Uncategorized
- October - Made a trip to India for dad's 60th birthday celebration.
- January - Got all four of my wisdom teeth extracted. Two had to be dug out. Was on a soup diet for a couple of weeks.
- February - Created the first version of the LazyEngine.
- March - Asked Liz to marry me. She said yes. Bought a Wii. The engagement was decidedly more memorable, but the Wii has been fun too :-)
- April - Attended a concert by Zakir Hussain and met him.
- May - Went to the hot springs at Brietenbush. Sis and niece came over to visit. We all had a great time.
- June - Moved to a new place right next to the river in NW Portland. Liz spoke at Ignite Portland 3.
- July - Liz and I made a trip to Maine to visit her parents and to spend the 4th of July holiday with them. Later that month, I traveled to Porto, Portugal to attend a conference. Lovely little city. It was my first time in Europe.
- August - Liz and I had our Portland wedding. Our New Delhi wedding is in December. We went to Crater Lake for a weekend. Beautiful place. Our first time there. I traveled to San Francisco to showcase my work.
- September - I hacked together ff2tweet. Hope to refine it further in the future.
My first job: web design
I earned my first paycheck in 1998 by creating a website for my uncle's business. The amount was Rs. 5000, which is about $100 at today's exchange rate.
Update (01/30/2009): I made this post when trying out Plinky. Probably won't be using the service anymore.
My experience with the Wii
I started with the wonderful Super Mario Galaxy and it was the only Wii game I played until a couple of months ago. Then, for five days each, I rented Transformers, Super Smash Brothers Brawl, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, one after another. And although I didn’t really get in to Brawl, I thoroughly enjoyed the other two.
Then came October, and my awesome mother-in-law completely surprised me with two Wii games for my birthday. Pirates of the Carribean: At World’s End and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. Both are based on movies that I haven’t seen. I’ve enjoyed The Mummy more than Pirates.
Then came November, and keeping in mind that Liz and I will be off to Asia during Christmas, my mom-in-law sent our presents early. Guess what I got, among other things? Yea, that’s right, two more Wii games! Iron Man and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. Each based on a movie that I have seen multiple times. Awesome! I haven’t played Fantastic Four yet, but Iron Man has been fun so far.
Next week Liz and I leave for a vacation to Asia, but when I’m back in January, I’ll sure have a bunch of Wii games to play :)
Happy Obama Day!
I sent the following out to my friends and family in the US and abroad, then decided to share it here too.
Dear friends,Congratulations!Hope you are well. What an awesome night. Liz and I are elated and the mood in Portland is ecstatic, as it is in several parts of the US and the globe. Everyone I know is happy. With the state of things, there are probably tough times ahead but this makes it so much better. In whatever way you may have contributed to this day, I thank you.
Cheers!Sam
Thirty-two
I’ve never blogged about my birthday before, which is strange because I’ve had thirty-one of them. A few seconds ago I turned thirty-two.
Here are some personally memorable events since my last birthday:
And lastly, here’s more about the number 32.
ff2tweet
I got sick of reposting to Twitter what I had just posted to FriendFeed. I was doing that to enable conversations in both networks. I tried twitterfeed and Yahoo! Pipes, before deciding to just write a tool to do exactly what I wanted.
ff2tweet is a tool to convert a FriendFeed post into a tweet and post it to Twitter. It does so while ensuring that the tweet is within the character limit and incorporates any comment made by the user when posting on FriendFeed. It also inspects the link in the post to shorten and add to the tweet as necessary.
ff2tweet is written in Python and I run it as a cron job on a server. It uses the FriendFeed and Twitter APIs to accomplish its task. It does what I wanted to do but it is a quick hack and there is definitely room for improvement. All feedback appreciated. The code is available on github. Join in!
I’m on FriendFeed at http://friendfeed.com/samgrover and on Twitter at http://twitter.com/samgrover.
Trip to Porto, Portugal
As I mentioned in my last post, (over two months ago!) I went to Portugal for a trip towards the end of July. I was attending the SECRYPT conference and presenting my paper there. All I knew about Porto, was what I read on Wikipedia and other places online. I was looking forward to a cute historic European city and that’s exactly what I got.
I reached there on a Friday afternoon, quite jet-lagged. The hotel (Hotel Melia Gaia Porto) was in the area south of the Douro river called Vila Nova De Gaia. That evening I got food at a nearby place and explored about a mile around the hotel, partly in search of a wall adapter for my laptop power cord. Walking around Gaia reminded me of India, especially my maternal grandma’s neighborhood in Delhi. The streets are narrow. The cars are small. Old rustic architecture is mixed with modern glassy facades.
The conference was at the hotel and ran from Saturday thru Tuesday. Each day, I would attend sessions until about 6pm and then head out to explore the city. On Saturday I took a leisurely photowalk towards the city center. As I got closer to the river, historic buildings appeared and this time I was reminded of Bombay, which has a heavy Portugese influence. The extent of that influence was more than I realized. I rediscovered words that I thought were of Indian origin, only to find that they were in fact Portugese. In Bombay, the word for bread is ‘pao’ and the word for potato is ‘batata’. Both of those are Portugese words. This discovery surprised my friends and family too.
Over the next few days I explored several areas around the Porto city center. The metro was very convenient. On my last day there I went to Casa da Música. It is an interesting building with non-perpendicular corners and a variety of unique rooms. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that it was completely open to the public for free. You could just walk into and all around its various rooms, even into the main auditorium. You could sit at a Steinway grand piano and play to your heart’s content and no one would bother. I didn’t because I don’t know how but a guy was doing just that.
Overall the trip was productive and pleasant, definitely whetting my appetite to explore more of Europe. My photos from the trip are in the slideshow below. You can follow it to the photos on flickr where you can view their location on a map.
What's going on?
There’s plenty going on.
My sister and her daughter came by to visit me from India last month. They were here for about a week and we all had a great time going around the Portland metro area and nearby to the gorge and coast. Here they are at Cannon Beach.
I got a paper accepted to a conference called SECRYPT. I will be going to present it at Porto, Portugal during the last few days of July. I just applied for a Visa and am looking forward to my first trip to Europe.
Ignite Portland 3 happened last night. This time Liz was a speaker. She spoke about her experiences of traveling to Afghanistan. She has a ton of stories and did an excellent job of squeezing a five minute rapid fire inspirational talk from them. There was a good variety of topics, just like at the last Ignite Portland, which made the evening quite entertaining. This time we went to the after party at Imbibe and had a great time with friends, old and new. You can see her slides and video right here. They go quite well together.
[youtube=[www.youtube.com/watch](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBLt3DO5Bis&w=425&h=344])
And lastly for now, Liz and I decided to start a blog together to document our adventures. I kicked it off tonight with a basic theme and a first post about how we met. Check it out and subscribe for more stories in the future.
New version of LazyEngine
About three months after its initial launch, I’m happy to announce a new version of LazyEngine. I have moved it off my domain and onto the recently launched Google App Engine. This involved a rewrite of the code from the original PHP into the new Python version. This does not mean that it is any less lazy ;-)
I had wanted to add a feature to remember a user’s past searches but was too lazy to implement that in PHP. With the new version, I get user logins automatically. You can use your Google accounts to log into LazyEngine and have it remember your searches from visit to visit. Give it a shot right now at http://lazyengine.appspot.com/. Enjoy!
Zakir Hussain and the Masters of Percussion
Even in those young days I had heard of the music of Ustad Zakir Hussain. Zakir is regarded as the foremost player of the Tabla in the world. He has achieved unparalleled recognition and mastery with the Tabla and is a household name in India. Last night, Liz and I went to the Schnitz for a concert by Zakir Hussain and the Masters of Percussion. It is an annual event hosted by Kalakendra. The group does a tour each year and the musicians change regularly. It was such beautiful and wide ranging music from a dozen different instruments of various Indian Classical schools. I was enthralled by the solo and group performances, especially the Tabla, the Sarangi and the Sitar.
Afterwards, we got to meet and chat with Zakir. He had such a jovial and warm demeanor. This was my first time at the event and I hope to go again.
Engaged
On March 21st, I asked Liz to marry me and she said yes. She was elated that I asked her on a full-moon vernal equinox ;-)
We are both very happy and excited. I don’t know who all read my blog, so probably you’ve already seen me mention this on Flickr or Twitter or in an email. The wedding will be on December 10th, in New Delhi, India. We’re really looking forward to it.
Time to play again
The last time I bought a gaming console was in November, 2001. It was an Xbox. For the last six years, I’ve used it exclusively as a DVD player.
I bought a Nintendo Wii today. They are still in short supply. The local Fred Meyer does a raffle when they get some stock. Last night they got twelve units. The raffle was scheduled for 6:45am today, fifteen minutes before opening time. I was first in line. Eleven people showed up. Everyone got a Wii.
I also got Super Mario Galaxy and played it a bit today. It is so much fun.
If you like playing games, you should get a Wii.
[Snacks] Left Hook Lager, counting votes, another smoothie recipe
Steve Novick is running a really cool campaign for U.S. Senate here in Oreon and it’s great that Liz is part of it. They just released a campaign beer called “Left Hook Lager”. Liz made the label for that and wrote about it here. You can buy some for yourself. Also, check out this beer themed ad they came out with earlier this year.
On the subject of voting in general, I get the impression that people are so casual about counting the votes. It’s great to see The Onion impart its inimitable style to the issue. Attacks on voting machines can range from the sophisticated to the cleverly simple. Check out Black Box Voting for more info.
Oh, and here’s another yummy smoothie recipe: Some Blueberries, some raspberries (little more than the blueberries), one banana, vanilla extract (to taste), two glasses of rice milk. Blend. Serves two. It’s really nice. In fact I’m going to make it right now.
My first website
There was some discussion today on Twitter regarding the first website made by people. That got me to look into my archives for the first one that I made. It was on Geocities and it doesn’t exist anymore, not even on the Wayback Machine. But the second one that I made was hosted on the servers at PSU and still exists on the aforementioned machine here. It was almost identical to the previous site and looked like this.
Click on the image to go to flickr and see it with notes describing the content. Share your first site.
[Snacks] I Want Sandy, Helvetica, Beer and Blog, MarsEdit
For the last few weeks, I’ve had a new personal assistant, Sandy. I came to her after trying Backpack, Remember the Milk, Stikkit and others that I don’t even remember any more. She’s the best one I’ve had so far. She makes me want her more. So far my girlfriend is cool with that, even though Sandy lives right here in Portland.
This weekend I saw Helvetica. I got excited when I noticed that Movie Madness had it on their list but it was never in stock when I got there. On Saturday it wasn’t on the shelves either, but Liz suggested that I peruse the un-shelved DVDs and there it was. I’ve never thought about the history behind types. This film was enjoyable just for that. And there’s a lot more about typography and graphic design in there. To top it all, the film is set to a really cool soundtrack.
Yesterday, I hung out with Beer and Blog peeps at the Lucky Lab on Hawthorne. The meeting was great. We touched on several topics and Justin has nicely summarized them. I’m looking forward to more such interactions. See photos here.
Lastly, if you’ve noticed an increase in my blog posts over the last few days, it can be attributed to some extent to the wonderful MarsEdit. It is a joy to compose and manage blog posts in it. I’m still trying it out but at this point is looks like I’ll be buying it well before the trial period runs out in about a month.
Announcing LazyEngine
LazyEngine is a lazy search engine. If you want to do a search, consider for a moment if you need the results immediately. If not, then this is the search engine for you. This is probably a silly web application.
That’s the idea behind my new web app LazyEngine. Give it a shot. I hope you like it.
Updated website and migrated blog
I’ve updated my website and moved the blog off to http://blog.samgrover.com/. I will update this feed to splice in more stuff at some point in the future. I’ll let you know when I do that. You may want to move to the blog only feed now or later.
I tried Movable Type over the last two months and didn’t like it much at all. So, I’ve migrated the blog to use Wordpress. Wordpress has a lot of community support and plugins that make it a great choice. It also seems simpler to use and maintain. I continue to support OpenID for comments.
I’m gonna work on tweaking the look and feel of the website over the next few days so come back to check it out later. I’ll also be expanding its focus.
Obama FTW!
The result of a little informal poll I did after Super Tuesday. There
were 151 responses. Mitt Romney has since dropped out.
One year with a Voigtländer Bessa R2A rangefinder
It was heavier than I expected. I had ignored my cardinal law in purchasing a camera, “Hold it in your hands to see how it feels”. One year has gone by with me using the Bessa exclusively, and I love it.
I bought it along with a 50mm Nokton f/1.5 lens and an adapter. The camera has an M mount, whereas the lens is a screw mount, so I needed an adapter. My plan was that if I liked this enough I could get an M mount Leica lens in the future and it would fit just fine with the camera. I still plan on doing that. Perhaps a 35mm lens, but more on that later. I bought this Bessa at CameraQuest, a website that I haven’t visited since then. I never planned on buying more of this system and I never had any issues.
My early experience with a rangefinder camera was in 2006 when I borrowed a Canonet QL17 G-III from my friend Doug. At the end of that month I was hooked and understood why the rangefinder is the best camera for street photography. A sentiment expressed by many a famous street photographers of the last century. My favorite part about a rangefinder is that since I can see the frame lines, I can see the things that I’m not including in the frame. You can never do that with an SLR. That allows me to frame the shot best, especially on the street when I have only a fraction of a second to frame and shoot a photo. I don’t have to worry about focusing because I pre-focus and set a high depth-of-field. When I bring the camera to my eye, all I have to do is frame and click. And I love it when the camera goes “click”. The Bessa has a quick sharp sound that is barely noticeable as compared to the extended louder sound of the DSLR.
Another characteristic of the rangefinder is that you can see the photo at the moment of exposure, while in the SLR you just see nothing. As a result, at the beginning, my timing was a bit off with this camera, but not only did I get used to it, I started to love it. Most of the time I take a photo, I just click one frame. No second chance. So it helps to know if I got what I was going for, even though the suspense remains until I actually get the film processed.
Over the last year I’ve put up 193 photos taken with this camera on my Flickr photostream, about 76% of all my uploaded photos for 2007. That’s not an immense number and probably would’ve been even smaller had I not made the trips to Burning Man and to India. I put up 481 photos in 2006 and 807 photos in 2005. I think the trend is down because the cost of using film has made me frugal.
I like using film because of the texture that it imparts to a photograph. I haven’t experimented a whole lot with different films, and settled quite early with Tri-X. Most of the time I push it to ISO 1600 and gives me just the right kind of contrast I like. It also helps to push the film in Portland, since most days are overcast and higher ISO films cost more ;-) Having said that, more and more manufacturers of are moving out of the 35mm film market. That trend has me thinking of digital rangefinders for the future. We’ll see how that goes.
I think I’ve spent enough time with the 50mm lens to now explore more primes. I would prefer to go wider, as that’s what I find lacking sometimes when I frame a shot. Also, I think it would help me get closer while out on the street. So, sometime this year, I’ll get a 35mm M mount lens, hopefully a Leica one. After all, that was the plan :-)
[Snacks] Warren Zevon, Dali Atomicus, a smoothie recipe...
Ever since I heard “Lawyers, Guns and Money”, I’ve wanted to hear more of Warren Zevon’s music. So this week I bought “The Best Of Warren Zevon” at Amazon’s MP3 store. I’ve listened to it twice and now there are a few more of his songs that I really like.
A new favorite song is Lily Allen’s “Alfie” which I first heard way back, and then again recently on the podcast of the wonderful NPR show, All Songs Considered. It’s quite pop-ish.
Recipe for a smoothie: Two Frozen Bananas, Three Frozen Strawberries, One Frozen Peach, Vanilla extract (to taste), Two glasses rice milk. Blend. Serves two. Experiment with quantities!
Mesmerized by Phillipe Halsman’s Dali Atomicus.
Yay for soups! I got my wisdom teeth extracted and am mostly eating soups.
A selection of my photos from 2007
I don’t like calling any photo of mine a favorite, but some are just more interesting than others. Two years ago I listed just a couple of photos. This year, I’ve gone overboard with ten!
Here are my “favorite” photos from this year. I still have to develop two rolls, so maybe I’ll add more later ;-)
And here’s one that just spooked me out! :-)
