Tampa Bay Downs, Race Track Road

This is third time I visited Tampa Bay Downs. Nothing changed. Same races, same punters, people losing money, making fortunes, shouting their favourite horses names... But there is something about this sport if we keep the betting part aside. Horses, Jockeys, Trainers, Owners, Breeders taming these wild animals, training them to race against each other, year after year, paying tribute to this ancient sport. It's exhllarating..and joy to watch the race.

Majjiga Pulusu (Khadi)

This is one of my favourite dishes. Last night, I observed Boodida Gummadikaayalu at the local Indian Grocery. I immly called my mummy and asked her for this recipe. And within an hour a very tasty dish is ready.

Preparation Time : 30 minutes
Serves : 3 ( serves 4 with Parathas)

Ingredients:
For Masala Paste:
2 tbl spoons Dhania seeds
2 tbl spoons Channa Dal
1 tbl spoon poppy seeds (khus-khus)
4 green chillies
4 sun-dried red chillies
1 inch ginger
1 garlic pod
1/2 tbl spoon jeera seeds
1/2 cup fresh shredded coconut
1 tbl spoon turmeric

For Main Dish
Also keep aside 2 cups curds (better if sour curds)
1 small piece Ash Guard ( ash pumpkin or boodida gummadi kaaya)
Curry leaves
Coriander leaves
1 tbl spoon Fenugreek Seeds

Preparation:
Soak all masala items (except shredded coconut) in water for 10 minutes. Then add coconut and make a coarse paste. Add this paste and turmeric to curds and mix thoroughly. Keep this aside.

Pressure cook pumpkin pieces (just for one whistle). Add the pumpkin pieces to the curds mix and bring it to one boil. Switch off the heat and keep it aside. (It should be moved off from any heat source or else water will come out of the vegetables. Dont even keep the vessel on the switched off burner).

Seasoning: Heat some oil. Add mustard, jeera and fenugreek seeds. Fenugreek seeds should be fully roasted (should turn black). At the end add some curry leaves to the seasoning and mix it with the pulusu.

Garnish with Coriander leaves.

Keep it aside for 30 minutes. Fenugreek seeds will be soaked.

Tasty Majjiga Pulusu is ready!!!

It is best side for hot rice with toor dhal (mudda pappu) and little Ghee. Goes well with Aloo Paratha or plain paratha too.

I did just like Mummy adviced and it came out extremely well.

Instead of Ash Pumpkin, the following vegetables can be used.
Carrot Pieces, Munakkayalu (Drum Stick Pieces), Arati kaaya (Raw Plantain) - pressure cook for 1 whistle.

Bendakaayalu (Okra/ Bhendi) - fry in little oil until sides turn black - never pressure cook Bhendi pieces.

In Nellore, at the famous Komala Vilas Restaurant, they add Tomatos also. If the curds are not fresh, we can try tomatoes to get that a tinge of tartness. 

Honeymoon Island, Palm Harbor, Florida, United States 

Clearwater Beach, Florida, Unites States 

Enterprise Architect Journey

There are always experiences in both career and life..some will be life changing.

One year back, I read a book "To Kill A Mocking Bird". A scene when the character Atticus Finch kills a mad dog. That makes him a larger-than-life character in the eyes of his 9 year old daughter Scout. It's brilliant. It shook my notion of heroes amongst the characters... I became a fan of Harper Lee

Something like that happened when I started my Enterprise Architect Certification journey. I was very skeptal as this certification is successfully achieved by many who has not even an iota of knowledge about enterprise architectures. But, as I started going through tonnes of material for preparation and hours I am going to put in the assignment, I felt extremely content.

In my job, many times I okayed many designs, even if it is against my conviction. (often political reasons). With this SCEA Part 2 assignment, I have an opportunity to architect a solution with the complete freedom as my heart feels.

We will see how it goes.

And BTW another book I read today is mesmerizing - "Patterns Of Enterprise Application Architecture" - Martin Fowler

Change or get doomed

How fast can IT management respond to new methodologies?

IT Services companies should continously strive to improve the SDLC process. Use modern paradigms like eXtreme Programming, Continous Integration etc.

Evolve...dudes.....fastttt

me@moonar, kerala, India 

JMeter rocks

I wanted to do a small scale stress testing with a simulation of few hundreds of concurrent users. I tried JMeter and it is wonderful. It took just 2 hours for me to create 5 test cases with dynamic data picked from external file and run the tests. Now I expanded it for full scale stress testing.

I recommend this if your requirement is simple and you want to do things fast.

visit http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/ for more details.

Sunday is Monday

Being an application assembler and in-charge of SCM is a pain particularly if the software has 3000 files and release cycles every week. Neverthless, it is my job. So the whole Sunday I ran ant scripts, testing, deployment and CVS commits.

Spoke with Raghu after so many days. He will be going India tomorrow.

Farewell to Shanti

Finally she left for India. When we met 2 months back both of us never imagined that we would be such good friends. And more than friends. She is my favorite sister now. With a protocol..that we support each others all the time....

Then came back home and started work, sleep, then had a dinner with Manju and Archana.

Later I watched 3 movies....Predator 2, The Great Train Robbery and The Desert Fox. Had a wonderful Saturday night. Half the weekend is gone...Gloomy Monday awaiting....But there is more...