(not the Real Estate bubble, silly… the Web 2.0 bubble)
You know you’re in the middle of a bubble when:
1. Companies which lose millions of dollars a month are bought out for billions of dollars.
2. Conferences about the bubble start handing out free iPod nanos.
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.
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 Chinatown 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:
Funky street performers at Fisherman’s Wharf:
and the beautiful sunset-time cruise to Alcatraz Island:
Day 2, we drove to Napa Valley – up and down Highway 29, visiting about half a dozen wineries from the small and quaint Cosentino
to the mega vineyards, wineshop and picnic spot of V Sattui:
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:
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:
Wow – it sounds like someone heard my private rants on the state of blogging tools. The blogosphere is awash with the news that Windows Live Writer Beta was released today. I’ve just downloaded it and it less than 2 minutes managed to set it up to publish to my blog. It’s surprisingly lightweight and responsive, even on my aging Tablet PC.
I’m not going to review it in any detail since it’s been praised and bashed all over the web, but i get the feeling I’ll have to break the ‘No-betas’ rule on my home laptop for this one.
Reviews:
ZDNet: Writer is Microsoft’s first Live killer app
Om Malik: Windows Live Writer, Write On!
Seattle PI: Assessing Windows Live Writer
Paul Kedrowski: Windows Live Writer … Huh?
Update:
Wow – Windows Live Writer is the top search on technorati today:
My domain and website are finally up and running. It's hosted at a free private hosting service and the website itself is just a couple of handwritten asp.net scripts that take my MSN spaces and Flickr RSS feeds and render them on the same page. I've just signed up for google adsense and analytics to get an idea of what the traffic to the site's gonna be like.
Ideas/Thoughts on how to make the site better? Add comments here or send me mail at my domainname@domainname.com.
Check it out: http://www.umeshunni.com/
Wow – I’ve soo not been able to write up the rest of trip given how busy I’ve been after getting back. But here’s the quick run down:
We went to the Grand Canyon at Yellowstone in the midst of some totally wacky weather… it was bright and sunny one moment and snowing 5 minutes later!
The Lower falls were awesome… especially the view from the brink:
The upper falls, somewhat less impressive.
Along the day, we saw more animals…
The Elk:
And the black bear:
And as I said earlier, some snow did fall while we were there:
