I earned my first paycheck in 1998 by creating a website for my uncle's business. The amount was Rs. 5000, which is about $100 at today's exchange rate.

Update (01/30/2009): I made this post when trying out Plinky. Probably won't be using the service anymore.

I started with the wonderful Super Mario Galaxy and it was the only Wii game I played until a couple of months ago. Then, for five days each, I rented Transformers, Super Smash Brothers Brawl, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, one after another. And although I didn’t really get in to Brawl, I thoroughly enjoyed the other two.

Then came October, and my awesome mother-in-law completely surprised me with two Wii games for my birthday. Pirates of the Carribean: At World’s End and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. Both are based on movies that I haven’t seen. I’ve enjoyed The Mummy more than Pirates.

Then came November, and keeping in mind that Liz and I will be off to Asia during Christmas, my mom-in-law sent our presents early. Guess what I got, among other things? Yea, that’s right, two more Wii games! Iron Man and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. Each based on a movie that I have seen multiple times. Awesome! I haven’t played Fantastic Four yet, but Iron Man has been fun so far.

Next week Liz and I leave for a vacation to Asia, but when I’m back in January, I’ll sure have a bunch of Wii games to play :)

I sent the following out to my friends and family in the US and abroad, then decided to share it here too.

Dear friends,

Congratulations!

Hope you are well. What an awesome night. Liz and I are elated and the mood in Portland is ecstatic, as it is in several parts of the US and the globe. Everyone I know is happy. With the state of things, there are probably tough times ahead but this makes it so much better. In whatever way you may have contributed to this day, I thank you.

Cheers!

Sam

I’ve never blogged about my birthday before, which is strange because I’ve had thirty-one of them. A few seconds ago I turned thirty-two.

Here are some personally memorable events since my last birthday:

• October - Made a trip to India for dad's 60th birthday celebration.
• January - Got all four of my wisdom teeth extracted. Two had to be dug out. Was on a soup diet for a couple of weeks.
• February - Created the first version of the [LazyEngine](https://lazyengine.appspot.com/).
• March - Asked Liz to marry me. She said yes. Bought a Wii. The engagement was decidedly more memorable, but the Wii has been fun too :-)
• April - Attended a concert by Zakir Hussain and met him.
• May - Went to the hot springs at Brietenbush. Sis and niece came over to visit. We all had a great time.
• June - Moved to a new place right next to the river in NW Portland. Liz spoke at Ignite Portland 3.
• July - Liz and I made a [trip to Maine](https://samandliz.wordpress.com/2008/10/05/our-trip-to-maine/) to visit her parents and to spend the 4th of July holiday with them. Later that month, I traveled to Porto, Portugal to attend a conference. Lovely little city. It was my first time in Europe.
• August - Liz and I had our [Portland wedding](https://samandliz.wordpress.com/2008/10/05/we-got-married/). Our New Delhi wedding is in December. We went to Crater Lake for a weekend. Beautiful place. Our first time there. I traveled to San Francisco to showcase my work.
• September - I hacked together [ff2tweet](https://github.com/samgrover/ff2tweet/tree/master). Hope to refine it further in the future.

And lastly, here’s more about the number 32.

I got sick of reposting to Twitter what I had just posted to FriendFeed. I was doing that to enable conversations in both networks. I tried twitterfeed and Yahoo! Pipes, before deciding to just write a tool to do exactly what I wanted.

ff2tweet is a tool to convert a FriendFeed post into a tweet and post it to Twitter. It does so while ensuring that the tweet is within the character limit and incorporates any comment made by the user when posting on FriendFeed. It also inspects the link in the post to shorten and add to the tweet as necessary.

ff2tweet is written in Python and I run it as a cron job on a server. It uses the FriendFeed and Twitter APIs to accomplish its task. It does what I wanted to do but it is a quick hack and there is definitely room for improvement. All feedback appreciated. The code is available on github. Join in!

I’m on FriendFeed at https://friendfeed.com/samgrover and on Twitter at https://twitter.com/samgrover.

As I mentioned in my last post, (over two months ago!) I went to Portugal for a trip towards the end of July. I was attending the SECRYPT conference and presenting my paper there. All I knew about Porto, was what I read on Wikipedia and other places online. I was looking forward to a cute historic European city and that’s exactly what I got.


I reached there on a Friday afternoon, quite jet-lagged. The hotel (Hotel Melia Gaia Porto) was in the area south of the Douro river called Vila Nova De Gaia. That evening I got food at a nearby place and explored about a mile around the hotel, partly in search of a wall adapter for my laptop power cord. Walking around Gaia reminded me of India, especially my maternal grandma’s neighborhood in Delhi. The streets are narrow. The cars are small. Old rustic architecture is mixed with modern glassy facades.


The conference was at the hotel and ran from Saturday thru Tuesday. Each day, I would attend sessions until about 6pm and then head out to explore the city. On Saturday I took a leisurely photowalk towards the city center. As I got closer to the river, historic buildings appeared and this time I was reminded of Bombay, which has a heavy Portugese influence. The extent of that influence was more than I realized. I rediscovered words that I thought were of Indian origin, only to find that they were in fact Portugese. In Bombay, the word for bread is ‘pao’ and the word for potato is ‘batata’. Both of those are Portugese words. This discovery surprised my friends and family too.


Over the next few days I explored several areas around the Porto city center. The metro was very convenient. On my last day there I went to Casa da Música. It is an interesting building with non-perpendicular corners and a variety of unique rooms. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that it was completely open to the public for free. You could just walk into and all around its various rooms, even into the main auditorium. You could sit at a Steinway grand piano and play to your heart’s content and no one would bother. I didn’t because I don’t know how but a guy was doing just that.

Overall the trip was productive and pleasant, definitely whetting my appetite to explore more of Europe. My photos from the trip are in the slideshow below. You can follow it to the photos on flickr where you can view their location on a map.

[https://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=59254](https://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=59254)

There’s plenty going on.

My sister and her daughter came by to visit me from India last month. They were here for about a week and we all had a great time going around the Portland metro area and nearby to the gorge and coast. Here they are at Cannon Beach.


I got a paper accepted to a conference called SECRYPT. I will be going to present it at Porto, Portugal during the last few days of July. I just applied for a Visa and am looking forward to my first trip to Europe.

Ignite Portland 3 happened last night. This time Liz was a speaker. She spoke about her experiences of traveling to Afghanistan. She has a ton of stories and did an excellent job of squeezing a five minute rapid fire inspirational talk from them. There was a good variety of topics, just like at the last Ignite Portland, which made the evening quite entertaining. This time we went to the after party at Imbibe and had a great time with friends, old and new. You can see her slides and video right here. They go quite well together.

And lastly for now, Liz and I decided to start a blog together to document our adventures. I kicked it off tonight with a basic theme and a first post about how we met. Check it out and subscribe for more stories in the future.

About three months after its initial launch, I’m happy to announce a new version of LazyEngine. I have moved it off my domain and onto the recently launched Google App Engine. This involved a rewrite of the code from the original PHP into the new Python version. This does not mean that it is any less lazy ;-)

I had wanted to add a feature to remember a user’s past searches but was too lazy to implement that in PHP. With the new version, I get user logins automatically. You can use your Google accounts to log into LazyEngine and have it remember your searches from visit to visit. Give it a shot right now at https://lazyengine.appspot.com/. Enjoy!

Even in those young days I had heard of the music of Ustad Zakir Hussain. Zakir is regarded as the foremost player of the Tabla in the world. He has achieved unparalleled recognition and mastery with the Tabla and is a household name in India. Last night, Liz and I went to the Schnitz for a concert by Zakir Hussain and the Masters of Percussion. It is an annual event hosted by Kalakendra. The group does a tour each year and the musicians change regularly. It was such beautiful and wide ranging music from a dozen different instruments of various Indian Classical schools. I was enthralled by the solo and group performances, especially the Tabla, the Sarangi and the Sitar.

Afterwards, we got to meet and chat with Zakir. He had such a jovial and warm demeanor. This was my first time at the event and I hope to go again.