Is it evening or morning !!!!!!!!!!!

The title sounds drunk right??

Believe me I am not writing this after downing a few nice glasses of beers.

 

Have you ever stayed up at night completely and then next day you have no clue regarding where you are? or who you are ? and what you are supposed to do. Everything just goes into the auto-mode. You just somehow end up walking around without actually really doing anything about it or thinking a lot about it. Those of you who have experienced this before would gleefully empathize with my situation (which is something I do not really appreciate) and those who haven’t been through it, I would elaborate it a bit more for you all to savour.

 

The day began as beautifully and normally as any other day. I woke up at 12 o clock in the morning ( I guess ) and began the day as an ungrateful person without really thanking God for the most beautiful thing in this world, “Sleep”. I can vouch for it now come what may.

Then it was the usual pre-lunch surfing of reading and writing tedious mails with a lot of intermittent orkut profile visits and then when I was too tired of this chore it was time to eat. The food sucked that day but the omlette rocked. I dont know how I would have subsited on the HBCSE had it not been for Naveen and omlettes. Then post lunch it was guffaw time with mommy aka Divya, bhai aka Shishir and stupid aka Khushboo. What does guffaw here signify? Exactly to tell the truth its something I don’t know but somehow all of us found some weird stuff to talk and laugh about. In case I missed it let me tell you we were meanwhile working on the POSTGRES API’s as well

After tea and some vatata vadas came the real challenge, setting the API’s right so that they worked and then integrating them in the harvesting scripts. The whole evening just went by into it and also interacting in livid ways with Mr. Mane. For refreshments we just played bzflag and had a whale of a time trying to smash each other’s tanks into oblivion. Then came the dinner and then suddenly I had a desire of staying awake the whole night. Somehow I thought lets make sure that the harvesting gets underway tonight. Enough had been enough. So post dinner the work started of incorporating the API’s and somehow mysteriously all of them started giving some niggling errors here and there. Its a pain to correct errors because you have missed a ‘;’ or gave a wrong indent in Python in a huge code but then what needs to be done has to be done.

Before we knew it was 2 o clock at night and to overcome drowsiness we went to the hostel to catch up up on some tea and coffee from the vending machine. At 3 o’ clock in the night Khushboo got a scolding-call(if such a thing exists) from her dad and had to push off to the hostel to sleep. Meanwhile Shishir had already gone to the hostel as he was down with viral fever. Our dev team was badly hit but then me and Divya had to lead the charge. Amidst protests from her parents Divya stayed on. I was silently thankful as alone I would have gone mad debugging though I didn’t mention it to her and pretended indifference. The night wore on and we were silently trying to tame 2 beasts at the same time MySQL ans PostgreSQL. From Wikipedia dumps in MySQL we were harvesting gnowledge(read as Free Knowledge) into postgreSQL GNOWSYS tables. Intially we hit upon a decoding problem with UTF-8 and Ascii.

The IRC channels added to our humour where we had turned for help as someone suggested us to go through the MySQL and PostgreSQL codes in 18 months to sort the problem. Instead of adding to our indignation we went on laughing. Soon the problem sorted out thanx to the Python Cookbook and harvesting started. Yes!!!!! The summit was ours, the battle was won .The watched clocked 6:30 am and we were feeling a strange drunk feeling. We decided to take a walk.

Oh yes! I forgot at 4 o’ clock I got a call from Khushboo that a mouse had entered her room. Since Divya is also paranoid about mice whe said she will go to the room but won’t take part in the “Chuha!! Room Chhoro abhiyaan”. Once inside their room both Divya and Khushboo stood up on their beds and I got myself packed up with ammo(read an old black umbrella) and then went into the corner and got the mice away. Then I taped up their windows and came back to the lab. The night seemed full of promises.

Yes. About the walk me and Divya we were both walking as if in a trance. I couldn’t feel my legs hitting the floor. I was flying and seemed to be walking in thin air. Somehow the world seemed too simple and funny to me and Divya and we couldn’t stop laughing. We were going nuts laughing. We went to the hostel and watched TV and then came back to have the earliest breakfast. We came to the lab and our program was silently and sturdily churning data. The harvest had started. Our eyes heart, backs fired and we went to surfing and waiting for Khushboo and bhai to turn up so that we could go. Bipin turned up and narrated how Debarshi was in a similar plight last time. Then when bhai and Khushboo came we had an early lunch at 1 and pushed off. I went into my room fell on my bed and was asleep before you could say “Sleep”. I woke up with a start at 5 o’ clock in the evening and had a bath and then went to the lab again. In that time Khushboo and bhai had harvested a lot of data and the GNOWSYS metadatabase had swelled to 300 MB. I was damn happy but showed as if I wasn’t impressed .They didn’t bother and I guess they knew how I actually felt and what I was showing.

I felt like I hadn’t slept for years. Every inch of my body hurt but my mind was at peace since our Summer Project was successful and GNOWSYS was being updated after six months. After a drowsy evening peppered  with scoldings from Khushboo I came back to the hostel at 10 o clock at night and went to sleep

What a night out it had been!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It had been memorable but we got the job done and that what mattere. The work had been tiring but then that’s a devs life .Another dev who has completed his Google Summer of Code the RUM project was also online at 4 o’ clock working away and we chatted on IRC for sometime. The channel #glug-nith feels like a second home. That had been the sojourn and to tell you the truth the lack of sleep had truly been worth it every inch.