Random Thoughts

I installed Picasa on my Ubuntu box today. It uses wine! For those who don't know what wine is, 'wine is not a (windows) emulator' for Linux. I used to hate wine. I had tried to run Kazaa way back in the day to get things off the internet and believe me, I got it to work, but with many hours of painful configuration. Linux has come a LONG way since then. I ran a ps --forest and viola fatherted 8569 1 3 16:12 ? 00:00:11 /opt/picasa/wine/bin/../lib/../bin/wineserver fatherted 8721 1 0 16:12 ? 00:00:00 c:\windows\system32\explorer.exe /desktop fatherted 8959 1 0 16:12 ? 00:00:01 PicasaMediaDetector fatherted 9198 1 71 16:12 ? 00:03:18 c:\Program Files\Picasa2\Picasa2.exe It runs everything in wine. And I didn't have to d...

Friday, I went over to Jon's house in the middle of suburbia. Serious suburbia in Virginia somewhere by the way. A place where houses dote the landscape and there are no sidewalks and no way to get into or out of unless you own a car or like risking your life on a highway of some sort! Jon has this little critter called Luda at his place... its under 5 pounds in body mass but it sure puts on quite a show. I think I spent a few hours playing with that little critter and I absolutely envy every dog owner now. Jon mentioned that he wished he had a dog growing up. I guess a lot of people refuse to let their kids get dogs for various reasons. My family isn't like that thankfully. I was born into a house full of dogs. From German Shepards to Pomeranians to daschunds to 3 generations of English Springer Spaniels, dogs have been part of a good chunk of my life. Every day that I lived in India/Africa, there was a dog in the house. Literally, aside from the time spent in cars/buses, tr...

So, a couple of weeks or so ago, someone showed up in DC. He was an old man. They call him his holiness. Or the pope. He came to see his followers in the new world, to say hello and to create a buzz. Guess what? He did. The pope's visit out here seems to have been quite a successful venture for the Catholic church. He addressed probably the one big taboo that no one really thought he would... or perhaps he would brush it by or pretend it didn't exist or something else. But, refreshingly, he didn't do any of those. He took on the issue head on. He apologised for it. He prayed. He met with the victims of abuse. He apologised again. He told his flock to do better. I am impressed. While I am not sure if it was an elaborate ruse to put the sceptics off or not, whatever the case, he pulls it off without sounding smug or looking down on the rest of us. I fully would have expected those two options. But, he seemed genuine. And he reiterated it plenty of times. No, I am not about to...

It has been 7 months since I was last in Vancouver. It is quite hard to believe that I have been away from my beloved little city for so long. While it is true that I was not born there, nor did I really grow up there (well, I moved there when I was 15, so I guess I did a bit of growing up there) Vancouver is, for most intents and purposes, my home. The only other place that I would consider home is India... It is amazing how much I miss that place. I miss the rain terribly. I miss the greenery, the mountains, I miss the good food, my good friends, the transit system... the sensible design, the politics of Canada, the TV... the list goes on. To the casual reader, the obvious question that has no doubt crossed the mind is, well if you miss it so much, why the heck are you not there? I don't know how to answer that except to offer sub par excuses... like, I need money to go there. Well, don't you work? Sure I do. Well then, why not just take a week off and go home? I don't k...

A while back, I blogged wondering about getting HD over the air. A bit after that, I saw a deal on an antenna: the Philips MANT940 from buy.com for a somewhat reasonable $30 or so after shipping was added. I got it. It took a while to get to me, and once I got it, I was ready to set it up. I live in a basement suite and as you can probably guess, getting signals of any sort can sometimes be a problem. DC is relatively flat, so you don't have the problems I experienced in the past with antennas in Vancouver where my location on a hill (on the wrong side of the hill) didn't really help get decent signals. Anyway, I opened the box, took out the 4 pieces, plugged in the antenna (which looks very different from the rabbit ear types) with the provided cable, the signal amplifier and the little piece that connects into the coax outlet on the TV. I put the antenna by my TV and let it search for channels. Soon enough, it picked up about 30 or so channels! I was impressed. A couple of...

I've been running Firefox 3 beta versions for a while now. It comes as the default browser on Ubuntu and my new Vista box runs Firefox 3 beta 5. I have my own list of Firefox plugins, the most useful ones I use are Forecast fox and that's probably it. Well no. I use a plugin called Adblock Plus and a companion of that, that has lists of ads to block. You never really know that it is even in play until you stop using it. At any rate, neither of those plugins work on Firefox 3 beta 5. Yet. As a result, every page that I visit (including the BBC of all places!) has advertiesements galore. You know those things that blink in a multitude of colours getting in your way of reading whatever it is that you're trying to read. Facebook is littered with them, many of the blogs I read are full of them, pretty much any page I searched for on google ends up having these darn things all over the place. I hate web ads. I don't think I have ever bought anything from the web because of a ...

It happened. I fell sick. I rarely fall sick. I rarely see physicians. Not because I have anything against them or a fear of needles or whatever, I am general not unhealthy and have so far gone without health issues. It started with a fever. I thought it was a one off. Maybe I imagined the fever. I woke up the next day, I felt a bit tired, this and that hurt but whatever, its a Wednesday, what do you expect. Well, it got worse at work. I sat there and I felt tired. I felt hot, I felt my head hurt, I felt like throwning up, going home, etc. I went home, fully intending to do my taxes only to barely make my way home and crash in bed. I took an asprin and I went to bed. I woke up a few hours later and thought I felt a lot better. I probably did. For a bit. The next day was worse. I woke up sweating. I took a shower, had some breakfast and thought I felt better. So I headed off to work. I had many reasons to go. I don't like missing a day of work. I thought I could make it through the ...

I have a big TV. I have no cable (there's a story that goes with it... that I shall document later), so I was wondering what sort of over-the-air HD programming is available. Apparently, quite a bit ! Now, that doesn't mean that I would get all or even many of those because I am sure there are limitations. For one, I am in a basement and any indoor antenna is unlikely to pick up line of sight signals that easily. I'm thinking of getting an antenna and giving that a shot to see if the hype really lives up to what they say. I am no fan of the cable company out here, so I'll spend the $$$ and see if it was worthwhile. Until then, I am stuck watching very grainy NBC...

Some things really bother me. Little, meaningless things usually. But it is based on principle and it really gets me going. So what is it? Well, I happen to have a sibling. This sibling has this terrible habit of taking my stuff and use it as if it was his own. Stuff like my car, tools in the house whatever. Now, I have no problem using those things, if you return them to where they are kept. Like tools. Well, lets clarify. Don't touch my car if you have your own. If you don't have a car, take the bus or walk or bike or whatever. But not so. My dear brother uses my stuff as if it were his own and then the silly bugger, he lies about it. He also has this terrible habit of wearing my clothes and then like a dummy, taking pictures in it and posting it on facebook. For Pete's sakes man, if you're going to deny using my stuff, at least don't put the pictures up yourself! People like that make me really mad. It is as if we have one set of rules and some of us are free to...

Some of you may know that I have a recently acquired an LCD HDTV. It is a thing of beauty. I have no cable service yet because Comcast is somehow screwing me over. But that axe will be ground another day. Today, I am here to talk about NHK. How did I get to NHK? Well, lets leave that aside for a minute. What is NHK is perhaps the first question to ask. NHK is Japan's public broadcaster, a sort of BBC or CBC of Japan. So now that the what has been resolved, lets get to the why . UHDV. Ultra High Definition Video. What's that? You've heard of 1080p by now. Blu-Ray DVDs can be encoded at that resolution. 1080p is it , right? Hmm, maybe. You see, the standard 1080p on NTSC has a resolution of 1920×1080 pixels. That's pretty cool. Well UDHV is 7,680 × 4,320 pixels. It is 4 times taller and wider. NHK is the force behind UHDV. That's how I was led to NHK. They are hoping to start broadcasting in UHDV by 2015. By the way, they switched to digital broadcasting in 2000....

I've been thinking of Africa of late. I am not sure why. Maybe its the Akon music. He's Senegalese. Or from New Jersey, your choice. Maybe its something else. Some of you may know that many years ago, I lived in Africa. I don't have too many memories of it, but the ones that I have are good ones. I somehow stumbled upon SABC's Greatest South Africans list . One tends to forget that a rather large continent sits out there and is teeming with some truly amazing people. Its amazing how we as a world are sometimes more obsessed with the next lunatic thing Britney Spears is going to do instead of perhaps enjoying the diversity that is this planet. As I scanned down the list, I noticed some names that I can say I have the honour of knowing about. There are the obvious ones for me: Mandela, Sisulu, Tutu, Tambo, Verwoerd (yes, he's on the list). But some that are not so obvious like Gandhi, Smuts (contemporaries of each other btw), Rhodes. But they are all sons and daughte...

The last few days have been a bit different. I'm in Texas for one. I've been talking to some friends of mine... and life is interesting. One of them moved back to Vancouver recently from DC. Lucky her. She sounds more happy than anyone I know of. Another guy is out for work in Hartford, CT... and is apparently going to propose to his girlfriend in New York next week. And then head off to Thailand for work. He just came from Mexico city... where he was working insane hours. Another one hates his job and wants to move back to Vancouver for good. As for myself, I miss my family, I bounce between not hating my job too much to downright hating my job. And now my work place is so much different. Three of the people that made it more bearable are in various stages of buggering off: one's gone to a new job that he loves I think, the second one is moving on because he found a better opportunity in the company... the third one buggered off home to work from there. So, that leaves me...

So I am in Miami (see previous post, I am not done writing it up at this point in time...) and I kept getting called by this weird number from Delaware (302 area code). As a rule, I do not answer my phone when strange numbers call me. In fact, I don't usually answer my phone at all. I use it to call people... not to be called. After the third call, I answered... and it was a recorded message from Bank of America. Apparently, they wanted to check some questionable charges that were on my credit card. I couldn't make sense of the charges so I hung up, waiting to deal with it when I get back to civilisation again and in the peace of my home. My blackberry has been on the fritz of late as well. No data requests were coming in for whatever reason. This was, I have to say, quite frustrating. And freeing as well since I was away from work and no emails came through. Of course my gmail stuff gets forwarded too... and it was annoying that I couldn't get them (flight delay notices f...

I did not mean to neglect my blog for this long. I am alive, I am well, I am busy, I am tired, I am... But how are you?

I've been thinking of all the fruits I was used to as a kid in India. I have not seen most of them for a long while now. I was talking about a pomegranate I ate recently to someone and I thought I'd go about listing the fruits. So then, lets start with the pomegranate. Its a strange one alright. Did you know that the Afghans are now shipping crates of these to Vancouver and other areas? It is a bright red fruit that tastes somewhat sour but is awesome to eat. And its good for you. Then there is the creamy Sapodilla. I have never seen it in North America. Apparently the plant itself is a native of Mexico. Either those facts are incorrect or people don't eat it for whatever reason. This thing grows like wild back home and I remember having tonnes of them on dining table fruit baskets... sometimes going rotten, or over-ripe. There is the guava with its coarse flesh inside. With little seeds on the inside. Again, endemic to Mexico and yet, I have not encountered any in the Unit...

Well, maybe it is the holidays. Maybe its the fact that I just had dinner alone. Maybe it is because I am watching Virtual Users abandon with glee and spiteful disregard for my cheering them on. Whatever the case is, I do remember lots. I thought I would list a bunch of things I'd rather be doing today. I'd like to walk in the rain in Vancouver. Yes, I know the few of you that read this page think I am crazy. But I kid you not. Try it out sometime. There is something remarkably refreshing, one would almost say a soul cleansing quality, to a walk in the rain in Vancouver. I think I've come up with more good ideas and made peace with more things walking in the rain all by myself than I have at any other venue. Granted, it isn't the easiest. But it is something that I do miss. And no amount of walking in the DC rain makes up for it. For one thing, rain is a rare thing here. Secondly, it pours like crazy when it does rain here. And I am not inspired by the rain here. No of...

Why, its Christmas Eve already! A couple of things that stand out for me this year. I still don't have a TV. No this isn't a message to jolly old St. Nick telling him that I want a 50" plasma TV. I'll buy it myself. Besides, I have no chimney. The reason I put the TV bit here is to express the joy of not being bombarded by annoying Christmas advertisements. No more, jesus was born a couple of millennia ago and now you need to buy this cell phone with this amazing feature at a price that can't be beaten... no more you need to buy this car (a Japanese luxury one) so you can wrap it with these ugly bows and surprise your significant other... none of that bollocks. Why? Because I have not a TV, nor do I have a functioning radio! Just the blessed Interweb thingy. I've had to do very little if any Christmas shopping. I am staying in DC. I am spending Christmas alone. I am sure there will be many emails forwarded and sent, facebook wall postings etc on the blessed day...

A lot has been going on recently in life and the world. I've been thinking about what I am doing here and why I am here. Who am I? What is my purpose in life? What works me up into a passionate frenzy? I am no philosopher, but I've been thinking about what it is that excites me. There are plenty of things that do. Cars do. Women do. Sadly, some of the servers I get to play with (I mean a 16-core SunFire box is awesome... but for what?) excite me, politics does, seemingly useless knowledge does. Food does. Learning does. Science does. When I was young, I wanted to fly jet aircraft. Many young boys dream of that I suppose. I saw MiGs and Mirages in action on a military airfield in North India when I was 9. That was one of the most awesome nights I have had. Me, twin-engined MiGs, single-engined Mirages, darkness, afterburners, the deafening noise of the engines on that deserted runway excited me. I still love the spectacle of a military airplane. Biology excites me. I've had ...

Well, its been snowing out here. My apartment is hot. I am sitting in my shorts and a t-shirt and I am sweating lots. What's going on in my world? Well, let me give you a random sampling of stuff I can come up with. Windows Vista, so far is not that terrible. After about 2 weeks, I had to press Ctrl-Alt-Del. It looks different. Maybe I don't use it much, but it works for me. I watched a video on Iran from the American Public Broadcaster PBS's show Frontline. The idea brought on are quite interesting. Kiefer Sutherland is apparently going to prison on account of drunk driving. It is rather sad I must say when Canadians, and that too notable ones go out and do such things. I mean, think of your family man! Your grandfather, well, he is something else to most Canadians. And yer poor mother! I ate salmon today. Its not sitting well with me. Some poor MP in Ottawa was blamed of looking at scantily clad women. Turns out it was his dog! Looked like a Gordon Retriever. Heard about ...

I did something I haven't done in a very long time. I asked another employer to evaluate my skills and see if they'd like to take me on to do some interesting things. Who knows if it will come to fruition, but I took the very first step in my eventual journey back home. The wonder is that if I do get the gig, I will be working in familiar quarters, with people who I have known for a while. Familiar faces, familiar surroundings, familiar rain, familiar coffee, familiar bagpipes... One piece of me is so excited I can't wait for it to happen; another piece of me is a bit sad that my learning has been cut short and that I am leaving... I hate to walk away from a good fight as it were. Only time will tell what really comes of this little endeavour. Wish me luck.