In Pursuit of Wisdom

I won the round 2 of chess tournament in Salesforce.com a little earlier playing with black. My opponent was Ron Pragides who sits in seventh floor in the same building as mine. He is Senior Director of Software Engineering. Shishir and Maithili joined me to watch the game. The chess clock we had actually ran out of battery so Ron did an interesting thing. He downloaded a chess clock in his iPhone where we set 20 minutes for each of us. It served the purpose fine! Ron made the first mistake but I made a follow up mistake too to bring him back in the game. So it went down to Ron to make the final mistake by him through which I was able to mate him. Unlike round 1, this time I was ahead of time.

As world cup cricket 2011 is approaching, some interesting cricket jokes are also on the horizon. Here is one - I am eagerly looking forward to the opening game of 19th February that will be held in my backyard in Dhaka between Bangladesh and India!

I played the first round of the four round chess tournament in Salesforce.com. I won with White, although I felt I am out of touch by a good margin due to the lack of practice. My opponent was Didier Prophete who is PMTS and sits in 3rd floor in the same building as I do. Also I took lot more time than my opponent to move. However, I will do some practice before next rounds so that I don't make simple miscalculations. Soon after this, I exchanged the queens to make sure there is nothing left in the board except my Rook and Didier's Bishop while I have a bunch of queens side passed pawns to march for promotion. So he resigned here while I had some 3 minutes left in the clock as opposed to his 9 minutes. Last few days I finished Himu Rimande and Kichukhkhon by Humayun Ahmed.

The eve of last year and the whole new year 2011 so far, I have been occupied with my daughter Suhaila and shopping with Ammu for my brother Rasel's marriage. I used my second week of paternity leave from office to visit my Uncle, Aunt and cousins in New York as well as send my Mom to Dhaka with my friend Paul. As a bonus we got snow, lots and lots of snow and snowfall in New York! In that sense this trip during 11th January to 17th January was a highly successful one. Ezaz dropped us in San Francisco Airport early morning so that we could catch our Delta Airlines flight at 8:30 AM on time. Kakku received us in JFK airport, New York. in the evening. That very night there was continuous snow fall that we watched over the window and enjoyed. As usual Abir, Asif, Roton, Kakku and Aunt were highly delighted to see Ahyan and Suhaila. The next day morning I and Ahyan got down in front of Kakku's house to help him clean snows and take some pictures during that time. The pictures fo...

Happy new year 2011! Last year 2010 was a very important year for me primarily due to the birth of our second daughter Suhaila . The last few days of the year I spent mostly with Ammu and Ahyan shopping for Rasel's engagement and marriage. It's lot of fun. Also I thoroughly enjoyed the India vs South Africa test series during this time. Sreeshant excellent bouncer to make Jack Kallis helpless in the second test turning him into a C shape will remain in my memory as long as I cherish test cricket. Here is an important number in cricket for batsmen with some modifications from me as a new year gift for the readers - highest batting average. The traditional way of measuring batting average is to divide the total career runs scored by the number of innings he played excluding the not out innings. This way we know before getting out, the batsmen scores how many runs on an average. Forget about the Bradman's magical 99.94, then the good batsmen averages around 50 to 60 runs be...