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| Friday, July 10th, 2009 |
tariquesani
|
11:25a |
You are not beautiful
 Nupur - you are and always will be!!! “You are not beautiful” These harsh words have to be endured by almost every girl/woman at some or the time of her life – unfortunately it is the chauvinistic setup of the society we live in. However it is not just male chauvinism which is at play here but something which angers me much more, though this is in no way tolerance or acceptance of MCP behaviour by men.
Read the rest of this entry » Originally published at http://tariquesani.net/blog/. Please leave any comments there. |
| Thursday, July 9th, 2009 |
yathin
|
9:44p |
East Glacier
Like I said in my last post, West Glacier was all about grand scenery and little wildlife. So, hoping that the law of averages does its thing I was looking forward to East Glacier. Bears, Moose and Mountain Goats were the top of my wish list for the day. My vacation days usually start well before the hint of sunlight. That means I need to haul myself out of my cramped tent, pack up and leave the campsite in nearly frigid conditions. It was such a beginning to the day at Fishing Bridge in West Glacier. After a quick pit stop at a gas station, I was on my way towards East Glacier. First destination was the strangely named 'Goat Lick' point along the main highway that connects West Glacier to East Glacier. Knowing about the grand naming schemes in and around the park, I wasn't hoping to see the mysterious mountain goats. And as expected, the parking lot at the Goat Lick pullout was empty. The tropical ape that I am, I didn't want to get away from the heated car into ice age temperatures outside. I was very, very positive that this was just another tourist trap and there would be no goats, gorillas or goblins around. My more adventurous fellow-traveler from the cold north wanted to go scan the area and did just that while I sat in the car. Seconds later there was a frenetic waving of hands and I forgot the meaning of cold as I rushed out with my (ever-ready) camera and tripod. Mountain Goats! With little ones too. There were a whole lot of them sitting, standing and sleeping in precarious places on dangerous looking cliffs. I had seen the famous mountain goats of Glacier National Park at last! Photographing them would be a letdown though because the sun was still not up. I would have waited for the sun to drop by, but then the goats were too far for my telephoto lens to make any decent photographs, so I made a few documentation photographs and headed onwards to a place called Two Medicine. Moose are giants. You don't realize how huge they are until you see one of those things for real. They are as tall as camels and with antlers that can span seven feet across they look more intimidating than camels. American bison look dwarf-like next to a bull moose. Since I couldn't imagine that they could really be so big, I just had to see one. Now, my fellow traveler knew a thing or two about Moose. Besides being their national animal, there was a great experiment done in their country to build a mighty moose cavalry. A cavalry so strong that enemies on mere horses would be trampled and crushed. Victories in wars would have been a moose-walk for the Swedish army. But it wasn't to be for moose are creatures not built for war. The Swedes would be wiser in their know-hows when it came to moose talk since that day. So, according to Swedish knowledge moose are to be found in places where there are trees, old and young, with water close by - old trees to hide, young trees to eat and water to play around in. I was also told that Moose are usually seen running by the roadside looking for the best place to escape into the forest by the roadside. And the Swede was right. By Thor, the Swede was right! On a deserted road through a conifer forest, I saw a giant animal running along the road. Moose! I couldn't believe the I could be so excited with my first moose sighting, but it was that exciting. It was a young male moose running along the road looking for a gap in the forest to run away into. Just as the Swede had predicted. Moose really are giants! So, in the first hour of sunlight I had two lifers - Mountain Goats and Moose. It couldn't get any better than that right? Well, what else could happen to make an already fantastic day better? It just did get better. Driving on the edge of the park, I noticed a animal in the shadows by the roadside. I first thought it was cattle from one of the surrounding ranches until I realized I was looking at a bear! Grizzly? My heart wanted it to be a grizzly, but I just knew it had to be a Black bear. And it was. It was another young black bear, but unlike the black bears I had seen on previous occasion, this one was really black. He was walking straight towards my car, on my side of the road, when I stopped at a distance and put on the emergency lights so that passing cars would slow down. Unfortunately, a bunch of cars came by from the other side and scared away the bear into the forest. I had gotten a couple of photographs, but I wished I had seen more of him. Slightly disappointed, I went ahead and pulled into a turnout to review my photographs. Now bears are inquisitive little buggers and I should have known that. While I sat there wondering when I would see my next bear, I casually looked at my rear view mirror and imagine what I see!? That young bugger had come out of the forest and was looking very curiously at my car! I got out of the car with excitement and that spooked him and he ran away into the jungle once again. I turned the car around and waited on the turnout on the other side and I just knew the bear would come out. And come out he did. This time I didn't get out of the car since I had parked it in a way that I could shoot from the window. He first stood behind a bush and looked at me for a few seconds. He then took a few baby steps out of the bush towards the car and then decided that he wanted to cross. He moved towards the other side of the road rather slowly and I was hoping no car would come by because that would surely kill him. He went to the middle of the road and then stopped. He raised one paw and looked at the me plotting his next move. At that point I wanted to get out to force him to cross the road quicker, but thankfully he decided to continue moving. He then got into the bush and disappeared into the forest. What a beautiful animal and what a magical moment! Later on during a day a beaver was seen in one of the lakes at a place called Many Glacier. A moose was seen running (as usual) along the forest's edge. And after the sun had gone down we came across a stopped car. The driver said he had seen two grizzlies in the meadow next to the road. The wait was exciting but we didn't see any grizzlies that night. And so ended the stay at Glacier national park. It was a beautiful stay and I was impressed by the Rockies. However, Yellowstone and Grand Tetons were coming up next.
( More photographs... )
|
code_martial
|
6:54p |
Data Wants Freedom (alt. Thrift Sucks)
As a continuation of my previous post, let me mention what happened with the Thrift experiment I blogged about some time back. Thrift is broken in many ways. It allows importing definitions from other services but fails to generate working code in such a scenario, so you can forget about having structs or typedefs that you want to use for multiple services. Next, it includes type specifiers for fields and return values but don't expect any type checking. Those specifiers exist purely for marshalling/unmarshalling hints. The only "help" you get is when the runtime throws ugly exceptions that you, an experienced senior engineer, can comprehend to be due to datatype mismatches. On the PHP side, it does something super brilliant. It IGNORES namespaces! WTF! So, you can't call out to two services that, God forbid, define classes (Thrift structs) with the same name. Class redef error. Oops! Next, Thrift totally doesn't allow you to write services in a layered manner. E.g. You want your service to have a request validation layer that verifies a signature, strips it and passes the remaining data on to the next layer that, perhaps, does some quota checks or logging, strips more of its book-keeping data and passes the rest to the implementation. Super easy with HTTP REST, right? Nawt so with Thrift. Muddle each and every end-point's signature for each service with parameters it doesn't even want to know of. I can't imagine writing services this way. It's sheer sadomasochism. Last nail in Thrift's coffin is custom client and server code for each service. How 1980s is that? I had just two services to deal with and one client for that service and I was driven crazy to my wit's end trying to keep things in sync. Experience teaches people a lot about some things. Some learning is supposed to be transient and some persistent. It's good to keep checking on the validity of your beliefs once in a while. I did it once with Java when I joined Hadoop. Indeed Java turned out to be a programming philosophy unto itself. One that was all about constraints, inflexibility and programming equivalent of the tunnel vision syndrome. I did it again with Thrift, this time revalidating what the title of this post says. Data wants freedom. It does not need to be tied to programming language constructs. Exchanging data as objects is bad juju. Even in the scope of the same language, passing PODs (strings, numbers, arrays, dicts) brings immense flexibility. So much flexibility that the trade-off against type safety is easy to go for. I've been programming without type safety for over 5 years now and except for the first couple of months, I never missed it. The day you realise that an object is just a dictionary in essence, and that methods can be invoked by their names represented as strings, you'll reach a new state of programming mindset. Or maybe not, but at least I did. |
code_martial
|
9:57a |
Python Praise
This isn't the first time I'm writing a blog post to sing praises of Python, the programming language, but still, go ahead and read ESR's quote in my earlier post. Anyhow, lately I've been busy writing what I call a "web service delivery platform", which is what required me to hack a lot (~125 lines) of Python. While writing this thing, I was just blown away by the way the code was unfolding on my screen. In a true top-down implementation model, I started with the core logic, fanning out to helper functions and returning to the core. Like ESR, I found my code to get to a working state faster than it took me to work out the logic! The most notable bit was where I wanted to use a config-dir configuration model like the one used by apache2. The code that I wrote to accomplish this worked in the very first run -- 15 minutes to look up the docs, code up and test. Before that I had to take a 20 minute walk in the park just to decide on using a config dir and figure out its contents. I wasn't even sure if it was doable in 3 hours! What the heck is this platform shmatform I'm working on anyway? Well, it's a souped up version of the JSON-RPC adaptor I wrote for PHP 3 years ago. Only this time it's for Python and it does way more than what the PHP thing did. I could probably talk more about it on the weread blog once it's done. One of the good things that came out of it was that I found Werkzeug, a toolkit for developing Python web applications. Unlike frameworks like Django etc., Werkzeug does not create a web application that you can plug your code into. It allows you to write your own web application from scratch without much pain. Worked well for me since all I wanted was high level HTTP objects and URL comprehension. Werkzeug does a really good job for all of these and its URL comprehension is outstanding. Well, that pretty much is all the Python praise I had to pour out here. This is a language that excites me the way C++ did, albeit for completely different reasons. Weird thing is, every once in a while, I think there's nothing interesting left in programming anymore and things like these pop up to remind me that this is not the end. Current Mood:  sleepy |
| Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 |
tariquesani
|
4:44p |
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| Monday, July 6th, 2009 |
yathin
|
9:06p |
West Glacier
I didn't know much about Glacier National park except for the fact that it is the only other national park in the lower 48 states that has Grizzly bears. Yahooing (but of course!) for more information revealed that it was the world's first international park and is contiguous with Waterton Lakes national park in Canada. And since I was planning on visiting the world's first national park - Yellowstone - during the trip, the prospect of going to the world's first international park seemed exciting. However, it was the park mascot that sold me Glacier - the Mountain Goat! Now what does American Football, the Loch Ness monster and Glacier National Park have in common? They were all created for the consumer - spectators, audience or tourists. According to a well known source here's a history lesson: "In 1891, the Great Northern Railway crossed the Continental Divide at Marias Pass (5,213 ft/1,589 m), which is along the southern boundary of the park. In an effort to stimulate use of the railroad, the Great Northern soon advertised the splendors of the region to the public. The company lobbied the United States Congress, and in 1897, the park was designated as a forest preserve" And so, Glacier National Park came into existence with catchy names for glaciers, roads, lakes and all. Thankfully the birds and animals were left untouched by the naming frenzy. The most famous of all roads in Glacier National Park is the Going-to-the-sun Road. It doesn't really go up to the sun (I didn't have to confirm that right?) and it is not all that high up in the mountains at around 6600 feet (2200 meters) on its highest point, but it is a civil engineering landmark nonetheless. You'll have to see and drive on the road to believe what an achievement it is. Really. Winter can dump eighty to hundred feet of snow on the road and it takes forever to clear out the snow when spring arrives. It wasn't even open in late June when I made the trip there! With the Going-to-the-sun road closed on the west side at its highest point, Logan Pass, traveling to the east side would have to wait for another day. Glacier National park on the west side starts off pretty flat. With beautiful conifer forests, the magnificent Lake McDonald and Grand views of the high Rockies. Every turnout overflows with scenic beauty (and with cars of course!). There are countless trails leading to a lake shore or into the forest. Trailheads and turnouts have notes posted everywhere in bright yellow, orange or red warning tourists that they are now in Grizzly country. The poor animal even carries a scientific name as horrible as Ursus arctos horribilis (meaning Bear bear horrible. Ursus means bear in Latin. Arctos means bear in Greek. horribilis means... OK, you figure this one out). Anyway, the bear bear bear is known to be notorious in these parts and every conversation for hikers and campers revolves around how to stay safe from them... if you can that is. Hikers are seen carrying bells, whistles and pepper-spray when in Grizzly country. The park also has the smaller and more common Black Bears (which are quite large by the way). So, how does one know if the bear is a Grizzly or a black bear? Well, it is really simple. Just look for their scat. Black bear scat will have leaves, berries and such. Grizzly bear scat will have bells, whistles and pepper-spray cans. It looked like I had taken the Crater lake weather with me as Glacier National park looked all cloudy and dull. The drive up to Logan pass was an uneventful one except for brief stops at a lake placid and a river wild. The Logan pass parking lot was an excited one. On one of the mountains near the pass, a gang of young male Big-horned sheep were honing their ramming skills on a patch of snow. A steady stream of tourists walked up a very, very, very slippery and steep trail to see the sheep from up-close. Blessed with a giant telephoto lens (compared to those pocket cameras anyway) that the tourists did not possess, I first took a shot of the sheep from down below. And then the greed for better shots took over my mind and I began going up the steep slope ignoring my awful mountaineering skills. I was doing OK uphill until I turned around and saw the near vertical trail (at least for my eyes and ability anyway). And the first slip happened and I had to stop almost immediately. I heard from tourists coming down that the sheep had gone away and now there was no motivation to do the last ten percent of the trail. Getting down was the priority now but not in the rolling down manner. After some circus and some nervous moments on slippery snow, I was finally down on the road with mud and ice on my back side. Did I mention that grass and small shrubs have strong root systems? :-) The day ended with a long and bumpy drive through deep wilderness to Lake Kintla on the Canadian border. The road was rough with spectacular scenery and wide open meadows. It took several hours to cover the fifteen or so miles because of frequent stops and slow driving in the hope of catching a grizzly on the meadows or a moose among the willows, but it wasn't to be. At one point I wondered if I had crossed off into Canada by mistake. Now that would be illegal and a lot of trouble for me. Anyway, I was more slow than I thought I was and Lake Kintla itself wasn't a letdown. Besides being amazingly beautiful (and I'm running out of words to describe the parks other features) it had one of the most remote camping grounds I've been to. Unfortunately, I had already pitched my tent at another place called Fishing Bridge and I had to turn around for the night. West Glacier was all about grand scenery and little wildlife. East Glacier was different and that story shall be told in the coming days. For now, here are the images from West Glacier.
Glacier National Park
( More images and a funny squirrel... )
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| Sunday, July 5th, 2009 |
tariquesani
|
9:20p |
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yathin
|
1:10p |
Crater Lake
I love blue and Crater lake is all about that color. It had been on my list of places to see for a long time and I finally got a chance to travel to the place this summer - on the longest day of the year in the Northern hemisphere. I headed out from San Jose several hours before dawn to beat the weekend traffic as I don't particularly enjoy driving in bumper-kissing traffic. I'm sure there are people out there who enjoy traffic and crowds and noise and such, but that's not me. Anyway, I had put in some good miles - bless cruise control - by the time I reached Redding in California when the first rays of the sun hit this part of the world. After a quick stop for fuel and coffee, the central valley of California had ended and the mountains had begun. Mountain roads are beautiful to drive on but they do need a lot of concentration as they are filled with distractions in the form of scenic places and wildlife. As the cloud cover cleared up a bit, a giant white peak was seen among the shorter pine-covered hills. It was the great white mountain of the Cascades - Mount Shasta. Traveling further north revealed that that mountain just rises out of flat ground and forms an incredible backdrop for the highways that run around it. I thought about going to the forests around the peak, but I had to decide between that and losing out on a camping site at Crater lake, so I decided to head on towards the lake. I had imagined Oregon to be all rugged mountains but it started off pretty flat - with Mount Shasta looking over the land. By that time, distractions had taken control and I was on an Oregon birding trail near Klamath Falls. Nesting Sandhill cranes, courting Wrens and blackbirds and mud-collecting swallows were seen and though I could have spent hours and hours there, I had to move on. When I arrived at Crater lake, the first thing I needed to do was to get a campsite. Most campgrounds get filled up by noon on summer days. However, most campgrounds at Crater lake weren't even open and the few that were open still had some snow in them! And there I was for my summer vacation in shorts and sandals. After registering at the campsite, I pitched my tent and headed seven miles north to the rim of the crater lake. It was all foggy when I reached the rim and through holes in the cloud I could see the deep, dark blue waters of the mighty crater lake. It is one of the deepest lakes in the world and was formed when a volcanic peak collapsed and trapped all the water from the snowfall on the surrounding peaks, so it has a bit of interesting history. The overcast conditions made me feel that I wouldn't be able to see the blue that the lake is so famous for, so I headed out to the trails nearby to catch some wildlife. I had to turn around soon though because it was obviously not a 'shorts n sandals' type weather and I had to head back to the campsite to change into something more appropriate - a layer of thermals and sweaters. :-) The fog cleared up for a few minutes during the day and the breathtaking blue was seen at last, but I think the lake deserves to be seen on a clear day when three-fourths of the rim drive isn't closed. The morning came early for me. I could hear rainfall on my tent and I dreaded the thought of having to get outside and pull apart the wet tent and dump it into the car. The sleeping bag had saved me from the bitter cold of the night and I only realized how cold it was outside after getting out of it. I quickly pulled apart the tent and started driving towards the lake from the campsite. It was still very dark outside and it was still raining. The car said that that outside air temperature was about 27F (or -3 Celsius) but since it was windy it felt a lot colder. When I got to the rim, there was absolutely no one there. And then I saw a shadow moving in the snow - a red fox in his gray winter coat was patrolling the village one last time before the sun makes an appearance. I put on my woolens and headed out to the rim to see what was happening on the lake. The lake was calm with clouds all around the rim and fog was moving in. I spent a couple of hours walking around the place till the sun broke through the clouds to show Crater lake one last time before I continued traveling north towards Seattle.
Crater Lake Blue
( More images from around Crater Lake and the road... )
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dianaparadise
|
4:54p |
Update
Still pregnant. The Baby seems quite content to stay where he/she is. I'm five days from my due date and never thought I would make it this far. Of course I am happy that from now on no matter when the Baby comes he/she will be good and ready. No preemie for me:o) Only problem is that because of my prior C-section the Doc is not too happy about me going all the way to my due date let alone beyond it. If I don't go into labour naturally within the next three days or so she will have to consider planning another c-section as inducing labour is not an option for me. The false alarms come and go and leave me disappointed just as I start getting my hopes up. Well I am ready, the Baby is full term the only question left now is "When?". I am hoping for a normal this time and so far things are looking good so I'm keeping optimistic. All of you out there say a little prayer for me that all goes well and that my next update is all about my new Bundle of Joy. Thanks! Current Mood:  restless |
| Saturday, July 4th, 2009 |
yathin
|
1:53p |
Monument Valley
The drive from Denver to back home in California was going to be a long one. I wanted to get back home before the holiday crowd takes over the national parks across the country. It is amazing how popular remote places and outdoor activities are in this country and for someone like me who prefers to be in places where there are no crowds, weekends and holiday weekends are time to stay away from national parks and such. I left Denver early on the morning of the 2nd of July. Interstate 70 through the Rocky Mountains is an amazing road. Besides being very scenic there is a lot of wildlife next to the roads all through the mountains. I saw lots of deer and big-horned sheep. They could be traffic hazards, but it is always nice to see that they are around even if they are next to a winding freeway at 11,000 feet where vehicles speed in excess of 75 mph. I picked Monument Valley on the Utah-Arizona border as the place to stop by for the night. It wasn't exactly midway between Denver and San Jose, but I couldn't have picked a better approximate midway point. When I got to the Navajo reservation, it was all cloudy and dark. The day was still young but I didn't have much hope to see the sun that evening. I went into the park and went for a drive on the valley floor. The overcast and low light conditions was interesting to make some photographs but when I saw horses for trail rides, I decided to go for it. Riding a mustang in the iconic western landscape can be wonderful experience but with the Navajo tour guide telling me things about Navajo culture, beliefs and tradition, it was just awesome. The weather played its part with an occasional drizzle as the Navajo horseman sung his rain song. Almost as soon as I had finished with the horse ride, the clouds opened up a bit to show the magnificent landscape of the Colorado plateau. Here are some photographs from the Monument Valley.
Route 163
( Read more... )
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| Friday, July 3rd, 2009 |
yathin
|
10:25p |
Back!
The two weeks in the American west went very well. Some of you reading my (infrequent) updates on twitter may know what animals were seen, but here's a list anyway: 7 wolves, 4 grizzlies, 4 (wild) black bears (and 4 black bears in captivity), moose, coyotes, fox, badgers, beaver, muskrat, and countless elk, chipmunks, squirrels, pronghorn and bison. While Glacier National Park and Grand Tetons are very wild and perhaps untamed, Yellowstone is incredible. From geothermal features to meadows and mountains teeming with wildlife, Yellowstone has to be seen to be believed. Really. It is going to take a long time to put together the images and words from the trip, I guess. :-) Meanwhile, Happy Independence day to all the Americans! This photograph is for you folks.
American Mustang. Monument Valley, Utah.
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| Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 |
tariquesani
|
4:11p |
A face for the unnamed… …
 Sangita - always a friend! Sangita! If there was anyone in my life I place after my mother it would be her. Even though she is just a year older to me she always held that place of a woman I could go to for comfort. I have known her since I was fifteen. We grew up together, kept in touch for a long long time but as fate would have it, life took somewhat divergent paths about ten years ago.
Read the rest of this entry » Originally published at http://tariquesani.net/blog/. Please leave any comments there. |
| Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 |
ramkrsna
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6:40p |
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kalyan
|
12:39a |
Following the Rains of Life
If you are from India, you know that the monsoons are the lifeline of the country. It brings joy and celebration to the land, the people and most of all the wildlife. Over ten meters of rain falls in the Western Ghats in this season transforming the land completely [ ...] Click here for more |
| Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 |
puremeteor
|
5:22p |
notes on a holiday
Had a busy few weeks. * Took the GMAT got a borderline score of 710 (Q49, V-38), still mulling over whether to retake or not. * Flew out to india for a 3-week holiday on 6th of June. Had a 14-hour layover in Abu Dhabi. I used the opportunity to catch up with my classmate from Engg who has been based there for the past 10 years. Met up with his family and saw a bit of Abu Dhabi. * Mumbai was hot and humid as usual. 3 days was spent attending a training. Met up with a couple of guys from college and from previous companies. nearly all of them are "family guys" at this stage. Met up with another ex-colleague on the flight back, so thistrip was a good one for catching up with old mates. * For an IT superpower, the way some things are done in India still sucks! You have to queue for 20 minutes to get a ticket for a local train! Where are the vending machines?? Roads and other infrastructure are still woefully inadequate, at least in Mumbai! |
tariquesani
|
4:50p |
A bit of FOSS contribution
Over at SANIsoft in the past few days we released two small but very useful bits of code. The code was written to itch the classical ‘I need it’ itch. I do hope there will be more like me out there who would like to solve the same problems.
The links to downloads and demo are on the pages which I have linked above
Originally published at http://tariquesani.net/blog/. Please leave any comments there. |
| Monday, June 29th, 2009 |
nithya
|
3:09p |
What the hell is wrong with me??
I can't really understand myself at times... There are times when I lose my temper and scream like a maniac and get paranoid about the most trivial things.. and then there are times when the world is really crashing around me and I stay calm.. |
nithya
|
2:53p |
Baahon Ke Darmiyaan
Its been a while since I wrote anything here... i have been working on trying to do some recording at home ..finally got together with my friend karthik and recorded Baahon Ke Darmiyaan... For some reason I still don't remember who I sang this song with when I was back in college... but i do remember that evening :) Current Mood:  calm |
dianaparadise
|
10:56p |
Then and Now
Then – 1st Trimester:
1. Severe morning sickness
2. Lost a lot of weight
3. Went off all milk products including cheese, paneer, ice-cream and chocolates
4. No food cravings
5. Did not show a bump for all three months
Now – 1st Trimester:
1. Virtually no morning sickness
2. Put on a lot of weight
3. Had no food aversions and on a healthy diet of milk and milk products
4. Craved meat, mostly red
5. Started showing in the second month
Then – 2nd Trimester:
1. Severe morning sickness
2. Started putting on weight
3. Still off milk products
4. No food cravings
5. Started to show at the end of the 4th month
Now – 2nd Trimester:
1. No morning sickness at all
2. No weight gain
3. No food aversions
4. Cravings for meat and ice-cream (not together thankfully)
5. Only slight increase in size of bump
Then - 3rd Trimester:
1. Morning sickness starting to wear off
2. Put on lots of weight
3. Still off milk products
4. No food cravings
5. Big bump, carrying high and around
Now – 3rd Trimester:
1. What morning sickness?
2. Put on weight, lost some weight
3. No food aversions
4. Craving lots and lots of meat
5. Big bump, carrying low and out front PS: In the picture the Now is on the left and Then on the right. Current Mood:  curious |
| Saturday, June 27th, 2009 |
bluesmoon
|
6:21p |
Summer in the valley
It's definitely summer time in Silicon Valley. Day time temperatures are up at around 30°C and nights are pleasant enough to walk around without a jacket. This is no where near as hot as Bombay's summer that, while I'm used to, I really cannot handle. Summer in the valley also means longer days, and lots of birds in the shrubbery outside my patio. It's been a while since I updated this journal, and this time, it's on a far more pleasant note. I've been cooking a lot, and cycling a lot. A new pedestrian/cycle bridge across the 101 means that I now have another safe route to use when biking to the office. That's always welcome. The older route was longer and had far less shade, which made it a bad choice for summer cycling. Last night some of my old college classmates dropped in. I decided to cook up something new to mark the occasion (a word that I always fail to spell correctly), and ended up with Sweet and Sour vegetables with pears. I think it came out well, and unless my friends were lying to avoid hurting my feelings, I think they liked it too. I've also tried a whole bunch of stir fry and Thai curry recipes to varying degrees of success, but I haven't posted any of those. The heat out here also means finding ways to cool off. My apartment has a swimming pool, which I used for the first time today. It was wonderful. 35 minutes of uninterrupted swimming was good to cool me down, and probably good to build up muscles in the long term, but in the short term it means aching joints and burning eyes from the chlorine. Easily remedied though. I think I'll keep it up for a while. Finally, a new website I've found. I was heading home on Caltrain from San Francisco last Wednesday night, and another guy on the train parked his bike on the same rack as mine. We started talking and realised that we might have common friends. He's also started his own company (a YCombinator funded startup) called hab.la. I'm always interested in projects such as these because of my history with libyahoo2, ayttm and a few chat related hacks at Yahoo! in my attempts to build something like this. Let's hope they add in openid support soon. |
| Friday, June 26th, 2009 |
vaibhav
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9:33p |
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vaibhav
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9:32p |
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