Really.

I mean, this is Faridabad.. in MAY!!! Last year this time, it was blazing hot with loo making it’s rounds all over India, with people dying of brain fever.

And now, when I come to Faridabad for 10 days, the last time before my job starts, the weather decides to become stormy, windy and rainy.

I caught a throat infection while coming home via Bhilai from NIT Trichy. I was hoping the heat here would cure the infection. But no, God makes sure the weather is such that it only gets worse.

Thank you, O Lord. (:oloo)

I am back home at Faridabad now.

It was a great journey form Trichy to here. Me and Ankit came together. We caught Rockfort express from Trichy and reached Chennai around 5:30 in the morning. Once we got down the train, we leisurely checked the time for our next train - Gareeb Rath. We had to go from Chennai Egmore station to Chennai Central station to catch the train. And the time for the departure of the train wasss…. 6:10 am.

I walked as fast as I could to keep pace with the nervous Ankit, carrying my ridiculously heavy prehistoric suitcase. When we reached the exit of the station, we were in such a hurry, that we agreed to an autowala when he quoted the price Rs. 50. We got into the auto and the auto took us to the station. When he stopped, he stopped in the main road. He said it would be faster if we got off here and walked to the entrance of the station, saying something in tamil-english of which I could catch only the following : “round, longer, less time, entrance, route”. We got off, and found out none of us had Rs. 50 change. I took out Rs. 100 and asked him to please find change from somewhere. He got off, went to few autowalas, then came back running, got into the auto, and drove off as fast as lightning. Ankit was cursing him. This is the first time I got bagged so openly.

We went into the station, found our train, got in at around 6am. Ankit got off to get breakfast, which consisted of 2 sandwiches, 2 garlic chicken puffs, and 2 simple chicken puffs. We ate it at around 6:30 am. It was delicious. Gareeb Rath was a strange train. It had 84 seats instead of the normal 72 seats. They achieved this by mounting 3 seats in the side berth instead of the normal 2. The journey was quite smooth. We spent the whole day configuring his laptop. First we repartitioned his hard-disk to backup all his data. Ended up using all the utilities which I had burnt up for purnima into CD’s. Then installed Windows XP, then installed Linux Fedora 8, then setup all his repositories.

Then around 7 pm, we watched the movie Amityville. We put down all the curtains and turned off all lights. The compartment was almost like a movie theatre. We watched the whole movie, which I discovered after watching for the first 10 minutes I had already watched.

The train was 3 and a half hours late. Mom came to recieve me at H.Nizamuddin station. We cought a Delhi-Mumbai train to go back to Faridabad.

On the way I discovered that the hols won’t be as free as I assumed them to be when Mom started laying out my time table in front of me.. “ Tuesday Mama’s birthday, tomorrow movie, Wednesday back, Thursday carpenter”…. Gimme a break!

Tomorrow’s plan of watching “I am Legend”, starring Will Smith, got preponed to today, and I am writing this blog after coming back from the movie from SRS plaza - PVR.

I just came back from Goa today morning.

It was the best trip of my life. We stayed there 3 days (3rd dec to 5th dec) in a guest house that Saurabh Shirolkar (a.k.a. Badri) had booked for us. We got a really nice deal. After that (5th dec) I went to my tayaji’s (Jayant Rai) house to stay there for 1 day. The next day on 6th dec, I left.

The first day we went to a commercial beach where we paraglided. After paragliding we all came back to the beach and I and Cyber did water biking and the others did something known as a “banana flip”. After that, a few of us went for a walk along the beach. I stayed behind. When they came back they said they saw three topless babes. I cursed at them for not taking a pic.

After that we went to a second more peaceful beach and had a nice time. All of us had rented Activa’s for transportation. Activa’s are tourists’ primary transportation in Goa as all other means are simply maddeningly unaffordable.

The second day we went to Chapora fort. The same place where the movie “Dil Chahata Hai “ shot 2 scenes. It was a nice climb. The view from along the route was simply breath taking. I took a lot of pics.

The 3rd day we had a great time at the beach playing football. Then I went with my friends sharing the cab with them and they dropped my at my tayiji’s place (Navneet Rai). Around 2 o’clock their daughter Megha came back from school. She is studying in 12th std and is really fond of reading. She want’s to become a journalist and has taken art’s stream in her 12th in Goa board.

We got along really well. That night, tayiji took me to the market and bought me two pants and also a shirt for my brother. Jayant tayaji took me to the station in his car on the second day. I bid them good bye. On my way back to Trichy I had a 9hr stop at Bangalore. I bought new Creative earphones in Bangalore. In the evening I went caught the train to Erode from where I took the train to Trichy, from where I am currently writing this blog.

Exposure refers to the amount of light falling onto the camera sensor. It is governed by two things :

1. The sensitivity of the medium the light is falling on (the ISO setting of your camers).
2. The length of time for which the shutter the open and the apperture size (the brightness setting of your camera.
   So, if you want a bright image, either increase the ISO sensitivity or increase the brightness. Increasing ISO sensitivity reduces image quality by increasing noise. Increasing brightness reduces the image quality by reducing the shutter speed.

For a great special effect reduce the ISO sensitivity and increase the brightness to get the same effect you would get by moving the “levels” center controller in any image editting software to the left. This is because of the increased exposure time.

For a natural looking image reduce the brightness and increase the ISO sensitivity.

The more I use digiKam, the more I appreciate it. I can’t imagine managing my photos without it! (sorry windoze user :P )

The one feature the really struck me was the advanced search features. In digiKam you can create complicated search queries and can store the resulting photos as a group! Neat…
In the many chronologically arranged albums I had, I tagged the pics I liked with the tag “Cool shots”. Then to get all the cool pics at once, all I had to do run a search for all pics tagged “Cool shots” and it would show up all the nice pics all at once. The combinations are endless. For example, you might want to look at only the “nice” pics from the shots of your cousin you took.

One more great thing about digiKam is all its cool plugins. One really utilitarian plugin is the red eye removal plugin. It does work.

I had always wanted to take photos since I was a child. This wish was fulfilled during these holidays.
I had gotten my mother a Sony DSC-W70 last time I had come for holidays after the IITB project. But that had been only for 2 weeks and I had barely gotten a day with the camera.
But this time….. things were different (with an evil smile). I got all the time I wanted with the camera. I played with it to my heart’s content. Here are some of my shots :

A lot happened when my closest sister Pooja came to Delhi to her nani’s house. She had come to collect the fittjee scholarship she had gotten because of coming within the top 50 all over India in one of fittjee’s scholarship test.
It all started while Pooja, Sagar and me were sitting on the bed playing Uno. A thought occured to me of teasing her. So I simply asked her - what would be the probability of one us winning a cards game in which one and only one of the players win? Probability is topic in standard X and she was in standard XI. She immediately replied -1, while my bro kept thinking. I was impressed by her sharpness.
Then I asked them a few more probability questions (my favourite topic ;) ) and she answered most of them! I was awe-struck. She had joint fiitjee coching in IX and had improved by leaps and bounds! No wonder she came within India’s top 50..
Meeting her made me feel ashamed of myself. How I had wasted my self. She had the determination of a winner. While I get very easily distracted (whenever I work that is). I do everything but study on the study table! Think about everything that’s not related to study. Every half-completed work that got left uncompleted for some reason has to be completed then. Every movie that I wished to see has to be seen then. What an ass-hole I am!

My old monitor : LG 775FT

My new monitor : Samsung 940BW

It’s HUGE. And so now the home theatre system is almost complete (still have to mount the 5.1 speakers on the wall).

Today I discovered one of the coolest softwares to manage photos from a digicam! The software’s name is digiKam.

The thing I liked the most about the software is the date view and the album view.

I own a Sony W70. It has 2 modes of connecting to the computer (both use the USB connecting cable provided with the camera). One is the “USB Mass Storage mode” and the other is the “PTP/IP Camera” mode. I asked my camera to show itself using the PTP.. mode (through the camera menu interface) and selected the import option in digiKam. Importing photos in digiKam really is easy.

After the photos get imported, in the date view all the photos show up in a cool chronological order. In the album view you can arrange the pics according to your preference. You can have albums, sub-albums, sub-sub-albums… in a folder tree fashion.

digiKam lets you resize, crop, rotate your images and apply simple color filters, adjust levels etc. It also has a cool feature of displaying the “EXIF” data of an image. That is basically information like focal length, digital zoom, exposure, ISO level and other details about the snap itself.

Now I am back home after what seems to be a very long time. (During the last sem hols I was doing a project at IITB and could come home for only 2 weeks. The hols before that I had come for 2 weeks but those had gone by in training at ABB. So this is one time when i am really home.)

One reason I am delibrately writing this blog is Hari’s suggestion of writing blogs regularly.

I got the tickets for bengaluru today for the hpic conference. I also took the gre diagnostic test today – it simply shook my feet. I got 1010 out of 1600 in the test. 310 in verbal and 700 in quantitative. That’s … bad. I havn’t yet written my CV. Could cause me great deal of trouble later.