siddhartha saha dot net

Here is a photo that I took with my cell phone.

For the first 24 years in my 25 year old life, I have never tried to set my foot on a dance floor. Or to rephrase it, while I was India, I did not have the social opportunity to try out these things. It all changed few months back when in UCSD I registered for a beginners lesson in ballroom dancing. As an inevitable consequence to the 24 years of inaction, I have a very stiff hip and sometimes I have no idea where are my feet going as I take a step. At that time I was desperately trying to find things to do to keep me busy. So registering for the ballroom class was a big step for me. It is not that I learned a lot of things, but the primary lesson that the class taught me is that dancing is fun, is a great way to socialize, meet new people, have some small exercise and least but hardly the least, to have a lot of fun. I have forgotten most of the beginners’ steps in all the dances that I had learned, but I left the class with a remarkably changed opinion on dancing and a few precious friends.
I like salsa and I have to learn that. I stared taking classes here in Seattle. After dabbling with the idea for some time, I went to the Century Ballroom tonight to practice a little – and I am really glad that I did. There are a lot of good salsa dancers around here – it sometimes just gets overwhelming, especially for me as I am supposed to lead and I am just a beginner. But people are nice and helpful – which makes the experience even more worthwhile. I met a couple of wonderful persons tonight.
All in all, I had a great evening and my stance on dancing being a good way to spend time and socialize got even more strengthened.

Dungeon Siege was the first RPG (of some sort) that I have played. Before that RPGs like Diablo II, Baldur’s Gate etc never really attracted me. I remember few people in IITK used to play Diablo like crazy and that always surprised me. Dungeon siege, even many would not give the game proper credit as an RPG, changed it all. These days I prefer RPGs to shooter games. After Dungeon Siege, I have played Baldur’s Gate, ES 3 Morrowind (with blackmoon and tribunal), Neverwinter Nights (and both SoU and HoD), Star Wars: KotoR and was thriled by all of them. I was so hooked that I kind of got mad and jumped into the MMORPG bandwagon and subscribed to Star Wars Galaxies for countless late night and early morning hours for eight months. Oh boy, those days…..

Well, after couple of years of waiting, Dungeon Siege II is supposed to hit the stands next week (8/16/2005). The penniless student days of IITK and piracy and warez gone long by… I will definitely going to buy this one…

… and Quake 4 sometime this november.

~ Peace…

I have been procastinating a lot – for several weeks. I reserved this domain name and this webspace around a month back – and I still do not have a working site… well, fully working site. On the face of it, this does not look a difficult task. You can build a good enough site with any decent webpage making tools in a matter of few hours. I have done that before. But I tried to do something different this time. I thought this is a really good opportunity for me to learn something about CSS, PHP and all that. So I chose a content management system WordPress, and that turned out to be a really nice decision for me. It took quite some time to dive deep into everything, but finally it seems that the work is paying off. I learned a lot of stuff. I did not know anything about CSS before – and now I know quite a lot. I knew a little PHP, but never have used it before.
Lastly, kudos to the people at WP. You are the best.
Well, I spent around 8-9 hours over the last two days on a local copy of this website on my laptop. I still need to do a lot of things – but hopefully I will finish them sometime in near future.