Uncategorized
- "Very Very nice information here… Thanks" - Double 'very'! I'm humbled. Thank you!
- "I love this site. Good work…" - Thanks! I try. It's not really work :-)
- "This is one of the best sites I have ever found. Thanks!!! Very nice and informal. I enjoy being here." - It's great having you here too. Stay as long as you like. Would you like a beer?
- "Great job guys… Thank for you work…" - Wow! You actually thought that there was more than one person here. I must be doing an excellent job. Thanks!
- "Hello, Admin! You are the best!!! Congratulations. Best regards from regular visitor of your site. ;)" - Thanks, regular visitor! It's as if I've known you forever; call me Sam.
- "beautiful online information center. greatest work… thanks"
- ...
- By the way, they provide Google Base for people to give them their deep web information.
- It's a little bizzare to see the lens through the viewfinder, but I got over that pretty soon.
- It is well known that rangefinders are quiet because they don't have a moving mirror. Even so, I was surprised by the quietness of the mechanism.
- The shutter priority operation threw me off for a while because I'm used to shooting with aperture priority. It makes me think in terms of time, while I'm used to thinking in terms of depth of field, or rather not thinking much in terms of either by setting the parameters once and not messing with it unless really needed.
Moving in two spaces
I just moved this blog here from it’s previous incarnation at http://samgrover.wordpress.com/. I’m quite impressed at the ease with which I was able to export the previous blog and import it here intact with the entries and the comments. My thanks to the folks behind Wordpress and Movable Type. Subscribe to the new feed!
That move was simple. Now I have to move to my new place in real space this weekend. Unfortunately, that will involve some more work! Portland has five quadrants. Yea, five. Portland is weird. I used to live in the Southwest and then I was in the Southeast for the last 18 months and now I will be moving into a small house in the Northeast. It will increase my daily commute, but overall it will be great! By the way, the fifth quadrant is North, in case you were wondering.
The Machine is Us/ing Us
[youtube=www.youtube.com/watch
I’ve been sharing this video with friends since I first saw it some months ago. It’s informative and elegant and the music is cool too. It provokes my curiosity, especially with the way it ends. Take a look!
Back
It’s been a while since I updated this blog. About ten months. I’ve been an intern at Intel during that period and I recently joined as an employee.
Also, now it’s been one year since I moved to the SE Portland. I like it here. I have a hour-or-so long commute each way on TriMet, which isn’t terribly bad as it gives me time to read. However, public transit doesn’t work too well when there are more things to do in a day, especially in different parts of town. Even though my schedule at work is quite flexible, public transit can become a bottleneck. That occurs when I want to do more than go to work in the morning and return home in the evening. I thought that was sufficient excuse for me to go in for a car ;-) and placed an order for a new Mini Cooper S in April. I expect to have delivery within a month and am looking forward to that. It will be my first car.
My photography has been up and down during this time. In January, I sold off my Nikon D70S digital SLR and bought a Voigtländer Bessa R2A film rangefinder. After playing with cameras and photography for a couple of years I had come to realize just the kind of camera that would work best for me. The Bessa fit that bill quite well. It was also quite affordable as compared to another option. My previous experience with a rangefinder was definitely a motivating factor. I will write more about my experiences with this camera in a future post.
Stark Street
Russ wanted to recreate the cover of The Beatles' Abbey Road album cover along with his wife, Patty and son, Riley. He planned the shot and scouted for locations, narrowing them down to two. So, on a Sunday morning we went out to take the shot. We were a bit early for the chosen locations. The light wasn’t right. After a brief time looking around, we decided to go get breakfast and then return to take the shots.
On our way to LaurelThirst, we spotted an intersection on Stark Street and as fate would have it, it was better than the others and just right for the shot. Russ parked his Bug on the wrong side of the road and we started taking shots. They walked through the intersection once and I took some sample shots. After correcting their spacing and rhythm, I took shots of a few more passes with digital and film cameras. About fifteen minutes later, accomodating for light traffic, we were done and headed for a tasty breakfast. I had never tried to recreate a photo before. This was fun, and hopefully I’ll do more in the future. We left out some details, like Paul’s cigarette, Ringo, etc.
After going through the photos, Russ and family selected this shot as their favorite. Click on the image to see the larger version on flickr. There you will also find a link to the exact location on a map.
Downloadable media
Amazon started offering downloadable movies a couple of weeks ago. That’s great, especially since they offer rentals. I prefer to rent movies since I usually only see a movie once. If I feel like watching it again and again, I would buy it. In that case, I wouldn’t buy a restricted downloadable file and wouldn’t recommend it either, especially with draconian agreements. I’d rather just buy the physical DVD at an affordable price. You can’t just give a restricted file to a friend and say, “Hey, check this out. It’s cool”. The same is true for restricted music.
The hassle of maintaining my own digital store and backing up stuff is another deterrent. Hard disks will fail, so one needs a more comprehensive backup policy than just saving the data onto a second disk. With movies, that’s a lot of data. There’s no way I’m going to put money into a backup system for that. Amazon’s videos won’t play on the Mac, so I can’t even rent it if I wanted to. That’s another side-effect of the restrictions. Apple is also offering movie downloads through their iTunes store, but they don’t offer rentals. So, I’m off to Movie Madness these days. If someone figures out a convenient way to offer downloadable movie rentals, I’ll sign on.
Bombay blasts
I was on my short commute today when I got a text message from my father in India. It said, " ... All ok in Mumbai. You may not be able to contact them as lines jammed ...". He was referring to my sister and her family. I didn't know what to make of this. I thought that perhaps the Sunday incident had flared up. I hadn't read the news this morning, so I called him and he told me about the bomb blasts. Seven bombs went off on board various trains of the western lines within one hour (Mapped locations). For more info and details from the blogosphere, see Ultrabrown, Vantage Point, Sepia Mutiny, MumbaiHelp, and Metroblogging Mumbai. Unfortunately, this isn't the first time this beloved city has been a target.
Just the other day, in conversation with friends, I was reminiscing my experiences with riding the trains in Bombay. I grew up there through most of the nineties, mid-teens to early twenties. Rush hour travel is the kind of thing you'd remember fondly only if you were nostalgic. The train cars are sometimes packed so tight, one could travel upright without either foot on the floor. 4.5 million people commute on the trains everyday. With that in mind, the horror of these events is inescapable. Emotions will run high, we'll all mourn, but the people of Mumbai will not be terrorized.
In 1993, in the days after the thirteen serial bomb blasts in two hours, there were billboards proclaiming that the city got back on it's feet within 24 hours. In memory of those who died, I hope that spirit prevails, that the aftermath is peaceful, and that the perpetrators are brought to justice.
The reviews are in …
From the comments to this blog:
It was bound to happen
I've set up a personal domain at samgrover.com. It is quite simple for now. I've also set up a photoblog there called "As It Is". It is about street photography and will have some of the photos I put up on flickr. Other sections remain to be filled and imagined.
I will move this blog to that domain when I've figured out a simple way to migrate it with all posts and comments intact.
P.S. I'm using DreamHost for hosting. Check them out and if you like their services, use the promo code SAMG to sign up with a large discount. Depending on the plan you get upto $97 off making this a really cool deal. I'm paying only $30 for an entire year using their Level1 plan.
Google Spreadsheets and some related idle speculation
I don't have any major need for spreadsheets, so I'm definitely not inclined to buy some software for it. But there are a few little things for which I could use one and that is why it's great to see a free web application from Google that provides it.
I started to use Google Spreadsheets yesterday and found it very convenient and simple to use. It offers some basic functionality for now but that's ok since it's only a limited test. It can import and export XLS and CSV files at the moment, so I converted my few files from a simple text format into CSV and they were smoothly imported. The application looks quite slick. This is the first application from Google that looks a lot like a desktop application. It has menus near the top with similar items as a standard desktop application. There are buttons for the usual suspects; Cut, Copy, Paste, Undo and Redo. It has collaborative features to let multiple users edit the same file and provides a chat interface too. I haven't tried that yet. I'm looking forward to more such applications. I'm guessing that I'll use some of them while others I won't, picking and choosing depending on usage, usability and desktop alternative availability.
And now for the idle speculation part, which kinda builds on what I first read a long time ago. This new product makes me wonder that with the known and unknown components below their web applications, Google probably has a development platform for hosting applications on their infrastructure. I wonder if they would make it available to developers too. Let's call it the environment for Google Developers, or eGoD ;-). They could potentially let eGoD applications reside on the developer's own hardware, but they can't really fulfill their "mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" if it's not on their own infrastructure*. A reason for developers to let Google host their eGoD applications may be to guarantee good performance by utilizing a large scale distributed system that is managed and maintained by Google. Another reason would be that all eGoD applications would be "local" to each other and to Google services so if they wish to exchange information, they would be able to do so very efficiently. I've read time and again that infrastructure is one of Google's main strengths and I think that is absolutely true.
A Google branded word processor based on Writely will surely come out soon. I don't know if these applications are the beginning of a challenge to Microsoft Office, at least not until the technologies and interfaces are more mature. However they demonstrate the capability of this imaginary eGoD platform. Such a development and hosting environment is bound to be disruptive in the desktop application ecosphere. Google may go after a big slice of the pie with Office, leaving the niche products to the small developers. Just like Microsoft did with their platform, Windows.
Early experience with a rangefinder camera
I borrowed a rangefinder camera from a friend a couple of weeks ago. The camera is a Canonet QL17 G-III. I've gone through one roll on it and it's been fun to use so far. I had been using SLR cameras until now and the rangefinder is quite different in operation. The major difference being that the image viewed through the viewfinder is not the same as the one that is seen by the lens. In an SLR you see through the lens, so it's more of a WYSIWYG interface. Here are some of my impressions with using this camera.
The hardest thing to do was the focusing. The viewfinder has a very small area to check the focus accurately, and its not something I could manage to do quickly. I found myself pre-focusing most of the time by reading the distance marking on the lens. So, I used the viewfinder only for framing, just before taking the picture. I like the speed of such operation, but have been reluctant to do pre-focusing before now. This camera kinda forced it upon me and I'll try to do it more often. I think it is a good skill to have for street photography, especially when using a manual focus mechanism. There is usually no time to focus.
It's been raining again for the last week, so I haven't had any chance to shoot more with this camera. Hopefully things will clear up next week!