Back again after a long time!

Almost an year since I posted my last blog. Many events occurred in my life for the last 11 months. The most painful of them all - I've lost my pets - Brownie and Julie - my most pampered pups. Its a sad thing that dogs have such a short life. I just wished they lived as long as humans. I always believe that dogs are the most gifted friend by nature to mankind. My pets especially have been the most loving, loyal and humble ones. They've spent all their time with me as a close friend and have been the best of my joys. I miss them both forever :-(. These days, while I'm staying without my pets, I'm filled with compassion for the stray dogs too. They are such humble creatures that have been largely misunderstood and abused by the large part of us. Life moves on...

The other painful aspect was to shift my residence. I lived peacefully at the outskirts of Sholinganallur for 3 years, and I had to vacate. House rents in Chennai have reached beyond their obscene limits. I managed to shuffle a couple of corporate training offers in Chennai and Bangalore till January, this year and shifted my residence to Mogappair. My parents have moved to Bangalore to stay with my brother. I miss them a lot.

Right now, I'm residing at a decent apartment in Mogappair. The good thing is, its highly accessible to main parts of Chennai than Sholinganallur. My wife finds this place more comfortable as all supermarkets are accessible at walkable distance. This is unlike Sholinganallur, where a decent supermarket used to be atleast 6 Kilometers away from my residence. While I lived in Sholinganallur, no good commercial establishments existed within 5-6 Kilometers from my house - things look different now, perhaps. ATMs, and bigger complexes have sprouted and the real estate prices have multiplied by 10 times in 3 years. It was a cooler and peaceful place though.

While I managed to shift to Mogappair, and get everything else settled - shifted phone connection, gas connection, ration card - needed for my wife's identity here, shifted my bank account and after a long wait, I managed to get BSNL DataOne connection just last month. Now, it seems that I have to shift once again. This time, the landlord has his own personal reasons to use this apartment in which I reside for his own self. The hunting game started last month again. The painful task of searching a decent house for reasonable rent. Unfortunately, most of the houses that I get to see are shabbily built and are priced too high to be affordable or being worth.

It is very unfortunate that houses are being controlled by the middle-men brokers (a.k.a real estate agents) who hike up the price to their whims and fancy. There is *no* regulatory authority that control the rapidly growing price rates of real estate and house rent. Owning a decent house is slowly becoming a distant dream for a lot of people here. Sometimes, I just feel that I should move out to the distant outskirts again, perhaps close to farm land or somewhere similar. Sad part is - will I get good Internet connectivity ?!

Over the last 2 years, I've been refining my thoughts and focusing more on corporate training. I did manage to bag a couple of big deployment/architectural development offers from companies - all of which kept me busy for a while.

My internal weekend training programs have stalled for a couple of months now. My weekends too are getting filled up with consultancy work and my week-day schedules have become largely unpredictable.

I'm working hard to make a dent in the corporate sector in FOSS promotion in the best way that I could - corporate training! Lots of competition exist, but I'm now proud of being the best recommended corporate trainer in Chennai and Bangalore by all of my clients so far, for all FOSS technologies that include Linux, PHP, MySQL, Perl/CGI, Shell Scripting, Python, UNIX System programming and so on.