Microsoft Ad 2 - Jerry Seinfeld Bill Gates (New Family)

Microsoft Ad 1 - Jerry Seinfeld Bill Gates (Shoe Circus)

Mulshi Dam, Lake and Waterfall... Pune, India

Drove to Mulshi this weekend (19th July, 2008).
Started from home at 9:30am.
Route: Wanawadi -Pune University-Pashan-right turn at Chandni Chowk-Pirangut-Paud-Mulshi. ~60kms from Wanawadi to the waterfalls (don't know the name). Stopped at Chandni Chowk for a coffee from Cafe Coffee Day.
The road to Paud (Pirangut Ghat) is a toll road with Rs 15 one way and Rs 22.5 for both ways for car.

The route was very scenic with the mountains all green with the monsoons. Stopped at multiple places on the route enjoy nature's beauty.

Reached the falls by 12:30pm. Had fun there. There are routes to trek up the falls to higher falls.
It rained too, while we were there, which added to the fun. Stopped by the side of the lake also for for the view and some pictures. Started driving back at 2:20pm. Reached home by 4:15pm.

Shivneri Fort, Junnar, Maharashtra

I'm back with a post on my latest hiking, after a very long time. This was to Shivneri Fort, near Pune. The trek was organized by the TRDDC trek club, ie folks from work.
- Started from TRDDC, Pune at 7:30am (though it was planned for 6:30am).
- Stopped for breakfast at Manchar at around 9:30am. (Upma breakfast. Others had Kanta poha, Chole poori, Sheera).
- Continued journey after breakfast and reached the bottom of the fort (not the main entrance) by 11:30am, looked for a route up (asked some locals to find the route), and started climbing.


- Reached the top by 12:30pm. Though it was a short climb, it was pretty taxing due to the steep incline. We rested for a while in a cave on the way up. There was a portion of the climb where there were steps cut on the steep rockface and ropes fixed for holding to, while climbing up.

- Walked around the fort, had sandwiches lunch.
- Came back through the normal fort entry route passing all the gates.
- Took our bus back from the main entrance.
- Reached back TRDDC by 6:20pm.

Walk the line

I watched this movie yesterday and I had been reading about Johnny Cash and June Carter since then. Also watching lots of videos on YouTube of their performances.
Here is something which I found really interesting - An interview with Johnny Cash and June Carter, recorded in 1981 I think.

San Juan Islands

Visited San Juan Islands (Friday Harbor and Orcas Island) last weekend.
Here's some pictures from this trip:

New Humming Bird species discovered

Seems like new bird species discoveries are being made at a higher rate normal. This is the third new species discovery that I've seen in past 1 year.


News Clip and picture credit to MSNBC:

BOGOTA, Colombia - There's a new chirp in the forest but it may be choked by the slashing and burning of trees by coca farmers, researchers said.

The Gorgeted Puffleg, a rare hummingbird that boasts a plumage of violet blue and iridescent green on its throat, has been discovered living in the cloud forests of southwestern Colombia, researchers announced.

The species — known by its scientific name Eriocnemis isabellae — was confirmed by two of the world's leading specialists on the puffleg, Karl L. Schuchmann, curator of ornithology at Zoological Research Museum A. Koenig in Germany, and F. Gary Stiles of the Natural Sciences Institute at the National University of Colombia.

Read full article from MSNBC

Mt Si [Little Si] (May 5, 2007)

Route:
I-90E, Exit 32, North Bend Way, Mt. Si Rd.

Trail:
Distance - 4 miles one way
Elevation - 3790 ft/1155 m (Excluding the Haystack)
Elevation Gain -

Trip:
Started at 8:00am from Bellevue, WA. Reached the trail parking lot by 9:10am. Started hike by 9:15am. Reached the top by 12:45pm. Started back at 1:40 and reached back the parking lot by 3:15pm. Had our late subway lunch at Northbend at 4:00 and drove back home.

Rattlesnake Ledge Hike (Apr 28, 2007)

Route:
I90E, Exit 32, Right on Cedar Falls Rd till the trail head.
Trail:
Distance - 2 miles one way (4mi roundtrip)
Elevation - 2213 ft
Elevation Gain - 1200 ft

Trip:
It was a family outing. Started at 11. Started hike at 3:30pm from the trail head. Reached up on the ledge by 4:25pm. Approximately 1 hr to reach the top. Started back at 5:00 and was back to the base by 5:45pm.

More toys

It's been a very long time since I made any post. I have acquired many new things which are worth writing here. 1. A new digital camera, upgrade from my Rebel XT to Rebel XTi, 2. A new lens - Canon 16-40/f4.0 L, 3. An indoor bike trainer, to keep biking during the winter months and 4. A Mio DigiWalker Portable Navigation Device. Watch this blog for some details and pictures of these new toys.

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.

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.