Monday, September 24, 2007

Vikram's school

Some of you might know that Vikram comes from an illustrious family of lawyers. Both his parents are lawyers. Vikram's grandfather was in fact, the first Chief Justice on the Indian Supreme Court after independence. His family owns a village and tea plantations near Chennai. The most impressive thing though is the free school that Vikram's family operates for poor kids in the outskirts of Chennai.

On my last visit to the Chennai office, Vikram took me to this school and I was impressed by what Vikram's family has done there. It is a very impressive school with K-10 education and Vikram's family fully pays for the cost of running the school with the mission of educating the poor children in the village. In addition, the children are given free food and clothes and Vikram's family goes the extra mile to run a school bus to pick up the children from their homes so that they do not miss out on school because of commute problems. I spent some time at the school and it is a great feeling to see these smart curious boys and girls who would have been spending time working as labor on farms if not for the free education provided by the school.

I'd like to give Vikram my support and best wishes in his endeavor of giving a better future through a good education to these little kids.

(dr.k)

Friday, September 21, 2007

Interview

I can still remember my interview with Vikram, which we had in his house. Some of the interview questions were:
a. Do you think India will win the match today?
b. In what channel do they telecast the match?

As you may not have guessed, I answered these two questions wrongly!
(p)

Soccer cleats

My favorite thing about Vikram is that he either couldn't afford or was too lazy to buy a decent pair of shoes for most of my first year here at Efficient Frontier. He wore worn out soccer cleats with no socks. It was also during this time that he and some of the other engineers played cricket downstairs in an open office in our Palo Alto office. Perhaps he felt the worn out cleats gave him an unfair advantage in "indoor cricket."
(tk)

Demon Tea

I remember that Vikram returned from India one time with a 1kg sack of tea leaves, possibly from his family's plantation. We brewed a pot of the tea and everyone at the time (me, Shawn Myers, Bill Hudak, Trish?, Anand) drank a cup. The tea turned out to be so strong that Bill became sick and had to go home for the day, and from then we called his stuff "Demon Tea."
(dw)

Vikram and the Princess

Though Vikram is a happily married man now when he started Efficient Frontier he was an eligible bachelor. When questioned about his dating life by co-workers (Junior, DWhite and Trish), Vikram would say he was too busy with school to meet girls. We offered up our matchmaking assistance for our seemingly shy friend but he wasn't interested. So we assumed he was content with work and his studies…that is until we learned about his secret, double life...

You see, at the time Vikram lived in a cottage behind a professor's house. This professor was the world's foremost authority on Bhutan. So when the Bhutanese King sent his daughters to the U.S. for college he entrusted them to the care of this professor. Do you see where this story is going? So it turns out the reason our friend and colleague, Vikram, didn’t need our dating help was because he spending time with a princess. Would our friend become Prince of Bhutan? Was there a royal wedding in our futures?...

Though he broke the princess' heart (I may be embellishing a bit here) he had a vow to return to India and his family. Upon his return home he met and married his lovely wife and the rest is fairytale history.

Thursday, September 20, 2007

Flaming Fingers Vikram

Vikram has always been partial to Cheetos. This is the transcript of an actual conversation with Vikram:

Anand: had a good janmashtami? filled up with goodies?
Vikram: yes, it was good. thanks. sweets though - i dont like sweets
A: no murukku business is it?
V: "cheedai" - non-sweet round items. not liked either. no festival involves popcorn or corn-puffs unfortunately.

There has always been an easy way to bribe Vikram to do anything one wants: Offer him Flaming hot Cheetos. Trish used to do this to great effect back in the day whenever she wanted Vikram to load her click data or her revenue data and so on.

The thing about flaming hot cheetos is that it converts your fingers to a reddish-purple hue. And when you spend most of your time typing at a keyboard, this converts all your keys to a reddish-purple hue also. This also renders your keyboard unusable by anyone except a touch typist because the lettering on the keys are indistinguishable.

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Tax Fugitive Vikram

Vikram famously never filed his tax returns. His thinking was that since he surely didn't owe any, he didn't consider filing important. (For those of you keeping score, Vikram comes from a family of illustrious tax lawyers in India. He probably knows whereof he speaks). This went on for a long time, until he came visiting last year. He finally ponied up a few hundred bucks for a tax preparer and had all his 7 years of taxes filed. Turned out he was due a huge refund. Unfortunately, he didn't actually get any. He also owed various cities and states many hundreds of dollars in parking and other driving related tickets. Apparently they garnished his IRS refunds to cover them.

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Vikram's cars

Vikram has had a long and tortured history with cars. For the first year and a half that he was with us, Vikram owned cheap cars on the use and dispose model. What that meant was that every 6 months or so, Vikram would go out and buy a $400 car, and then get rid of it 6 months later when it stopped working. As an economic model it is hard to find fault with this M.O.

Our earliest experience with his car was back in 2003, soon after he had started. Our colo at the time was in San Francisco, and I needed Vikram to go with me and set up something on this new Linux server we were trying out at the time. I had taken the train in to work, so Vikram drove us back to the city. As soon as we got on the 101, it started raining. Of course, the wipers don't work so well on a $400 car. "Don't worry about that," Vikram said, "if we drive fast enough, the rain will slide right off." All the way, the windows barely hold up, and the howling wind with the rain make for a fine driving experience.

We drive to the city and fix the server and get back in the car. Vikram puts the key in the ignition, and I notice that it has gotten rather foggy very quickly. Vikram agreed. Then I pointed out that for fog, it smelled a little too much like burning car. We quickly got out of the car and opened the hood to see a steaming pile of car in front of us. We hung around for a while waiting for the car to cool off. Eventually, we got back in the car, and Vikram put it in drive. Except the car wouldn't move forward. He put it in reverse, and it moved backwards of course. Vikram pointed out that he could reverse his way back to Palo Alto, and was quite happy to do so. As a slightly responsible founder, I had to demur. So Vikram came up with an alternative idea, "I'll just leave my car parked here, surely eventually the city will just tow it away, and it won't be my problem any more," he said. That seemed more responsible to me and we moved forward on that plan. Eventually, Vikram had to tow his own car to a junkyard, pay the city about $500 in fines for leaving his car on the side of the street and buy a new car.

This new car ran well for a while but eventually reached the end of its lifetime also. Vikram took it in to the mechanic to find out what to do about it, and the mechanic asked him when the last time he put oil in the car. "Oil?" asked Vikram. Apparently, Vikram had had no idea that an engine needed to be kept lubricated. That was the end of that car. So Vikram left it parked in the office parking lot while he considered what to do with it. Except, a few days later the car was missing. Turns out our landlord decided the car was a blight on the landscape (we're talking east bayshore here, not the world's prettiest landscape) and had it towed. And the towing company charged Vikram a couple hundred bucks to have it junked.

The economics of the use and dispose method begins to break down if every time you dispose you give up as much as you spent getting the car in the first place. Having come to this reluctant conclusion himself, Vikram then proceeded to get himself a brand new Passat. It being a new car, the guys decided to drive down to Tahoe and go skiing over the weekend. We had Barker and Vesko in Barker's car in front, and Kevin and Vikram in Vikram's new Passat following them. It was snowing quite heavily, and of course Vikram had no chains, and of course Vikram drove as if it was sunny and dry. (If you've never sat in a car driven by Vikram, it is a well recommended experience. All the thrills of sky diving, none of the expense!). A car a few cars in front slid off the freeway and the others behind braked hard. Vikram braked hard too, only he was going a little too fast. The car spun out, Vikram turned the wheel, hit the brakes harder, and while he was at it, hit the gas as well for good measure. The car rotated through 3 or 4 turns, and came to a halt in front of Barker's car, in the meantime not having touched any other car or roadside object in the process. All the while, Kevin sat praying for his health, and also promised his personal God never to ride with Vikram again.

Friday, September 7, 2007

My Vikram experience

On my first day at EF, I was taken to a rather small room, extremely untidy with empty packets of flaming hot chips lying around, an old pair of shoes and assorted computer hardware etc lying around.

I was rather chuffed that I had an office, but it turned out I was sharing it with a guy called Vikram, who I had met a few times at Stanford and who I know talked very fast and with very high bandwidth.

It turned out sharing an office with Vikram was the best place a new EF engineer could be placed, given he knew everything and you felt you could ask the stupid questions you may hesitate to ask Dr K or Anand.

Vikram worked a lot, and he worked a lot on the move. Have laptop and a internet connection, will code was his philosophy. From Stanford, from various airports on his way to the east coast, from office. I sometimes called Vikram 'Mr Wolf' (he solved problems).

Vikram was also a big proponent of Web 0.1. He is to date the only person I know who actually really used lynx (a text based browser) rather than a browser that showed pictures and stuff. Indeed, the ACM was built and debugged using lynx until the sad day when an unsuspecting piece of Web 1.0 crept in in the form of Javascript to login (!!) and lynx had to be dropped (although not without some searching through sourceforge i feel). And the ACM did look good on lynx.

Vikram did not watch baseball or football or reruns of ESPN news; he watched CSPAN. Between him and Anand (and the occasional contribution from dg), I was educated on the finer points of the US political landscape.

We all thought marriage would change Vikrams work hours, but even though he's in Chennai I am often chatting to him at 2pm PST, and he's often at some airport when he calls in to the weekly Infrastructure meeting. So, reassuringly, nothing has changed.

Tuesday, September 4, 2007

Vikram eggplant eater

Vikram is a fussy eater. There are very few cuisines he will eat:
  • Thai Food: A particular favorite, but only if he gets to eat Eggplant green curry. (Preferably from Amarin Thai).
  • Indian Food: But only channa batura (even at Chevron Bevron)
  • Pizza: But only cheese, with huge and liberal helpings of crushed peppers on top
  • Subway sandwich: But just toasted with cheese and jalapenos
It was quite the shock to David White's and my system when he started here 4 years ago, and when we asked him to go get lunch with us, he assured us that he would rather go to the Pizza Hut in the Target store across the street and get himself a cheese pizza. David White and I of course pride ourselves on our discriminating culinary taste, and it was surprising to us that somebody would enjoy eating just cheese pizzas from Pizza Hut. But here he was in flesh and blood.

Back in the day, we used to get dinner at the office every day and around 6pm, David would make the rounds, "taking a census," as I called it, to find out what people wanted for dinner. With Vikram the answer was always simple, "Thai Food," and "eggplant green curry." Of course, we couldn't possibly have Thai food everyday, so we would have to get other cuisines, and Vikram would rather starve than eat a non-approved cuisine.

Vikram could of course eat eggplant green curry 3 meals a day if he wanted, so strong was his commitment to the food. This one time when we were at the Castro Office, he decided to go out and get some for lunch. He asked Nick Hristov if he would like some, and Nick said, "sure." So Vikram goes out and gets some extra spicy curry and gives Nick his little box of food. Five minutes later, there's an explosion in Nick's cube, smoke coming out of Nick's ears, Nick rolling around the floor in pain and trying to put out the fire in his mouth. That was the last time ever that Nick had Thai food.

Needless to say, this was unfortunate for us. If both of them were having dinner with us, there was nothing we could get, one guy would only have Thai food, the other would definitely not.