flavour of the month

Music is the one of those things in my life which I cannot live without and I constantly need something new to keep me going. That's been my task this past weekend. Trying to find some new music for the week/month/year/life . Typical life span of any new music ranges between a couple of days to a couple of weeks in my play-list. Although, I must admit some songs just stay fresh forever (like 'Marooned'....it surely must be Gilmour's 'Magnum Opus').
Being mostly a classic rock guy, I've lately been hooked on to lounge. Here's some of the songs that survived the many try-outs and made it into my 'flavour of the month' play-list.

Song: Sitar Gaze - Niladri Kumar
Album : Red Earth - India On My Mind
Short review: Most songs in this album are good, But 'Sitar Gaze' is clearly the best of them and deserves to be on everybody's play-lists. The mellow beginning and the sitar riffs certainly touches ones' emotions. Niladri Kumar is a very talented musician. Also worth mentioning is Nladri's rendition of Jana Gana Mana in A R Rahman's version of the national anthem.

Song: Drive
Artist : Karsh Kale
Album : Karsh Kale - Broken English
Short review: Karsh Kale is one highly talented artist. The sitar in this piece is played by Niladri and is very well mixed by Karsh. Very melodic and soothing , is a 'must listen' on a long drive!!

Song: All Bliss - John Wubbenhorst
Album : Incredible India
Short review: 'All Bliss' another one of those melodic pieces on sitar. Played by John Wubbenhorst, it proves, what a magnificent instrument, 'The Sitar' really is. The album has several good songs but only 'All Bliss' gets the special mention.

Song: L'amour
Album : Dubai Chill Lounge Vol 2
Short review: Just fell in love with the French in the song. Decent lounge music. Made it to the play-list because of the French :)

Song: Mumtaz
Album : Bombay Dub Orchestra - Vol 1
Short review: Beautiflul, melodic piece of lounge music. The flute just soothes your mind. Once again most songs in the album are good.

All songs are available on www.musicindiaonline.com for anybody's listening pleasure.

emissions

Woo Hoo!! I passed my emissions test today.
I have spent a lot of freakin money on fixing my car this week. After having been kicked around by the auto shops, I ended up visiting the dealership to find a fix for my car. Auto dealerships are the worst of the lot. As soon as you step inside you can be sure of parting away with atleast a week's worth of money.The service guy greets you with a certain 'what-a-poor-bastard' kind of smile and you greet him back with an "Oh-shit!!" kind of smile. Its a perfect place to discover how notorious the service industry in the US is. All my car needed was a new canister (part of the exhaust system which is made of a thin piece of sheet metal) and some cleaning of a blocked valve. And it cost me 685 friggin dollars!!!!
I could have actually done away without the new canister, but I had received a threatening notice several days ago from the DMV informing of my driver's license suspension if I did not get my emissions done in time. WTF!!!
Having already had many encounters with the cops (darn luck!!), didn't want to take any more chances. So today I have finally got my car fixed and the emissions done!!! I wanted to treat myself for this wonderful achievement but remembered I had a big crater in my bank account. Crap!!!

'HOME is where the heart is'

After 3 long years in the USA , I finally decided to take off for a month long vacation to 'namma Bengalooru' this December.It was a super relaxing trip and was indeed a well deserved break. There is nothing that can rejuvenate a spirit like visiting your home. After all 'HOME is where the heart is'!!

I had waited a long time to see my family and friends and my city and was super excited to meet them all. However this wait seemed to stretch longer and longer as I flew our 'warm and motherly' Air India (reminds me of a pun my sister once told me: warm because the A/Cs don't work and motherly because all the air hostesses remind you of your mother). I had heard horrid stories from friends about their flying experiences in Air India. But now I had the chance to experience it myself and I did! Firstly the flight from Chicago was delayed 'supposedly' due to the cold weather which didn't seem to affect any of the 100's of other air crafts taking off that night from O'Hare. It was just poor planning and irresponsibility by the AI management. Its amazing how the staff come up with such lame excuses knowing that not one soul on the aircraft would buy such an explanation. This joke seemed to have ended until we landed in Mumbai where there was further delay. This time it was because we were waiting for other transit passengers to arrive from other air crafts and board ours. And the joke was that the other air crafts hadn't even landed !! And we were made to wait inside the aircraft with no A/C and only an hour away from home which was so frustrating and resulted in my decision to not fly Air India ever again. Anyway, all this frustration flew right out of the window as soon as I landed in namma Bengalooru and saw my parents after 3 years.

Bangalore has changed tremendously and at an insanly rapid pace. Namma Bengalooru doesn't seem much like 'namdu', if you have missed all that's happened to the city in the past 3-4 years. What was once a relatively calm, green and peaceful Bangalore is now a bustling, polluted and loud metropolis. Apartments are springing up on every corner of the street like hair on a petrified cat, real estate prices have skyrocketed in only 3 years and traffic!....well, that's for another post on another day! And I can barely recognise Airport road...All this can be a little over-whelming if you have been away from Bangalore for three years as I found out!!
Well...no matter how much I bitch about the current state of Bangalore, its still namma Bengalooru and I'll always love it. Even with the aforementioned by-products of a booming economy, the people are still the same; warm, cheerful and with a 'swalpa adjust madi' attitude. You cannot help but feel the positive energy that is radiating form this place. I have made a promise to myself to visit Bangalore more often than I did before, for, the next time I see it, It may not be 'namdu' anymore !

Great Smoky Mountains

Clingman's dome
Originally uploaded by ravishankar_ha.

'Mambo Craze' by De Phazz

- Why, Lucy, your eyes are filled with tears?
- My heart is strained with bloodness
Oh look, the orchestra is getting ready, dance with me, George!
Check the scene outside of Medellin.
Make a fuss in Caracas
Mixed guys and dark men at the bars
Mambo's slow Guantanamo
Was so glad escape in Trinidad
Outside down in Kingston town
Stole a car in the streets of Panama
Went too far in Bogota

Space cake brake at the Titicaca lake
Got some more in Ecuador
Out for a dance in a dive in Puerto Prince
Went too far in Bogota

A little weak, a little pale today
Looks like it's time, for that certain holiday

A little weak, a little pale today

A little weak, a little pale today

"Rip 'em up"

Space cake brake on the Titicaca lake
Got some more in Ecuador
Stole a car in the streets of Panama
Went too far in Bogota

A little weak, a little pale today
Looks like it's time, for that certain holiday

A little weak, a little pale today
Looks like it's time, for that certain holiday

A little weak, a little pale today

Apt 2002

view from my apt :)
Originally uploaded by ravishankar_ha.

After 3 long years of stay at the IIT campus, I've finally moved out. The feeling is totally mixed. As much as I wanted to get the hell out of a very poorly maintained and totally neglected residential complex provided by the IIT, I feel pretty emotional and sentimental about leaving it. Those 3 years of fun, friends, and school can never be replaced or erased out of the memories of any of us who lived there.

However,with all that emotions, I'm also excited to move into the heart of downtown Chicago. Yeah that's right, its 'downtown Chicago' baby. The apartment is a beautiful 2 bedroom setup on the 20th floor with a pretty good view of Rush/Oak street and the oak street beach,(the pic shows what I mean).

Well, I hope this move brings equal excitment and fun as did IIT!!

Yellowstone

yellowstone landscape
Originally uploaded by ravishankar_ha.

Visiting Yellowstone had been on my wishlist of travels for a long time. Finally I got the chance to be there this labour day weekend. Having a cousin live in Helena, MT (3hrs drive from Yellowstone) also helped :).
For all I had heard and imagined about Yellowstone, I must say it was bit of a let down. If you expect a green landscape you'll be dissapointed. There so much logging in the forest, the hills are only swatches of the lodgepole pine trees which is the main vegetation of the yellowstone forest area. Personally I like the smokey mountain landscape compared to this. However Yellowstone is yellowstone and no where else would you find so many gysers and springs in the world (maybe newzealand and iceland :)).
All said and done, Yellowstone is off my wishlist and is now captured in my head and my canon S3IS and I like it.

panning shot!! Mustang

Mustang!! Originally uploaded by ravishankar_ha.

Macro

Shooting small objects at blown-up sizes, seeing the minute details and capturing them in a camera makes it a very interesting field of photography.
I've also discovered that macro photography can be very painful if you donot have the right amount of patience. But once you have started playing with the settings and found the right one for you it is super fun.
From what I've read, true macro photography is best done with a macro lens and an SLR camera. However, I feel fairly satisfied with the performance of my Canon S3IS. Using the super macro mode with a low aperture setttings gives pretty good results. Ofcourse playing with the shutter speed and aperture a little bit can make the results even more satisfactory.

CANON S3 IS

Once in a while there is this sudden rush of passion and interest that hits me when I least expect it. If it comes to me fast, then it leaves me even faster. This time around its an interest in photography. Well, this "sudden rush" thing is also often accompanied by an impulse buy. And this time around its a CANON S3 IS which is an absolutely marvelous piece of equipment and I love it so far. To be fair to the camera itself and just to give a comapritive idea on the performance of the camera, I think I should give a low-down on it. So here goes it...

Type of Camera:
Compact digital camera with built-in flash, 12x Optical / 4x Digital / 48x Combined Zoom

Total Pixels:
Approx. 6.2 Megapixels

Focal Length:
6.0-72.0mm f/2.7-3.5 (35mm film equivalent: 36-432mm)

LCD Monitor:
2.0 inch low-temperature polycrystalline silicon TFT color LCD with variable-angle function

Maximum Aperture:
f/2.7 (W) - f/3.5 (T)

Shutter Speed:
15-1/3200 sec. (settable in Tv or M)

Shooting Modes:
Auto; Creative: P, Av, Tv, M, C; Image: Portrait, Landscape, Night Scene, Sports, Special Scene (Foliage, Snow, Beach, Fireworks, Indoor, Night Snapshot, Color Accent, Color Swap), My Colors, Stitch Assist, Movie

All this interest in photography really started when I was going through a friends blog which had a link to the pictures she had taken. The pictures were really impressive and intiated an interest in photography in me.
I surprised myself with all the research I did on photography and all the forums I joined to learn the tips and tricks of photography even before I bought the camera. Although I did some research on photography, I didnt know squat about what equipment to buy. So I totaly relied on another friend's advise on buying the camera itself. She being a "total photography person" and all, owning a myriad of cameras from pentax to canon, sugested the CANON S3 IS and I just bought it without a second thought. And I must thank her for this beautiful suggestion coz I totaly love the camera. I just now hope my interest in photography lasts a little longer than the others did.

?

Whenever you come across an idea or confront an opinion, you have a choice to handle it open mindedly or conservatively. Being open minded all the time means you are constantly changing your ideals, while giving a chance to the idea or the opinion that you come across.Which further means you cannot hold on to one ideal or one belief , which would make you feel vulnerable and wandering, without a foothold. This simply is not a recipe for success. However being conservative all the time, would mean you are sticking by your one ideal or belief and not giving a chance to other possibilities and simply not growing, which again is not a recipe for success. This seems like a perfect paradox. So, one can never approach any idea being either open minded or conservative. There has to be a bit of both to get ahead with the idea. So people who call themselves a liberal or a conservative can go take a hike. Everybody is a bit of both.

Productivity level...dangerously low

Thanks to a very cool software called Autodesk Viz, and Autodesk Inventor, killing time at office has been made a
whole lot interesting. Theses accompanying pics are a couple of my creations. My productivity at office is at an all time low now.

The first pic is a supposed Mclaren MP4-20 with the famous Viking horns. The gold rendering is an attempt at displaying my artistic skills. I've used dimensional data from Mclaren.com and F1.com and pics from all over the web as reference.

The second pic is my rendering of a V6 engine block. I've used pics of a Ford GT 5.4L Aluminum Block as my reference.

Parle-G

As I munch on a Parle-G biscuit at my desk, I see my R&D manager walk into his office. Boy Am I glad to see him back!! While he was away (for more than a week), loads of shit has been piled over me. I can now gladly hand it all back to him. The reason he was away for so long was a bizarre incident in the office. My supervisor who I think is full of shit, made a comment on the R&D manager about a virus attack on the server. He claimed that XXX( R&D manager), was the originator of the virus coz he downloaded some unsecured stuff from the internet. Ofcourse XXX (who was a former IT employee of Reuters and holds a PHD in Mathematics) denied the accusation and conveniently asked my supervisor to walk out of his office, which started a whole process of accusations and name calling (at one point of time "asshole" was also used). It was some entertainment for all of us in the office.

Well anyway, its over and the R&D manager is back. Although I can shift back most of the work to him, I know I'll be stuck with some of it. Thanks a lot!!

Oh learned one!! I bow to Thee!!

 

Network failure...attempting to reconnect

whoa!! its been a while since I posted a blog. Shear boredom at the office and a constant urge to reconnect with my ability to read and write has driven me back to blogging (although, I didnt blog a great bit before).

Back in Bangalore it was a lot easier and convenient to keep myself updated and keep my brain cells challenged, which drove me to atleast a semi-decent level of reading, quizzing and conversing. I guess it was the crowd that I was amongst and the constantly urbanizing atmosphere of Bangalore and hence BMS which motivated me to watch,read and learn. Although in the US, access to information is a lot easier, (thanks to a free 11mbps, 24/7 wireless internet connection on-campus) I feel a lack of motivation to do the things that I did in BMS. I miss the crowd. So I guess my motivating force is people. It is strange, because I'm truly an introvert.

However, this doesn't mean I'm not having fun here. I have loads of fun. Different kind of fun. But I feel an urge to get back to those days of quizzing, reading and stuff that I did in BMS. This is one such attempt.