Running late

I recently observed that my Omega Speedmaster was losing time on a consistent and measurable basis.

I originally attributed it to my habit of changes watches every now and then depending on my mood on that day and the attire I would wear. This would mean that I would not be wearing the Omega for a day or so and that must be the cause for the loss of time. So I did an experiment where I wore the watch every single day for three months...did not even take it off during the night as is my usual practice.

Guess what? It lost 15 minutes over those 3 months. That's 5 minutes every month. 20 seconds every day. That sounded completely unacceptable to me. So I went to Rodeo Drive where I bought the watch in the first place and asked their service center to have a look at it. It was indeed 20 seconds off and they very kindly reset it for me. But here was the surprise for me. I was told that even a very good quality Automatic Chronometer has a +6/-4 second tolerance!

I did not know that! To confirm, I went hunting on the Internet to check if that was the case. And it turns out, it is indeed the case. So I have to get used to the idea of correcting the time on my watch every few months.

Felt a little disappointed after the whole deal. Oh well...the choices we like to make!

Bandeau Aid

My buddy and I are planning a trip to a certain nordic country somewhere in the first few months of the coming year. Knowing the frigid temperatures in that part of the world, not withstanding the current snowed out conditions in most of northern Europe, I know that I have a tough time there, especially for someone who is not very fond of cold weather.

For most of my adult life (and a part of my childhood as well), I have had the tendency of my hands and feet getting cold with the slightest hint of cold weather. I'm not even talking snow conditions...even if the temperatures go slightly below 20˚ C, my hands and feet go colder than the ambient. Given this tendency, I prefer to be in places which are predominantly warm.

You would realize now that Nordic weather will be quite a challenge for someone of my body characteristics.

One of the big "To Do" items on the list is to buy warm clothing. This includes mostly inner wear, jackets, shoes and the like. I recently added another item to the list...and just got possession of it.

The place where I got it lists it as a "Bandeau Multifonctions" or Multipurpose Headband. It is also sometimes referred to as a "Buff" or a "Snood" (Samir Nasri of Arsenal wears one for every cold weather game, so if you see him play, you know what I mean).

This Bandeau / Buff / Snood is a tubular garment which is supposed to be worn around the neck or head to protect against the cold. The key character of this garment is that it stretches only sideways and not towards the edges. This allows me to wear it as a tubular neck scarf, a skull cap or a bandana. The most important way of using this would be where the back of the neck scarf is pulled over my head and the front is pulled over my lips, thereby shielding me from the super cold temperatures I will encounter once we get there.

My trip just became a little more comfortable...in my head. Hope it goes that way too :)

More than a 1000 people have something to talk about

So I might as well scream from the mountain tops.

I LOVE MY NEW SHOES!

This might make me sound gay (and as Seinfeld rightly pointed out…Not that there's anything wrong with it), but I just have to tell you guys about the shoes I have. They're called the Vibram (pronounced wii-br-um) Five Fingers and they are the closest I have felt to barefoot while still wearing shoes. You have to check these out.

I got these shoes two weeks ago and ever since I have put them on, I have not wanted to put any other shoe on…and if I have to, I do so grudgingly.

Now these shoes don't exactly look like the shoes you are used to. These are distinctly different and actually have a pocket for each toe, hence the name Five Fingers. They look a bit different and so get used to people staring at you. If I'm in the elevator, the whole elevator stares. If I'm in the bus at the airport taking me to the airplane, the entire bus stares. If I'm in the office, the entire office has asked.

Since the time I have gotten these shoes, there must be at least a thousand Tamilians with a new story to talk about. And at least 200 Bangaloreans. Which should tell you how much time I have been spending in Chennai for the last few weeks.

Long story short, the shoes attract attention…and usually the wrong sort of attention with people sniggering or smiling or just shaking their head at the contraption I am wearing on my foot. And most of your friends will try to make your life a living hell over the shoes. Only 2 out of those >1000 people have looked at them and said "They look really comfy. I wanna get them."

Luckily for me, I really don't care about what anyone has to say. And at the end of the day, my feet thank me. And that's what matters to me.

Thank you Vibram for creating this fantastic product and I am proud to be an exponent of this fantastic piece of footwear.

My feet are sooooo much happier these days!

I'm looking up...

By me, I mean my blog :-)

OK So I know I have just started writing after a long absence, but that does not mean that I gave up on all the vanity I have accumulated over the years. So obviously I was curious as to how much traffic the blog is getting. Here's what I saw:

I started out towards the end of 2004, so I ignored that year. Between 2005 and 2006, I started to write quite often and saw a nice rise in the number of people coming to my site. The peak seems to be 2007, but there were fewer people coming back to the site.

Here's the astonishing part: I didn't blog much during 2008 and not at all in the whole of 2009, yet there are over 5500 hits and over 3000 unique visitors to my blog. And since I have started, I'm averaging as much as I was during the peak of 2007, so I guess that's a good start.

But there is another thing: 75% of the people who land on my blog usually land there because of some search string they keyed in on Google (usually some variant of the word "bakwas") and they leave within 5 seconds after they realize that these are nothing but the ramblings of a deranged man. But then…

If they stick a little longer than 5 seconds, they invariably tend to stay on for between 2 and 5 minutes. And these are the people who usually come back and stay for between 5 and 20 minutes. And that is the 25% that make my regular returning readers.

And it is to you, my 25%, that I want to thank for putting up with the bu11$h1t that I am infamous for posting up here.

I will keep endeavoring to make my bu11$h1t more tolerable and easier to swallow (yuck!).

Q(uite a few) B(eers) A(fter)

Facebook surprised me yesterday. I put a status message that I had landed in Delhi and got a comment back telling me that my buddy from Singapore was also in Delhi. So of course I called him and we agreed to meet in the evening for drinks and dinner.

The place we decided to meet is a lounge called Q'BA (pronounced Queue Baa) at Connaught Place. It turned out to be a surprisingly nice place. Music not too loud, comfortable seating, nice food, great service and an option to either sit in or go to the open roof top seating area. Since it was Delhi in the winters, we chose to sit in.

I ended up meeting a couple of his colleagues (one of them turned out to be from my first company and somehow knew me…go figure!) and his engineering-college-time buddy, a boisterous and animated Mr Amardeep "Dippy" Singh. Together, we regaled ourselves with stories of a long gone era, reliving our days in college and of hostel life. And in the process, consumed quite a bit of alcohol. That led to the idea of going out being relegated to the trash can (I use a Mac, so no recycle bin here) and we decided to order food at Q'BA itself.

Which turned out to be a good idea. The food was nice and we saved ourselves an unnecessary tour of Delhi late in the night trying to hunt for a place serving decent food.

Only thing against Q'BA was the bill…or rather the amount that we had consumed. Thank the force that we had someone with us who earned in S$ :-D

A nice place, I would recommend it to anyone who wants to have a conversation without screaming at the people around while sitting comfortably having nice food…albeit for a price.

Print your blog?

Was surprised to see this link on my blog composition page. What is does is takes your blog link and gives you a preview of what your blog would look like if you do choose to have it printed.

Curious as to what it will look like, I tried it. And it does not look half bad. And I realized my blogging would result in a mammoth 357 page tome!

But here is the catch:

Do I look like an idiot to spend $140 on printing the drivel that I dish out? Insane, isn't it?

But I admit, I am tempted to get the digital copy for $8. No harm in spending $8, no?

What do you say?

Life without four remote controls

We had gone to watch Kung Fu Panda over the weekend at Fun Cinemas on Cunningham Road. After the movie (which was nice), we stepped to the Reliance Timeout just a little further down the road to pick up some stationary. What I had not noticed in my previous visits to that store was that Reliance Digital - Reliance's appliance megastore - was on the first floor of the building. Curious as to what they had to offer, I sauntered over to check it out.

My first impression of the store was that they had a lot of stuff. A large floor space with refrigerators at one end and flat panel TVs at the other and everything else in between. Then I realized that these were the brands that you could get pretty much everywhere, just the prices were a tad below MRP (which is to say that you are buying at a little bit of a discount). I walked around to see if anything catches my eye and there it was, waiting for me to see it.

A whole bunch of Universal Remote Controllers (URC) to choose from!

Why do I need it? Why does anyone in the typical household today need one? So you have the remote controller for the TV, then there's one for the DVD player, one for the cable set top box and then, if you have a Home Theatre System, a remote for the amplifier. That's four remotes that I have to juggle with whenever there's something to be watched on TV. 

After a bunch of research on the Net about URCs, the general consensus was that the Logitech Harmony series (preferably the Harmony 1000 which has a cool touch screen display and looks like a PDA, but in the absence of that, the Harmony 890 which looks like a traditional remote, but is extremely versatile) was the best URC to buy. It was extendable, could be configured and taught using a PC and there were downloadable templates to configure it. All of this, without a lot of fuss. The downside? You guessed it. Cost! Both the models cost a BOMB! The 890, which was available at Reliance, was going at Rs. 16500, the equivalent of $400!

That's too much for a remote controller, I thought.

So there were the usual suspects. Some Chinese companies at a ridiculously low price (which makes me massively suspicious) and then there was Philips. There were three models available with increasing feature functionality and consequently, increasing cost. The range started from Rs 2999 (about $60) and went all the way up to Rs 10999 (about $250). Being the cost conscious Indian buyer, I narrowed down on the lower end of the spectrum. From what I saw, the more expensive ones were relatively easier to configure as compared to the lower end one and had more sources that they could control. The most I wanted was a replacement for the four remotes I have at home and this one could manage them all and a few more (seven to be precise). As for the ease of configuration, being the geek I am, I have no problem investing some time and a few brain cells to figure out how to do it. In fact, I would rather do it the hard way so that I know exactly what to do if shit hits the ceiling :-)

So I finally bought the Philips SRU 5170 URC, a product that comes with a bunch of preset codes for a bunch of sources and can replace up to 7 device remote controls. That was like music to my ears. What I did not expect is how quickly I would be able to get it up and running.

I started out with my LG plasma TV. On the remote, I initiated the process to add a source and it gave me an option of TV, AMP, DVD, CD, Cable, another TV and DVR. After I chose TV, it gave me a huge list of TVs to choose from. Within LG, it sent out test signals to figure out which would work the best and then just configured itself! One down three to go. The Sony DVD player and the Tata Sky cable set top box (Thomson rebranded...I checked at the back) went in similar lines. Then came the AMP setup and that is where the remote was lost. It did not have preset codes for my Cambridge Audio Azur 540. Granted that the Cambridge Audio brand is not the most popular in the world, but it is one of the best out there in terms of performance. But without wasting too much time on this, to cut a longish story shortish, there were no codes to auto set the remote. 

No worries! The remote can learn. I just set the remote to some arbitrary amp and then "taught" it all the keys I use on the AMP remote. By taught, I mean that I had to manually set all the keys by making the remote accept the codes that the main AMP remote was sending out. And the way to set it is so easy, it only takes a short while to do it. So that was done.

Then there was the picky part of me. I wanted all the popular buttons on all the remotes to be mapped appropriately to some button on the URC. That took a bit of time, not because of the time it takes for the remote to learn, but because I took a little time analyzing which keys get used the most and where to most appropriately place them. In case I did not want to allocate a button for it, the URC gave me the option of adding what it called "Xtras", something that you could activate from a list of extra functions. Like the Eject button for the DVD player. Or the Picture-In-Picture related buttons for the TV. Once that was done, the remote was all set. 

And that is when I realized the joy of using this thing. From a single place, I could do pretty much everything I wanted with my AV setup. Short of turning on my Wii and flying over the Wiimote to where I was sitting, the URC can do everything I ask it to. And in case I accidentally find a couple of buttons that I have forgotten to configure, it takes just a few seconds and it's done!

Purrrrrfectamente!

For anyone who has had enough of the multiple remote controllers at home, I would very VERY strongly recommend the Philips SRU  5170 URC. It will make your life a lot easier and make sure that you only have - and need - one remote controller by your side.

I love you, ComedyCentral!

Oh Boy! This is going to be good...

I have a habit of checking up on the ComedyCentral website every morning for last night's installment of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. This is usually how I start the day and those few moments of laughter are the best way I have found to start it. Whenever the Daily Show is on vacation or there is no broadcast, I usually have to resort to watching older clips just to keep me going.

Imagine my surprise - and a pleasant one at that - to see that ComedyCentral has completely revamped The Daily Show website and have added a timescale which allows me to browse all the available videos ever since Jon Stewart took over as host of the show in 1999. Oh, this is fantastic news.

For someone who follows every single episode of the Daily Show and who thinks that Jon Stewart is absolutely great, this is a God send...To be able to see shows from 1999 will keep me occupied for a while now. I highly recommend you to go and have a look yourself. It's all there.

Now I can appreciate why it's called the Grand Canyon

As you might have noticed from my previous post, I was in Las Vegas for a company conference. As my golf buddy, Saday, was also going to be at the conference, we had decided to make a little trip of our own after the conference. The plan was to go to the Grand Canyon, which is a ~250 mile drive from Vegas, so that we can see one of the grandest creations of nature.

Saday's friend Ashish was going to join us in Vegas for a couple of days and then we would embark on our little road trip towards Arizona. Other than this, we had not planned on anything. While we were at the conference, we came to know about this thing called the Skywalk which had been build at the West Rim of the Grand Canyon. What these highly ingenious (and capitalistic) people had done was build a semi-circular walkway jutting over the Canyon. The most striking feature of this walkway? It's made of glass! And the view from there was reputed to be truly awesome, despite the fact that the surroundings themselves were awesome in their own right.

The conference ended on the 1oth evening and we were scheduled to leave for the Grand Canyon the next day. Thanx to Ashish, we had hotel reservations and a car already booked for us before we left. Ashish had even left in the morning for the airport to pick up the rental car. Fortunately for us, we got a FWD Subaru Outback which is a wonderful car to take out on a drive in the outdoors, especially if it's a dirt road, something that was to be expected on the way to the Skywalk.

Our itenary was to go via the Hoover Dam into Arizona, then take the Pierce Ferry road onto the West Rim. The drive would be around a hundred and twenty miles and we were hoping it would not take us more than two and a half hours. The Outback proved itself to be a stroke of good luck as it seemed to make the journey feel a lot more effortless than it was. We stopped at the Hoover Dam for a short while to admire this effort of engineering made so long ago and to marvel at the sheer size and scope of the structure. Just the flood hole of the dam was an intimidating sight. But it was not the Hoover Dam that we wanted to see. We wanted to see the Skywalk and we wanted to get there before 3:30pm which is when the last tickets get sold off. Also we didn't want to miss the sunset at the Canyon.

The last 30 miles to the West Rim is a pure dirt track and it was quite treacherous driving on the road. That was compounded by the cars ahead of me which were throwing a bunch of dirt onto our car. That was the main distraction for us which kept us from looking at the lovely Joshua Tree surroundings which littered the sides of the road. Finally when we pulled into the parking lot of the West Rim, the car was as filthy as you could imagine. But that was nowhere close to enough to dampen our spirits as we looked forward to getting to the Skywalk.

What did dampen our spirits was the fact that the Skywalk tour would cost us $81. That is a lot of money and we were not sure if the experience for the Skywalk was worth it and whether we should do it at all. Finally one of us prevailed and we bought out tickets for the tour. Boy! am I glad we did that!

As we approached the Skywalk, we could appreciate the scope of the construction. From our vantage point, the view was breathtaking and intimidating at the same time. And the Skywalk was built at a point facing the opposite wall of the Canyon so that the sun would set lighting up the Canyon wall as you stood admiring it. Nothing is allowed on the Skywalk for fear of cracking the glass walkway. So we had to leave our cameras and our cellphones in the lockers provided (for a charge, of course) and then proceed towards the Skywalk. They also make you wear these covers for our shoes so that we don't scratch the glass surface or stain it. So with these sleeves on our shoes, we were made to wait behind a curtain in an effort to dramatize the effect of walking onto the Skywalk.

The dramatization worked!

As the curtain came away, the effect was phenomenal! An all glass walkway jutting over the canyon! Before we arrived at the Skywalk, we were talking about how it would not be a big deal walking on the glass walkway and why it should be fine. Let me tell you...we were scared witless when we walked onto the glass. As I stood on the edge of the opaque area and considering my first step onto the transparent glass, sparks ran through the soles of my feet and it was an exhilarating few moments as I took my first few steps on the clear transparent surface. Saday and Ashish immediately dove for the opaque sides of the walkway, but I wanted to overcome this knee buckling effect the Skywalk had on all of us. After more than 10 minutes on it, we were finally acclimatized to walking on something that made one think that they are walking on air. I even have a picture of the three of us on the Skywalk which I bought from the staff (we obviously could not take our own pictures).

After only a minute of being there, there was a unanimous agreement that the money spent on the Skywalk was completely worth it. So much so that we did not feel like leaving. Mainly because the sun was setting and it was throwing the most amazing light on the opposite wall of the Canyon. We did have to leave though, and thankfully so, otherwise I would have missed this picture that you see on the right side. As we were coming back from the Skywalk after collecting our belongings, the sun was right behind the tour bus stand and the lone staff member sitting there to help the visitors was illuminated perfectly from the back by the sun. This is one of my favourite picture from the trip, one that I want to blow up in size and hang in my house. Trust me, the photograph looks a lot LOT better when seen at the native resolution captured by my 8 megapixel Nikon 8700.

Immediately after taking the above shot, I took my next favorite picture. The same tour bus stand, but this time with the sun on the horizon. The couple of pictures that I took just after the Skywalk provided the icing on the cake. This was one of my more memorable tours and I highly recommend it for anyone who is interested. The only suggestion I will make to anyone who is going there is to not underestimate the Skywalk. One of the staff on the walkway pointed us toward what looked like bushes from the Skywalk. He said they were actually large trees which were looking like bushes from out height of 4000 feet from the Canyon floor. That was when we realized that our concepts of distance had gone out of the window and that we could not comprehend how far some of the points in the Canyon were. The scale of this natural structure is awesome in the true sense of the word.

This was the final shot of the day at the Grand Canyon, the sun just settling below the horizon. When I say horizon, I mean the horizon as you can see from the Grand Canyon. Being 4000 feet from the floor of the Canyon tends to expedite sunset. What it also does is enhances the colours when the sun is setting and this picture is testimony to that. It is also the same time when I realized the genius that is the human body. The appreciation that these two eyes gives us is far more than any camera can capture and amplify. The sights that we were surrounded with and the light we were bathed in was just fantastic. Too bad my limited vocabulary is too feeble to describe it. What I can say, however, is that anyone who has a chance should see these sights at least once in their life. They will be memories you will cherish for a really long time.

We left the West Rim after sunset and that was the time Ashish got in the mood to do a little bit of Rally style driving. In a place where there is no cell phone reception and where the visibility is made really poor with the last cars leaving the West Rim, the man was pushing his luck sliding in and out of corners. Saday and I breathed a huge sigh of relief as we got off the dirt road and onto a paved road, on the way to the South Rim.

We had booked ourselves at the Motel 6 which was about 50 miles from the Grand Canyon National Park South Rim entrance. By the time we reached and had dinner, it was already 11:30pm. There was a lot of debate about whether we should get up early to catch the sunrise (Ashish had asked around and found out that sunrise was to be at 6am). It would take us at least an hour to reach the National Park and we would have to leave around 4:30am if we had any hope of catching sunrise. After a lot of discussion, I prevailed and we slept with the idea of waking up at 4am to take some amazing pictures. After we saw the pictures that we had taken that day, there was no contest on whether we should carry on the next day.

Wake up at 4am we did and left for the National Park entrance. After paying our entry fee of $25, we figured out that Mather Point would be our best bet for the right sunrise pictures as the sun came up over the horizon. We were not disappointed. The only thing is, we were there almost 45 minutes ahead of the actual sunrise, mainly because we did not take into account that sunrise would be a little later at the Canyon.

I had become so shutter happy that I was clicking pictures every couple of minutes. The only thing that stopped me was the fact that it was extremely cold. And the little wind there was not helping either.

So after setting the camera up on the tripod (yes, I carried a tripod for the trip knowing I would need it for some great pictures), I spent most of my time alternating between keeping myself warm and clicking pictures.

It was all worth it when the sun peeked above the Canyon top and I caught the first light of the day at the Grand Canyon's South Rim. It was a great sight and the light that it threw on the Canyon walls and the shadows it created was an amazing site. A photographer's dream! Suddenly, standing in all that cold and waking up early to get to sunrise felt like a small price to pay after being treated with such a glorious display of light and colours.

In the first light of the morning, you could see all the reds and yellows that made the Canyon walls. You could see the rock formations and the abrasions made by wind and water from the Colorado river as it chiseled it's was through rock over millenia. And standing there appreciating the scale of this gigantic structure made me realize why it is called the Grand Canyon. The scale truly makes it grand.

I want to end this post with a picture of the Canyon wall at sunrise. This is just one of the more-than-hundred photos I have clicked during this most amazing trip (and there is no reason to pick this particular one). But it is one of the most breathtaking picture sets I have taken in a long time.


This post would be incomplete without mentioning my thanks to Saday and to Ashish. Saday is the person who engineered this trip and got Ashish involved. And Ashish made the whole trip worth it for all of us. From taking care of a lot of logistics to the banter in the car to the song singing sessions to the dinner arguments, it was one heck of a trip, memories of which will stay alive in my mind for a long long time. And in the process, I got to know a great person in a short time of two days.

Thanx a lot, guys! You guys made this trip worth it and I would not have had anywhere close to this much fun without you. Thanx for making the trip a memorable one.

I think we're getting there

I have this habit of looking around the Net to see what's happening. One of the places I check from time to time is Google Labs since they have some cool stuff happening there all the time.

I had seen the music trend a while back, but just wanted to know what people (who are using the Music option in Google Talk) were listening to. Imagine my surprise when I saw a Hindi song at the bottom of the list. And here's the great part: It had moved down 9 places to land in at the 20th spot!

Here's proof of it.

It's just great to know that not only are my fellow Indians on the Net a lot, they are online, on Google Talk (which is just one of the chat services available) and on top of that are using something like iTunes to listen to music which is getting into the stats.

Way to go, India. And way to go, my fellow Indians.

Isn't this one of the cutest videos you have ever seen?

Meebo Deebo Doo

Of course, I couldn't say Yabba Dabba Doo, but you know what I mean :-)

I am talking about Meebo, a service which allows you to simply and easily see all your chat entities (yes, Yahoo!, MSN, Google Talk, Jabber, ICQ, et al) on a single Web page. That too with a consolidated buddy list and a neat interface which allows you to chat with ur friends with the help of only a web browser.

From now on, if all you are interested in doing is chatting (and not want the ability to do VoIP) OR if your corporate network does not allow you to install chat tools or restricts the proxy on the corporate firewall, you can now use Meebo to chat away.

Cool, no?