Platonic

Image source: Sampada.net

Well known Kannada science and technology writer and music critic Prof. G.T Narayana Rao passed away this morning. He used to write science for the masses. His writings were appreciated for its style and simplicity used in language. Its a great loss for Kannada science literature world.

I got to know more about G.T.N after viewing podcast posted at Sampada and his views on technical writing had really moved me. I would like to follow his path and try my best to make technology reachable to all. That will be a small tribute to Prof. G.T.N from my end.

Read more :

• Ismail’s write up: My Father, Stars and G.T.N
  
• Sampada Podcasts (Audio and Video)
• G.T.N Profile and News updates @ Star of mysore
• Teacher’s Day: Yet another Routine Ritual - By G.T.N

Me and my friends wanted to spend some time outside the city and we decided to visit Mahadevapura bird sanctuary in Mandya district. Its a very small village with a 600 year old Shiva’s temple which is displayed in the below. A quite reservoir where in you get to see lots of bird and you can also see “Kaveri” river flowing quitely near the village. Most of the village population found to be busy in their farms. Childern were found near the river enjoying the afternoon. It was a bright sunny day.

By afternoon we were too hungry, after visiting the temple we decided to visit “Sriranga pattaNa” but we ended up landing in Mysore. Had nice lunch and finalized our plan to visit Chamundeshwari hills. You can see the gopura of chamudeshwari temple.

I learnt lots of driving tricks from my friend during this trip. Gained some confidence too on highways. It was all fun and adventure. By the end of the day I was so tired but had to drive back home on my own for 2 hours with in the city limits. Felt so releaved once I hit the sack.

Hard work is on

Sun set in Mysore

They look so pure…

I could not update my blog about my car after that day. As posted earlier days have been quite busy. Not because I bought a new car. The day I took my new car home on my own driving carefully on the rush hour in Marathahalli, Habbal I don’t know what really happened to me. I started driving with all josh and never felt that I’m driving the car for the first time in such traffic. I still had my learners license in my wallet.

I had to come back to my office that night as I could not pickup one of my friend who works in JP Morgan on ring road. It was all first time for me on main roads. Searching for some address on a rush street. I had to concentrate on traffic, signals, pedestrians, time, petrol in my tank (I had got only 2 liters of petrol in my tank).

When I reached office I could share some sweets with some night shift colleagues and then started off from there at around 12:30. Roads were damn empty and I found that to be an heaven as I had no fear driving in smooth roads.

Road blocks were found to be waiting for me at Binny mill near Mysore road. I had to take ‘U’ turn and get back to an another way to reach Majestic via “goods shed road”. But there was an another block near City railway station and I was tested to drive in a narrow way near “Ananda Rao circle” which is just apposite to City Railway station and City Bus stop. Once that is done, I could drive the rest of streatch with lots of ease. One of my office cab drive had come along with me for help incase I had any emergency. I could drive without any issues and he was a moral support for me at that time.

When I reached my home it was around 1:30 or 1:45 AM and my parents and my younger brother who were still awake to see my vehicle were too happy to see me driving the vehicle.

All helped my take my bags inside and we got less chance to talk that night as we had to go to temple next day morning to do pooja for the vehilce. I had a nice sleep for 3-4 hours that night and I was back online

Next day morning I took my family to near by Ganesha temple and did pooja for my new vehicle.

Wanna know what happened afterwards? An another long story. Will tell about that some other time. I can just give you an update here about the current status. I have touched 500 Km’s last sunday and currently my speedometer reads 810Km. Planning to hit 1000/1200 Km in next month first week and leave the vehicle for first service. (Oh yes, right now my vehicle is in service station. will give you an update on that too) Till then check out these pics.

In a corner of my mind there is some fear about exams from couple of days. Have to prepare my self for my MBA exams which will start from July 6th.

I never feared about exams, used to take it cool and crack them all though it used to be tough to meet the deadlines set for studying. Last few weeks have been quite busy. Hectic work hours and catching up with my regular time sheet has been quite hard.

Haven’t started preparing for exams yet. Today I opened my book. Got to revise few chapter which I had read a month ago and then continue with the rest.

Getting back to exam schedules, reading text books etc are fun but with work it sounds too hard. I have got some interest in learning the MBA subjects. To have a domain knowledge in “Management” its always good to get started with some management studies.

Looking for some guide to quickly learn “Financial Management”. I have to go through my own balance sheet, profit and loss account etc to master myself in this.

Wish me luck for my exams.

The most awaited web browser for internet freaks “Firefox 3″ is now ready. Its about to set the Guinness world record for Most Software Downloaded in 24 Hours. One of the lightest browser available on the earth. If you have never tried Firefox before, today is the best day.

Join your hands with firefox community to set this record.

Recording and Editing audio is a great art and sound engineers would love to have a tool which lets them do anything they would like to on their tune. Audacity is one such tools which brings in smile on any body who would like to play with Audio files. Its easy to use and configure. On top of all this its an OpenSource project released under GPL. This tool has been used in OpenMovie project as mentioned earlier in my post on “Big Buck Bunny”.

(Work environment of Audacity)

Audacity is built on lot many other opensource projects like expat,  OggVorbis, FLAC, LAME, SoundTouch, PortAudio etc which makes it rock solid. Try this out today for a sample audio editing task and you will get addicted to it. Audocious…

Opera released 9.5 last week. Its light and looks elegant and jazzy with new browser engine. Theme looks great. It also has got book mark synchronization now.   Opera is now thinking more about “fraud protection”. Find some fraud protection features added. More can be found out here. What i didn’t like in this browser is the unicode support and font configuration. I’m not able to read Kannada pages with ease. I might have to hack into the core to get it working. I will get on with this business later today….