Vancouver again

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I took three days off this week and joined Vikram and his brother on a trip to Vancouver and Whistler in BC, Canada. Ullas was here too and joined us on the trip. I’d blog in detail about the trip, but Ullas has written up the salient points in his blog. Some trivia about the trip:

  1. This was my third trip to Vancouver. I’ve now visited Vancouver once a year for the past three years.
  2. The weather sucked. It was cold, windy and rainy for most of the three days we were there. It wasn’t as bad as in Seattle, which had a couple of thunderstorms while we were out, but pretty bad nevertheless.
  3. All my trips there have had some connection to the (rather pathetic) movie ‘Fantastic Four’. The first time we were there, in Nov ’04, they were filming the movie a block from our Hotel. The second time we were there, the movie had just been released and we saw this huge flying ad for the movie while we were at Stanley Park. This time, I had the DVD of the movie with me when we were there. I know… lame…
  4. Vancouver downtown – especially the area between Gastown and Chinatown – is full of druggies and drunks. Even at 10am! The last time we were there, we walked from Gastown to the Chinese Garden at 6pm and thought it was just because it was after dark that there were so many of them there. This time, we saw drunks on the street at 10 in the morning!
  5. Some river near Vancouver was flooded recently leaving the entire city’s drinking water supply polluted. So, restaurants and hotels weren’t serving water anymore. We were glad we carried water, Coke and Capri-Sun with us from the US.

The trip itself was a lot of fun – Whistler was waay above my expectations and I will from now on look down upon every other ski resort, including Snoqualmie, with contempt for not living up to the bar that Whistler has set. We didn’t do as much skiing as would have liked – we started at 1 and were done by around 4.

A few pics in my flickr set.

An Empty Inbox

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Woohoo – something to be proud of… an Inbox with zero unread messages in it… for the first time in nearly three years!

Well, I kind of cheated, by moving all my mail from my Inbox to an archive folder the day after we shipped! The best part about starting with a clean Inbox is that I can now strive to be at zero email bounce at the end of each day or atleast each week.

Buddy Cards and the end of privacy…

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It’s bad enough that our privacy is constantly threatened by surveillance cameras, spyware, data leaks, call centers and even Netflix… but 30 boxes’[1] new Buddy Cards take linking together the marks you leave on the web to a new level.

I was reading some blogs earlier[2] and chanced on a blog entry on Dodgeball‘s Google integration that  decided to comment on.

All I did was to enter my Name, Email address and URL into the comment entry field and it, through some funky integration, gets my userphoto from flickr and added it to my comment. As if that wasn’t bad enough, when I hover over the ‘avatar’, I get a link to my (sparsely used) MySpace profile as well as my recent uploads to flickr!

 

Luckily, Buddy Cards seem to have a reasonable privacy policy that lets you control what shows up and allows you to opt out :

Buddy Cards are a service enabled by the blog owner and are subject to that blog’s privacy policy.
Blogs that make use of Buddy Cards generate a profile for each user that posts a comment on the blog.
Members 30 Boxes may edit and maintain what content appears on their Buddy Card.
For non-members, 30 Boxes searches the web for public information about the person making the comment. Information tied to the email address that the individual has chosen to make public on other sites (such as photo albums and blog posts) is used to create a Buddy Card.
Buddy Cards do not expose a user’s email address

but I’m shocked that this is an opt-out service as opposed to an opt-in one.

Private by default, anyone?

 

PS:

[1] Wasn’t 30 boxes supposed to be hot new web 2.0 calendaring app? Oh yeah, that was before Google Calendar!

[2] Still using bloglines, Google Reader’s still too slow for me. I don’t mind sacrificing Ajaxy coolness for speed.

Google Transit thinks I’m Moses

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I was checking out Google Transit the other day, to see if it’s any better than SoundTransit’s Trip planner in finding me a bus home.

On the bright side, it gives you a nice view of the actual distance and duration of the trip. It’s bus selection seems to be pretty lousy, though, with it picking the 271 over the faster 554 in the trip I tried.

What cracked me up is that it seems to completely ignore the fact that I’m not Moses and can’t part Lake Sammamish to walk home.

 

Come to think of it, if I could walk across Lake Sammamish, I wouldn’t need a bus at all, now would I? 

Finding gold…

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One of the reasons I like taking and looking at photos is because they capture people’s thoughts, emotions and memories and preserve them for eternity. Every year, when I visit my parents in India, I like to browse through the old photo albums in the almira and gaze at photos of my great grandmother who I’ve never met, my grandparents, two of whom exist only in my memories now, baby photos of my cousins, photos of my uncles when they had hair and so on…

The funny thing about Orkut, which everyone and their dog in India seems to be on these days, is that I meet a lot of my middle and highschool friends there. Since I graduated from highschool before most of us had email (or orkut/facebook etc. existed), I had lost contact with most of them over the years and it’s been great digging them up from someone’s friend’s list. This has of course swelled my friend’s list though not as badly as this guy’s:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Brv-TIb70b0.

So, recently I found my 2nd grade classmate Shikha on orkut, then blogspot and finally flickr. So, imagine my surprise when I was browsing through her photos to find a couple of old photos of me!

For your viewing pleasure:

and

No points for guessing which one is me! Geez.

Catching up…Trip to the Bay Area

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It’s been a while since I blogged… Mostly since I’ve been busy at work getting Beta 2 Tech Refresh out the door. Over the long weekend, we did a short, but fun trip the Bay area and Napa Valley.

We spent Day 1 in San Francisco, hanging around and Fisherman’s Wharf and did a cruise to Alcatraz that evening. Key memories include a lunch of Dim Sum at the busy  Gold Mountain restaurant:

Gold Mountain

Funky street performers at Fisherman’s Wharf:

Street Performer

and the beautiful sunset-time cruise to Alcatraz Island:

Sunset at Alcatraz

 Day 2, we drove to Napa Valley – up and down Highway 29, visiting about half a dozen wineries from the small and quaint Cosentino

Entrance to cosentino

to the mega vineyards, wineshop and picnic spot of V Sattui:

V Sattui's wine shop

As expected, we were exhausted at the end of the day and couldn’t stand to see another bottle of wine!

Later that night, we met up with Karthik, AP & Ishwar at Berkeley before heading back to our hotel downtown.

We spent day 3 finishing up the other must-see spots in SF including the Golden Gate bridge and Twin peaks:

Us at the Golden Gate

 

As always, photos are at Flickr:

San Francisco: http://www.flickr.com/photos/umeshunni/sets/72157594271385261/

Napa Valley: http://www.flickr.com/photos/umeshunni/sets/72157594271416195/

and my favorite photo from this trip:

Vineyard

User generated ads

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Kiss 106.1, the radio station we usually listen on our way to work everyday recently ran a contest for the best commercial that user’s could come up with. Now, I had heard of contests for the best slogan or the best punch-line before, but this is the first time I’ve heard of anyone holding a user-submitted-commercial contest.

What makes this contest really unique is the fact that you submit entries by uploading your entry to YouTube and tagging it with “kiss 1061 commercial contest“.

So, has Web 2.0 finally hit mainstream?

Is user-generated-content really the future? Or is this just a result of Kiss 106.1 cutting their ad budget by an order of magnitude.

Philosophical questions aside, here’s the winning entry:

 

 

All other entries are at http://www.jackieandbender.com/KISSTV3.htm. Most are pretty lame!

Snakes on a Plane !!

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There are movies, there are B-movies and then there’s Snakes on a Plane! Well, at least that’s the impression I had  of Snakes on a Plane before I went to see it today.

But, I was pleasantly surprised today and this movie was waay better than I expected. It kept me on the edge of my seat most of the time in spite of the razor thin plot, stereotypical characters and predictable ending. The movie never felt like it was 116 minutes long and had scene after scene of decent CGI snakes, heart pounding action and not-as-cheesy-as-you-might-expect dialogs. This is certainly going to become a B-movie classic like Attack of the Killer Tomatos.

Anyway, if you haven’t seen it yet – go watch it! Don’t wait for the DVD – shell out the $8 or Rs 50 or whatever it costs you to watch this movie. And,

Some geek trivia from the movie:

* The snooty Brit guy was carrying a macbook pro.

* The Desi girl was credited in the movie as the ‘iPod girl’ though she was actually listening to a Dell Mp3 player.

* What’s with the wacky ‘gun and pressurized cabin’ physics? I can see how the cabin gets decompressed if there was a hole in the cabin wall, but how will a hole in the cockpit door cause the cabin pressure to drop enough for the plane’s frame to rip away?

PS: If you hadn’t heard of this movie before this, read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snakes_on_a_Plane#History

LinkMania: Seth Godin and a trip to Pakistan

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Two unrelated but insteresting links i ran into today:

Seth Godin , the author of All Marketers are Liars, gave a pretty good talk to Googlers a couple of months back. I finally had a chance to watch it this week. Here it is… http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6909078385965257294

Via the India Uncut blog, I came across this blog post by Leo M about his travels through Pakistan: http://positivelylowbrow.blogspot.com/2006/08/disclaimer-this-is-far-from-perfect.html