The Aptly Named, Sam's Blog

Sometime last week, Liz and I saw Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, a biographical film about Howard Hughes. At the end of the movie I remarked that the Hercules flying boat, designed by Hughes, and shown in the film is on permanent display in our Oregon neighborhood. A few minutes of online searching later we decided to go check it out at the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum in McMinnville on the weekend.

Sunday morning, after a brief breakfast stop at a local bagel joint, we drove out towards the museum. We passed beautiful hills draped with vineyards and wineries. Later in the day we learned that these were the Chehalem Mountains and Dundee Hills regions of the Willamette Valley Wineries. We hadn’t been there before and were delighted to see it. Eyeing all the wine tasting signs we decided to stop at some of the wineries on our way back.

We got to the museum about an hour before noon. It is located across the road from the airport in McMinnville. There are two museum buildings which house the aviation and space museums and a third building has an IMAX theater. Some aircraft are displayed in spaces along the buildings too. We only visited the aviation museum, choosing to return to the space museum on another day, perhaps after they install one of the retiring space shuttles, which they plan to do.

It is clear upon looking at the aviation museum and the time spent inside it that the Hercules is their star attraction. It takes up most of the space and even though there are about a hundred other aircrafts spanning the hundred year history of powered flight, they all appear negligible next to it. The critics of this magnificent aircraft, the largest of its time, called it the “Spruce Goose”. Liz and I were disappointed that this name, which was despised by Hughes, was the one used prominently by the museum. Their website address uses it; they sport it on gift store items; and they even have a winery that makes wine branded the same.

Even in their relative smallness, the other aircrafts on display offer a great collection of beautiful airplanes, helicopters, balloon-basket, a Wright 1903 Flyer replica and even a model skeleton of the wing-like device sketched by Leonardo DaVinci. There were some charming touches to the museum. Sitting next to a WW2 bomber was an old man who had flown one of those for thirty missions over France and Germany when he was eighteen. Alongside some planes were accurate models. One depicted intricately the machine gun wing assembly on a WW2 fighter. Next to the Hercules was a model of it used in the Scorsese film and donated to the museum.

On our way back, we checked out a few wineries, tasted the wines at a couple of them and bought some at one in Dundee. I haven’t been a fan of wine most of my life, having sided with beer whenever presented a choice, but in recent times I have started to experiment. Now, having had some really delicious ones, I’m starting to become a fan to the extent that I know a bit about what I like and what I don’t like. My wine vocabulary remains minimal and will probably stay that way unless my interest in it skyrockets.

We drove back to Portland through a different, but similarly scenic route. To top off the lovely Sunday, which was filled with expected and unexpected pleasures, that night we saw Terry Jones’ Erik the Viking. It featured a different kind of flying boat and was quite hilarious.

I’ve returned to using Netflix this year and it’s working out great for Liz and me, both film lovers. Here are some thoughts on my recent Netflix experience.

I noticed the other day that when Netflix shows me ratings for a movie that I haven’t rated (the red stars), it is not showing me what I thought that was. The red stars show me what Netflix thinks I will rate the movie rather than the average of what others have rated. It is a prediction. This is not news, but is news to me. I don’t like it. I’d like to see the average rating given by others instead of the predicted rating for me. I’ve taken to hovering over each film’s title or image to get that information. It’s annoying but doable and I prefer it to the misleading red stars.

Recently when Liz was away for a few weeks, I had a plan to watch a bunch of action flicks and such-like that I wanted to see and knew the she wouldn’t want to see. Not that she isn’t into action films; the other day we greatly enjoyed Inglourious Basterds. So I browsed for those films that I had heard of and those that folks recommended, added them to my queue, and moved them to the top. Soon enough they started showing up and I had a great time catching up on that genre. Now that Liz is back, the queue is as it was before she left and I’m faced with a slight problem. When I come across a film in the aforementioned genre, I would like to store it for another similar time in the future. However, I can’t just add it to my queue without constant annoying maintenance. I’d like a feature using which I can make a list of movies called “Sam’s Must-See Action Flix”. When Liz travels, I can make this list my active queue in one click. And then one-click should return the active queue to the regularly scheduled list when she returns. Simple.

The “Watch Instantly” feature of streaming movies is most excellent. I love it, despite the fact that it causes my browser to crash once each time I use it. I’ve been using it to see movies I’ve enjoyed before but not seen in a long time and also for those times when you just want to see something right away but aren’t in the mood for the DVD lying on the table. It would be most awesome if it worked directly with my PlayStation 3 but from what I’ve read that is not likely to happen anytime soon.

I’ve just released Avatari 0.3. This version adds support for Adium and also updates the FriendFeed API to the latest version to ensure forward compatibility.

I’ve been considering developing Avatari on iPhone. Would you be interested in it? If so, please answer a couple of questions here. It will take less than thirty seconds of your time. You can also write to me on Twitter at @samgrover or @AvatariApp. Thanks!

The latest version of Avatari is available at the link below, or just select “Check for Updates…” in the menu from within Avatari.

Download Avatari

I released an update for Avatari two weeks ago. Since then I’ve found a few blog posts talking about it. See them here, here, here and here.

Did you check those out? I did and found that none of them are in a language I know!

So, what do I do? Well, there’s Google’s language tools which can translate foreign language pages to a language of your choice. Google has handy bookmarklets for many languages. Find yours and set it up in the bookmark bar in your browser. When you’re at any website in a foreign language, just click that button for a quick translation. Awesome!

By doing that I read those blog posts and am quite happy to see that folks like Avatari and are finding it useful. Thanks folks!

I appreciate all comments and feedback regarding Avatari. Blog it or write me directly!

A couple of weeks ago I finished reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. The book is about food production and agriculture in the US. It is also about man’s relation to food and to the culture of eating. This is not a review of the book, but rather a summary of my thoughts on this subject as it relates to my personal health and habits.

Many years ago I saw Super Size Me. Following that I stopped eating at McDonald’s and reduced my consumption of fast food in general. It wasn’t until I saw King Corn and The Future of Food that the reality of industrial agriculture began to sink in. I was increasingly disgusted by what I was eating.

I’ve been altering my food habits towards ones that I believe will support the goal of a healthier life. Habits, that were encouraged by my parents while I was growing up, but those that I easily ignored in my adult independence. My mom taught me that just about anything is good in moderation but nothing is good in excess. Pollan’s observations on food show just how much excess is involved in industrial food. Observations of my own diet revealed that I was having too much meat and processed food and not enough vegetables, whole grains and fruits. I also found a large amount of HFCS in my diet, mostly from soda, but also, and this was a surprise to me, from ketchup and other products.

Throughout my twenties, I didn’t think twice about what I was eating as long as it tasted good, and often, fast and convenient. My younger body could take that abuse without much consequence. My older body won’t tolerate abuse as it gets confused and transformed by the bad food I eat. It is imperative that I live a healthy life and for that it is necessary that I eat healthy food. Enough is enough.

Having moved to the US from India, I’ve always admired the nutrition label on foods sold here. What I had often ignored was the list of ingredients. Now, more than ever, I find that information very valuable when eating or buying food. Labeling is important and I would like to see it become even more descriptive to capture the source of ingredients and to their status as GMOs. I’m grateful to those that research information about food and agriculture and seek to have it readily accessible.

Over the last few months I’ve been eating much less meat. I have eliminated HFCS from my diet. I have greatly reduced the consumption of processed food and increased the consumption of whole grains, fresh fruits and vegetables. I acknowledge that as I seek to minimize my consumption of unhealthy food I may occasionally give in to the desires of speed, convenience or taste. Having Liz in my life has significantly helped to reintroduce and encourage healthier eating habits. Her food ethic is much stronger than mine and she is acutely conscious of what she consumes.

As an omnivore I can eat many things, but I won’t just eat any thing.

I’ve just released Avatari version 0.2.2. This is a minor release. It preserves avatar file type when uploading to a service. It also improves and simplifies the user interface design when adding a new account. Many thanks to my friend @ubercolin for his suggestions regarding these improvements. For a complete list of changes, please see the Release Notes. You can get the latest version at the link below, or just select “Check for Updates…” in the menu from within Avatari.

Download Avatari

Mike Johnston, over at T.O.P, writes interesting posts quite often. He has recently written a couple of them that hit close to home. They are The Leica as Teacher and Why It Has To Be a Leica. Mike suggests a training program using the Leica for a year to shoot B&W film extensively and to edit and critique oneself on the photos taken. I’ve tried to do exactly that over the last two years.

There are some differences, of course. My camera has been a Bessa R2A. I’ve been using only that camera with a 50mm prime lens since January 2007. The Bessa is like a cheaper version of a Leica. Most of the points that Mike mentions in the second post apply to the Bessa too.

Certainly, I haven’t been as prolific as Mike suggests. Much has happened in my life since then and other interests have sometimes taken priority in spare time. As of today I have 362 photos on Flickr taken with this camera and lens pair. That’s an average of about three selected photos per week, although in reality there were bursts of activity when I was on vacation. About half of those photos are B&W. I typically haven’t thought in terms of color unless it felt quite essential, and have preferred B&W film for the most part.

The gist of the matter is that this is a really good exercise. In the end, like Mike says,

Because make no mistake, photographing the way I suggested in the previous post is the photographic equivalent of being a top athlete: it takes dedication and coordination and talent and time and sacrifice and lots of training.

This gels with what Malcolm Gladwell has written in Outliers and with my own experience. What matters most is that you put a lot of time and effort into it. The constraints Mike suggests help to make the exercise even more focused, pun unintended. It’s definitely not the only exercise out there but I sincerely believe that if you were to do this, it would greatly benefit your photographic eye. I can surely feel it and perhaps my photography shows it.

When I started using my Bessa, I dumped my DSLR and haven’t missed it since. Having said that, I think I’m getting weary of having a film based workflow as my primary one. I’m still hoping that a nice digital rangefinder will come along or that I will find it reasonable to invest in a Leica M8. Until then I may try the new Sigma DP2. It looks quite promising. I’ll keep an eye out for the news and reviews and look at photos from it for a couple of months before deciding.

Yea, the last few posts on this blog have all been about Avatari. Life, as usual, is way more varied. Here’s a recap of some travels and photos from the last few months.

Late last year, Liz and I traveled to Asia. We visited her Nepalese home near Kathmandu, had our second wedding of the year in New Delhi and then went to Bali for our honeymoon. That’s a whole ‘nother blog post that one of us will eventually write on our blog. Oh, but the pictures are ready to go in my Asia 2008 collection on Flickr.

Our first trip this year was during the last week of April. Liz and I went on a road trip in the Colorado plateau area. We flew in to Las Vegas and drove to Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, Bryce Canyon and Zion National Park. It was an amazing set of places to see with wondrous natural landscapes; the product of water, stone and time. We spent four nights camping and three in hotels. An exploration of that trip will also be in our blog soon, I promise! Once again, the photos are ready :-)

These two trips have been my primary outlet in taking photos over the past several months. I’m quite happy with the resulting pictures. I am, however, starting to feel tired of using film and the related workflow and cost. I hope I can make the transition to a decent digital rangefinder sometime over the next year or so although I will have to save up for one of those!

Tomorrow Liz and I will be going to Bend in central Oregon for this Memorial Day weekend and I’m hoping to explore new places and take a bunch of more photos. So, stay tuned for those!

I have a couple more ideas for blog posts so hopefully the next one will be sooner rather than later. In the meanwhile, feel free to follow along at @samgrover where I can be found posting much more frequently.

You wanted AddressBook and iChat support. It is here!

I wanted more web services to adopt an API for uploading avatars. Shizzow responded with enthusiasm. That support is here too!

By enabling AddressBook and/or iChat support, entries appear in the account list for each of those. When you are ready to update your avatar, just select them if you want to update those too.

If you use iChat for Google Talk, then setting your avatar in iChat will update your avatar on Google’s servers the next time you connect or immediately if you are already connected. Google then updates your avatar across all their services including Gmail, Google Profile, etc.

I’ve just updated Avatari to the latest version using the newly added auto-update feature. This has been made super simple through the Sparkle framework for Cocoa. After you download this version, the application should auto-update with each new release. There is also a “Check for updates…” feature in the application menu for manual checks.

Special thanks to @bsneed for the idea to support AddressBook and iChat and to @ryansnyder at @shizzow for responding to my call for an API within a matter of days!

Heartfelt thanks to all of you for the enthusiastic response to my first Cocoa application! I hope you like this release and continue to provide me with your feedback on my Gmail address, samgrover. I will do my best to deliver.

Download Avatari

Requires Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). Runs on Intel and PowerPC based Mac computers. Supports multiple accounts on Twitter, FriendFeed, Shizzow and your Mac’s AddressBook, iChat.

Avatari is an application to update your avatars across the Internet with one click.

I keep my avatar the same most of the time but every now and then I would replace it for a short period to represent a holiday or a cause or some event. When I would do that it would annoy me that I had to go to each individual location where I had uploaded my avatar for a brief replacement.

Not anymore.

I made Avatari to solve this problem. It currently supports multiple accounts on Twitter and FriendFeed. When I came up with this idea, I found that Twitter already had an API for uploading an avatar but FriendFeed didn’t. I requested the folks at FriendFeed to create an API for me, and to my pleasant surprise, they had one ready in twenty days. Thanks guys! I hope to add more services in the future.

My other motivation for making Avatari is to teach myself Cocoa programming. I had hoped to make something useful while familiarizing myself with Cocoa. It’s working great and I’m hoping to advance my knowledge of Cocoa software development with continued effort.

Last week I presented Avatari to the folks at Portland CocoaHeads and tonight I presented it at Demolicious. I’d like to thank all the folks at either event for their feedback, ideas and encouragement regarding this project.

Special thanks to Giglielmo for sharing the photo used in the logo under the Attribution-Share Alike license and to my wife, Liz for transforming it into the application logo.

I hope you like using Avatari. Let me know what I can do to make it better. You can reach me at my Gmail address, samgrover or via @samgrover. You can download Avatari from the software section on my website or by clicking the link below.

Download Avatari

Requires Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.

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.

It has been a little over eight months since I bought the Wii. Even though my best video game experiences have been on a PC, the Wii holds its own and is a pleasure to play.

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 :)

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

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:

• 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.

It was a wonderful year and I'm looking forward to the next one.

And lastly, here’s more about the number 32.

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.

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.

http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=59254

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.

Around the end of May, my landlord and I had a disagreement on the terms for a lease renewal at my current place. So, I decided to move out and started looking for a new place. I found a nice two bedroom condo right by the river in NW Portland and will be moving there this weekend.

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.

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!

When I was a kid, I enjoyed tapping on tables in the style of a Tabla player. The sounds were fun. My mom used to say that I should learn the instrument. I never did. I think that was for the best since I don't seem to have any talent in playing a musical instrument.

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.