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Originally uploaded by akshaydhavle

For the past 7 months, I have been taking a rickshaw ride to office and back. Except of course for the 6 weeks in between that I was in Hyderabad. It takes about 30 mins door to door.

I used to listen to music through that journey but I like to talk to the rickshaw driver if I can so I can't listen to music. Couple of months back I decided to start taking my camera along everyday.

The 85mm is lovely for portraits out of the rickshaw. I am not all that good at it but here's one that has come out well.

My main problem right now is mis-focused pictures because I take them from a moving rickshaw, but I am getting better at it.

The walls at the side of the streets in Pune are painted with a weird shade of blue. Most of the times it enhances the portraits a lot.

Hyderabad...

So I am in Hyderabad these days. Its an agile enablement project and its a nice change from the usual delivery stuff. But this is not my business blog so...

I have only been here for a week but here are my first impressions and some things that puzzled me in a good way :-)

Airport
What can I say? It's absolutely brilliant. Grand and really well maintained.

Transport
Airport to City was a beautiful cab ride. Get out of the Airport, take a Meru cab, chill out. There's a nice huge road that bypasses the city and takes you to the west side in about 40 minutes.

I have traveled from Airport to City frequently 4 cities. Bangalore, Pune, Mumbai and Hyderabad.

Hyderabad is by far the best. Pune is good as well except its small. Bangalore is OK because getting shuttle buses is a breeze but the traffic is horrible. Mumbai deserves a post of it's own but for now "Totally disappointing management, horrible cabbies and traffic that will make you cry" is enough description

Vibes
Hyderabad has a hi-tech vibe to it. The part I work in is not called Hi-tech city just like that. WiFi is a given where ever you go (with unbelievable speeds by the way). I saw the first advert for a 20MBPS consumer broadband connection in India.

Its a foody city as well. Although I think Pune is more foody than hyderabad. The word "Biryani" is abused a lot so eat it only in places recommended to you by people who don't hate you.

There is also a very welcome sense of this place not being over populated. Maybe weekends are different but on our daily dinner endeavors, not many people are seen on the roads. I think the area matters as well so let me mention that I stay and roam around in the Whitefield and Jubilee Hills area.

And here is the pleasant puzzle I was talking about...

I am actually not a very social person. But having lived alone for quite a while and having to commute by cab / auto-rickshaw every morning to work, I have taken to talking to the driver. I have done this for the past one year continuously but hyderabad is different. Different because the people here actually seem happy.

They laugh and joke and talk about serious stuff as well but all in all they are actually happy. They are not pissed off with life like the whiners in Mumbai. They are not assholes like the Chennai auto guys. They don't jack their meters like the ones in Pune. (They don't have meters which is a different thing). They fix a rate and go by it and don't haggle at the end of the ride like the ones in Bangalore.

I don't know how come they are on much better terms with life but I'm going to find out.

Download XCode 3.1 for Leopard

Some of us don't have snow leopard yet. So here are 3 easy steps:

1. Go to connect.apple.com
2. Log in using your Apple ID (or register)
3. Follow the Download link and choose developer tools in the categories.

I wasted loads of time starting with apple.com / google searches and getting nowhere. All you can download is XCode 3.2.1 which only works on Snow Leopard.

Mac is back :D

So like I said I had some water spilt on my Mac and it was recovering very slowly. I decided to give it some time and packed it away for almost 2 months. The battery was dead and I had already decided to get it replaced.

So I came back from my vacation in Kerala and Bombay and then took my Mac to the iStore. The guy hit the button and hey!!! It booted perfectly well.

The battery life has suffered a bit but it's still way better than my dell / HP

Well thats that. Photo's from my vacation are here. Although there is nothing very kerala about the photos at all. I need to stop macro photography :p

Booohooooo :((

I guess there are thousands of these posts on the internet. But I am still adding one of my own.

My Mac had some water spilt on it and it died!! :( Well, it's slowly coming back to life so its not that bad.

First it didn't run at all.

Then it ran but said there is no battery.

Now it runs and says there is a battery but I don't feel like charging it.

Only time can heal the wounds. It'll come around to charging the battery sooner or later. I hope. So I am using my company's Dell 6500 for now (Windows). More on that in the next post.

The devil's bargain

This is fun!!
Originally uploaded by akshaydhavle

I had loads of fun today. Went around the park and saw that the Children were playing in water. I had the 24-105L on so I had an amazing time clicking portraits of careless, happy children. Someday these kids will be stuck in a company somewhere... writing stories for custom software development... walking around the city downtown... feeling happy for kids playing in water :-)

Ended up getting interviewed by dogstar7 (http://www.youtube.com/user/dogstar7) on the price for peace. Interesting view that the world was appalled and brought about peace after US bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki 64 years ago. Dogstar7 asked me if there was a guarantee that the same would happen again, would I support the US bombing civilians for the greater good?

Really? I mean it's a good argument. Thinking of it as an alien (having no interest in human life) I probably would support the movement. But then again as an alien why the hell would I be interested in human peace anyway.

Like I said to him, I don't think peace peace is really possible at all. I think it's just that we are here, alive right now and we see atrocious things happen and we feel really bad about ourselves and the state of the world. But this is exactly what has been happening throughout human history. I think we'll keep having these problems and keep learning to live with them.

Sometimes I wonder if the human ability to adapt is a blessing or a curse.

iPhone :) :(

So I bought the iPod Touch when I got to US. I have enjoyed it a lot. The only bit missing really is network on the go. And the fact that I have to carry
1. My Touch
2. My P1i (quite large)
3. My Card Case
4. 4 Access Cards
5. Bills and Change
and other obvious hardware in my pants :D

Oh! and it's summer so no jackets meaning less pockets...

So I thought let me merge my touch and my cell phone and get the iPhone instead. So I went and stood in the line in the apple store yesterday... for an hour.

Then the guys sets up my account and says "Ha! You don't have a credit card!! So you have never been in debt in the US. I know the likes of you, you debtless immigrant... AT&T would like to relieve you of $500 as security deposit on which you will get no interest :D". He was quite friendly really

Anyways! Like all good consumers I sucked it up and paid as the guy said "This is a refundable deposit so you'll get it back whenever you cancel your contract OR it will be used against your bill amounts at the end of your contract"

One other friend also wanted to buy an iPhone so we went again today. I wanted to pick up a screen guard and a case.

Now the friendly apple guy (a different one) told my friend the same story BUT "This deposit is non-refundable", he said, "If you cancel the contract within one year". My friend said "Thanks" and we came back. (I obviously didn't pick up the guard and the case)

I searched a lot today but this clause is not mentioned anywhere really. So I wait to talk to a friendly AT&T guy tomorrow. Hopefully, things will work out.

But even if they do, I'll be sad in my heart. Apple makes a great product and then goes and makes it impossible for travelling folks such as us to enjoy it. I sincerely don't know where I'll be in the next 3 months... India, UK, Australia maybe (it'll be summer there) OR maybe I will still be in the US. I don't want to know. I like to have no plans but I would like to use an iPhone... let's see.

Another Lotus Notes surprise!!! Err.. Shock rather :(

Lotus Notes never ceases delivering doses of reality in nasty shocks.

It seems that I can create a "Rule" to deal with email. But...
...I can NOT apply a rule to all my current mail??

Really??

Back on the wagon... or is off the wagon?

More commonly used to describe alcoholism, I am talking about my WoW relapse.

Started playing again yesterday after a 4 month break. Feels good :D

Ibanez S470

Wooooohoooooooooooo!!! Finally! Finally I bought an electric guitar.

It's an Ibanez. It's a used S470 which I got at lesser than the price of a new RG350EX.
Advantages?
1. The Zero-Resistance Tremolo
2. Hard Shell Case (included in the price of the guitar)

The Pickups are the basic INF pickups on the starting guitars.

Since I am in Chicago and have to take all this back, I decided to go with the Roland Micro Cube

Here's a demo of the amp. It's good enough for me to practice and my neighbors to know that I am practicing :-p

Twitter is awesome

Just wanted to say that. Downside is, I can't seem to write blog posts anymore :( unless I really concentrate

Only one in each please

That's the look on people's faces as I absent-mindedly entered the same compartment of the revolving door as the person ahead of me.

There was a noise and door jam and multiples of sorries tumbled out of my mouth.

Slightly embarrassing but much more fun :D

Don't try...
OK try but keep saying sorry as you do it.

Next time I am going to try going the wrong way and fight with the people going the right way :D

Suddenly Spammed!!

I don't know what happened. I had a lovely weekend. Came back yesterday and checked office mail. And what do I see? SPAM?? On my Office address. I have only ever submitted that address for a couple of trial downloads of commercial software!!

This was one. Few more people in that Venn Diagram :D

Another guy has randomly mailed people his resume. I looked him up on linked in and he seems like a genuine guy. I don't know if that's called spam these days. I call it spam though.

Then this company who published "latest business directories" or something like that.

And then, two comments on my Business Analysis blog. These guys have actually registered with blogspot (Google) to spam comments.

I hope there's no more. The saving grace is that I see a definite improvement in the quality of spam here... :D

Sony Ericsson's new PC suite

I was on the brink of getting "bored" of my Sony P1i and switching back to Nokia. A good opportunity presented itself as my wife's handset got damaged. I thought I'd convince her to use my P1i and get myself another phone. Problem was, I didn't really know what I was missing.

I am not a music-on-the-go kind of person so am quite happy with the multimedia capabilities on my cellphone.

I hate cameras on mobile phones because they are frankly rubbish. I leave "taking pictures" to my (awesome) 450D

I do care for email and calendar synchronization and that's where the problem was.

When I got the phone a year back, the PC suite that came with it couldn't sync with Lotus Notes. But the new PC suite does connect to Lotus Notes and does it rather well actually :)

The only downside seems to be the fact that there are enough unfortunate people in the world who use Lotus Notes to induce SE into integrating with it.

Mail :-)

Does your day begin alright but as soon as you reach office and check mail you get really frustrated?

Are you actively contemplating switching your job because your organization's mail system?

Are you a victim of Lotus Notes?

Are you using 6.5?

Amazing as it may sound I have found the solution. Use Notes 8 client and replicate. It worked for me maaaayyyybe it'll work for you too :)

Canon 100mm f2.8 macro!!!

Got this amazing lens yesterday. Haven't been able to do much with it yet but I can tell you that it's sturdy ( and heavy) lens. I took a few random shots on my way back from the store and I think it'll do good as a street portrait lens as well. Specially since it gives you some distance.

I'll put down my review on my photography blog around next weekend I guess.

BTW Kata bags are really nice for carrying your photo equipment and your laptop around. Lowpro are way over-priced.

Locked out of WoW

It's been a while. I have been busy with a QuickStart I am doing for a client here in Chicago. I have always had to ask friends in the US pick up WoW / BC for me. But I got here on 10th and the latest expansion came out on 13th so I had to get this one.

I tried to track down the stores near by, but the biggies like GameStop, BestBuy, etc are all pretty far off from where I stay. In my haste I ended up ordering the WOTLK Strategy Guide from amazon instead of the real game. It's going to take a while to ship anyway so I didn't buy the game on amazon.

At last I asked a guy at a nearby RadioShack if I could get PC games close by and he pointed me to FYE, a 3 min walk from my place.

So I finally got the game!!! Tried to install only to find out that I didn't have enough disk space :(
This means I'll have to get rid of my beloved linux... but the next project requires windows anyway so I am going to go ahead and do it this weekend.

So why am I writing this post instead of playing my existing version of WoW?? Well in my excitement I went and upgraded my account to WOTLK. Now when I log in it says I need a WOTLK client :(

The problem solved...

Thanks to this thread, I realized that the problem was my graphics card temperature. And I should've guess coz my fingers burned when I played WoW. The card was hitting 100-105C !!

For now I play in 1280x800 windowed mode with a game CD box to elevate the screen end of the laptop. I take the CD ROM out for more airflow. Thanks Dell for this facility.

So I got to get the card cooled properly and I am done.

XFCE Startup

Recently my battery died. Well it was about to die so I got it replaced. But it got me thinking about setting up a bare bone lightweight desktop to use for browsing and coding when battery life is important.

I setup XFCE 4.4.2 with conkeror and emacs, happily ran emacs and type "XS".

Damn Caps_Lock key. I had it remapped to be another CTRL in Gnome. It was a simple option in the settings program. Nothing like that in XFCE, so I scripted it using xmodmap

xmodmap -e "remove Lock = Caps_Lock"
xmodmap -e "remove Control = Control_L"
xmodmap -e "keycode 66 = Control_L"
xmodmap -e "add Control = Control_L"

So I put it in a file ~/.xmodmap

remove Lock = Caps_Lock
remove Control = Control_L
keycode 66 = Control_L
add Control = Control_L

and then started looking for a way to call "xmodmap ~/.xmodmap" at startup. I was directed to ~/.config/autostart by one post. But this is not true.

I put it in the .bashrc but that required starting the terminal for the script to run and Ubuntu does not use bash_profile.

So I was searching for XFCE 4.4.2 specific setup when I came across this post. So if you are looking to autostart anything with XFCE, create a ".desktop" file in the /etc/xdg/autostart folder.

Flying Fun

As I mentioned WoW keeps dying on my machine lately and I have been doing a lot of testing to find out what goes wrong. This involves doing something in the game for about 10 mins after which the system will start dying.

Killing is impossible in these test runs, coz I am bound to die after the game hangs. So I thought I'd just play with my flying mount for a while.

So I was doing this. (hovering right in front of another hovering toon)



Most of the "hoverers" were AFK. But I found one guy who wasn't.

He started by going higher (hitting space). I responded in the same way. And then we suddenly started on these acrobatic feats... going very high up, diving nose-down, stopping just before hitting the ground, flips (Ins and Del) and turns and keeping track of each other and suddenly stopping to hover in front of each other.

Then we talked a while about mounts and enhancements and how to grind for the 5000G needed for the epic flyer.

Good Fun!