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.

I bought it - PV-GS150

I just realized that this is my third post in a row about camcorders. Seems like I am INTO camcorders now. It's a seasonal thing I guess. May be not. Just that when I make up my mind to buy something, that's all I think, see, read and write (only thing I write is this blog other than documents at my work) about. But this post is to say that I was not just preaching, if you bothered to read my previous post; I bought it. A Panasonic PV-GS150 3CCD camcorder. I bought it during Thanksgiving and I think I got a good deal. There might be people around who got better deals. But I am happy, with the deal and with what I bought.

Here are a couple of pictures of my own Panasonic PV-GS150:



I Left all the junk on my table so that you get an idea of its size.

The camcorder (Palmcoder? for Panasonics) came on UPS yesterday and lo, it was a snow day today in Seattle. Captured a lot of snowfall, not as great videos, but as a test to the new camcorder. It did very well. I even transferred those videos to my PC with the USB cable that comes in the box. The only complaint I have is the MotionDV Studio software that comes with it. It was a real disappointment.

If you have Windows XP or later OS, don't even bother to install this software. The Windows Movie Maker that comes with XP is an amazing piece of software, at least for tranferring videos from MiniDVs. The Windows Movie Maker lets you preview, control the connected camcorder (forward, rewind, pause...) and Start and Stop capture from the tape positions that you want to. Don't know the MAC Equivalent of this, but I bet there would be something as good or better on MAC.

That's it. Got to sleep now. It's past 12:00 midnight.

My advice to sub $1000 camcorder buyers

As I had written earlier, I am looking for buying a new camcorder. I never thought I will buy one, but I guess I am going to. Earlier when I was debating between a DSLR and a camcorder and I had done some camcorder research and had come up with this choice of Panasonic PV-GS70 3CCD camcorder (That was the first prosumer 3CCD camcorder ever). Even after a year later, panasonic seems to be the best choice to me. There was a time when Sony used to make really great camcorders. Even now they do, just that I hate the touch screen controls. Having to have the LCD view finder open and doing touch screen operations to adjust anything seems "yuck" to me. Don't know why sony doesn't understand this.

I did my gadget R&D, foucussed on camcorders this time again and here are my choices... Panasonic PV-GS250 or PV-GS150. I do not want to go down to PV-GS65 because I am quite particular about the lenses and of course Leica is anytime better than a Panasonic video lens.

Here's how they look and according to my aesthetics they look a lot cooler than anything else in the market in this range.
Panasonic PV-GS250 (Images from CNET.com) Panasonic PV-GS150






You could read detailed reviews of PV-GS250 and PV-GS150 at camcorderinfo.com.

Now if you don't care much about having a manual focus ring and an optical image stablilizer (which is indeed a great thing to have, though that has made this camcorder considerably larger than the other), you are definitely better off with a Panasonic PV-GS150. So that's my choice.

A particular reason why I love these Panasonic camcorders is that I am a manual control freak and these offer ALLOT of it, which no other in this category or price range can match. And the 3CCDs definitely make them stand apart in picture quality and color saturation. Panasonic has also worked on their low light shooting capabilities a lot from their initial models. What else could you ask for at this price range. But I would have loved to see the manual focus ring which the earlier (now not in production) PV-GS70.

Hope that helps someone around there.

Ultra zoom camcorder from Panasonic - PV-GS35

I love researching about the latest electronic gadgets more than buying them. Recently I came back to researching about camcorders and stumbled across this small ultra zoom camcorder PV-GS35 from Panasonic. I had been always a fan of Panasonic for making 3CCD camcorders available to low budget consumers from the time they released the PV-GS70. PV-GS35 is not a 3CCD camcorder like most of the other PV-GSs. But it's extraordinary optical range is what impressed me. I am sure this would be great to shoot something like "Birds in my backyard".

Read the CNET Review of Panasonic PV-GS70, 30x optical zoom camcorder.

The CNET editor's take is:
The Panasonic PV-GS35 is an ordinary MiniDV video camcorder with an extraordinary optical-zoom range.

Also, according to the CNET editor, Here are the goods:
"Superb zoom reach; solid video quality; excellent battery life; simple controls."
and the bads:
"Poor still quality; obscure icons for manual settings; odd shifting effect from image stabilization."

Hiking Shoes

After looking around almost a month for a good pair of Hiking shoes, I finally bought one yesterday. It is a hiking shoes it is waterproof and it is a "Coleman", my favourite hiking/camping equipment brand. It is good-looking too, at least as per me. Waterproof hiking shoes is a necessity if you hike in rainy places like Seattle and vicinity.

Here is my new hiking shoe.
And, btw, I took this picture in my living room and you could see a bit of my bicycle too.

Camping at Mt. Rainier

I live in Greater Seattle and being a trekking enthusiast have visited Mt. Rainier National park at least 4 times in last 2 years. But I have always entered the park through Nisqually Entrance and followed the same route to Paradise and beyond in all my previous visits. This time we decided to take the White River entrance and camp at White River Campgrounds. White River Campgrounds mostly are a first-come first-serve and hence the chances of getting a good campground in summer are high during peak summer season. You could find more information about various campgrounds within Mt. Rainier National Park and reservation information at National Parks Service Website (Opens in new window).

Pic 1. By the White River
We started early enough so that we were there at White River Campgrounds by 8.00am on Saturday morning, after two and a half hours of drive. Though it was peak summer camping season, we could easily find many vacant campgrounds and even pick one of our choice. You definitely have to be there before noon to get good camp sites, as we found that by evening all camp sites were taken.

Pic 2. Bridge over White River and Mt. Rainier
This campgrounds is near to the Sunrise point and by the side of the White River, as the name suggests. There are beautiful trails, easy and tough around the campgrounds. There is a long trail to Sunrise point as well.

We took a couple of trails there and spent peaceful evening by the White River.

Next day morning, we started early to the Sunrise point, which is about 20-30mts drive from the campgrounds, of course to catch the Sunrise. Beleive me, it was amazing. I bet not many people would have seen Sunrise and only Sunsets. My aim was to get a few good pictures, which I was successful at.

Pic 3. Sunrise Point.
The sunrise itself and the Mt. Rainier lit in the rising sun's colors were beautiful. After the sunrise watch, we came back to the campsite, spent some more time there and started back.

Pic 4. Moon over Mt. Rainier
We drove back through the roads inside National Park through Paradise and exited through the Nisqually entrance/exit.

A trip planner to visit Olympic National Park, WA, USA

I visited Olympic National Park recently. Trying to plan for the visit, I searched the internet for some ideas on how to make the best out of a visit to this national park which covers a whole wide variety of landscape and vegetation. You might say www.justfuckingoogleit.com(Opens in new window). But it was not as easy as that. After my visit and spending 3 days and 2 nights there, I feel I have a plan, which might help the first timers to plan their trip.

The Olympic Peninsula lies towards the north-west of the nearest big city Seattle. The first place and the best place to enter the Olympic National Park is from Port Angeles. At Port Angeles is the Hurricane Ridge visitor's center, from where you could pick up the national park maps to help you drive around for the next 2 days. You invariably have to take the trails to enjoy the beauty of the Park. Hurricane ridge offers magnificent views to the snow clad mountains and some trails through the Alpine Meadows. There are also camping locations around Hurricane Ridge.

Pic 1. Hurricane Ridge Visitors Center
Plan to stay in Port Angeles the first night. Reserving accomodation in advance would be ideal. It could get really tough to find an accomodation especially during the long weekends, especially in summer. If you could do reservation well in advance to get a place to stay in the historic Crescent Lake Inn, that would be awesome.

Pic 2. Crescent Lake
You could visit places around Hurricane Ridge during the first day of your visit. Don't miss to stop by and drive around Crescent lake and take Marymere falls trail and Sol Duc river trail.

Pic 3. Sol Duc river falls
Continue on US-101 east to the Pacific Ocean beaches the second day and plan for a stay at Forks. If it's only 2 days and 1 night trip, skip the stay at Port Angeles/ Crescent Lake and plan for stay at Forks.

Ruby beach and Realto beach are must visit ocean beaches. Cape Flattery (Neah Bay), the most north westerly point in the contiguous 48 states of USA is another place of interest. There is a scenic viewpoint that overlooks the Pacific Ocean and Tatoosh Island.

Pic 4. Ruby Beach
Of all the varied vegetations that Olympic Peninsula offers, I found the Hoh Rainforest the most amazing. With an annual rainfall of over 150 inches, Hoh rainforest is the home to diverse vegetation including big trees like western red cedars, Douglas firs, Sitka spruce and bigleaf maples. The ferns, mosses and lichens, which cover the trees, the ground, and every other stable surface with a thick, almost fantasy-like growth makes us feel we are in a fairy tale world. Rain Forest - Olympic National Park

Pic 5. The hall of mosses
There are 3-4 beautiful trails in the Hoh Rainforest of which the "Hall of Mossess" is one which you should not miss. The Hoh Rainforest vistors center offers detailed information on all the trails.

There are more Ocean beaches to visit as you continue south on US-101.
I would suggest driving south on US-101 and then I-5 N to reach back to Seattle instead of going back through Port Angeles.

This template looks cool

I deleted my old blog because I did not like how it looked. Here is the new one. Looks good eh!? Please take a look at my Photo Blog