Following the tradition started last year, here are my personal hi-lites and lo-lites for the year 2003:
HI-LITES:
- My first and the only book, J2EE Security for Servlets, EJB and Web Services was published in the month of September. Subsequently, it was reported at theserverside.com, excerpted at java.net, promoted at javaranch.com and, as a surprise Christmas gift, was reviewed at slashdot.org. Authoring the book turned out to be quite an experience: besides providing the statisfaction of creating something tangible, it created an opportunity to savor the unique, author-only post-publication experience: daily (sometime, hourly) monitoring of Amazon.com sales rank, fretting over negative (and, of-course incorrect!) Amazon.com reviews, interactions with other authors and promotion through forum postings! The latest was the pleasure of being shown the low-cost Indian edition of the book by a colleague who bought it in India for Rs. 295/- and being requested to sign it.
- Most of the work that I do at HP is company confidential and I rarely get a chance to talk about those in these pages. However, WSMF, a set of specifications for Management USING and OF web services, was published by HP and contributed to WSDM-TC of OASIS. I was closely involved in this effort as program manager and also contributed as a co-author.
- After a long gap of almost three years, we visited India during the month of August. This was remarkable in many ways -- for the first time, all members of the extended family got together; I was off from company e-mail for a full one month; and we stayed at a hotel in Bangalore for one full week doing nothing but meeting old friends, shopping and roaming around.
- At the year end, we finally summoned the courage and bought a house in the Silicon Valley at a price which I still consider quite inflated (that is why this item will appear under LO-LITES as well). We moved-in just a week ago and are still in the process of unpacking and settling-down. The good thing about owning a house is that now Akriti and Unnati can do as much jumping around as they want. It has also reduced my commute to work from already low of 5 minutes to 3 minutes!
LO-LITES:
- The workplace restructuring/downsizing continued at HP and my organization was lighter by almost 20% by the year-end. The notification day came just after a couple of months of closing the house escrow and caused me and Veena a great deal of financial anxiety.
- Veena had a foot-fracture which made her near-immobile for more than three weeks. This caused us to suspend Akriti's birthday celebration and postpone our India trip by 3 weeks.
- We couldn't get Unnati admitted to the Parents' Participating school where Akriti had gone during her play-school days.
- We moved from a very comfortable and affordable apartment to our own house with significantly higher monthly fixed payments (mortgage + property tax + insurance + enrgy).