Fortworth Stockyards

Fortworth is a city to the West of Dallas about 30-40 mikes away. There is a small area called as the Fortworth Stockyards. This place is very cool, absolutely chilled out... people wearing cowboy hats & boots, drinking beer on the roads, bands playing music really loud in open top wooden bars....really crowded & fun. There were a lot of roadside bars, Texan boots, hats & souvenir shops.

We had food in an open air wooden bar with live band and some beers. Then with our beers in hand, we started walking on the street. We walked into one of the shops and happened to walk through a door which said 'Employees Only' & to our surprise landed up in the rodeo show arena. The show had started about an hour before we got there and still we caught a good amount of the show.

The Fortworth stock yards show is 112 years old. Well trained cowgirls & cowboys compete in various competitions like brading calves, stay on & tame a raging bull etc. This was a very exciting experience & something to take friends & family to when they visit Texas.... :)

Infomaniacs are beyond me!!

He collects information about something or the other all the time. I worry thats the reason he is the way he is.

His office is pretty strict about the usage of internet and so obviously he cant stream anything, cant check his personal mail for too long, cant keep any internet window open for a long time. So all he does when he wants to get a break from work is go to some website and read various articles, collects & stores random data in his brain database. I thought he does this cos he has no choice.. turns out he would do the same thing even if he had a choice. Thats strange for me.....I fail to understand. Dont get me wrong I am not against any good reading, I read newspaper almost everyday myself but my info collection pretty much ends there on daily basis.

Even when he can watch fun stuff, like at home, he would rather watch information aquiring stuff, it could be trip to europe, construction or history of a RV truck, cookery show, news, construction of a building, some show about some historical place but never/vvvvvvvery rarely would you find him watching comedy, game shows, stupid tv shows. Very rarely would you find him looking for just funny videos or ads or movie clips on youtube. Instead, you always find him reading about some random information. Thats wierd because I cannot read or watch these kind of things all the time, I will definitely read/watch something that interests me.

I wonder what he does with so much information. It worries me that someone has the capacity to collect such kind of information all the time froma ll directions and doesnt need a break from that. I dont want to say its bad its just beyond me!!

He is not a boring person at all. He loves going out, having fun with friends & family. Freaking out at parties, getting drunk with friends, watching movies, loves travelling and I just cant link the infomaniac & the fun guy. I believe some part of it is hereditory. Good thing about this nature is that he is an extremely good planner but sad part is, he plans absolutely unnecessary and irrelevent things sometimes and anxiety about random things eats him for no reason.....as I said its beyond me!!

TV shows

F.R.I.E.N.D.S - Evergreen comedy show. 6 friends staying in the city of New York, going through the ups n downs of love affairs, marriages, divorces, babies and managing to be good friends all throughout. I have watched this show million times but still catch 2-3 episodes every week on TBS. Its a good dose of laughter after work.

Family guy - As the name suggests, this is a cartoon show revolving around one American(supposedly) family from a fictional town named Quahog. Peter, Lois the parents, & the kids are Chris, Meg & Stewie (most interesting character of the show) and of course a dog, Brian (who almost always talks and behaves just like humans). This is my favourite show these days. The writers of this show crack jokes on blacks, whites, browns, disabled people, babies, sex basically anything and everything. I donno if theres anything in this universe that these writers think they cannot make fun out of. They can take any situation that could be serious, turn it around and make it HILARIOUS!!!!!

America's funniest home videos - I don't know the timings of this show but I land up catching it at least once a week by accident. In this show the host presents various hilarious home videos. These videos are sent by the viewers of the show. Some land up winning $10,000 for these clips. I guarantee, at least once every show everyone drops off their chair. The presentation of the show is really good. Well put together show.

Top chef - I haven't managed to catch a lot of episodes of this show but its pretty interesting n delicious. Well qualified chefs cook to impress a panel of judges. The food is judged by the taste, appearance, presentation and many other aspects. I want to be a judge on this show.....Dream job!! :)

Rock of love, parental control - Rock of love airs on VH1 & Parental control airs on MTV. Those are THE MOST CRAPPY shows I have ever seen. Rock of love is a show where a group of whores or almost whores are competing for a guy who they believe is the love of their life. The drama, politics & stupidity overall is........am out of words........IDIOTIC. Parental control -I dont even wanna write about it.

Sex & the city - A show about 4 New York based women in mid 30s discussing their reationships, sexlives, constantly changing boyfriends and involving complications. This show on the whole has no substance but for some reason I have seen all the seasons more than once. The drama in the show keeps u glued to the seat. The fashions and shoes in the show are fab. (sorry, m a shoes freak!!). Many of the supposedly socially relevent issues catered to in the show were absolute bull according to me....being a non-american I couldn't relate to those I guess.....Enjoyed the drama!!

Beginning work @ Beck

I am currently working for a construction company by the name of Beck Group in Dallas, Texas. Within Beck we have a group of people who work for At&t - Beck alliance. Currently, I am working on an Internet Data Center for At&t. First day at work was insane.....My boss walked me the whole site and showed me how the data center works. Only thing that I caught out of the whole process was that, these are the servers for various clients At&t wants to sell this space to and the electrical and mechanical system running these servers can NEVER go off. This whole week felt like a bad dream where everyone else except me understood everything that was going on at the data center. I attended the subcontractor and owners meetings in the first week itself and all I had in my meeting minutes were 10-15 words that I didnt know the head or tail of.
Next week, Monday, my boss explained the meanings of all those terms that I did not understand in the meetings and dropped a bomb on me saying that I will be responsible for meeting minutes for the subcontractor meetings here onwards. I haven't forgotten to drink coffee on Fridays since then. :) Soon I found myself responsible for Request for Information from Architects and Engineers, transmittal, many small project coordination. Taking down the meeting minutes was a good task. It gave me a gist of things happening on the site and introduced me to different subcontractors performing various duties on the site.
Within the 1st & 2nd week I was put through a lot of training. Beck believes in continuous training and cross training. This gives every employee an opportunity to learn something new constantly.
Now I am two months old with Beck and feel much better about the job. I have great amount of faith in my boss and I think he has a plan for me in mind. This gives me a direction to work and keeps me moving up the progress ladder.
My boss always told me that our job is never 8-5 type, its always 7:30 to whatever it takes. I am starting experience that now. Tomorrow will be my first duty beyond midnight all by myself. Pretty exciting!!! :)

NY,DC, Boston 2006

I came to Texas A & M, College Station to study construction management in the fall of 2006. I travelled a whole lot during these 18months of masters course. My first trip was to NY, DC, & Boston in the month of December 2006. We travelled the NE USA with a bunch of friends. We went to NY to experience the cold and snow. It didnt get as cold as we expected though. During that time Texas was cooler than NE.
We wanted to be present in NY for the 31st night to experience the crowds and the most famous NY ball drop at the Times Square. We spent a lot of days in NY, stayed with some old friends. Times square, NY bull, Stock exchange, Statue of liberty, Madame Tussads kept us pretty busy.
Times square is an experience of a lifetime and is a place that should be walked in the day and in the night.
We travelled to DC in the cheap Chinatown buses from Manhattan, it was amazing to see this surprisingly big Chinese setting in the heart of one of the most expensive cities.
The downtown DC has numerous museums, historical buildings and of course the White House. None of us were really impressed by the White House. Expected this powerful building to be much better. DC is a city one should experience walking as much as possible. You come across a lot of historical landmarks all along the way. I went to DC again in the month of December of 2007 with my dad. We have walked & walked & walked & walked & walked...............ppphhhh....
Towards the end of trip we went to Boston. Boston is also a pedestrian city. We went to Boston only for 2 days. The main intent of the trip was to visit Harvard and MIT. Harvard has a very nice campus, worth visiting. Clicked a lot of pictures of the CS & Artificial intelligence center designed by the famous architect Gehry.

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1st post

Since 2005, I have been wanting to create a blog and be regular at it. Even created 1 or 2 but never managed to be regular at posting. I guess this is my last attempt.