Me: (to Swapna, in Malayalam) Get the keys? Lock the balcony door?

Swapna: Yupp.

Neighbor: English!

Me: (to the neighbor) I’m sorry, were you talking to us?

Neighbor: Not just to you. (Pointing to my other Indian neighbor’s door) To them and to the ones living downstairs, to all of you. Speak in fucking English.

Me: Excuse me?

Neighbor: You heard me. You come to my fucking country and you don’t speak my fucking language?

Me: You don’t get to decide what language I use to speak to my wife. I’m a tax paying legal immigrant. I think I have the right to speak to my wife in whatever language I want.

Neighbor: Oh yeah? Why don’t you get the fuck out of my country then? Who asked you to come here?

Me: Are you kidding me, man?

Neighbor: Why don’t you get the fuck outta here? Yeah, get the fuck outta here.

Me: No, you get the fuck outta here. (Yupp, that’s the best I could do at that point. I was so nervous. I wasn’t quick enough to come up with a befitting reply.)

Let’s rewind back a little bit. July 27th 2002. That’s when I arrived in the US for the first time as a student on an F1 visa.

I graduated with my Masters degree here in Computer Science from UTA in August 2004. Got a job after that.

I’ve always paid my taxes, social security, medicare etc on time, every time. Never committed any crime. Never been arrested. Never broke the law. Never done anything wrong.

I don’t even download movies illegally.

Yet, none of that matters. Doesn’t matter how long you’ve lived here or how well you’ve blended into the society or how great you’ve been a member of the civilized population or how many friends you’ve made. If you are a foreigner, you better be prepared to be on the receiving end of some racism, my friend. It’s happened to me before but you just don’t get used to something like that no matter how hard you try.

Swapna wasn’t happy at all. She’s never seen me in a confrontation before. She was upset. It’s been only 3 months since we moved to this new place that is swarming with Indians. Not bachelors. Full fledged families with 2 kids on an average. 90% of them work in the IT industry (Pepsi, JC Penney, Frito Lays, Dr. Pepper, Cadburys, Infosys – all these companies are less than 5 miles from this place. Most of these guys are contractors there).

At first, we were surprised there were so many desis around. We didn’t know about it before we signed the lease. As time passed by, we got invited to potlucks and our neighbors speak Tamil like us. It was a huge change and Swapna loved it. At my previous apartment, that was her biggest complaint – “People keep to themselves here. Nobody talks to anybody. Nobody comes out of their apartment. If they do, they get in their car and go away. I’m bored out of my mind” (this was before she joined Epsilon)

As you can imagine, she was excited about the interaction she was getting here. People stopped by and said Hi and asked about our dog when we were walking Mia. Apparently, we’re the only Indians in this complex that owns a dog. Nice ice breaker.

So anyways, our awesome neighbor gentleman complained about us from day one. No, literally. He called the office and complained about the movers making noise when they were carrying the furniture in to our apartment on our moving day. A week later, he also complained when we got our washer dryer installed in the garage downstairs which was funny because he actually lives on the second floor and he said he couldn’t stand the noise.

Today’s incident was our first face-to-face chat with him and obviously, it didn’t go too well.

I think I’m gonna have to talk to the apartment manager tomorrow. I don’t know what the outcome is going to be but I’d hate to have to move again.

May be I should bake him a cake. One with a picture of one of our Gods with multiple arms with a dot in the forehead working at a call center fixing somebody’s computer.

UPDATE: When I walked into the manager’s office this morning, he was already there. She made him apologize to us. She also mentioned that they are discussing terminating his lease. I don’t know if they are actually going to do it. But she seemed pretty sincere and was apologetic for his behavior.

Interestingly, she told me that this was not his first incident there. And that they have zero tolerance for racists especially because it’s considered harassment under law and is a crime.

His side of the story was that some Indian kid threw a ball at his friend’s dog and the dog’s leash came loose and it ran away. He had to chase it and when he came back and asked the people around who was responsible for the kid’s actions, nobody said a word. So apparently he was pissed off at them and he just took it out on me. Because you know, the kid was an Indian, I’m an Indian, all Indians are jerks..etc..etc.

Anyways, I’ve decided to blog more “often” moving forward and I’ll have some of the good stories (from the past year) for future posts. If you’d like a teaser, here’s one – barely 10 days after our anniversary celebrations, Swapna and I almost drowned after our boat hit a rock and toppled when we went canoeing on Buffalo river in Arkansas. Yupp. Life is just awesome.

But this post today is about something completely different but very important nonetheless.

Today’s my last day at EMC Corporation.

It’s been five and a half years since I joined my first company – Bright Corner (acquired by Geniant which in turn was acquired by EMC) and it’s been an awesome ride. I learned so much from so many smart people not just on different projects but also in personal life. I’ve built a lot of great relationships with some very good people here. Some of them are still with EMC and some have moved on, but still in touch with me.

I am who I am because of these wonderfully talented and skilled people and I will never forget that.

I’m trying very VERY hard not to be cheesy (any more than I already have been so far in this post) here but believe me, it’s tough.

In any case, thanks to everyone who’s supported me and helped shape my future and career. You know I sincerely appreciate it.

The time has come for EMC and I, to part ways and as per the #1 rule of life, things have to move on. EMC will. And I will too.

Moving on…

Here are some more pics from the wedding.

By the way, feels FANTASTIC to be married. She is terrific! It’s an awesome feeling waking up next to her every morning. Guess I got lucky.

Just watch the video below and think again.

Just watch this video below. The statistics (not sure if they are accurate but looks credible) are fascinating.

Great music too, by the way.

“Wait a second…What if I use it to count down to my wedding date? It could be a depressing reminder tick-tocking it’s way to the end of my bachelorhood and all its glory. Or…or….it could be an agonizing wait till the day i marry Swapna!”

He he he…

Anyways, check out my count-down timer in the header of this site.

If you don’t see it, it’s probably because either the site itself or its flash-content is blocked by your network team (assuming you are at work).

The basic model is less than 2 grand which means no power steering, no power windows, no radio, no air conditioning, NO SHIT. The counter argument for that is that, in India, you don’t have any of such features in a two-wheeler either and the idea is to target the middle class families that owns a two-wheeler to “upgrade” to this car. So of course, they are going to appreciate a vehicle similar to what they have right now, only difference being for a few thousand rupees more (a few hundred USD) the “upgraded” vehicle will have a roof on top and couple of more wheels….isn’t that right Mr. Ratan Tata?

And their plans seem to be ambitious. They plan to hit the US market by 2010. And Europe by 2011. I’ve been living in the US for the past 7 years and I just don’t see how people here would buy this car, for obvious reasons. It’s too small, probably won’t pass the stringent crash tests, max speed is 43 miles/hour, poor mileage and the list goes on.

But here’s the line that caught my attention.

About the pricing of the car, Tata said: “. . . obviously (Nano) would not be a Rs 1-lakh or a $2,500 car (in Europe), it will have all the airbags and all the safety features that would be demanded by the European customers.”

Read the full story here.

Can you believe it? The Indian model doesn’t even come with air bags. Apparently, they were so focused on building something with a budget in mind, they didn’t mind tossing out the basic safety feature. And the Indian government allowed it to be sold to Indian consumers. This just blows me away. The lack of respect for human lives in India is just incomprehensible. The Nov 26th Mumbai terrorist attack killed 183 people. And what did we do? Nothing. This apathy, this insensibility to suffering is just appalling and depressing. Nobody gives a shit.

This reminds me of an incident that happened a couple of years ago. One of my distant distant relatives came to the US for a business visit. He worked for Air India at that time. I don’t know if he still is employed with them. Anyways, he visited my sister’s family (she was in Richardson, TX back then) and was talking about the purpose of his visit when he mentioned that he was here to buy airplanes and jets from the US carriers. He mentioned how his company was getting a good deal since the planes that these people were buying were OUT OF COMMISSION in the US and the US carriers were just selling them away for whatever they can get for it, as the FAA wouldn’t allow them to operate them anymore.

Now take a minute to process that. Planes that have been found UNFIT to fly Americans in the United States, are being sold to the Indian carriers to fly Indians in their domestic market.

I could go on and on about several issues like this, like how only cops that are of higher ranks in India, carry hand guns and the lower level constables carry a simple lathi (bamboo stick). The lone terrorist in Mumbai attacks that was caught alive, killed the police officer who didn’t have a gun when he confronted him in the car that he and his friend were attempting to escape in. The police officer was fighting this terrorist with his bare hands and was holding the barrel of his AK 47 trying to point it away before the killer pulled the trigger and sprayed 16 bullets into the cop’s torso and he died on the spot. However he didn’t let go of the gun even when he dropped dead and that’s how the other cops were able to nab the terrorist.

Can you even imagine such a thing happening in the United States?

So many things like this. Construction workers don’t wear a metal helmet or any sort of protection gear, no shoes (just plain rubber slippers), including women and kids (who are not legally supposed to work anyways. But hey, Welcome to India!), electricians working on lamp posts on the street climb up with a rope tied around their ankles (I have seen this myself several times), patients lying on the floor in the government hospitals puking blood and dying for attention (quite literally)…i can keep going on and on. These are the sad stories of human beings in India, the working class. Don’t even get me started on the plight of animals. I’ll save it for another post.

I don’t understand how the rich keep getting richer in India and everybody says “oh…watch out…India is becoming a super power!”.

What’s the point of being called a super power if you can’t provide the basic facilities for your own citizens?

Just because we have millions of English speaking youngsters graduating every year out of colleges and every 3rd person owning a cell phone and a every middle class family owning a stupid shitty car, and winning Oscar awards (Love A. R. Rahman. He is a God, but he himself admitted it was not his best work), doesn’t mean we have made it, people.

If we don’t start respecting our own fellow Indians and take care of each other, we’ll never be a super power.

I have so much more to say….but what’s the point? Neither you nor I can make a difference. Corruption will always exist. People will always suffer. Rich will rise and fall and there will be another set of goons that replace them.

I cannot let things beyond my control, bother me. It is unhealthy and counterproductive.

I’m just going to do my best and see if I can be of any use to my society. May be sponsor a poor kid’s education or help set up somebody’s small business or pay for somebody’s medical expenses….I don’t know. I just don’t want to keep complaining. I want to be a part of the solution. But as a single man, there is only little I can do. And I guess I just have to live with that.

Obama promised change and change indeed has come to America.

India is waiting it’s turn…

Anyways, let’s get to the point.

So in the current project I’m working on, I build SharePoint web parts. A lot of them. As with typical SharePoint projects, the web parts need to be deployed to the GAC/assembly. before they can be added to the pages.

The problem with this as you can imagine, is that every change no matter how small or big it is, needs to be built and the assembly copied to the GAC (C:\Windows\assembly). If you are using the WSPBuilder Visual Studio plugin, this is probably a bit less cumbersome than going to the location of the DLL and manually copying it and pasting it in the assembly folder, you know, using good old Windows Explorer.

This is great if you are big fan of the mouse. Just 4 clicks/gestures. One for the build. And 3 for the GAC deployment – Right click on the project, Click on WSPBuilder, Select Copy to GAC.

But for people like me, that prefer keyboard short cuts over mouse clicks, here’s how we can make this much faster – Map custom short cut keys to do the build and deploy.

You may already know that Ctrl + Shift + B builds the project. But it builds not just the current project but every other project related to it (and may be even the independent ones too if I’m right).

Now that is still 3 keys. Let’s see if we can bring it down to 2 keys.

Here we go.

1. Click on Tools – Customize in Visual studio as shown below. 

2. Click on Keyboard

3.  We need to find “Build.BuildSelection” command. So start typing that in the “Show commands containing” textbox. It’s autocomplete as you can see below. So just select the item as soon as it shows up.

4. After you select it from the list, move your cursor to the “Press shortcut keys” textbox below and press the short cut keys. I chose Shift + F1 since I just have to use my left hand fingers and the keys aren’t too far apart.

Note that you CANNOT type your shortcut. You HAVE to press the keys on your keyboard as the text above the textbox says.

5. After you select your short cut, the “Assign” button gets enabled as shown below. Click on that to assign the short cut to “Build.BuildSelection”. “Assign” button now becomes “Remove”. It took it. Good.

6. Now click OK.

7. Test the short cut now. Open up a file in a project and use your short cut. If everything worked ok, the project that file belonged to, would have been built. Just that project.

8. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. Do the same for “Copy To GAC” feature.

9. Look for “copytogac” in the commands text and you may notice that once you select the command as shown below, there already might exist a short cut for it. In this case it is Ctrl + Shift + Alt + B.

I don’t know about you but that is lot of keys to press for a simple command. It is ok though. You can leave it alone and map yet another short cut to the same command.

I chose Shift + F2. 

10. Click Assign and then OK. And all done! Now we can easily build and deploy the currrent web part/dll to the GAC with the press of just 2 keys per command.

Shift + F1 to build. Shift + F2 to deploy to GAC.

I suppose it must save some amount of time in the long term. Enjoy!

Dec 29th 2008 will go down in history as the day I got engaged to Swapna.

At the risk of sounding cheesy, I’ll nevertheless, say a few things about her. Alright… so here we go…

Although my parents did all the work and found her for me, I must admit that they didn’t do all that bad.

She is a software professional like me and works in Boston. Going by the experience that this long distance relationship has provided us over the last 6 months (For those who don’t know, I live in Dallas, TX which is about 1759 miles from Boston as per Google maps), I can say this much – She is GREAT!

Swapna is a very sweet, loving, caring, understanding, kind, polite and lovable girl that grew up in the same city as I, back in India. We have that thing in common (in addition to a lot of other things) and it makes things a lot easier. For example, music we listen to, movies we like, eating habits, local jokes and the references that go with them etc.

In any case, I know it takes a lot of patience to deal with someone like me (I can hear you going “yeah…no shit!”) .  And I think she is ready, willing and in fact happy to do that for the rest of our life together as a couple.

All said I think she is just beautiful inside out. And I hope I’ll be able to make her just as happy as she makes me and continue doing that for the rest of the journey.

Wish us luck!

Now consider you are working with SharePoint and you are in a tight spot as mentioned above. You probably want to ensure that WSS/MOSS has been configured properly and that the problem is not with the webpart you are working on, for example.

Here’s a quick and easy way of writing a “hello world” webpart that doesn’t involve features and layouts and WSPs and stsadm commands and etc.

1. Open up Visual Studio 2008 and create a new class library project (name it something unique, for example, DingDongBellWebPart) and add the following code in Class1.cs

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Linq;

using System.Text;

using System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts;

namespace DingDongBellWebPart

{

public class Class1 : WebPart

{

protected override void RenderContents(System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriter writer)

{

writer.Write(“DingDongBell test”);

base.Render(writer);

}

}

}

}

2. Check the “Sign the assembly” checkbox in Project properties “Signing” tab as shown below

(Click on image above for better resolution)

3. Under “Choose a strong name key file” dropdownlist, select “New”.

4. Uncheck “Protect my key file with a password” as shown below

5. Give it a name and click OK.

6. Build the project.

7. Drag the project’s dll from the bin folder and drop it in C:\Windows\assembly folder. This registers the DLL in the GAC.

8. Replace the values for the attributes where necessary in the line below and add this line in the <SafeControls> section in the web.config file of the website you are trying to deploy this webpart to. (You can even try the SharePoint’s central admin’s web.config file. should work.)

<SafeControl Assembly=”DingDongBellWebPart, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=1af588c27b5f26e0″ Namespace=”DingDongBellWebPart” TypeName=”*” Safe=”True” />

**NOTE**: Don’t forget to replace the PublicKeyToken above. There are multiple ways to fetch the PublicKeyToken of your DLL. Here’s one way. Go to C:\Windows\assembly and right click on your assembly and click properties as shown below.

9. Visit the following URL – http://insert_your_website_url_here/_layouts/NewDwp.aspx [Of course replace "insert_your_website_url_here" with your value]

10. It should show up in that list as shown below. (I know….it says GirishWebpart.Class1 in the screenshot below instead of DingDongBellWebpart.Class1. May be it is because I figured GirishWebpart was a much better name than the ridiculous-sounding DingDongBellWebpart.)

(Click on image above for better resolution)

11. If it doesn’t work, reset IIS. And try again. Should work.

12. Enjoy.