…I imagine it would read a lot like the musings of my friend Ranjeet.

(Notice how I said “got older” and not “grew up”)

There are only two blogs I read purely for entertainment value. One is by Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame). The other is Jeet’s. Everything else I read has some tangible benefit for my career or my life. These two are purely for the feeling of ass-meets-ground (when I fall off my chair laughing). Writing with humor and wit is a rare commodity indeed, and Jeet’s posts are like those martinis he likes so much – very dry and with a twist.

After a day of wrestling with my computer problems (yes, my laptop issues are still not resolved, and I have applied for a permit for a non-traceable, UNIX-based firearm to shoot whoever heads the Vista development division), I needed something to cheer me up. 5 minutes of catching up with the misadventures of Ranjeet during his recent California trip put me right back in the spirit of things.

His blog tagline is “Trying to be smart and funny. Struggling at both“. I don’t think so. He brings the same wit and humor he displays in real life to his writing. You’d think that the offline, time-delayed nature of blogging would end up being a filter on that wisecracking mouth of his. Not so much (witness his recent post on wives and remote controls, which had Tanu laughing hysterically one second, and then looking at me with suspicious eyes the next; thanks, Jeet).

Read his blog, it is hilarious. I keep telling him he should stop looking for ways to earn his millions from a startup, and just do this. The contextual Google ads to go with his posts would be a riot.

Maybe if he got a cat he could torment…

This long weekend down in Maryland, I was able to attend a Washington Nationals game in their new ballpark, Nationals Stadium. It was an interesting experience.

First off, the new stadium is pretty nice. Walking over from the metro the stadium entrance (yes, we took mass transit), we entered the gate and found ourselves on an expansive plaza that overlooked the sunken field itself, a pretty cool experience in itself. The layout of the stadium is pretty open, with some interesting accoutrements. The stadium is completely open to the elements on all sides (even the area where the concession stands and restrooms are is under a “roof”, with no walls around it). While this was great on a sunny day like the one we experienced, it would probably be problematic on bad weather days. I did love their high-resolution big screen in centerfield. And I didn’t get to check out the Playstation lounge (from our seats, we could see that the lines were massive).

Being by the Anacostia river, I expected a view of the water from the park, sort of like AT&T Park (which used to be SBC Park, which used to be Pac Bell Park, which…oh, you get the picture, and my opinion of stadium naming rights). Instead, you get a view of the top of the Capitol (in the far left of the picture), and from some angles, Washington Monument). Certainly cements the idea that we are in the Nations Capital watching the national pastime being played.

And a pastime it is, not a religion like in New York or Boston. People seemed pretty casual about their baseball team. There were lots of folks in Brewers fan gear, and plenty people wore gear for other teams that weren’t even related. People would barely make noises or cheer when the displays would blare “Get Loud” or “Make Noise” or other such attempts. And kids were being urged to leave the stadium in the 7th inning and line up outside the gates for some kids event called “Running the Bases”. And in a game that was tied in the 6th and got decided on a walk-off wild pitch in the bottom of the 9th. Way to build a fan base with the kids, guys.

I guess there is no such thing as a native DC-ian (I guess the term Washingtonian is for the state). And there is no danger of a Baltimore-Washington rivalry for the hearts of baseball fans breaking out any time soon. Pity, really. It is a nice ballpark.

If you are blogging about your personal life, you must read this article/story by Emily Gould, talking about what she went through as someone who converted a hobby/passion for blogging about her life into a job at Gawker. It is a bit long, but a terrific read and tremendously insightful and touching. And it reflects on the impact our blogging passions can have on the people close to us, something I know a little bit about.

They won! They actually won, and on penalty kicks, no less. This is just unbelievable. The Red Devils won the Champions League trophy, the “Superbowl” of European (and therefore world) soccer. To make it sweeter, they beat bitter rivals Chelsea in what was the first-ever all English club championship.

The game was hard fought and very exciting. I hate games that have to be decided on penalty kicks, but I can’t argue with the result. Man U was not the better team today, since Chelsea seemed to play better than them for most of the game. But Chelsea did only manage a very lucky goal just before half time, and Man U had a number of chances that they just missed, plus a sweet goal from wiz-kid Cristiano Ronaldo (who am I really starting to like despite the attitude). So, in the driving rain, the game was decided by a penalty save by Van der Sar against Anelka, after a lucky break when John Terry slipped on the slick turf and hit the post on what would have been the winning PK for Chelsea (you have gotta feel bad for Terry, who is one of the nicest guys in soccer).

But most victories are built on someone else’s crushed dreams. And tonight, Man U made our dreams come true by crushing Chelsea’s hopes of a first European Championship and winning the Cup. It was also appropriate on what was the 50th anniversary of the Munich air crash that killed 8 United players.

This year, my beloved New York Giants won the Superbowl, and now Manchester United have won the Premiership and the Champions League Cup. Could the Yankees make it 3-for-3 and add to what is turning out to be a great year?

My cousin Anu was in the papers! As Program Director at the Headlands Center for the Arts in the San Francisco Bay Area, she works on projects that promote a global view of art and culture. She recently put together a show going on now that is called “East of the West“, for which she was interviewed by the San Francisco Chronicle. I loved this quote:

“‘East of the West’ refers to the shifting perspective of moving across the world, of the immigrant, the person for whom the entire world is potentially home,” says co-curator Anuradha Vikram. “We are here on the westernmost point on the globe, but we live on a sphere. ‘Middle East’ is a term that was created by Europeans, it’s not a term that people in that region would use to refer to themselves. So what is the Middle East?”

Last night, while walking through Times Square on the way to a dinner, I took this shot of a group of monks, in full monk garb, looking around at the lights with excitement, and even taking photographs (with a fancy looking camera). Times Square never ceases to amaze me with the fascination it engenders in all that visit it. While native New Yorkers do tend to get tired of the crowds and hassle of the area, I just love the fact that such a place exists, and generates the kind of excitement and awe that it does.

The quality of the shot is a bit crappy, but then I did take it with my Treo (since my camera was home in case Tanu wanted to take shots of the munchkin).

Now that I have my computer back, I can write about the big weekend Arav (and therefore we) had.

Starting this weekend we let Arav sleep in his crib the entire night, getting up only when he would let us know that it was time to attend to him. This following Arav’s pediatrician telling us that we didn’t have to strictly enforce the 2-hr schedule at night. It was a little nerve-wracking, as the first night we (okay, I) would get up at the slightest sounds of discomfort he would make.

But gradually, we are getting a feel for what it might be like. It is no less nerve-wracking after 4 nights, but I did manage to get a little more shut-eye each night. He looks so tiny in that big crib (especially since we keep the crib bare of any frills like blankets, pillows or stuffed animals).

It was also Arav’s first big social weekend. It kicked off Saturday when Victoria came by to visit Arav, and giving us the opportunity to catch up with her for the first time since she moved back to New York. She brought Arav his second “My First Yankee Tee” t-shirt (after the one Ranjeet and Sanjeevanee got him), his first styling pair of denims as well as Magnolia bakery cupcakes for his mom. We decided to use the opportunity of her visit to go for our first weekend brunch outside, heading to Amiya just a block away from our place. Given that Arav is still on a 2 hour schedule, we were just able to fit a nice buffet in between feeds. Arav went through the whole thing pretty peacefully, I must say.

This was followed by Arav’s first social visit anywhere on Sunday, when we went to Maasi’s place up in Westchester. It was a big gathering (as Maasi wanted to get all the mothers, especially the new one) together on Mothers Day. We generally don’t celebrate Hallmark holidays, but it did turn out to be a useful exercise in taking Arav out within a controlled, known environment. It was also the first use of our diaper bag. We managed to hold our own pretty well, and Arav was pretty calm through most of the trip, though bad traffic at the Lincoln Tunnel back to NJ proved to be too much of a strain for the little guy. He definitely does not like sitting in traffic for too long. But we did get some confidence about being able to take him places later this summer.

All in all, it was a pretty good weekend.

You know what, I am a pretty patient when it comes to technological challenges. I will work around most issues, and do more than what an average joe will put up with. Primarily, this is because I know how hard it is to design good software.

But I pretty much hit my limit today. The source of my frustration – the completely inane support capabilities built into Microsoft Vista (and I suspect the previous versions as well). Let me explain the neat little conundrum that Microsoft decided to test my patience with.

For the last couple of days, my laptop has been acting up, where all of a sudden the screen will go black, and pretty much the only thing I can do is hard power down the machine. After a relatively light weekend (by my standards), today things just imploded, where the machine would barely boot before it would conk out.

So I started the machine up in “Safe Mode” and started trying to figure out what to do. Going on some forums pointed me to a few knowledgebase articles, that recommended some hotfix downloads. Here is where the fun started.

You can’t download the hotfix unless your windows version is validated as being genuine. But the activex control on the windows site relies for this on a service running on your machine, and that service will not run in “Safe Mode”. Trying to start it gives you a nice little message telling you to start the machine in Normal Mode. But I wouldn’t be trying to download the hotfix if I could do that!

I tried downloading the hotfix from another machine, and transferring it to the laptop. But then installing the hotfix failed because of “Safe Mode”. So I needed to do something else.

I figured the best approach would be to update the display driver. NVidia’s website was no help at all. Their “beta” utility to detect my display type failed, and their manual download mechanism wouldn’t locate the right driver. Further searches on forums suggested that I use windows update to check for official driver updates. Going to the website recommended that I use the utility on my machine. But again that machine does not run in “Safe Mode”.

What did I end up doing? I kept rebooting the machine till I managed to start it in Normal Mode long enough to run windows update and download and install the updated driver. That was a fun 5 hours. Seems to be working so far, but I have to say that it really made me reconsider the quality of Microsoft’s engineering. I don’t understand how they could have created a process with these kind of contradictions built into it. Maybe all those guys develop on Linux or OS X.

This is one aspect of my personality that Tanu has a real problem with. Anything that I am into, I am into all the way. It borders on obsessiveness, though she thinks I tend to cross that line. I will work late into the night on my website, watch NFL Live, Sportscenter and NFL network every night, fill my memory cards with countless photographs (including one memorable episode in Melbourne that I will not elaborate on) and visit Facebook and LinkedIn every day.

But I don’t think anything I did comes close to what this kid has done (filling 50 VHS tapes with X-Files episodes is probably the closest thing I have come to this). That is either one obsessive kid, or a true Packers fan that puts all of us to shame. Any girl he ever dates had better watch out!

If there is any possibility of a silver lining to this Jeremiah Wright controversy, it could be this: hearing so much about his crazy pastor should have effectively killed any remaining misconception that Obama is a Muslim.

It’s the same folks that put any credence in both these non-issues.