No makeover. But, a new blog.

After thinking over the material I want to put in the photography blog, I thought it is better to start a new blog than to revamp this one. The new one is here. http://drfotoz.wordpress.com/ I am trying out wordpress for this one.

That blog will be focused on photography related matter.

Atom feed for the new blog is : http://drfotoz.wordpress.com/feed/

Blog makeover

I haven't posted anything to my blog for slightly over two years. Planning to revive it and make it a photography oriented blog. Hopefully, I will be able to keep it alive.

Cameras and market segments they are aimed at

I was looking at buying an SLR (bought Canon EOS 400D) and going through reviews and guides at different sites. Found an interesting comment at

http://photonotes.org/articles/beginner-faq/cameras.html#marketbracket 

How can I tell what market segment a camera is aimed at?

Look at the advertising. If the camera brochure features lots of snapshot photos of happy families on holiday, it’s a low-end or consumer camera. If the brochure features lots of photos of attractive young women smiling coyly at the camera, it’s a midrange camera. And if the brochure features more glossy fashion photos, landscapes, etc, then it’s a professional camera.

The human network - II

I posted a little time ago (actually, one year ago) about different social networking. Now, I want to add two new ones to the list.

Shelfari - A new social network which is still in beta is a place where you track the books you read and see what your friends are reading. I joined couple of weeks back and found it useful. Antoher network based on your reading interests is http://www.whatshouldireadnext.com/. This one does track your friends, but suggests the next book you should read. Shelfari should add that feature too. :-)

Last.fm - This is a hugely popular social network based on people's music interests. People with similar listening habits become neighbours. The very good thing about Last.fm is that you don't need to enter the songs you listened to the site. They have plugins to allmost all media players - windows media player, winamp, itunes - which will automatically upload the data for you. The site currently boasts "over 20 million users," which currently makes for an approximate average of 10,000 fans for each band or label.

They have a radio software (both browser based and stand-alone) which will help to find lot of free music depending on genre or artists. The collection they have is awesome.

I found a mashup between Last.fm and Youtube which will pull out a person's favourite tracks from the former site, finds the music videos of those tracks from Youtube and plays for you. The mashup is http://lasttv.net/. Pretty neat idea. The latest news is that last.fm itself is starting a music video service. The widget on the right side of my blog is from last.fm showing my weekly charts.

Interesting quote

Life can only be understood backwards - but it must be lived forward - Søren Kierkegaard, Danish Philospher.

Came across this on "Intelligent Investor" , a book on investing in stock markets. This quote is very true in share markets.

My New Car

Finally, I got a new car. Had been planning to buy a new car for almost eternity (read 4 years.). After I came back to Bangalore in March, I decided it is the time. Had to wait for a month or so due to some red tape in Ford and my company.

From My New Car

My alter ego in cyberspace

Found this site today. http://mycybertwin.com. This site a bot which resembles the user's personality. To adapt to the users personality, it asks 79 questions. I am not sure how much my cybertwin resembles me. Try him out below.

Send email
|
View personality profile
|
Get your own CyberTwin


View privacy policy
|
View explicit content policy

Around the world in eighty ...er sixty days

Yep.. Completed a full circle around the globe last Friday when I landed on Raleigh Durham Airport. Last November, I returned from Raleigh via San Francisco and Singapore to Bangalore. This time my trip from Bangalore was via Germany. So that makes it a complete circle.

Visited a lot of airports on my way. Waiting on some airports was a pleasant experience, especially in Singapore. On some others, it was quite painful.

• Raleigh Durham
• Washington Dulles
• Los Angels
  
• San Jose Minetta
  
• San Francisco
• Hong Kong
  
• Singapore Changi
• Bangalore
  
• Frankfurt
  
• Chicago O'Hare
• Raleigh Durham

It was a journey with lot of hops, with stop overs at some places from 2 days to 2 months :-). Met some friends and visited some places nearby when I was in those places. Did some shopping as well.

One of the places, I liked was the Lick Observatory, Hamilton Hills near San Jose. It was only an hour's drive away from San Jose. The place was pretty fogged up when we went there. The visibility was only 10 feet. Ramji did very good job of keeping his Kia Amanti on road and not going into one of those chasms on the sides of the road. The below photo shows our pic on top of
Hamilton Hills.

From Lick Observatory

The city that impressed me most is Chicago which has lot of big and old building and and the beach. Sabarish and Meena were my hosts in Chicago. The best view of the city was from top of either John Hancock or Sears towers. It seems you can see the neighboring states from those towers. Could not go on top of Sears as we got a little late. Below picture is from John Hancock.

From Chicago

Another nice view is from the Navy Pier in the night. All the building were lit up brightly and they were getting reflected on Lake Michigan.

From Chicago

It was very chilly in the windy city. I struggled to hold the camera steady to take this picture. :-)

Another city where I spent couple of days is Washington. Went to lot of Museums in the Capitol Hill Area. Spent an entire day in Smithsonian Museums catering to subjects like Aeronautics, Biology, American History etc.

From Washington

The places in Research Triangle Park (RTP) were in stark contrast to other places. It is a peaceful countryside with lot of vegetation. My office in RTP is inside a forest and I got scared driving to that place on my first night there. November was the best time to be here in RTP. You could not find two trees of the same color. There were difference shades of orange, red and yellow all over the place.

From Research Tria...

Now, all the trees have fresh leaves and they are all green.. :-(

That almost covers my trip in US. oops.. missed one place.. San Francisco.. How can miss it.. Drove from San Jose to SF on a weekend with Rohan and Family. Drove through the still-being-painted Golden Gate Bridge. Went on a boat cruise around The Rock (Alcatraz Prison).

Tried to do a Magneto Act (You have to see X-Men: The Last Stand :-) ). Oh man, that thing is real heavy !! :-)

From Sanfrancisco

This is first post in 2007. Happy new year to everyone who comes across this blog.

The human network

This is the time for collaberation over the internet. There are lots of sites today that allow people all over the world to cooperate and collaberate on whole lot of different things and lot of them are coming to life everyday. Myspace, Orkut, Facebook, Youtube (Gootube soon), Flickr lead this revolution of shrinking the world. How can the networking giant Cisco stand back ? It started the human networking portal last week. On the right side, it has a list of networking sites. I spend some time exploring some of the interesting ones..

• http://www.knacktion.com/ : This site allows people to show of their talent. The TalentZone has some interesting videos and pics. It has some contests running too. People can sell and buy thier content on this site.
  
• http://www.thisonenext.com or http://www.whatshouldireadnext.com/ : This is the most interesting site I found. Enter the the books you read. It will analyse your tastes and recommend new books depending on what other people of similar taste liked. They are extending this idea to Music and Films as well. I feel it is great idea. I need to create my favorite list and find out if it gives good recommendations. Planning to do it in my free time.
• http://idealist.org/ : Action Without Borders connects people, organizations, and resourcesto to provide a one-stop shop for volunteer opportunities and nonprofit services in communities around the world.. This is a place where charitable organizations and individuals to co-operate on voluntary and non-profit activities. Idealist has become one of the most popular communities of nonprofit and volunteering resources on the web, with information provided by over 57,000 organizations in 165 countries, and thousands of users every day.
• http://www.thelivinglink.net/, http://popurls.com/ , http://digg.originalsignal.com/ : These are the sites which are always open on my browser. They give a snapshot of what is happening in news sites, tech news sites, geek sites like digg.com, slashdot.org, del.icio.us, technorati, gizmodo. They are the fancy versions of online RSS aggragator, although they can not monitor custom feeds. If bloglines comes up with such an interface, it will rock the world.
  
• http://tenbyten.org/10x10.html : This is not a site which is built on collaboration of people. It is an aggragator sort of tool. It scans the news items on different feeds and finds out 100 most important or relevent words and pictures. It considers this ensemble as a snapshort of that moment in time. At the end of each day, month, and year, 10x10 looks back through its archives to conclude the top 100 words for the given time period. This way it claims to create an record of our world. Whatever be their claims, the interface looks very good. I enjoyed scrolling through the list of words :-)
  
• http://radar.net/ : This is a flickr like site. People can share their camera phone pictures online with their friends. I could not try this out much.
  

The number of internet joints for collaberation and social networking is increasing day by day. Some of them are really good ideas.

Another star from Kerala calls it a day

He is not a sportstar or a movie star. But his name is familiar to malayalies all over the world. His retirement is reported by BBC. He is our very own "Theeta Rappai" from Thrissur. Known for his unlimited appetite, he is famous for consuming 700 idlies on top of 10 kgs of halwa on one go.

BBC honoured him by this headline. India's 'monster eater' retires
It is heard that hotel owners in Thrissur are thinking about resuming their unlimited lunches and buffets.

Quote : Linux vs Windows

Came across an interesting quote:

If you face problems in Windows, reboot. If you face problems in Linux, be root

Courtesy: Jimmy Louis

Get busy livin' or get busy dyin'

"Get busy livin' or get busy dyin'"
"Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things and no good thing ever dies"
"There's somethin' inside that they can't get to, that they can't touch. It's yours."

These are some memorable lines from a classic from Steven "Horror" King. "The Shawshank Redemption". I wonder how I missed this movie for so long. Perseverance and hope pays of for Andy Dufresne after a long wait of twenty years. But, do I have to wait for that much ?


N.B. Software bugs can create problems in relationships. Look at bug#330884. So be careful when you write code. :-)

BTW, my article found a place in Slashdot's front page today. My karma is positive now :-)

A Job change

A Job change
Originally uploaded by Dinuraj K.

Never thought that I will do good in this job. Has cooked food for some time. But, it was probably the first time that I was serving. :-) The occasion was GP and Sreenu's house warming. Got some suggestions for improvement from their relatives :-).

It is Munnar Again

 


I have lost count how many times I have visited Munnar. Maybe it was my fourth or fifth. But, I found the natural beauty of munnar still enhanting and romantic. Reached there on 25th November morning with seven others from work. We were on our way to attend Jimmy's (another colleague) marriage. Our stay was in Hotal Oakfields which was at some remote corner of munnar and the road to that place was really narrow and dangerous after the monsoon and landslides. But the scenery that welcomed us to that place was really breathtaking. Midhun, Prem, Nagesh and me went for cycling on 26th morning to explore the surroundings. The hotel was on top of hill surrounded by tea estate and offered fabulous viewpoints. The wooden house on its backyard was also beautiful.

Went to Eravikulam National park to see the endangered "Nilgiri Tahr" on the first day. It was on the foot of Anamudi , the highest peak in south india. I forgot the angle from which the peak looked like an elephant. :-)

The place I liked the best was Madupetty dam. The lake was full and it offered beautiful scenery. Look at the pic taken from the dam. This is one of the best I have taken.


Munnar is a very very beautiful place. All the keralites I have shown that photos from munnar have expressed surprise that such a place existed :-). Muttathe Mullakku Manamilla (The literal translation of that would be: The jasmin in the backyard does not have fragrance.. :-)). The photos can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/dinuraj/tags/munnar/. Some of them are really amazing..

creative ads

Posting after a break. Found this great collection of interesting ads. The axe
advertisements and the erotic ads are really great.. :-)

http://www.coloribus.com/

The below pic of an open book is my favorite.

Tic-Tac-Toe

Heard this in Radio City today. Somebody was asking Rohit Barker tips for his first date. Rohit's tips were amazing.. his three ideas follow

- Take her to a coffee shop and have some romantic talk
- Go for bowling and enjoy a good session..

Now comes the ultimate one

- Play Tic-tac-toe !!!!.. How is it ? It is not the usual 3x3 grid game where you have to fill in tics and crosses. This game is linked with testdriving cars :-).. In this version of the game, each square is filled with different colors or brands of cars. Now, the game starts, the dating couple has to go around car showrooms posing as prospective customers and try to get cars for testdriving.. and in the process, filling up the tic-tac-tow grid if the car matches the specification.. And the one makes three grids in a row wins the game (as in the normal version).. !!!!

Wow!!! I was bowled over by the last one.. the way he said this one was really funny ( I may have spoiled it).. really impressed with this idea.. that too on the first date.. any volunteers ? :-) I have posted a sample grid to start off :-)

Blistering barnacle .... $@#%@#

Look at a post in friend's page.


I don't know about the authenticity of the story he is telling. But, I have heard similar opinion about malayalam movies from many sources (from non-malyalies, of course). Its very sad to hear that it is the impression about malayalam movies, even though we used to churn out some of the well acclaimed movies in India.. :-(

nowadays, I am feeling more love towards Malayalam. Is thinking about start blogging in malayalam. As the following Vallathol Snippet says, no other language is dearer than your mother tongue.



 

Beware the speller

The speller in our word processors, email clients etc is definitely useful.. but when
we use SMSlike lingo in our docs, we should be really careful..

For instance, one of my colleagues was sending a congratulatory mail to his female friend when she was blessed with a kid.. this was the original content..

"Congrats.. hows ur kid doing ? blah blah... "

After that, the default spellchecker in his thunderbird mail client kicked in and corrected it to

"Congrats.. hows our kid doing? blah blah... "

Fortunately, my friend noticed the terrible thing he was about to send in time and corrected it manually.. so beware the speller.. :-)

WiFi @ Home

The long wait is over.. got my linksys 802.11b wireless router today.. could not wait to try it out.. hurried home after buying a 220v - 110volt converter. it booted up in seconds.. wonder what software it runs (my IOS isdn router takes at least two minutes). It throwed up a configuration webpage on the default IP address and allowed me to do some basic tweaks.. Voila !!! my laptop detected a wireless network .. :-).. this is really cool.. This post is carried over this WiFi link from my living room :-)



I should get rid of the ethernet cables lying on the floor.. need to install some security stuff on it so that my neighbours do not get into the my WiFi zone.

Thanks Midhun and Asif for helping me buy this router.. :-)

Masala Mango Slice at the top of Yercaud