Tuesday, October 31, 2006

India's Google Map ?

I came across this India's version of google maps today.
Even though its not as detailed as US and Canada, this looks cool.
At least its a good start.

Who knows, Yahoo or Google might end up buying this company, making the owners millionares.

http://db.mapmyindia.com/

You can see a map, or you can get driving directions too.

Sunday, October 29, 2006

Road Trip to Canada - Part I

It was like 8.30 am on a wednesday morning. I went to Vasanthi akka's home to get some Canadian dollars. She had some from her earlier visit to Toronto. I thought I could use it. It was a 11 hour long drive from Richmond, VA to Ottawa, Canada, according to my car computer. It started badly. I was lost in Richmond twice. Yes, it's quite embarassing considering that I have lived so long here, I took wrong exits twice and it cost me nearly 30 minutes. Then as I had lots of water that morning, hoping to stay hydrated during the long drive, I had to stop twice to pee between Richmond and Washington DC. But call it blessing in disguise, because of this delay, I missed the rush hour traffic in Washington DC.

When I reached the US-Canada border the immigration post was like a toll booth. The officer 'Bonjour' ed me. I replied the same and said 'Hi' . That's my complete French vocabulary, other than 'Sortie' for 'Exit'(this is very important, I needed to know how to get the hell out of a place when in danger) and 'One, Two, Three'.

The officer did not ask much questions. He knew why I was there.


Then when I reached my place at Ottawa it was like 7.00 pm wednesday night.


I checked in and was looking for a place to eat. I found a Greek fast food place and ordered some Falafel togo.
Came to my room, had it and went to bed.



The next day was important for me. I needed to be relaxed and comfortable.

Thursday, October 26, 2006

My new digital Camera






For a long time, I wanted to own a digital camera.
The one I had bought in 2001 was a very old camera with poor resolution and very low memory.
I gave a Canon digital camera to my sister as a gift.
But I myself never owned one.
The only camera I had was a film SLR.

So for this Canada trip I decided to buy a digital camera.

I was impressed by reading the reviews of a particular camera
Kodak EASYSHARE V570 Dual Lens Digital Camera

I also bought a 1 GB memory card.

I took lots of pictures in Ottawa, Toronto and Niagara falls.
I will have to download them to my computer, which by the way suffered a hard disk crash, and check out the quality of the pictures and video clips(yes, the camera seems to take beaufiful video clips).

But first priority, salvage my notebook computer and see if I can recover my data from the hard disk.

Camera Review:

It's simple, easy menu options, less buttons, not too complicated.
For a "not so smart" guy like me who just prefers to take pictures and does not want to spend time figuring out how to take pictures, this is a good camera.

Monday, October 23, 2006

Road Trip to Canada



Yea, that's the route of my Road Trip to Canada.

Richmond, Virginia, USA
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada
Buffalo, New York, USA
Richmond, Virginia, USA

About 1800 miles, 5 days.

Tuesday, October 10, 2006



Throwing a stone!

Maybe they just had one nuke and they used it for testing and now they are thinking they made a mistake by using the only one they had for testing.

If this is the way NK is going to fight, then we don't have to worry about them.

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Oh I forgot to tell about another movie I saw with my friend in the theater. 'Fearless'.

Jet Li seriously kicks ass.

Monday, October 02, 2006

This weekend was both tiring and relaxing.
I went to the gym and did some intense exercises after a very long time, and Iam very sore and tired. At the same time I rented lots of DVDs and watched a lot of TV at home too while relaxing in the comfort of my couch.

I saw 'The Triangle'. I thought this was a movie about Bermuda Triangle, but it happened to be a 6 hour TV movie about Bermuda Triangle. Nevertheless I enjoyed it, worth all the money I spent as I got 6 hours of entertainment. Also it was good to see 'Catherine Bell's cute face. But my plans of sleeping early Friday night and getting up early on Saturday morning got screwed.
Then I have started to Netflix one of my all time favorite TV Serial, The X-Files.
I got the first 2 DVDs of Season 1, total 8 episodes including the pilot. Man, I love X-files. Its good to see the faces of Agent Mulder and the flawless Agency Scully :)

Then I also saw 'V for Vendetta' starring one of my favorite actress 'Natalie Portman'. It was an ok movie, in my opinion.

Goddammit its 9:50 am. Let me get back to my work.

The most unwanted

Even since I returned from There, I have been going though a phase, I guess.
Suddenly I feel like the most unwanted person or the most insignificant person.
I very well knew each one of us and everything we have seen in this planet is insignificant compared to the Space Time Scales we have known.

For those who don't know what Iam talking about, you should see this Cosmic Calendar.

This shows in the known Time scale, our life span is so insignificant. Also we all know the size of the solar system, and the Milky Way galaxy and billions of such galaxies and may be even billions of universes. So both by Space Time scales we are insignificant.

But recently I have started to feel that even in this small planet earth, in the small city where I live currently, Iam the most unwanted and insignificant.

I do not know if this just happened or this was always the case and Iam just aware of it now after coming back from There.