premshree

The sunset the other day was *beautiful*

April's been relatively relaxing. I spent one of the weekends in Seattle, where I hung out mostly with ravi. I'm still undecided if I like Seattle, but will visit again anyway. I have some pictures on Flickr. Oh, Virgin America First Class is pretty sweet. :-)

I spent five days (beginning weekend before last) in New York City. Met a bunch of friends from college, did the usual East/West Village thing, arms got screwed-up after rowing in Central Park, hung out at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, went to The Hamptons, went to Long Island for the first time, met friend in Queens.

Hung out with BOBPOPO (one of Live's favorite broadcasters) and friends in Brooklyn. Bob later walked Eric and me to his barber shop, Ticky's, on Flatbush Ave. (We recorded some really fun videos that I'll post here someday.) Bob gave Eric the Flatbush touch and later insisted I should get something done. Check this crazy video.

I haven't finished uploading all pictures, but they'll end up here.

Oh, and in other news, I quit smoking some ten days ago. Cold turkey. So far so good. Hopefully this time around it works.

Was in New York couple of weeks ago to meet friends, etc. Sometimes I feel like I should just move there, but I don't want to work for Yahoo! in that case. (That'd be like working for PWC in San Francisco.) Oh well, we'll see.

This was shot from the top of the Rockefeller Center (or Top of the Rock). I highly recommend it if you want fantastic views of the New York City skyline. Views from the Empire State are nice, but not as good as the Rock; also, there is practically *no* line to get on top; and, of course, you actually get to see the Empire State. :-)

More pictures here.

Arnel Pineda's voice is fucking amazing, and definitely comes closest to Steve Perry's. Check this video, for example (my favorite Journey song).

Made my day.

Some of you know that I've been working on Yahoo! Live. I was so busy with trying to get some fixes and generally work on some of the boxens that I have had absolutely no time to blog about it — I mean, I built this dope! I'm at hour number 45 (and finally home) or so right now (I took a nap some three hours ago, though). Things are looking pretty stable now and we are doing our best to iron out any kinks as best as we can.

I hate to say this (because it almost seems like an excuse), but Live *is* a limited capacity release and it *is* possible that we will reach our limits. (Note: we hit our limits pretty quick with all the rush last night, but Keith and I optimized and fixed some of the issues that caused us to run out of capacity.) Major props to those of you helped us (and are continuing to do so): Pankaj Kaushal, Raj Shekhar, Jay Janssen, Rasmus Lerdorf. I must be missing someone, but I'm just too doped out right now — sorry.

We had been doing internal tests of Live for a while before we went, umm, live, and it was pretty easy to tell that this was going to make it big. And it did. We're all absolutely psyched about this — it's been a while since we've all heard of a "wow" product.

Obama rally on Yahoo! Live

Live was built by an incredibly small team — part of the Advanced Products team based out of Brickhouse in San Francisco — in like six months. See the official post here, with a video hosted by JT The Bigga Figga.

There's a bunch of stuff we want to work on. And, of course, I'd love to hear what you have to say. Leave any comments/suggestions here or on the official blog.

I think I deserve some sleep now. :-) Night y'all!

Man, this thing is dope.

PicLens has got to be the coolest way to view Flickr streams.

Enough already about that piece of shit you so fondly call R-oh-R, fucking dweebs.

The long weekend last week was Death Valley. We hadn't planned well, and since it was a long drive, we rented a car -- a hybrid -- sadly from SJC. And I wasn't allowed to drive, apparently, because I need to be _25_ to drive a _hybrid_. WTF.

Fujicolor Superia 100

While I wasn't particularly excited about the freezing weather, I'd imagine it's much better than being there during the summer. The most fun part was hiking the sand dunes. More pictures here.

I have a selection of my photos that I file under personal favs, but if I had to pick one that I absolutely love, it has to be this:

For the technically inclined, it's not as sharp as one would like it. But I think it turned out fine as it is. This was shot on Fujichrome Sensia 100 on my (now broken) Nikon FM10. As to why this seems square-cropped when it's shot on 35mm film: this was the last exposure on the roll, and it got only partially exposed; so it was not cropped, really. (Aside: when I gave this roll for development, this last frame wasn't scanned -- the guy probably assumed it was a "bad" exposure -- so I went again to get this one frame scanned. I'm glad I did.)

Krunal and I ended up doing a Vegas/SoCal road trip the week leading up to New Year's. Nothing was planned -- the only thing we knew we were doing once he got here from Boston was Vegas. After a couple of days in the city, we started looking for rental cars. Everyone was sold out, and when available, regulation cars were at like 90-100 a day. I called good 'ol Mountain View Avis; they had a car. We head there next day (fuck, it's nuts to commute down south without a car) and Mr. Anil says, "I'll give you a Mustang. Convertible. 29." Gotta love the guy.

So we started off for Vegas. Things were good. I drove more of the California part because in Nevada it had to be Krunal all the way. After having dinner (at some Denny's) we continued down I-15S. Krunal suddenly realizes we're running out of gas! The friggin' indicator was fux0red! Anyway, we couldn't do much so we kept driving for a bit (that bit ended up being more than 15 miles) in hopes of finding a gas station. No luck, so we moved to the right-most lane. The car stops. Wouldn't start. Fuck. Quickly put the parking lights on, and later pushed the car more to the right (the darn thing kept shaking when a truck would go by). Anyway, so we're fucked. Called NHP, but they said they needed a mile marker and it was waaay cold (less than -5° C) for any of us to go figure. Called Avis. Their Vegas location was closed and the woman who answered wouldn't help us any other way. Called again, and now they'd just hang up. (They'd say "hello" exactly twice and then just hang up.) Bastards. We called another Avis location (I think) and explained our situation. She was extremely helpful. She managed to connect us to a towing service, who was supposed to bring us gas. The guy later called us to find out where we exactly were. We managed to give him directions using the GPS (15 miles away from exit 31 or some shit on I-15S; at this point we were about 20 miles from the strip). Anyway, after maybe a couple of hours he came, without fuel -- the gas station that he thought he'd get fuel from was closed. Oh well, so he said he could tow us to the closest gas station which happens to be in the strip. 20 minutes later all we see are lights. We fill up the tank and look for a motel.

Anyway, so that was that. We spent a couple of days in Vegas.

We weren't sure what we wanted to do next, so since Hoover Dam wasn't too far, we headed there.

Traffic was crazy and later I wondered why people even bother coming here. Anyway, next we thought we should head to check out Grand Canyon. Checked maps/GPS and we were on our way. Half way there, we filled up gas in the middle of nowhere in Arizona. It was way late at this time and we were told there's no point going at this time. So then we decided we should head to Santa Monica.

We got to Santa Monica late in the night. Couldn't find a cheap place, so ended up going to Inglewood, close to LAX. Breakfast next day was at the Taco Bell next door -- and I was shocked to see what I saw. The guy told us it's standard-issue LA. We then headed to Venice and later Long Beach. At this point we decided we needed music to be played from the iPhone, so we ended up at some Apple store in Manhattan village to buy the iTrip -- where we learned that the darned thing works only with iPods. Okay. We then headed to Griffith Park in the Hollywood hills to get a view of the LA skyline (not a clear night, sadly.) Later we headed for dinner at some restaurant in Huntington Beach where we were to meet Cathy and Peggy.

We had decided to head out of the area that night, but both of us were extremely tired. So we drove 6 miles to some motel in Beach Blvd. in Anaheim. Later that night Cathy called up saying they wanted to check out SeaWorld in San Diego the next day. That was a good thing, because plans to meet in Vegas had gotten fucked-up. So anyway, they called in the morning saying they were on their way. We left an hour later. So we were in San Diego.

Nice time was had. Later in the night we headed downtown for some coffee for our drive back to San Francisco.

More pictures here.

(I'm glad I ended up writing this. It's been a while since I've written about any of my trips. And that sucks.)

I hate it when people say things like "that guy is weird", "he's crazy", "I don't understand him" and such. People probably just say it because they're not like that; but it bothers me. As an example, some of my closest friends are spendthrifts (I belong to this category), while others are the frugal kind — folks from one category don't "understand" the other kind. There's probably this human urge to try and understand something you don't, well, understand — which is just fine — but don't try too hard.

At this point I'd have quoted that cliché about variety and life, but I'll pass. People are different, and that's one reason I love life.

These days I use my company-issued MacBook Pro. It's amazing how small my 12" Powerbook seems in comparison. Sadly, it's no longer in an usable state. I'd still want to get a 12" (or smaller) MacBook Pro (if they ever make one): it's so easy to carry around.

FWIW, now I have more sticker space. :-)

Oh, here’s an useful post for you geek fashion n00bs (gosh, it almost feels retarded saying that) on how to (and how not to) accessorize the ultimate geek fashion accessory.

(Whee, fourth post already!)

http://www.google.com/search?q=bangalore+babes =))

I happened to open my Flickr page on Firefox the other day (I normally use Safari) and was shocked. Most of my recent digital photos appear dull on Firefox. And it seems to be a problem only when I shoot RAW. iPhoto seems to be converting images to generic RGB (Adobe RGB). Die, iPhoto, die! I think I’ll buy Aperture.

I lived in corporate housing for almost a month on Geary St.. Those who are familiar with the neighborhood would know that it’s not the best place to live in. It’s nice in that Union Sq. is a couple of blocks away, and there’s loads of restaurants around. But I hated it. The apartment building wasn’t too great; I needed a key, a real key, to get in the building (I hate that — fob any day); the hallways were shabby; no laundry in unit. They lease for relatively cheap, but I wouldn’t have been able to live there.

I finally moved to my apartment in 199 New Montgomery couple of days ago. Office is three blocks away, Market St. is a block away, Metreon is a couple of blocks away. Downtown living, baby! I *love* it.

The building's fantastic. My apartment’s a studio, but it’s got everything I need: in-unit laundry (Bosch equipment), dishwasher (again Bosch), french windows, etc. I got myself an Airport Extreme, so now I’m wireless. All I need now is an HDTV, and a surround sound system. While my apartment itself doesn’t have much of a view (faces Academy of Art), the view from the roof deck is nice:

As for food, instead of burritos from the friendly taqueria, I’m eating from hygienic Chipotle; instead of Jack in the Box, it’s McDonald's. And I need to find good restaurants around.

Today I went to Bed Bath & Beyond to get shower curtains and rings and a rug. Gosh, I went nuts there! That place is awesome. (Reminded me of how much fun Pankaj and I had when we were setting up our penthouse in Bangalore.) But I stuck to plan and bought only what I needed.

Saturday was Monterey with Gopal_V, Subbu, Sai, hitesh and teemus. Hitesh drove Subbu and Gopal in his nice Pontiac G6, while I drove the rest on Sumeet's awful Focus. The drive was mostly uneventful. We got there some ten minutes before Hitesh and gang, probably because we exited CA 1 via US 101, while those guys took some GPS-assisted, longer route (CA 85, CA 17, CA 1).

We got there a little too late for whal-watching and the next sail was only at 14:00, so we decided to visit the aquarium and then get back.

I didn’t want to spend 25 bucks to see the aquarium because I had visited earlier in August with GopalV, but I ended up going anyway (loser). The Ocean Sunfish fascinates me. Done.

Excited, we headed to Chris’ whale-watching tours, only to learn that all whale-watching tours were canceled thanks to choppy waters. But he was doing a 10 buck “sail around sea otters” thing, which didn’t soud very interesting, but we went anyway. Boy, was it worth it! The waves!

Time to get back north and head for dinner. Subbu, Hitesh and I; Sai, Sumeet and Gopal. Subbu drove, while I slept through most of it. Pit stop: 748 N Mathilda (aka Larkspur). We rest for a while, yathin comes in a few, and then we head to DishDash just down the road. I asked for Sambusak Dajaj, realizing when it arrived that I was basically eating chicken patties in some gravy that was way spicy for my taste. My stomach’s bad right now.

Now I needed to return my rental car today because I had received a legal notice from them earlier on Friday. My credit card couldn’t be charged after the first month because it was over limit or some shite like that. Anyhoo, legal notice. I’d potentially be prosecuted if I didn’t return the car. So, Hitesh and I head to my place, Sumeet his; Hitesh’s car goes to garage, take my car, head to Sumeet’s (he’s the money); drive to Avis in SJC. Car returned. Say what you want but I really liked this car, the Chevy HHR.

I’m one broke man.

TODO: Tokyo and Sydney

Life’s been crazy. I never had an issue with my passport wherever and whenever I’ve traveled. I didn’t even have a problem with my social security. But... DMV refuses to accept my application because my name on my social security and passport don’t match. So that’s that.

What else? Umm, code_martial has been ordering like a mad-man. That's not what’s crazy — I’ve actually been receiving them too. That’s not what’s crazy either. The *one* package that *I* have been expecting hasn’t reached me in over a month. It’s officially lost now. *That’s* crazy.

I want to fly out to BOM/BLR early next week; and need to get back by 12^th. That’s bad too.

ack