SE S006 Cyber shot Specifications:
3.3” inch (480×854 Pixels) FWVGA Screen
16.2 Megapixels Camera with High-Brightness LED Flash & Autofocus
700MB Internal Memory
Micro-SD card up to 16 GB
SMS/MMS/E-mail
Music/Movie Playback
Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g
GPS with Navigation Maps
Bluetooth+A2DP
Smart Sports calorie counter
Dimensions: 115 × 52 × 17mm

I like this shot particularly because of the tones, and the balanced exposure I was able to obtain.

Well, Work – is money. Life – is everything else. When the life is everything else, you obviously need more space for it than the work. Agree that at different phases of life the balance shifts to different sides. I am confused – what does it all tell me? It’s more of a personal problem than an official problem that your leader / manager can solve it for you! What is life – for me it is my hobbies, my kid, wife and friends… to satisfy all these I need to work. It sounds like a chicken-egg situation. I work more, I earn more. Do I need to earn more to have a better life – obviously YES.

So, where is the limit? Who dictates that limit for you? – it is YOU.

First – convince yourself that your work-life balance is screwed…if it is. Are you managing two full lives? Life at work and Life and home? Then spend little time analyzing it. Everything starts with one simple question – Are you happy?

It is personal and it is a choice to be made by the individual. Do you need 50-50 split? Or is it 70-30 split? Once you list out what you are missing because of your work – and start making space to each one of those in your missing list – one by one, I am sure you will reach that perfect balance very soon. For me, it’s all to do with “what and how I do things”. That makes a big difference for me end of the day whether I am happy or not.

There are 100s of best practices on how to solve this. But again, in my view this is very personal and individual issue – the best practices may only help trigger some thoughts. But they wouldn’t be able to solve unless its felt and the individual is committed to solve his own issue.

All the very best!

And it obviously needs greater read /write speed… the new spec will support 32MB per write compared to 128KB what is currently supported!!

That’s all possible mainly because the CF 5.0 supports 48bit addressing. The 48bit logical addressing allows unique address for 144 million Giga Bytes of data…wow! 48 bit commands allow single command to transfer 32MB of data, where as the 28 bit allows only 128KB… do you see the difference?

Well – how does it help you and me? If you see what happens currently when you click a 4MB size of photo it needs 32 writes for data and the table updates.. and imagine if you shoot photos in RAW mode..how many writes does it need? All this can be done in a single write with the new spec! That means, your camera will be FASTER and more importantly it would consume lesser power – that also means lot more photos per batter recharge!… good benefits isn’t it?

If you are excited and interested to know further – get onto this http://www.compactflash.org/

Sabarimala trip

Sabarimala trip, one that I look forward to each year. This time again as per the plan I have reached my village on 20th Nov, and wore the ‘ayyappa mala’ (as it’s called in Telugu). It’s a very different feeling that I undergo when I wear the mala. I wish I follow the full mandalam which is 40 days, but due to the nature of my work and other issues I am not trying it. May be after 5-10 years I get a chance to follow the 40 days and then go see the god after the full 40 days.

It was the next day morning at 4, the ‘irumudi’ process starts. This time it was a big batch of almost 40 guys from my village were going to sabarimala, irumudi was started earlier than usual. It was such a wonderful time all throughout this morning. The irumudi for all 40 was completed by 7, and we waited for the 10 ‘O clock to start the travel. The 10 ‘O clock was decided following on an advice from the local priest.
We started from the hill at 10AM, and climb down to reach the vehicles which are parked at the outskirts of the village. This is a process that the journey must start from outside of the village. 5 Vehicles in total, we were 7 in my Scorpio. 3 of us can drive, though I have decided to drive all the way myself. I feel safer driving rather than sitting in passenger seat!
The journey was wonderful. The route we followed was – My Village- Kuppam – Krishnagiri – Coimbatore – Palghat – Thrisoor – Guruvayoor – Erumeli – Pampa.
We stopped at Coimbatore at around 11PM to catch some sleep. It was cold, had a sound sleep for almost 5 hours. We then started to drive Guruvayoor and it was almost 6AM when we reached there. This time I was very particular about visiting the Lord Krishna at Guruvayoor, though this is my 3rd visit we hadn’t been able to get in because of the huge crowd and the lengthy queue. It was such a wonderful temple, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was around 10AM when we started from Guruvayoor. We then reached Erumeli at around 2PM and stopped over for the lunch. It was an ordinary lunch and I later understood if you expect non-Kerala food inside the kerala, it will be ordinary.
It was a continuous drive from Guruvayoor, reached our destination Pampa at around 5PM on the day 2.
Bathing in Pampa is always a different experience… This time the water was really good, flowing at good speed… as always, it was freezing cold … but you know what, it doesn’t matter how cold the water is – bathing in pampa is always great feeling.
Climbing up the hill was better this time.. I was walking slowly – enjoyed walking… Didn’t get tired… we reached the temple around 9PM, and it was crowded more than expected. Usually, at this time of the year the crowd is supposed to be less. Darshan was really good… and that’s the best part of it. After darshan, we spent time there until the harivarasanam song was played. Some of the guys in our batch were very particular to make sure they listened the song and then leave the temple… I had a chance to sleep 1 hour during that

Well, we came down at around 1AM… biggest mistake was the choosing the nambiar road to come down… Just I and my bro took that road, and it was nothing less than a major adventure of our lives… No one in the vicinity… it was skidding all over… every step was a real tough, but tell you what… we had all the fun and we both enjoyed the tough time
Slept at the ganesh mandir until the morning… and one more round of bathing at pampa, and removing the ayyappa mala… except my car everyone else went on different directions on their own interest to visit temples and other places… none of us in my car were interested so we decided to drive back home… I took the Kottayam – Kumily – Thekkady route… rather reluctantly because I didn’t want to take the unknown road and risk but my dad told me that it would be a good road to drive.
And that was the best part of the whole travel… I haven’t been on a roadway more beautiful than this one… it was all forest and such beautiful landscapes all over… Didn’t feel like driving at all… we had stopped many times in that 100Km drive… too many waterfalls, too many beautiful landscapes to just sit and watch… it was fun… we then had our lunch in thekkady and started driving. We chose the Dindugal-Salem road (thanks to Karthik)… it was a wonderful road to drive… It was the next morning by the time we reached home… One more wonderful journey that I cherished every minute of it… Thanks to god to have given me this chance…

Above was the picture collage that shows some of the shots I took. Few more on my flickr…

On the day two – I decided to go on a real long ride. I went on the Maduravoyil – Porur – Tambaram road which is a 6 lane, safer road to ride bike. One thing I must say is, I never felt like its needed any effort to ride this bike. It went like a breeze. Another advantage with this bike is that it’s NOT too attractive unless someone takes a close look. This particular ride was around 30Kms total.
The first feeling I had was – I felt I am much closer to the nature. One, it was because of the cool weather on that day and two, it was because I could stop wherever I wanted, just to wander the nature. This could also be because I had not even been riding a motor bike for the past 7 years. It was always a four wheeler and you know what it means in chennai – always close the windows and run on AC. Most of the time – you don’t realize how pleasant the weather is. Well, I think I have enjoyed my first bike ride.

After this ride, I had been on the same road a couple of times now and I tell you – riding bike is so very good… It’s wonderful!.. Yeah, the side effect is the good health.. it’s good cardio exercise

The technical spec of the bike is here..
Frame: 19; Aluminum 6061
Front Derailleur: Shimano C050
Rear Derailleur: Shimano Tourney 7 speed
Headset: Promax
Shifters: Shimano ST-EF50
Wheels: 700X35C; 28
Quick release option for the seat and the front wheel – that’s very useful for me to accommodate in my car.

Some of the comments I came across on this bike – very impressive
‘One of the best looking Indian bikes’
‘Finally, we have got a great quality bike’
‘You now don’t have to depend on the bad attitude bikes (firefox etc)’

And finally, the price I paid was close to 10K… I bought it at BSA GO showroom in annanagar, Chennai.

Here is the pic I shot on this day of my bike ride… excuse me for the photo quality it was shot the BB phone camera.

Close to nature

Rain drops and fresh leaves

At 8Am when I took my camera on a weekday – I better get a shot that I like!

Wanted to capture some rain and deatils inside the rain drops… though I didn’t succeed too much with the drops, I think the back ground rain, leaves, and the stem has made this shot look interesting… Will try more of this before the rain goes away…

Alphabets? what isss it?

The traffic didnt irritate me that much… becuase I had my camera with me… yeah In fact its always with me but this time I had used it!

I was trying to capture the rain – if you dont know, chennai is being soaked at last for almost a week now… let it be the mansoon or the low depression… who cares… its raining finally… the most awaited rain this year… imagine how would it be next summer without water source… chennai is desperate for some good rains to keep upto the next year demands… god bless.

Well, coming back to the matter… I shot this picture when the traffic was moving very slow… my interest was to capture the rain… though I know it would be tough to capture any kind of shot while driving , low light, raining… tried some shots anyway.. this shot was special becuase of the light pattern,… i ran over a bump during the exposure and that bump has created these aplhabets… I liked it, its interesting.

 Those really crazy ideas when put on the white board… had all turned out as real high performing pieces today. Will I ever forget the days of sandpit and P1R1… one of the craziest ideas I had ever thought and implemented was the IDS integration. Today, the so called role profile module- spine integration for bringing in the roleprofiles. And the best of that was the automatic shutdown of browser when the IDS terminate the user session, or when similar events happen. It was absolutely a crazy idea and most satisfying. It’s always in the list of my achievements as a programmer.

After nearly 7 years of working on this dream vision (I am sure people who are associated from the 0.5 version of LZO will accept calling this as a dream project) today, I have a strong reason to feel happy, confident, and safer (most desired at this point!).

It’s the passion about LORENZO… this passion was created by the very few leaders this company initially had. And I am sure, the people who I work with accept that very strong imprint those leaders made on all us. I can’t forget the days we listened about the vision for hours, it definitely drove us emotional and motivated. And this motivation will never be gone. Nothing much gets more important than satisfying your own emotions, and one of the reasons for this happiness we undergo today is exactly that. Take a moment to look back – how many lessons and how much of learning… isn’t that what makes this journey very special.

This is not an achievement of a single person or a single team. 1000s working on this program today. That’s the most a-mazing fact of this whole program. It’s truly word class. There are no competitors today to replace the real iSOFT’s products. It’s got to be iSOFT with the world class LORENZO to go back and provide a much better experience and value to its existing customers. Isn’t that amazing?

Congrats to all of us, and all the best for the next immediate milestones.