Old habits die hard! Even till today I do fix most of the household broken things like changing bathroom fittings and taps, regulators of ceiling fan, Fixing of water pump in air cooler, alarm clocks etc., You may get it done by professional but the happiness you get in repairing it is more worth it. Trust me! :)
Recently my cruel eyes have turned towards my "toy", Royal Enfield Bullet :D I bought the pete's manual for my bike last weekend from Nandan, so called Bangalore's bullet scientist :) and have started doing a study/research on my bike to find out how-things-work in it during weekends. Call it passion or insanity or whateva!
No matter how people ridicule me and poke fun at my craze, someday I wish to open up the whole of engine and put it back as it is with even better tuning done with perfect valve train arrangements. I am quite good at tools but I don't have a set of all tools required. Shopping list of spanners, box pliers is quite lengthy! A single change of engine oil requires about 2.2L(INR 440 bucks), leave alone primary clutch-case and gearbox oil. But it is quite a cheap machine from spares point of view to screw-it-up :P
I refreshed all my high school basics about Bernoulli's theorem to know action of carburetor and see it practically working in adjustment of the idling thump. Basics of alternator/regulator to know the use of AMPs meter and how charging is done using DC output of rectifier. Lenz law to know how induction coil works. First of all the physics behind the 4 strokes design of single cylinder petrol engine - about how linear motion is converted into rotary motion by crankshaft and connecting rods. Knowing how overhead camshaft(OHC), pushrods, rocker arms are used in inlet and outler valve timing. Electrical timing of spark soon after compression. It is a lot of fun than you can imagine if you have a feel for it.
You may ask why I am becoming(or rather mere talking) more like a mechanic now than an software engineer :P
Well, In industry, If you write a piece of code you need to stick to the norms of code readability, re-usability and do everything the C++ way in overriding,overloading but you can't hack your own code to make life simple! :( Lost are those college days when you had all the freedom to obfuscate complex sudoku solvers in 3 liners, Solve Tower of Hanoi using bitwise operators and the simple yet famous "hello world" programs into single line and enjoy them all. There is some internet humor @ http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/helloworld.html
Behaving as though you are "seasoned professional" even though you are not one is so much painful like an itching somewhere you can't reach! So I am trying to get back to my instinct of gaining knowledge and learn new things while breaking and fixing it up again :)
Even now I have the habit of adding "Thanks and Regards, Karthik" at the end of this blog as in outlook conversation which clearly indicates the other side effects of becoming addicted to office e-mails :P
Anyway,
Thanks and Regards,
Karthik :D
