Spider racing in a Metro

Ok... the title of the post is bit confusing but it is intended so..

Lets start with Spider-man 3 . It is a long movie, dragging at a slow pace and with all those typical Bollywood style. It has many goofs... like when Marko Flint gets into that Physics Reactor, why everything converts to sillicon except the pendant which contains his daughter's photo? there are many other similar goofs all throughout the movie, which doesn't seem to end.
Rating: 2.5/5

Now quickly we move on to Ta Ra Rum Pum which was another disappointment despite being from Yash Raj banner. The movie has a very old time story feeling with new packaging where the protagonist is a racing driver. Otherwise, it has nothing much to offer.
Rating: 2/5

However, I was third time lucky. It was Life in a Metro, directed by Anurag Basu. Having a big list of characters and multiple intertwined stories running in parallel, it had a fresh feel. Neatly packaged, fast paced, away from fake drama and emotion, the movie registers itself with you especially with young urban crowd of india. The end was a bit of hastily scripted. The songs accelerates the story but the videos are irritating as you see the Metro Band performing in each of the song.
Rating:3.5/5

Continuous Improvement - Part II

Living upto myself, I couldn't control to make certain tweaks to the blog. One, I have removed del.icio.us links from the feed as it was flooding the blog feed. Second I have added another section on left sidebar which allows you to subscribe to the feed using email.

Bouquets and brickbats welcome.

Vista Zero Touch Webinar

Yours truly had worked on a project in partnership with Microsoft. It was a solution innovation project where our team developed a unique solution around enterprise wide Windows Vista deployment. The solution was also judged as the best solution by Microsoft. I have already given the solution presentation to 6 customers and hope to see good increase in top line.

Now, under the Microsoft Technology Community Program (TCP) , I am doing a webinar on the technology side. This will be my first webinar so will be for TCP. The webinar will be broadcasted on May 25, 2007 from 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM IST. I am all prepared and I hope it goes well. I will publish the webinar invitation mailer once I receive the final version.


Update: Here is the mailer

_________________________________________________________

Live Meeting Details

Click Here to Join Live Meeting


Subject: Vista Zero Touch Deployment webinar
Meeting URL: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/microsoft/join
Meeting ID: GS7SM7
Meeting Key: zerotouch
Role: Attendee

This meeting will broadcast internet audio directly to your computer.

Please ensure that you have Windows Media Player 9 or higher installed.

Conference Call Details:

US Access: 001 203 480 8000

Pass code 6339416

India Access

New Delhi Access: (011) 4422-3031 / 2654-0731

Hyderabad Access: (040) 4422-3033 / 2348-8233

Chennai Access: (044) 2831-0734 / 4422-3034

Meeting ID: 4258 2790#

PIN Code: 1878892#

Online Features:

*0 - Operator Assistance

*6 - Self Mute / Unmute

At Gateway of North East

On 28th of April, I boarded early morning IndiGo flight from Delhi Airport which landed at Guwahati Airport at 08:30. And the first thing I noticed was the pleasant weather. This was a breath of fresh air for us Delhiites who suffer from aggressive mercury and rising pollution levels. There was greenery all around and last night rainfall was adding that extra chill in the air.

Now the purpose, I went there for a cousins marriage. The ceremony was grand as they had two Performance Evenings, one by professional artists (including Gaurav Sharma of Laughter Champion fame and Juhi Parmar of Kumkum) and second one by family members. And a big reception and dinner party the third day. The whole ceremony lasted whole three day which is kind of rare these days. I also put my camera's 10x zoom, 2 GB card and 6 megapixel resolution to good use ;)

And it seems that being an MBA and working as MT in a Top 5 Indian IT company also makes you most eligible bachelor as I gave introductions to 20+ uncles/aunts of mine, many of them I have never seen before.

Last day, I went to Kamakhya temple but somehow didn't like that place much. No offense.
I also roamed in Fancy Bazaar which is quite famous but was a disappointment for me.

One more thing, there is a railway line which goes across the city and there is only one flyover. At ll other level crossings, 50% of the time the traffic is closed to pass the trains. Other infrastructure is not upto the mark either. Being a state capital and The Gateway to North East, the city deserves bit more than that.

So after four days of welcome break from tiring work schedule, I returned on next Wednesday when for a change the weather at Delhi was also likable.

Kimi Raikkonen and reliability issues

Kimi Raikkonen and reliability seem to be synonyms. After an eventful courtship with Mclaren, where he had 30 retirements/DNF in last 5 Years (that is 6 per year... his record with Sauber was not great either, 7 retirements in a single year), he jumped ship and moved to Ferrari, which was known for its reliability.

At Ferrari, where he was replacing Michale Schumacher, the expectations were already very high. And till now, he is not able to match up. He has won the Australian GP, finished third in Malaysia and Bahrain... and living up to his old records, failed to finish in Spain.

I somehow fail to understand the reasons!! is it purely because he tries to get maximum out of the machinery and in the process forgets the limitation of machinery and blows it up??

Disclaimer: I am a diehard Kimi fanboy.

Lewis Hamilton - The new force to reckon

Lewis Hamilton is a formula 1 driver from McLaren Team and is a rookie in the sport. But considering his performance in first four races, Rookie title seems to be a misnomer for this guy. In his maiden F1 Championship, he is leading the driver table and poised to finish in top three this very first year. This is inspite of not winning a single race but finishing all four on podium.

Consistency surely takes you far...

Hibernating?

For past few weeks, I was not able to post on the blog... but it doesn't mean that I was hibernating. I was pretty much active and I could say that it was one of the most busiest month in my last year. There are lots of things happening at professional and personal life. I need time to jot them down.

Some Ideas:

• Lewis Hamilton
• Kimi Raikkonen
• Travelogue - Guwahati
• My offending one liners
• Camera
• Webinar
• Movie Review
  

I will be soon writing on these items. This is just a promotional post in the meantime :)

Shooting @ 10x

I have just bought a cool Nikon Coolpix S10 digicam.

And the two best things about the camera are a whopping 10x Optical zoom and a swivel lens. Alongwith it I am using a SanDisk 2GB SD card which can take 680+ shots at full resolution and minimum compression...
You can read the review of the camera at http://www.dpreview.com/news/0608/06082411nikons10.asp

Some observations till now:

• The Optical zoom is awesome and works like a breeze
• The swivel lens allows to take snaps from creative angles without you needing to bend
• It has an exhaustive list of scene modes
• You can't use optical zoom while capturing a video
• It has a Time lapse mode for movie which allows you to shot movie snippets at regular interval which can be used for making a Time Lapse Movie
• It has a sports composite mode which take 16 composite shots of a sport scene and make a 4x4 collage of that.
• The UI and controllers take some time to get used to
• There is some noise in night landscape images.
• While shooting at 10x, the hands should be extremely steady. Tripod recommended.

Burn Baby Burn

I have moved my blog's default feed to FeedBurner. It will help me in analyzing blog visits and subscription data. The new blog feed URI is:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Nerd-beta

The old feed URI is no longer available.

The one thing I like about feedburner is that it also integrates my del.icio.us bookmarks in my feeds. Which means, know you can also check which sites I am visiting and bookmarking.

In future, I will also integrate my flickr account so that the feed becomes a one-stop-shop for all the updates from me.

By the River Ganges, I jumped and rafted

After all those boring weekends, It was a good change.

After one week of planning, one day of cancellation and one hour replanning, we finally set off for Rishikesh on Friday Night. It was a tiring journey and we reached the destination saturday morning.

As the camps were not available at that moment, we started playing cricket. Mind you, I was playing cricket after light years and for the next two days I faced the repurcussions in form of a painful shoulder.

Next was a good bath at river Ganges. Earlier, I was aquaphobic, but after this bath, I was not... I still don't know how to swim, but atleast I am no longer scared of water.

Then a trip to Tehri dam. It was huge... and that is an understantement. Thanks to Prakhar, we got permission to visit the powerhouse tunnel and it was mind blowing.. Loved that trip.

And if you think that was enought for the day, the best is yet to follow..

When we came back to Rishikesh from Tehri, it was already 10 PM. Now it was time for some fun at river coast in a moon lit night. The feeling is too good to be described in a blog.

EOD

The next day morning, it was time to go to Neer Garh Water Fall. It was a half an hour trek from our camp and was fun. We had fun in the water for next 1 hour (at the place depicted in the third snap on the aforementioned website). Time to return back to camp and go for the climax... Rafting..

Initially, I was feeling a bit nervous about this whole rafting thing. As I don't know swimming, it adds to the pressure. But leaving my nervousness aside, I sat on raft and we started for the journey which I will never forget in the times to come.

We started slowly, but gained good pace during the course of rafting. We sailed through many rapids some of which has very weird names like Return to Sender, Tee Off, Roller Coaster, Double Trouble etc. That was adventorous..

Next was a jump in the river... As I told earlier, I don't feel very comfortable in water, but having a Life Jacket and five trustworthy friends by my side, I jumped.. and we floated for almost 4-5 kilometers in the river.. It was a wonderful feeling, floating in the water... heads up... watching the sky..... simply too good.

Time for a break, and some adventuruous friends of mine did some diving practice in the river... Back to the raft and another sailing session of 5-6 miles and we are at the end of our journey.

I will not forget those days.