After quite some uncertainties from several parties involved wrt mutually convenient dates for meeting up in Bangalore, it finally happened this weekend. An accident involving the bus in which I was traveling, marked the beginning of this eventful weekend. God knows what the driver banged on when we heard a loud “Thud” and I (seated in the 2nd row) opened the screen to check what was wrong. The entire front cabin was jammed and the driver missing. We had to get out of the bus through the driver’s window as the doors were jammed and catch some other bus to get to Bangalore (yes, all by ourselves in the middle of nowhere. Driver absconded). Reached Bangalore safe and sound at around 0700 hrs (2 hrs late) on Saturday and was joined by Onkar later in the day from Pune. We had lunch and then headed to my ex-office where there was an “Open House” happening. Open House happens once in two to three years when the employees bring in their family members and show around the office and stuff. So we went in as a “family” of one of my partners in crime. They also “complimented” me with a nice WildCraft bag . Being a Saturday night and in Bangalore, the day is incomplete without a “Team Building” Session with good old fellow team builders. This time we had a Video Conference with one of our teambuilders joining in from Hildesheim, Germany on Skype with a bottle of beer and the traditional “Prost” marked the beginning of the 3 hr session…

The plan of action for Day 2 was to meet up at Parthan’s place. We planned to do a mini Bug Jam but it turned out to be a “hackathon” with Onkar and me working on the Windows port for gnusim8085, Parthan triaging a few bugs in Launchpad, Roshan (ubunturos) doing some Python reading and Barkha (baks17) trying to get GNU/Linux (Installfest ) on her newly bought laptop. We had great fun as you can read from here. Good news is “Gnusim8085.exe” is not far away *fireworks*.

The day ended with Ashish, Amit Modak, Onkar, Barkha and me having dinner at a chinese restaurant “Chung Wah” discussing random things and finally today, I bid goodbye to Bangalore for a few months to come. Back in Chennai and time is running out.. tick tick tick..

Complete flickr set of the Ubuntu India friends meet up.