Wanderlust

Last Post

Ever since I set up a community blog for my friends (and myself), I have not been blogging regularly here. It's simply not possible to maintain two blogs. I started this blog primarily for my travels and for communicating my observations about the places I visit to friends and family. This will be the last post on this blog.

I will still be blogging regularly on every topic under the sun on Rantlust. There are many contributors there and some good posts. If for some reason, you want to see my own posts, here is the direct link.

Wikimania

Along the lines of wikis propping up all over the place in all sorts of categories (wikisex anyone?), I found this today morning:
http://wikitravel.org

The site has descriptions and guides to destinations around the world, useful travel related articles, and even online phrasebooks. So, before you shell out for the Lonely Planet or Rough Guide to a country you are about to visit, check this site out first to do your research. Of course just like Wikipedia, the information on this site need not be accurate.

New Rules

Bill Maher is a funny guy. His acerbic wit and ruminations on everything from Britney Spears tonguing Madonna to espousing that stem cell research will help the spinal cords of the Democrats, now appears in the form of a book called New Rules. I bought this yesterday and it took all of 90 minutes or so to wrap it up. I spent most of that time smirking and laughing like I do when I watch the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Maher and Stewart are similar beings. They are both comedians, social critics and political pundits. I don't watch Maher's new show on HBO called Real Time only because I don't get HBO. I used to watch Politically Incorrect sometimes until it got canned because Maher referred to the 9/11 hijackers as not cowardly.

]]> The book is subtitled Polite Musings from a Timid Observer. His musings (if you can call them that - it's more like raging rants) are neither polite nor is he timid. The book is a collection of brief observations that are culled from a routine segment of the same name in his HBO show. You can see a lot of these rules online but the book has many newer ones. His targets include every aspect of life in America today from John Travolta (he should stop dancing in his movies), Mt. St. Helens (blow up or shut up), Paris Hilton (throw her in when St. Helens blows up), Scientology (it makes its adherents fat), Dick Cheney (the only reason to bring him out of seclusion is to make Rumsfeld seem more human), Star Wars (space movie for guys who can't get laid), tattoos (the Chinese character above the crack of your ass says "beef with broccoli") and so on and so forth. The people who get the most bashing are (understandably) the President, John Kerry and Paris Hilton.

The titles of these new rules are also hilarious. They are filled with innuendos and double entendres. Some of the choicest ones (I would leave it as an exercise for you to figure out what they are referring to) are Abu Grab-Ass, Ash Hole, Bored of the Rings, Diet-Netics, Inky Dinky Don't etc. The rules are arranged in alphabetical order and each letter is in its own section. Each of these sections also contain what he calls Editorials which are more like a 2-3 paragraph version of the rules in which he defends California (our farms feed the world), challenges the right leaning women to put their cervix where their mouth is (stem cell research), the maudlin coverage of the Olympics (NBC uses this to show the world that Americans cry a lot) and so on. You may not agree with all of his views and rants but it will surely have you smile, laugh or have you go - how the fuck can he say things like that? Very politically incorrect indeed.

Maher's views on the important issues in America these days are clear. He supports Gay marriage, opposes the banning of lap dances in L.A., supports stem cell research and opposes gas guzzling automobiles. His political views are less certain since he bashes both the republicans and democrats with equal fervor. He voted for Nader in 2000. I am not sure who he voted for in the last election.

All in all, a very entertaining read by an intelligent wit. And while you are at it, check out Stewart's best seller - America (the book) too. Equally funny and informative in a very different way.

Freakonomics

I recently wrapped up an interesting book called Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. This is still on the NYT bestseller list. Levitt is a well known Economist who is a professor at the University of Chicago, considered to be the best school for Economics in the US. He created a stir when he published a paper stating that the drastic drop in crime in the '90s were a direct result of the legalization of Abortion by the U.S. Supreme Court (Roe vs. Wade) in 1973.

]]> As the authors themselves state, the book really does not seem to have a "unifying theme". The various chapters start out by asking pointed qutestions such as "Where have all the criminals gone", "Why do crack dealers live with their moms", etc. Then Levitt (or rather Dubner quoting Levitt) goes on to explain after analyzing a set of data he presents succintly. The book is easy to read for the layman who does not understand much about Economics.

There is a lot of praise of Levitt in between chapters in the form of an excerpt of an article written by Dubner for the New York Times but this is tolerable because Levitt does indeed raises some thought provoking questions and his analysis makes you want to believe. He even has 2 chapters devoted to parenting where he puts forth the idea that the name that the parents choose for their children has a significant effect on the future of that child. He also dismisses the notion that parents have a huge influence in how their children turn out (in the conventional sense) and argues that peers have more influence.

For a trivia buff like me, this book is a God-send. I learned many details about how the real estate market works, sumo wrestling and the K.K.K. The book is about 200 pages long but is easy to read in a few hours. A highly recommended read.

Blog Addiction

The world is being taken over by blogs but most blogs (including this one) are quite boring to a majority of people. Especially if it's being written by one person with a biased view on things. Who cares really about my travels or my views on the latest blockbuster? The most successful blogs are either written by people who are extremely good (and funny in most cases) writers or are community blogs such as the Huffington Post where many people of (mostly) varied interest write what they feel.

]]> So, after thinking about this for months, I decided to host a community blog for people I know. The goal is simple - invite people I know to blog about whatever topic under the Sun they want and make the interface simple enough for them. Most of my friends have not even heard about blogging or are not technically savvy. So, I had an uphill task. But after 3 weeks of running this site, I have had quite a few entries on my community blog. The site is called Rantlust (meaning a passion for ranting). I couldn't think of a better name. For now, it's hosted on a subdomain of my domain but if this takes off in say, 6 months or so, I will register a new domain and go with that.

One advantage of a community blog is that you are guaranteed at least some readership (the members themselves). In light of this, I have been blogging more on that site than my own site. Since my site is more about traveling entries, I will likely keep it that way and if I have to make my feelings about say, hiking or Maria Sharapova known, I will blog on the community blog. We shall see...

Bruce Willis

It's been a while since I saw a Willis movie and I was happy to see one last night called Hostage. He has been my favorite action movie actor for a while now and since he is not getting any younger, has been acting in fewer and fewer of the movies of this genre. Recently we have been watching too many foreign and independent movies and it was a well deserved break from that to see one which doesn't require you to think so much.

Willis is Jeff Talley, a former hostage negotiator from L.A. and now working as a police chief in a small city in Ventura county. He has to go to back to his negotiating skills to rescue a family trapped in a mansion after being held hostage by a group of teenagers. He doesn't want to repeat a mistake which made him quit his job in L.A. where a suicidal guy killed a woman, child and himself. The movie is usual Willis fare (think Die Hard) but it was fun to watch the man again. I am looking forward to Die Hard 4.0 which is supposed to come out next year.

Road Trips

Most of my travel of late have been hopping on planes and flying off to exotic countries and I am glad to come back down to earth and get ready for 2 long back to back road trips. My company normally shuts down for the July 4th break and we get about 9 days including both the weekends. The first trip is to Crater Lake National Park in Oregon next Friday for a few days with our friends Vanessa & Jose. At almost 2000 ft. in depth, it is the deepest lake in the US. We are planning to spend a couple of days exploring the park and car camping.

The second trip starts on July 6 when we head off to Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon and Albuquerque, New Mexico to show the places to Eug's 2 nieces, who are coming next week. That's going to be a much longer trip distance wise but it should be fun to drive through the southwest again. I have to admit I am a bit wary of the Arizona temperatures at this time of the year.

Emerald Bay State Park

embayview
Originally uploaded by winryder.

A few friends and I went camping in Emerald Bay State Park in South Lake Tahoe this past weekend. This photo shows the view from our campsite (#29) which had to be one of the best car camping (as opposed to backpacking) sites I had ever stayed in. We originally had campsite #33 near the loos and was lousy but luckily we changed to this one as soon as we got there (around 10:30pm). The next day, almost everyone who passed our campsite were wishing they had taken this spot and some even wrote down the site number for future purposes.

We were originally planning to go backpacking as my friends Vanessa and Jose wanted to take their newly minted Son (almost one year old) into the Desolation Wilderness. On Saturday, when we went to the ranger station to ask them about the current conditions, the ranger there warned us that they were expecting winds of up to 70 mph at Granite Lake which is where we were supposed to go to. So, we canned that idea and instead stayed in the campsite for 2 days and did a 4 mile day hike on the Rubicon Trail around Emerald Bay instead. We had our usually great BBQ food at night and chatted around the campfire.

Yet another blog?

Almost everyone in my company is blogging these days and getting a good deal of press about it and we even announced the open-sourcing of Solaris via employee blogs yesterday. I also joined the fray by starting a blog though I haven't had the time to post anything beyond a first post - yet. Since this space is reserved for mostly non-work related stuff, I will keep it that way. The Sun blog will consist of work related or at the very least tech related topics.

And speaking of blogs, I am in the process of setting up a community blog with a few friends who are interested in talking about topics as diverse as backpacking to baby care. So far we have about 10 people interested in that. I was originally planning to set up something last weekend but then I realized that Movable Type (on which this blog runs) allows only up to 3 authors with its free version. The full version costs $99. So, I decided to go and do some research about other blogging software before setting that site up. Currently I am looking at Greymatter and WordPress.

Smugmug

Over the weekend, I discovered smugmug - an online photo storage and sharing site. Unlike flickr, they don't have a free service and charge anywhere from $29.99 to $99.99 depending on the level of bandwidth and customizable features you want. But you can upload unlimited photographs and store them on their servers in the original high quality format (only JPGs or GIFs as of yet). I took to it immediately and uploaded about 10 galleries by now. I like their look and the ability to customize my smugmug site so that the only mention of their name is at the very bottom in an unobtrusive footer. Of course this is possible only for the power user level onwards. But even for the basic subscription, they don't display ads from third parties. Smugmug was started by Chris MacAskill, the brain behind fatbrain.com, and his son. I hope their promise of unlimited storage is never broken. I already have 2.1 GB of photos stored there and I have many more gigabytes of them to upload whenever I get a chance. Though I haven't yet ordered any prints from them, I hope to try them for bigger prints (I own a Canon S9000 printer). They don't print the photos themselves but use the services of another company.

You can check out my galleries on smugmug here:
http://donaji.smugmug.com

Flickr

tiger
Originally uploaded by brodi.

After months of debating, I finally joined flickr, the online photo sharing site. I am yet to explore all the features or even to upload any photos to the site. The one feature I really am going to use is the ability to blog from flickr directly incorporating an image that I like to blog about. This is a test post of the first such blog.

This is a nice shot of a tiger from a flickr member named brodi and since I do like all wild cats, I thought that would be a good image to test flickr by. Expect more such photo blogs with images that I myself take or that I find especially captivating.

Flickr has been around for a while but was recently bought by Yahoo.

Training for Whitney

3 friends and I are planning to return to Mt. Whitney next month and I have begun my training for it. Eug and I have started doing a tough but small daily hike in our favorite part of Rancho San Antonio Preserve. It's the Black Mountain Trail but we only go up till the Windmill Pasture and then head back. It's a brutal climb and we try to do it non-stop. It's also doable daily as it only takes about 35-40 minutes and the trailhead is only 10 minutes from our place. If I can do this daily for the next 2 months, I should be in good shape come Whitney time. This will be my 4th time to Whitney. I have climbed it successfully before. I decided to go back primarily to take my larger camera and do some serious photography on the mountain. I won't feel bad if I don't make it to the top this time. Only one among the four of us haven't climbed the beast. For those of you who don't know, Whitney is the tallest mountain in the contiguous United States at 14495 ft. I am also planning a longer and tougher hike next Saturday. Since we are backpacking in Whitney, I might even take my backpack along for the training hike.

Spice Hut

I had originally planned to cook yesterday but after our daily hike in Rancho San Antonio, I felt kind of lazy and instead decided to buy some food to go from Spice Hut. This is an Indian fast food type place which is very popular in the Bay Area. They have been around for only 2 years or so and in that time has grown in popularity. We normally order a 4 item combo and sometimes their extremely tasty masala fried fish. The people who own the place are also from the same state in India (Kerala) that I am from. I highly recommend this place if you have not been there yet.

Broadband woes

We use Comcast as our broadband provider at home and yesterday, the speed dropped from somewhere close to 4000Kbps to 20Kbps and I spend a significant amount of time trying to nail down the issue. Was it the cable modem or was it my Netgear router? Or was there an outage? Finally I figured out that it was only when I connected my router to the cable modem that this started happening. If I connect my laptop directly to the cable modem, the speed was what I expected it to be. So, after fiddling with all sorts of config parameters on the router, I gave up and called their tech support. After about 45 minutes of repeating the same sort of tests that I had already done myself, the technician concluded that they will replace my router. But I told him that I will call back the next day to confirm this after doing some more experiments on my router.

]]> I am glad I did this because soon after I hung up the phone, I tried one last thing on my router which was to change its mac address and then restart everything. This forced the cable modem to go get a new IP address for my router which made things work normally again. So, apparently, after the recent upgrade from Comcast of their broadband speeds, certain IPs don't get the full speed. If you ever encounter such an issue (this is normally only a problem when you have a router attached to the cable modem), try changing the mac address on the router to reset the IP address.

We had a nice weekend camping with Vanessa, Jose and Grace in Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park in Big Sur, about 2 hours south of home. You can see some photos at:
http://photos.donaji.net/2005/bigsur/index.html

Cuban Flavors

I love Cuban food and have been to my share of cuban restaurants and yesterday, we tried another one here. It's called Habana Cuba and is in San Jose. Not as fancy as La Bodeguita Del Medio but the food was decent and wait staff friendly. There was a floating Mariachi type band and the place was crowded. We again booked through Opentable. I had a chicken dish (Pechuga de pollo a la plancha) with sweet plantains and chicken soup and Eug had a pork dish whose name I don't recall.

]]> We were planning to go see the new Russel Crowe/Renée Zellweger movie - Cinderella Man - yesterday but didn't make it since our friend Ravi was over here and had some Aquavit with him instead. He works at Nokia and keeps going to Finland and other such Insomnia friendly Scandinavian countries and wanted to borrow my noise cancellation headphones. I still want to see the movie and will likely go see it during next week.

This weekend, we are off camping to Julia Pfeiffer State Park in Big Sur. The weather is just unbelievably good, even for California. We are leaving in a couple of hours with our friends Vanessa, Jose and Grace.