Sharavathy Valley Day 2
I thought I would get a damn good sleep in the night because I was so tired. Unfortunately, it was not meant to be. Not with the snorers around. On top of that, it was so cold and I didn’t have a jacket. I kept tossing and turning all night.
At 4.30 am of Day 2 (June 01 Sunday), I was jolted by a shrill cock-a-doodle-doo sound. Soon enough, our leader Narayan woke us all up. I was surprised to see everybody get up immediately. At around 5.30 am, we all went out in search of sighting some animals. Unfortunately, we were too loud to get to see any animals. Even our footsteps, especially when crushing leaves, were loud enough to alert the sensitive-eared animals. Our guide who was in front saw some bisons but they ran away in lightning speed. I didn’t know they could do that.
We were soon enough on top of another hill and got to see another beautiful view. Heh, I’m such a landscape-voyeur.
And it was funny to see the things we do for poses in photographs.
What was amazing though was we could see islands in the Arabian Sea.
And then Narayana found viper snakes! These are poisonous snakes and one bite could have been fatal for any of us.
Sharavathy Valley Day 1
For a while now, I was annoyed by the fact that it has been more than a year and a half since my last trek. So when I saw a call for people who want to join a trek in Shimoga in the Orkut Bangalore Trekkers group, I jumped at the chance.
A few days later on May 30 night (i.e. last weekend as of this writing), I was on a bus to Sagar in Shimoga district with 13 other strangers I had never met before. Thankfully, all it took was a few smiles and laughs and we got along very well. There were people from varying age groups - 18 to 55 although majority were the young IT crowd.
Then the inevitable happened. Bangalore traffic jam. It took 2-2.5 hours just to get out of the city! There are so many bottlenecks especially near the Jalahalli cross. No wonder the bus drivers are so stressed out. God save us all, I wonder how much worse it can get. Because of all this hungama, we reached Sagar more than a couple of hours late which threw our trekking plans haywire. We had to ditch the idea of trekking till the Belli Gundi waterfall and do a shorter exploration of the area.
To start the day (May 31 Saturday), we got into an open jeep to transport us to Kattinakaru. We had a fun ride through the scenic locale. We even saw the Linganmakki dam from far.
Biking to Ooty
It all started on Monday last week when Lakshman tweeted if anybody was game for a weekend trip. Ashwin tweeted back saying yes.
Later they asked me over email. My reply was “Why Ooty!?”. They replied saying “It doesn’t matter. We’re going for the drive.” Two days later, we three were driving to Ooty on bikes at night.
My descriptions below are in twitter style as an ode to how the trip
happened. ( But of course, my usual writing style will resume after
this post 
)
We started off at 8 at night. First stop was some lip-smacking food at Kamat Lokaruchi:
9.10 pm : We’re on the way! 3 twitterers on bikes.
9.25 pm : Getting out of Bangalore is the toughest thing.
9.30 pm : @scorpion032 says 2020 will also be the year of the linux desktop.
10.32 pm : @cruisemaniac and @scorpion032 are tweeting away…
1.40 am : Taking a break.
2.33 am : Admiring the mysore palace…
3.16 am : Sleep getting to me… But we’re taking breaks and having fun. In Nanjangud.
3.20 am : Another break.
3.34 am : Listening to My Sacrifice at 330 am at 70 kmph on bike with the wind in your hair is something to be experienced.
4.10 am : We find a freakin’ coffee day in the middle of nowhere. Waiting for capuccino.
6.15 am : Mudumulai forest.
6.20 am : Animals! Elephant, deer, peacock, mongoose, eagle, woodpecker, … All right there next to us… Thank heavens the elephant didn’t think we were pesky…
6.45 am : Exiting Mudumulai forest.
My favorite photo from this trip (notice the clouds and the bike):
Mumbai Family Trip
It was a crazy 4 day trip. Crazy because it was 8 related families going together, that’s a total of 23 people. 23. It should be easy to imagine the cacophony that followed…
The highlights of the trip was something like this: sultry mumbai atmosphere, hare krishna mandir, watching dabbawallas, mouth watering vada pav, fantastic four part 2, running on the beach and wide mumbai roads at 4.30 am, mumbai darshan, planetarium, aquarium, museum, marine drive, catching two buses and a local train and a boat to reach essel world, water rides in the rain in water kingdom, rain dance to bollywood songs, finding ice skating easy, jostling for life in local trains, lonavala, famous lonavala chikki, disappointed by khandala, air deccan flights, two days of sleep after coming back home.
Lalbagh Flower Show
The Lalbagh Flower Show turned out to be great. The flower arrangements were a feast for the eyes, especially for those with a photographic eye, although most people were point-and-click-photographers like me.
The Dalhousie Trip
I’m writing this a few days after coming back to Bangalore, because I had to get over my holiday hangover. It seems unfair to gain so much, make so many new friends and have so much fun, and suddenly let it go, and that too, back to the daily routine life.
The trip was centred around attending the YHAI National Himalayan Winter Trekking Expedition, although it turned out to be the Dalhousie picnic because the trek was easy, but that little dampener didn’t stop us from having a great time.
It all started a couple of months ago when Niara and myself wanted to go to the Himalayan trek organized by YHAI in December, and we started planning.
Then, I remembered that I had inquired about the same trek last year and had got my friend Abishek (who is into making movies and graphics) interested but he got an offer to do a Nokia ad and he said he didn’t want to miss the opportunity. So, I had to shelve my plans that year. So, I soon started reading up the official YHAI website and was glad to be planning for it this year. We did plan a lot, and WriteBoard came in handy so that we could coordinate ourselves, from booking train tickets to getting medical certificates.
The trip started on the evening of Christmas Day of 2005, when we boarded the Rajdhani train to Delhi. It was going to be a 36 hours journey.
Hebbe Falls Trek
From riding on the roof of the jeep, to walking 10 km, to diving in freezin’ cold water, to feasting our eyes to lush green hills, to loads of laughter, we did it all.
foss.in day 4
Yesterday was such a long and awesome day.
The day started with me missing Taj’s talk on Entropy and I’m still kicking myself for that one. I attended Gora’s talk on IndLinux efforts and I got to know about the various efforts in localization and translations going on.
Then, Alan Cox spoke on Modern Linux Device Drivers. There was so much information that he was doling out that I didn’t quite follow, but I did get the gist and understood that kernel stuff ain’t that much of a voodoo as I thought it would be. It simply requires a lot more discipline and awareness of how design impacts performance.
Then, it was Welte’s turn to talk how he reverse-engineered Motorola’s EZX linux phones to allow a full free software stack to be used on the phone. It was interesting to note the various steps he takes, including using an oscilloscope to find out which probes and points actually work! I didn’t stay for the whole talk because the amount of jargon involved was simply beyond me.
Next, I was listening to Volker on the Munich City’s transition to free software. Interestingly, in the city’s evaluation, they found the proprietary solutions to be cheaper than the free software contract quotes (we are talking a difference of 10 million or more!) but they took many more considerations such as long-term costs, support, localization, etc. and finally OpenOffice+Linux got lot more points and was finally chosen by the Munich city. The last-minute offers by MS which include cuts of 7 million dollars, etc. were not considered by Munich.
After that, we were in an Advanced Python BoF with Taj, Siddharth, and many others. With Sid being present, the talk veered off in various directions and that’s a good thing. Sid was talking about how to have some feedback values put in generators and Taj gave an example of how such a problem is faced in producer-consumer setup when they are using python generators. Taj said there’s a relevant PEP that’s out there but with no consensus yet on what’s going to be done about it. There was much more discussed including decorators, metaclasses, and Ruby too (no, we didn’t bash it).
