New bird discovered in India

So much study and research has been done in the field of ornithology that the discovery of a new species of bird is indeed sensational. A new bird discovery hasn't been made in over past half a century in the Indian Subcontinent. India is probably the subcontinent with the most rich avifauna in the whole world. The new bird which now named "Bugun Liocichla" was discovered recently in the Eaglenest wildlife sanctuary in Arunachal Pradesh, a north-eastern state of India. This bird was spotted first by a professional astronomer and amateaur ornithologist named Ramana Athreya 10 years ago. He spotted it again now (september 2005) and confirmed the identity of a species which is not been documented still.

This bird is named "Bugun Liocichla" being found in the forest where the Bugun tribe resides.

For more details find the paper by Ramana Athreya on this new bird.

Bike Helmet

I really wanted to get rid of my old ugly bike helmet and get a new one. Finally I did get one last weekend. Got it from Performance Bicycles, well, that's where I have bought my bike and all the accessories till now.
Some details for those who would be interested.
Brand: Giro,

Model: Indicator (Sport)

Size: Adult (Universal Fit) 54-61cm, 21.25"-24"

It says it is a mountain bike helmet. But I couldn't find any difference between this and other so called "road" helmets. Actually I found this lighter than some road bike helmets that I found there and this looks neat too.

Pictures from Leavenworth trip

I uploaded the pictures from our trip to leavenworth to my web album. Feel free to browse my other albums as well. And I do have some decent pictures in my Photoblog as well, not of leavenworth, but some selected pictures from my collection.

Leavenworth, WA

It's a very long time since I posted something here. We had been to Leavenworth, WA, which is a Bavarian village and an interesting tourist destination. The route from Seattle to Leavenworth on US-2 through the Snoqualmie & Mt. Baker national forest is really good.
Here are some pictures...

I am having some problem with uploading pictures... I just managed to do one. Will do more in my next post.

Raw Sugar

Thought I will introduce a website which I use quite extensively for those who didn't know about this. Do you use multiple computers (say at work and at home)? Have you ever thought, "oops... i have that website bookmarked/added to favourites at my home computer"? I faced this many times and thought it would have been great to have my bookmarks stored online so that I can access it anywhere? Though I came to know later that this was an already solved problem by popular sites like http://del.icio.us and recently by Windows Live favorites (http://favorites.live.com/). But I found RawSugar much better and ingenious that all of this. It adds tagging and hierarchical relationship between tags and hence search within everybody's tags to the bookmarks stored on internet. You could make your bookmarks visible to yourself or to everybody. This is indeed cool.

Here is how RawSugar folks describe their service themselves.

RawSugar is a free service that provides the best navigation and search for directories, blogs and websites. Our service adds hierarchical relationships to tagging and merges everybody's hierarchies to bring human intelligence to finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. What previous tagging services did to share favorite sites and pages, hierarchies with tagging does to topic-driven navigation. There are millions of blogs and websites on the web that cover specific topics and RawSugar can make all their material findable with a better way to explore the web by navigating topics of interest.

Check it out. By the way, the site is http://www.rawsugar.com and yeah, you would need to create an account. They also have browser buttons and FireFox add-ons which makes it easier to add websites to RawSugar. You could import your existing bookmarks from Internet Explorer and Firefox as well.

More bicycle

My bike

Here is the picture of my bike which I said I will put up, in my previous post. See more pictures in my later posts.

Bicycling - My new hobby

As always, I keep discovering new hobbies and interests. After all, that's what keeps you going. Biking (aka. Bicycling) is my most new found hobby. I have been doing quite a bit of long distance biking recently (at least as per amateaur standards). I used to have a $60 bike bought from Target. But once I got serious about this hobby, I went ahead and bought a "Fuji" road bike. For those this makes sense, it is an entry level road bike with Shimano (Sora, Tiagra) components and has an aluminum frame and carbon fiber front fork as well. I have done quite a bit of reading on serious training on improving bike fitness as well, and am sincerely trying to put that into practice.

You can see my cycling statistics (updated as an when I go cycling) through the link on the sidebar of this blog. I am writing this while at work (taking a break :-)) and hence do not have any pictures of my bike to post. I will put it up once I reach home, as I have it on my home laptop.

For those who are newly into this hobby and planning to get a decent road bike, I offer some free advise, if you are interested. Feel free to post any questions in the comments of this post. I had done quite a bit of research before I went ahead and busted $700 for an entry level road bike. I have also put up some links to some interesting web sites in the "cycling" section on the side-bar.

I am not here even to attempt "Tour de France". But definitely I want to do a century not too long from now. Till now the longest single ride I have done is ~21 miles at an average speed of 11.1 mph.

Update (3/16/2007): I have done multiple half centuries now. The longest being 54 miles. I have also managed to do a 30 miles ride at an average of 14.3 mph. Being the winter months, I had been off the bike for a while. But the indoor trainer that I got helped keeping me bike-fit even being indoors. Now summer is coming, and I am all excited to get back on the bike.

Our baby girl

Making a post after a very long time. Not that I had been way too busy. Just procrastination. Also not that I have not been posting anything at all, as you will find out if you read past. We had a baby girl (we named her "Saira") on 16th of Feb 2006. Yes, she is more than 2 months old now. I created a blog for her http://sairasajeev.blogspot.com and have posted a whole lot of pictures there. Check out this blog to see our baby.