Stealing this meme from SEV
20 years ago I . . .
1. was in elementary school
2. discovered swimming
3. was watching mahabharat n visiting ppl over summer vacations
15 years ago I...
1. was still in school.The last stages of it.
2. playing soccer in the monsoon
3. started playing the guitar.
10 years ago I . . .
1. was doing engg.
2. attending a ton of rock shows all over the mumbai landscape. So much that I was there when PDV was first starting out at Terna Engg, Nerul.
3. Just having a blast going thru college, made some lifelong friends in the process.
4. did a lot of PC gaming, AoE, Halflife, NFS (this is when I first heard about the Nissan Skyline)
5 years ago I . . .
1. was in the process of coming to Rolla.
2. travelled alone thru some remote areas of interior Maharashtra on local transport. One of the best trips ever.
3 years ago I . . .
1. switched from working in the auto industry in LA to the Insurance domain in Lansing, Michigan.
2. found a fantastic mentor at work, if you have seen HOUSE M.D. now that is what the mentor was like.
3. got my first car, the Mercury Cougar
2 years ago I . . .
1. was working 60hr/week shifts
2. got promoted at work and was mentoring another guy now
3. but gained the lbs as a result.
1 year ago I . . .
1. moved to DC from Michigan, got back to swimming
2. got the G37, (ref. from 10 yrs back,the Infiniti G37 is known as the Nissan Skyline 370GT in Japan)
3. started exploring the DelMarVa and started using the Nikon outdoors more
4. discovered that the best time for a drive is early Sat morning when
everyone's wasted from the previous night of partying.
Thus got upto 130mph/210kmph on the I-70 at 5am, thanks to clear roads.
So far this year I . . .
1. have been busy with parents n relatives visiting.
2. have got a receiver + surround sound setup now and the blu ray on the ps3 is being used to its full potential
3. thanks to the above have been hooked to the full sonic range capabability from the likes of Yanni, Satriani
1 week ago I . . .
1. saw Chalo Dilli, Fast Five
2. ate awesome dosa at Udipi Palace
3. saw Braveheart after a very long time. It's still kickass.
Yesterday I . . .
1. got a colleague's large library of Dvd's, gladiator, troy, pirates, matrix, generally good stuff.
2. got done with my regular 2km/day swim.
3. put on the Division Bell, audio bliss.
Today . . .
1. is a Friday and may meet some friends later tonight
2. will start watching some stuff from the library
3. Hookah + Tandoori/Chinese nights.
Tomorrow I will . . .
1. recover from the hangover.
2. check out tickets to India again.
3. will try to swim some more.
In the next year I will . . .
1. try to make an India trip during Holi.
2. hopefully not be married ;)
Done. This meme was easy. Typed this up on Friday, posted it on a Saturday :)Saturday, May 7, 2011
Meme
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
A year in DC
Its been exactly a year now in DC, damn, time flew fast and I thought I was only gonna be here for 6 months. Since I moved to the east coast haven't been out much (exception being the St.Louis trip over new year's), partly this can be attributed to the fact that several ppl visited me over july 4th, labor day, thanksgiving, n even the folks visited last feb. So far so good. Am looking fwd to more friends coming over (prob. the Boston ppl) over this summer. May get out to Boston by myself over some summer long weekend. Probably spend a night in NY and drive on the following morning to Boston.
Sometime back made a trip to Rutgers,NJ which was good. I needed to get out of DC and also just go on a long drive by myself. Audiobooks are pretty neat. Last winter I didn't drive much and also had a colleague's Toyota RAV4 SUV at my disposal most of the time so put about 1k on the G's odometer thru the winter period. Have gotten the hang of rev matching now and it takes time to get used to it but it has its own share of fun. Got upto 130mph/210kmph on the NJ turnpike. Quite hairy, I assure you, especially in traffic.
Rediscovered swimming in DC and do about 2km/day on a regular basis thru the work week. Also thanks to another colleague have been going for tennis lessons on warmer weekends. There are several plans for this summer not restricted to just biking thru the DC trails or camping in the Shenandoah Valley. Figured that I might as well make some use of staying near a warmer place on the east coast and with a more relaxed work schedule compared to my days in Michigan.
Hiking/Camping plans to Yellowstone/Yosemite/Alaska Glacier park don't seem feasible yet. Like the last post said I really need a vacation and time off.
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
The vacation
My last time off was Nov 2009 when I made the trip to India, since then haven't taken any time off, not even a short break from work. Its not that I can't take time off its just that before I moved to DC I had an entire tour of Italy all chalked out but had to scrap it right at the last moment for the big jump to DC. Also its been more about do I really need time off, I don't really feel burned out or anything that I need time off to "recharge my batteries" and "ease my troubled mind."
Infact I end up just hurrying along to every place I can on vacations. I have barely ever sat still on a vacation and its always been go-go-go. Also the photography bug means sitting still means losing some scenic vistas as well so all the more reason to snap click every little thing that catches my eye. My last trip was to St.Louis to meet the old gang, and it was just everything that I thought it would be and more. Just the feeling of seeing the same old Lambert International terminal again makes me nostalgic. I have spent New Year's eve at Times Square, & on a cruise in Miami but this last trip to St.Louis ranks right up there with the best of the parties. That wasn't a slow recharge rather it was more like a sudden jolt of energy to last me hopefully thru the entire year.
Winter is almost over now which does mean that driving season is comin up pretty quick. So far I have a few road-trips planned to the NYC area, maybe Pittsburgh (Rama's), and of course an annual trip to Boston and Quincy Market, the Harbor area. Last year I went to the Florida keys for some fantastic snorkeling, Mustang convertible action, camping on the Outer Banks of North Carolina and the trip to Boston and New York. This year I should make a trip to Atlantic City, the Chesapeake Bay, and hopefully find someone to go camping/canoeing with thru the Shenandoah.
For now its back to my good routine since winter is over. My punishing swimming schedule.
Work-swim-work
Infact I end up just hurrying along to every place I can on vacations. I have barely ever sat still on a vacation and its always been go-go-go. Also the photography bug means sitting still means losing some scenic vistas as well so all the more reason to snap click every little thing that catches my eye. My last trip was to St.Louis to meet the old gang, and it was just everything that I thought it would be and more. Just the feeling of seeing the same old Lambert International terminal again makes me nostalgic. I have spent New Year's eve at Times Square, & on a cruise in Miami but this last trip to St.Louis ranks right up there with the best of the parties. That wasn't a slow recharge rather it was more like a sudden jolt of energy to last me hopefully thru the entire year.
Winter is almost over now which does mean that driving season is comin up pretty quick. So far I have a few road-trips planned to the NYC area, maybe Pittsburgh (Rama's), and of course an annual trip to Boston and Quincy Market, the Harbor area. Last year I went to the Florida keys for some fantastic snorkeling, Mustang convertible action, camping on the Outer Banks of North Carolina and the trip to Boston and New York. This year I should make a trip to Atlantic City, the Chesapeake Bay, and hopefully find someone to go camping/canoeing with thru the Shenandoah.
For now its back to my good routine since winter is over. My punishing swimming schedule.
Work-swim-work
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Tv
As a latest update, have now quite got the hang of rev matching, have switched from Linux finally back to Windows, have been playing the drums (Alesis DM6), work related stuff will always be there on my mind, n watch a lot of TV thru the entire weekend (College Football, NFL and of course Dexter S5).
Speaking of TV, I hardly ever watched any sport as much as this NFL season, even cricket, partly this can be attributed to coworkers/ friends following NFL, College Football and also as in Lansing due to being around MSU where the Big Ten is a religion. Infact I have started following football so much that I tried to watch an EPL (Chelsea/Everton) soccer game a few days back and it just seemed slow and boring in comparison. College Football is even more interesting since the Spartans had one of their best seasons in 20 years.
This brings me to Dexter, I usually don't follow a series but Dexter is different. I started following Dexter from last year in Lansing due to recommendations from various co-workers and so initially caught up on seasons 1-4 on Dvd's and finally started season 5 on the regular TV schedule. IMO, the best seasons have been in that order seasons 2,4,1,3. Season 5 looks to be shaping up as a classic as well, sortof a combination of seasons 2 and 1.
Speaking of TV, I hardly ever watched any sport as much as this NFL season, even cricket, partly this can be attributed to coworkers/ friends following NFL, College Football and also as in Lansing due to being around MSU where the Big Ten is a religion. Infact I have started following football so much that I tried to watch an EPL (Chelsea/Everton) soccer game a few days back and it just seemed slow and boring in comparison. College Football is even more interesting since the Spartans had one of their best seasons in 20 years.
This brings me to Dexter, I usually don't follow a series but Dexter is different. I started following Dexter from last year in Lansing due to recommendations from various co-workers and so initially caught up on seasons 1-4 on Dvd's and finally started season 5 on the regular TV schedule. IMO, the best seasons have been in that order seasons 2,4,1,3. Season 5 looks to be shaping up as a classic as well, sortof a combination of seasons 2 and 1.
After moving to DC have hardly ventured out at all except for an occasional NYC trip, rather have had a ton of visitors for sometime now, starting from July 4th, Labor Day, Thanksgiving and prob thru the end of the year as well. Need to get out and connect with STL/KC folks sometime, its been a while since I met the old gang.
Monday, June 28, 2010
Centurion
100 posts over a two year period, wow. I need to get back to doing this as soon as I stop thinking about (in that order) work related stuff, the car (downshift rev matching it is now).
Need to practice the rev matching part more, will post on that sometime.
Need to practice the rev matching part more, will post on that sometime.
Friday, June 25, 2010
iTunes under Virtualization
I generally do not update my iPhone on a regular basis thru iTunes since there isn’t a native iTunes client on Ubuntu , iTunes even under XP is a generally buggy s/w. Since I did not want to jailbreak my iPhone I ended up running a XP image inside VirtualBox under Hardy. Now this was working fine until recently when the latest iTunes 9.2 update came out. Apple for some reason decided to crash iTunes if virtualization was underway over here. Now this I realized pretty late until after I had made multiple images of my WinXP and after several unsuccessful attempts to get iTunes going on each of these multiple images. I even tried to get Vista to play nice, but the Vista iso itself had issues, so had to call it a day there.
Coming back to the issue at hand, the quick fix for this was to revert back to an older version of iTunes, I mean who really cares about an iTunes update anyway. I use iTunes for transferring music to the iPhone because Apple makes me do so (unless I jailbreak), but that’s all I really do with iTunes. No Podcasts/Video, nothing. But the catch over reverting back to an older iTunes version is that apparently iTunes uses a library file called (you’ll never guess this one !! ) ‘iTunes Library’, now this file gets timestamped with the latest date that it was generated by iTunes and the version of iTunes used to generate it. And this file isn’t exactly backward compatible too, so several attempts to replace the existing lib with the older lib didn’t work either. Finally the easiest fix for this was to simply delete the lib itself and have iTunes regenerate it. Yes, I do lose my playlist info and stuff, but that’s ok, I was booting up from a fresh XP iso anyway.
But all said and done at the end of the day the only reason am still going to stick with the iPhone over Droid phones is since the G37 has a complete iPod interface and I intend to make full use of that without buying another iTouch for the same. I did try to do an update today after several months since I needed a backup of my Contact List after I switch to the iPhone 4.
Coming back to the issue at hand, the quick fix for this was to revert back to an older version of iTunes, I mean who really cares about an iTunes update anyway. I use iTunes for transferring music to the iPhone because Apple makes me do so (unless I jailbreak), but that’s all I really do with iTunes. No Podcasts/Video, nothing. But the catch over reverting back to an older iTunes version is that apparently iTunes uses a library file called (you’ll never guess this one !! ) ‘iTunes Library’, now this file gets timestamped with the latest date that it was generated by iTunes and the version of iTunes used to generate it. And this file isn’t exactly backward compatible too, so several attempts to replace the existing lib with the older lib didn’t work either. Finally the easiest fix for this was to simply delete the lib itself and have iTunes regenerate it. Yes, I do lose my playlist info and stuff, but that’s ok, I was booting up from a fresh XP iso anyway.
But all said and done at the end of the day the only reason am still going to stick with the iPhone over Droid phones is since the G37 has a complete iPod interface and I intend to make full use of that without buying another iTouch for the same. I did try to do an update today after several months since I needed a backup of my Contact List after I switch to the iPhone 4.
Sunday, June 6, 2010
Ride Review
The first 1000 miles are done on the car now and I had promised a review to several folks, so here we go.
This car is incredibly fun to drive. I have driven the 335i so lets start with that. Yes, the 335i does carry the tag of 'the ultimate driving machine' but there is still German refinement in there, but not so much in the G37. Simply put the 335i is like an escort service whereas the G37 is just a high class hooker. They both will finally lead to the same result, total ecstasy, but there is a whole lot more fun to be had in the G37 than the 335i. This is the car that can bring out the child in you, who simply wants to have a blast on his day out. The 330 horses in this are more than enough for regular folks on city streets and most ppl will never ever go upto the red line here anyway except on rare occasions. Yes, the 335i does produce more torque(30 lb-ft) but it is a lot more entertaining in the G37 because you need to rev it upto 5200rpm to fetch the 270 lb-ft.
I had a friend (Pam), comment on the looks once as ' A Batmobile lookalike', enough said. Everyone knows that the Batmobile is by far the coolest car anyone can ever have. The number of gizmo's loaded in this is HUGE. Damn, there is also a USB host port in it, so basically anything and everything goes now. A special mention goes for the 4th gear, which will keep pulling from 1500 rpm all the way to 7000 rpm. The sound from the dual exhausts is mind blowing. The gear ratios are perfect higher up, 6th has a sublime 1:1.
There are cars in which you need to think twice when coming up to a traffic light changing from green to yellow about if you press the throttle whether you will clear the light or not but no such doubts over here, the G37 is up there all the time with you during these decisions. A joy for weaving as well thru traffic. If you think that you can get thru sticky situations then this car will do so too. Simply put, when at a traffic light you get into a drag race then pretend your inferiority and encourage your adversary.
Curvy mountain roads are where this thing comes into its own. The power is savage, speed is exhilarating and handling on a knife's edge, so you really need to be awake to push this car and when you do the rewards are there too.
Once another friend (Rama) gets back to Pittsburgh I will be taking this on the Pennsylvania TurnPike thru the Appalachian Mountains. I also have started using the WMATA bus service to get to work and back and taking the car out now on weekends when I can really enjoy the drive :)
On long drives I intend to take the D90 with me now everytime to get some panorama's from the east coast.
This car is incredibly fun to drive. I have driven the 335i so lets start with that. Yes, the 335i does carry the tag of 'the ultimate driving machine' but there is still German refinement in there, but not so much in the G37. Simply put the 335i is like an escort service whereas the G37 is just a high class hooker. They both will finally lead to the same result, total ecstasy, but there is a whole lot more fun to be had in the G37 than the 335i. This is the car that can bring out the child in you, who simply wants to have a blast on his day out. The 330 horses in this are more than enough for regular folks on city streets and most ppl will never ever go upto the red line here anyway except on rare occasions. Yes, the 335i does produce more torque(30 lb-ft) but it is a lot more entertaining in the G37 because you need to rev it upto 5200rpm to fetch the 270 lb-ft.
I had a friend (Pam), comment on the looks once as ' A Batmobile lookalike', enough said. Everyone knows that the Batmobile is by far the coolest car anyone can ever have. The number of gizmo's loaded in this is HUGE. Damn, there is also a USB host port in it, so basically anything and everything goes now. A special mention goes for the 4th gear, which will keep pulling from 1500 rpm all the way to 7000 rpm. The sound from the dual exhausts is mind blowing. The gear ratios are perfect higher up, 6th has a sublime 1:1.
There are cars in which you need to think twice when coming up to a traffic light changing from green to yellow about if you press the throttle whether you will clear the light or not but no such doubts over here, the G37 is up there all the time with you during these decisions. A joy for weaving as well thru traffic. If you think that you can get thru sticky situations then this car will do so too. Simply put, when at a traffic light you get into a drag race then pretend your inferiority and encourage your adversary.
Curvy mountain roads are where this thing comes into its own. The power is savage, speed is exhilarating and handling on a knife's edge, so you really need to be awake to push this car and when you do the rewards are there too.
Once another friend (Rama) gets back to Pittsburgh I will be taking this on the Pennsylvania TurnPike thru the Appalachian Mountains. I also have started using the WMATA bus service to get to work and back and taking the car out now on weekends when I can really enjoy the drive :)
On long drives I intend to take the D90 with me now everytime to get some panorama's from the east coast.
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