View from my apartment - Shutter priority with exposure at 30s

I had a blog post of an almost similar name a couple of years back - when I had got Canon A570IS. And after months of research and reading online articles, watching videos, I finally ended up ordering Nikon D90 with 18-105mm VR kit lens. It arrived this Tuesday, and I was SUPER excited - so excited that I left office a couple of hours earlier than usual :)

I would have loved to have shot an unboxing video (but, I was TOO impatient- just grabbed a knife and opened the box the instant I got home). I had also ordered some additional accessories (that included a Dolica Proline tripod). So, the first thing I do is to setup the camera on the tripod and shoot with a reasonably long exposure (30s). Thankfully, it was dark outside. And I liked the result :)

For the past 2 days, I have been reading about the features of the camera - in fact, had bought a book by David Busch specifically for that.

I guess I'll be using my Flickr account big time now.

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Today's hot topic - my cooking. As Agila pointed out, I should blog about it. Good idea!!!

I was never into cooking. Even as a kid, I seldom watched how my mom made those delicious dishes. Until recently, I didn't even know how to boil an egg. The only thing I was able to make was tea. My parents' friends used to praise my "tea preparing skills" like anything (my mom taught me that way back when I was in 9th grade). Otherwise, I was utterly useless in the kitchen. And to be very frank, I never had to worry about it at all. Once I left home for college, thanks to the hostel food and cafeteria, my hunger problems were taken care of - well not exactly the way I would have preferred (implying the food was just horrible). But I survived those 4 years. Then when I started working, office cafeteria didn't make me feel the need to bring cooked food from home.

Living in Pune also had its advantages from the food front. Why would I want to learn to cook when there were numerous eating joints throughout the city. With all types of cuisines imaginable, I enjoyed my stay in Pune.

Now, when I am in US, the regular home made Indian food seem to be a delicacy. Before leaving India, my mom tried to give me a crash course in cooking, but failed miserably (she teaches well, but me being me, had other things in mind at that time).

And yesterday, with a bit of imagination, I tried to make something from what was available in the refrigerator - potatoes and peas (with tomatoes and onions), and some assorted spices. And to me surprise, it actually turned out to be delicious (well, there was no one else to vouch for that). But all in all, I was happy. Now I can experiment with other things. And I realized, that cooking can be fun :)

May be a blog on "Abhishek's own recipes" some day, eh? :D

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The hibernation ends (yet again)... Yes, just 1 post in the past 6 months!!! Well, I didn't have much to write about recently, other than the fact that I have been on the move since May. But, now that I am settled at one place for quite some time, I thought of picking up this whatever little habit of blogging I had earlier.

Sitting at home after an usual day at work wasn't that common when I was in India - I generally came back home late. Here, its different. Its almost winters now - yes, I mean "almost", as most of my informants have warned me about how harsh winters are usually here. With DST off, things get dark a bit too early. 5 0clock, and its dark outside. And not to mention the constant roar of the wind which I am able to hear outside my apartment window.

I remember, when I landed in Chicago on 15th August, I loved the weather here. It was warm and sunny, and I could see the daylight till late 8.30s. And I made full use of that opportunity to visit some of the most famous places in Chicago - the Field Museum, the Shedd Aquarium, the Adler Planterium, the Science and Industry Museum to name a few. Millennium Park and Lake Michigan are just a mile walk from where I stay, so I used to visit those places frequently. And there was the Chicago Jazz Festival which 1 of my friends dragged me to.

One thing I like about this place is how much information is accessible anytime you want. My earliest friend in Chicago was in fact - google maps. From locating the nearest Walmart store, to exploring the various bus and train routes of CTA, it was really the most useful tool I found during my initial days here.

Now, that the winter sets in, it is getting difficult to get out of the house. But I am enjoying the cold chill - reminds me of the times I spent in north India.

Well, thats a lot of updates I seem to have given. But that pretty much sums up what I have been doing these days.

I leave you with a glimpse of some of the places I have been talking about...

Check out my flickr stream here...

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Driving can be fun, that is, when you know driving, and when you don't have to constantly apply brakes. Alas, thats not the condition in most parts of India, and to be specific, in Calcutta (aka Kolkata, as some people would prefer to call the city of joy).

I recently shifted to Calcutta, and one of the primary concerns after landing here was the dilemma if whether I would be able to drive. As with most of the cities, people drive their cars in a general direction (is there something called LANES?). Yes, and thats where the problem starts. Bus stop to pick up passengers on the fast lane. Rickshaws (both cycle as well as hand pulled) also prefer to drive on the right lane. And thats just the beginning.

Then there are the infamous yellow Ambassador taxis, which don't follow any traffic rules, but expect you to be a law-abiding citizen (ever seen one of those without a sign of "obey traffic rules" on its back?). And their numbers are in 100s and 1000s. If you manage to look at the streets here, you'll only see the yellow color everywhere. (There have been a couple of times when I just managed to escape from being hit by a taxi while overtaking me from the left).

Yes, thats pretty much it. You get the picture, right? So, I was a bit too scared to take my car out on the roads in the beginning (and, sometime, I am still). But, you get used to it. You get used to the buzzing city, the city full of lights and life. And that's what makes this city one of the best cities in India (at least when you are not driving :P ).

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There are various ways to make your computer desktop more useful. People use widgets to display various details directly on their desktops. I had heard about something called "GeekTool" a long time back, but hadn't actually bothered to have a look at it. Yesterday, while browsing, I came across a series of screenshots flaunting the use of Geektool. I got curious and started exploring. And, I liked it.

Geektool is a utility for your Mac which allows you to post results of various terminal commands (Unix commands). This can vary from simple date and time commands, to other system commands like top, ps. And, the outputs can be displayed in various fonts and colors, thus blending with your wallpapers. Try it out.


You can get various scripts for your Geektool by just searching about it on Google.

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Learning languages can be fun (as if knowing how to read, write and speak in 3 languages wasn't fun enough!!!). Yes, for Indians, we are generally comfortable in communicating in 3 languages (generally) - English, Hindi (our national language) and our mother tongue (and we tend to create a new language by concocting the three languages most of the times). But, some people (including a good friend of mine) have a flair for learning new languages. Unfortunately for me, whatever I have learnt in my first 5 years of life has been permanently stored in my memory, and any new language I learn is automatically purged after a few years of inactivity.

I have traveled a lot since I was a kid, been to almost all the states in India, so have been exposed to a number of languages. But, somehow, I never made a conscious effort to learn that region's language. So, I was stuck speaking in Bengali at home, Hindi with friends and English at school. In my school life, I had French and Sanskrit as a part of the curriculum, and, I think I managed to get good scores in those subjects quite well, but actually didn't get a chance to converse in those languages. So, after a few years, the only things I remembered were a few unrelated words.

I stayed in Kerala for more than 2 years, but somehow, managed to be just fine by not learning Malayalam - English was fine enough :). Then, when I moved to Pune, haven't even made any effort to learn Marathi, even though it has been about 7 years here.

But now, I realize that learning languages can be fun. Other than knowing the various ways in which you can communicate to the residents of the place, it helps you to understand that region's culture even more. For example, currently, I have started learning German, and other than learning about the language, I am also becoming aware of their culture and lifestyle.

So how do I rate the languages I know (refer the picture at the starting of the post)?

1. English - 6th box

2. Bengali - 5th box

3. Hindi - 6th box

4. Sanskrit - 5th box

5. French - 5th box

6. German - somewhere in between 3rd and 4th :)

7. All other languages = prelinguistic :P

The ultimate level of perfection? Profanity, of course :)

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I noticed that the my new Blogger theme had loads of links to external images, which forced the user to wait for a considerable time before he/she can see the full page. And sometimes, a few of the images would not show up at all (again, those little idiosyncrasies of the browsers). I was looking for a way to embed the images in an encoded format, directly into the HTML of the theme. After googling on it, I found a nice site which will create a Base64 encoding of any image I provide, which I can then add to my theme.

The general way to add an encoded byte stream instead of the URL in CSS:

div.image {
width:884px;
height:181px;
background-image:url(data:image/jpeg;base64,/9j/4AAQSkZJRgABAgAAZABkAAD...);
}

It took me considerable time to actually replace some 20 odd pngs and jpegs with weird series of characters (not to mention, it makes the theme code even more unreadable, but I managed to add comments wherever possible). I was happy with the result, as the updated theme loaded just fine in Safari 4 beta and Firefox 3 in Mac, Firefox 3.1 beta in Windows, Mobile Browser in S60 3rd Editon (Nokia E51), and Opera Mini browser. But, IE 6 couldn't process the encoded characters and display a picture. Haven't tried it IE7, so I would be really gratefully if someone is able to post a comment on how this blog looks using IE7 (or any other browser I haven't tried). If there are problems with many browsers, I might shift back to my previous url-linked-images version of the theme.

Update: Searching on the net provided some solutions to make IE display Base 64 encoded images, which requires a bit of PHP coding. Now I need to learn that, so I'll try to get this thing fixed as soon I have some time. My verdict? Why doesn't Microsoft's browser support something which is unanimously supported by all other browsers across all platforms? I would have completely ignored IE, but most of people still use IE, whether they like it or not :(

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Lately, I have been tweaking my blog with lots of new widgets (if you navigate along the sidebar, you'll see what I mean). This mainly includes getting some code snippets (javascript mainly) and modifying the XML template of the theme. But, its really frustrating to get complete different results when I view this in different browsers. I predominantly use Safari Beta 4, and most of the widgets work fine. But when I open the same page in Firefox 3, a few them stop working completely. Take for example, the flash widget for displaying the label cloud (source: roytanck.com). The labels show just fine in Safari in Mac, and IE6 in Windows. But when it comes to Firefox, based on the version of the browser I am using, it behaves differently. Like, for example, in Firefox 3.1 beta 3, I need to specifically click the start button to start running the script, and in Firefox 3.0.8 for Mac, it doesn't work at all!!!

Again, while composing a blog in the Blogger editor, things work just fine in Firefox. But when it comes to Safari, if I paste some lines from somewhere into the text area, instead of landing where it should land in normal world, it somehow manages to paste itself outside it, no matter what I do.

So, currently, I am trying to find out the best browser to use in various scenarios. So, if you see some weird results while viewing this site, you can try switching the browser for some time :P

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