Coming back to what we bought at the store yesterday, amongst the rattles, colored links and activity gym, there was one interesting item. This was called "Flutterbye Dreams Lullabye Birdies Soother". It is a crib toy in which a few birds on a tree move around in an animatronics-like fashion. It also has bird sounds and some soothing music to it. You may ask, "Ok, whats the big deal ?". Well, it has a small projection light at the top and so, when you switch to that mode, it projects a film of very colorful pictures (of birds and nature) on the ceiling. To many of you, this may not be anything exciting. I was just awestruck at the beauty of the bright colors in the dark. More than my son, I was completely enthralled by this toy. Of course, later on during the night, he seemed very engrossed in it too. He kept staring at the toy, kept kicking his legs all the time and mumbled some mumbo-jumbo all the time. I am glad that he likes what daddy likes ! :-)

Long weekend

The long weekend is over and I think I spent it really well. In our part of the town, the sun was having second thoughts as to whether to shine or not to shine. We even had a gloomy day with lots of thundershowers. Just the perfect day for some book-reading, which I haven't done in quite a long while. Coincidentally, just last week, I had picked up a copy of the Illustrated version of "The Da Vinci code" at the local library. I have been waiting to read this book for a really long time. The time was just ripe and so, I just settled into the couch and started reading. It was a 500 page novel and in my prime days (which I consider my teens), I would have finished it in a day. Not now. I haven't been reading a lot of late and hence, I may have slowed down. I must have read for close to 18 hours over the weekend and I still have another 100 pages to go. That is like 2.7 minutes to a page !!! Well, I guess I also spent some time admiring the artwork and the sculptures in the illustrated version. Regardless of the fact that this was one of those unputdownable thrillers, I still had other things to attend to this weekend. Like a nice game of tennis.

I haven't played tennis since last summer and I am not one of those players whom you see and wish you could play like that. On the contrary, if you see me playing, you would really wish that you did not play like me. :-) But my comtemporaries with whom I play are worser than me. So, I was glad that I was able to sweat it out on the courts for a couple of days. But, I am feeling the incidental damages today. Some of the parts in my body are groaning for rest. I have a slight limp today and my shoulder hurts from my false serves !

Well, I must be able to finish the book by tomorrow and I hope to write a review of the book here. Too late for a review you may say but there are still others who have not read it yet. I promise that I will not give away the plot in the review.

My life's path and Infopath

Woohooo ! Finally, I get a chance to get back to my blog again. First things first, yes, our baby boy is finally out in the big, wide world. Its been close to two weeks now and that explains the lack of any activity in the blog (I can hear some of you go "yeah, right !"). We are so excited with the new arrival and everyday seems to be flying so soon with so much activity happening around us. Of course, needless to say, everything seems to be centered around the little guy now. Every evening, when I come home from work, my walk is very hurried because I cannot wait to see my son. As soon as I enter my home, I wash my hands and then pick him up if he is awake. He doesn't seem very excited now to see Daddy ! :-( But, I am guessing it will be soon. :-)

As I am typing this, I have the Visual Studio .NET 2005 Beta 2 installation going on. Yesterday, I had installed SQL Server 2005 and it went through fine. Not that I am very paranoid about Microsoft installations, I know what to expect. I am very excited about these new technologies and am hoping to develop some really cool projects and setup code samples on my website.

A couple of days back, I had attended the local .NET users group meeting. This was my first attendance there and I was happy that I attended. The topic of discussion was Infopath, something that I have been playing around with lately. It is a fabulous tool if you want to do just feedback forms, surveys, procurement requests and routing. But, anything more than that, you might be pushing it. Let me explain why I say that. The product still needs more maturity in terms of handling even slightly complex situations. There are still lot of things that need improvement in the product like -

1. No support for direct database access to OLE DB based data stores like ORACLE. We have to go through a web service to connect to such data sources. Only SQL Server and Access are supported for direct database access currently.
2. Well, if you thought that was ok, listen to this. Direct database access is not supported with even SQL Server or Access if the database table in question contains any blob (text, image or binary) or long datatypes. The workaround for this is to pass such datatypes through a .NET dataset from or to a web service.
3. If you were thinking of using text boxes for collecting passwords or any pin numbers, you cannot do so because there is no password control !!! Inspite of having a decent variety of controls, a password control was not provided because Microsoft does not guarantee the security of collecting sensitive data through Infopath forms. A workaround will be use to use your own custom controls for such purposes. I have not tried that yet and hence, I cannot speak for that.
4. I wanted to see how I can tie Active Directory (AD) users into various roles within Infopath forms. Using such an approach, I will be able to hide or show certain portions of the form, filter results of my data etc. To support this, we have Roles within Infopath. I tested this and it works very well. However, there is a note on the Roles window which advises the user not to use Roles when sensitive data is treated ! The reason behind such a warning is that data is only hidden from the user's view even though it has already been downloaded to the form.
   

So, how are we supposed to handle roles and security then for sensitive data ? This is where I left my research but I can see a technical possibility by using a typical Users and Roles tables combination in the database and using such data to secure the data. The only thing that I was not able to figure out was how to pass the currently logged on user's user id to the web service which gets the data from the database. If this were possible, I can get only the data that is specific for the current user. I think that this is possible but I need to do some more reading. If you know how to do this, please post the solution here.

Overall, I was very happy with the way the product is positioned today. As I said, it will definitely be useful for a specific set of applications but not for a wide-range of solutions. I would like to read more about the product roadmap and see where Microsoft will be taking this.

Okay.....that will be good enough a post for today. I have to get back to some reading, diaper changing and of course, zzzzzzzzz......some good night's sleep. And yeah, the VS .NET 2005 installation was a piece of cake. No issues. Go Microsoft !

Blogger's block

Can a blogger have a writer's block ? If so, should it be called a blogger's block ? Whatever it be, I seem to have the blues for writing even though this is probably the best time I must be putting down my thoughts on paper......pardon me, on the blog. With an extremely life-changing event about to happen in a few days, I have to gather my thoughts and stream them towards this blog. As my friend pointed out today, these thoughts may be very funny and interesting to read about once my wife and I have the baby and my whole life goes topsy-turvy !

As I was walking down to work this morning, I was plugged to my IPod and listening to vivaldi rendered beautifully by a string quartet from San Francisco. Add to that the effect of a light breeze blowing across the river on a sleepy morning. It was the perfect time to forget all the worries in this world and look forward to greeting new life around me. I started thinking about my yet-to-be-born son again....

My wife and I know that we are expecting a boy. We both have great dreams about the little fellow. Not that we have planned anything for him but we both are high with anticipation about how exciting our lives are going to be very soon. The last few months, we have been crazy buying new stuff for my son. Wow ! That feels good.....when I say "my son". It is a new thing to say and it feels good to say it again and again.

The only thing that I keep wondering off late is what will my son see when he sees me. Will he know that I am his father ? Will he recognize my voice ? Yeah, I have been talking to him for the last so many months now. He better recognize my voice ! The one thing I remember very clearly about him is his face when I saw him during the ultrasound. The Ultrasound apparently penetrates the baby's eyelids and so, the baby will look like he has his eyes wide open. So, when I saw him, he was actually staring back at me. I will never forget that look. I am very much looking forward to see if his eyes are as beautiful as it looked on that day.

The big day could happen this weekend or sometime early next week. Whenever it may be, my wife and I cannot wait to hug the tiny one and welcome him into our family. In the meanwhile, I am going to try my best to blog.....

SQL Server 2005 Service Broker

Today, I attended an MSDN webcast on SQL Service Broker in SQL 2005. Found it to be very interesting and saw a lot of scope for future development in that area. I am planning to investigate more into identifying practical scenarios for using this technology. I can see how distributed applications re-architected using SOA can use this technology to their benefit. But, I need to understand more on why we need to move messaging into the database instead of having it at the application level. I am sure there are pros and cons with both methods. I will try to write more about those when I get to read more on this topic. For now, I found this blog to be very useful in this regard -

http://blogs.msdn.com/rushidesai/

Also, check out this article on MSDN -
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnsql90/html/sqlsvcbroker.asp?frame=true

Ergonomics

Ergonomics has become a very important word in my work life over the last few years. As many of you may emphathize with me, regular keyboard usage and uncomfortable seating arrangements can cause long-term injury and short-term pain. Recently, I started working at a new client and my body was not able to adjust itself to the new workplace. Very soon, I had to pay a visit to my doctor for a stiff neck and throbbing shoulders. The client is very sensitive to such issues and they even have an ergonomics assessment team within the building. One of their representatives swung by my desk the other day, asked me a whole bunch of questions, observed my posture while I worked and then made a recommendation for me to get a natural keyboard. I was using a similar keyboard at my previous workplace and it seemed to help in a way. So, I have been using that for the last few days now and I don't think it has helped still. I may need to go in for some physical therapy.

In the meanwhile, there has been a lot happening on my personal side. My wife and I are expecting a new arrival in the house - our first baby. She is already four days past her due date and still has no signs of labor. So, this week has been "painfully slow" in all aspects for both of us.