Katrina!

No, wait. Don't get excited. This is not about the Kaif girl in India. This is about the huge hurricane named 'Katrina' that is hitting New Orleans as I type this! The met department is about to call this the 'American Tsumani'. This is one of the series of interestingly named hurricanes that hits the US coast evey year (George, Dennis, Ivan, etc). It is normally the Sunshine state - Florida that welcomes all these evil hurricanes and packs them off to other states to cause further damage.

Katrina was named a 'Category 5 hurricane' (evil witch from hell) till yesterday, but apparently today it has subsided to 'Category 4 hurricane' (just plain witch from hell). I guess the Mayor of New Orleans will be happy : "Hurray, Katrina is gonna submerge our city in only 20 feet of water, not 22 feet as we had feared!"

It was nice to see the amount of preparation that goes behind welcoming the evil hurricane. Most of the people are evacuated from the cities in the path of the hurricane, unless you are a media person, in which case you will be travelling INTO these cities with your video camera! It was also very nice to see the amount of responsibility shown by the city Mayor in handling the situation. This no doubt keeps the death toll low. I heard a CNN report about a huge hurricane that hit New Orleans in 60s that caused, quote, "more than 60 deaths". Apparently it is a record so far for the city. Our Mumbai broke the record by 10s of times very recently. That shows how badly prepared we are to face natural calamities. Life is cheap in our country because we have so many people, so apparently we don't care.

We have a trip coming up this weekend and I am wondering if Katrina is going to create any problem in our trip. In case YES, I hope it will at least be the other Katrina ;-)

Barsana Dham

Today I had been to Barsana Dham. It is a spiritual centre and US centre of Jagadguru Kripalu Parishat. It is located a few miles outside Austin among a lot of greenery and calm atmosphere. It houses a Radha-Krishna temple and meditation halls among beautiful landscaping and ponds. Their way of worshipping resembles the ISKCON way, involving singing Bhajans and dancing. Today they were celebrating Janmashtami, so it was grand.

I am not really very religious, so the place did not make a significant impact on me. But I am amazed at the following it gets from both Indians and natives here. The dedication shown by a few people there really surprised to me no end. Another interesting thing I have observed is the effect of music on devotees. Most of these worshipping methods involve a Bhajan that starts slowly and picks up pace and volume with time. By the time it ends, many of the devotees reach a state of mind that cannot be explained very easily.

My thoughts about religion and God are not in line with their practices, hence I must restrain myself from judging their practices. However, another thing there today was totally in line with all my beliefs - free food. At any point of time, the food court was drawing two times as many people as the main hall where today's festivities were on. I could see that a number of people were there to enjoy a good evening socializing with others, enjoying free food and having a walk in the serene surroundings of Barsana Dham. I call it a valid purpose in itself, because I am part of that gang ;-)

BTW, their websites are IE only :-( They strictly prevent you from getting in if you are using any other browser. Also, while their website is loaded, (really! I am not making this up) it disables copy-paste functionality on the entire OS. Very surprising to see the lengths they go to safeguard their copyrighted stuff, especially considering it is a spiritual/religious organization. However, I tried to load their website on Firefox in Linux, and bingo, it went through :-)

Bored as hell

This work week has been one of the slowest moving ever. I have not been this bored at work in a very long time. With no plans for the weekend, I expect the same sullen mood to reign over the weekend as well. As a result I may blog a lot.

Oh, I added word verification for comments to my blog. If you don't know about this, it is a simple mechanism to ensure a human is entering data into a web form, rather than a web bot. Pretty common in sign-up processes on many websites now-a-days. Yesterday within a few minutes of posting my new blog entry there were 8 comments to it. Just when I was wondering how my blog became so famous so fast, I saw that all of them were unsolicited junk from automated bots. one was screaming that I had won a Gateway laptop, some wanted to give me millions of dollars for no good reason whatsoever, and one desperately wanted to sell me cheap viagra :) It was a reminder about the importance of network security, spam assassin software, etc. It is a bloody deadly world out there on the web.

The Texas State Capitol

Though Austin is only the fourth largest city in Texas (Houston, Dallas and San Antonio are bigger), it is the capital of the state! Since it is the capital, it gets to have the Capitol building that houses the state legislature. The Texas State Capitol in Austin is one of the most beautiful buildings in Austin. All the modern spanking new buildings around it only help to enhance, not diminish it's beauty. Though Texas state has a history of around 150 years, this building was built in 1888. Made of red granite rock available right here in Texas, this is the second largest among the capitol buildings in the US, second only to the national capitol in Washington, D.C. However, it is taller than the national capitol!

We have Vidhana Soudha in Bangalore which can be compared to the Capitol in beauty and elegance. However, what sets Capitol far ahead is the ease of access to general public. Almost all rooms of the fully air-conditioned building are accessible to visitors, free of cost. The Government has also arranged for free guided mini-tours inside the building. Capitol sits in a vast campus covered with green lawns. A small museum near the Capitol lets visitors learn a lot about the history of Texas. This weekend I went to the Capitol late in the evening at around 10PM and found that the simple flood-light arrangement enhances the beauty of the building even further. I just sat for a long time admiring not just the building, but the system here that allows such an easy access to the state legislature building to the general public. Could that ever happen at Vidhana Soudha?

(Click on the pictures to see bigger pictures)

Google 'talk'

I, as well as many of my friends are normally suckers for anything that Google dishes out. So when I heard about Google's latest IM client (www.google.com/talk), I jumped at it immediately. It is not a YM-beater at the moment, but knowing Google, I expect it to improve drastically in the coming days. However, one crib about Google remains - it sometimes leaves Linux desktop users high and dry. They did a great job with supporting standardised interface in Gmail and Blogger, but we are yet to see Picasa, Desktop search and Google Earth being ported to Linux. I am sure they can, if they really want to. But they are on good track with Google talk - it supports Jabber protocol, so our good old Gaim works just fine for text messages.

Six flags

The last weekend was quite eventful. We rented a Chevy classic, which makes enough sound to scare the driver whenever he presses down the gas too hard. We went to the Six Flags at Fiesta, a huge entertainment/theme park near San Antonio. I define these parks as places where we pay a hefty fees and in return they scare the shit out of us! I still get goosebumps when I remember the scary rides I 'enjoyed' in Las Vegas a few years ago. That is when I had decided that "If I want to get scared so much, I will rather drive on Bangalore's roads". So I skipped some of the scariest ones in Six Flags, like the "Superman Tower of Power". Call me a sissy if you want.

Six Flags houses one of the most famous rides in the world, a huge wooden roller-coaster called "Texas Giant". If you watch History channel regularly, you would have seen this! But it was closed for maintenance this weekend. One of the rides, I think it is called "Texas Tornado", is insanely scary. It uses a huge vertical swing to swing people hundreds of feet in a circular motion. In case there is a mishap when it is swinging at it's top speed, I think it will behave like a huge catapult, hurling people hundreds of feet away, possibly just out of Six Flags area. It could be good idea to build a hospital just at that place, they can save on ambulance costs. This is how a conversation there may go:
Doctor : "Nurse, any new patients today?"
Nurse : "Hmm... Let me see... (looks into the sky towards Six Flags with a binocular).. Yes, I can see one coming in"
A HUGE THUD... and the doctor is now busy.

The other thing about last weekend was the temperature was in low 100s (roughly 40C), so that was taking fun out of rides at Six Flags. If the women there looked hot, this was the reason behind it :-) But for the same reason men and everything else were hot too, so we had to be careful ;-)

Testing blogging thru mail

Hari, Seema, I'm trying out blogging by mail. I agree that it is quite
convenient, I stand corrected. I will also try the Word plugin when I
boot to Windows. Thanks!

Lotsa links

Added a number of links to the.... you guessed it, 'links' section of this blog. Mostly they are links to other blogs - result of the new-found interest in blogging among my friends. Many of them are trying novel ways blog - e-mail, MS-Word, etc. Only one question comes to my mind about these funky ways to blog - "Why?".
My own album on fotopic, of course, is the first link. Hari's blog was the first blog among us. You can expect any topic here from nerdiness to Bangalore's traffic. Ananth blog is advertised in a negative sort of way - 'Random' thoughts of an 'uninteresting ' 'teetotaler'. Too many negatives here, huh? Comes with a disclaimer as well ;-) Chinmay's blog is now confirmed to be alive, with the second post in. Random scribbles?? Seema's blog scared me first - I read it as Mind Read, but it turns out to be just Mind Speak. Hopefully her own mind. Last link is "Get Firefox". This is for those who are stranded 2 years back in time, stuck with IE. Girish too has a blog and a noble intention behind it, but I can say it is alive only after I see the second post.

Independence day!

Last Sunday evening, as India was celebrating Independence day, I was doing something that would have made Gandhi proud - I walked miles together, not because of my patriotism, but because I had lost my way trying to explore some place near Austin's town lake. If you know how Austin's weather is in summer months, when the everyday temperature reads like FM station frequencies - (97.8, 100.3, 103.1, etc) you know that walking miles on hot asphalt is not among the most comfortable things to do. I must have lost at least a pound during that walk. But I found my lost pound at Pizza hut in the evening. This is one of my lost possessions I would have loved not to find back!

Speaking about Independence day celebrations, The India Community Centre, Austin is arranging India's independence day celebrations this weekend. It should be good to see people, who have gained their independence from India, celebrate India's independence day. I wonder if the Indian communities in England too celebrate it. Imagine Indian community chief in London (who, btw, would have taken up UK citizenship two decades ago) saying: "This is the day we got rid of the British". Well....

Be-ka(ca)r in America!

Some of you may know how this feels. Living in a small city in the US and not owning a car. If you don't know how it feels, I will explain. Imagine you are in Bangalore and you don't have a car or a bike (I know it is hard to imagine that, but give it a try). Also imagine auto-rickshaw-wallahs are on strike and so are 95% of the BMTC drivers. You should be getting the picture now. Now you just need to imagine that the nearest grocery store is 2 miles from home :)

In my previous visit to the US I had not lived a single day without a car at home. I had never boarded a city bus in the entire 1 year I lived here. But this time around, no escaping from that. We only rent a car on some weekends when we feel like driving a bit. Luckily my office is right next to my apartment, so it is faster to walk to work than drive.

To give it's due credit, Austin does have a fair network of city bus service. But the biggest complaint is that there are no buses to our place late in the evening. By late evening, I mean 6PM! But when the buses do ply, they make an enjoyable ride. Neat, nice, nearly-empty buses with good AC and cheerful drivers. Just 1 Dollar gets you to ride for 24 hours. Surely the bus service should be one of the biggest loss-making companies around here! Add to that, there are these 'Ozone action days' when the ride is free. I really don't know how these ozone action days help ozone, I have started liking ozone now!

Ping-pong

I and Murali found Table Tennis tables with nobody to use them. So we decided to make the best use of the opportunity to achieve mastery over this game. We were no strangers to the game. I was already well-versed with it, having played it as many as three times in my life. Murali was even better than me, having played, probably, twice as many times!

Our first task was to buy TT bats and balls. After having browsed all the sections in the nearby sports superstore, including the entire treadmill section, all of basketball equipments, etc we finally stood in front of TT section trying to decide which one we should buy. The range offered was quite good. But for seasoned professionals like us, making this choice was easy - just find the cheapest! After we found the 10-dollars full-set, we were still wondering who would buy the higher priced ones - some of them as much as 40 dollars for just one bat. We found a Chinese-looking guy picking up one of that and exclaimed "Moron! He must be blind or totally dumb. Why should one pay 1700 Rupees for a TT bat!".

We are quite happy with the way our games are going. Sometimes others join us for a game. However, our cheapo bats can't understand all their professional top-spins, cuts, smashes etc, in fact such extravagant shots end up being counter-productive! So they try all the stylish shots, start cursing the bats with some choicest words (like @%$!@#&@#@ and @#$$*&!@!) and end up losing the game to us :)

We have now learnt to trust the intelligence of Chinese-looking guys with anything related to TT. However, we are not complaining too much about our TT equipment, as we are winning games!

Didn't I tell you?

Didn't I tell you everything is bigger in Texas? Look at this Texas Lone Star. I guess this star should be called 'Superstar'. Rajnikanth, serious competition here.
(This Texas Lone Star is in front of the The Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum, Austin.) It also houses the only Imax in Austin, but it mostly runs only documentaries and informative films.

Everything is bigger in Texas!

This is something you will see in quite a few places in Texas, especially on t-shirts: "Everything is bigger in Texas". Well, I don't know about 'everything', but the state surely is and the vehicles people drive surely are.

The state is too big. Being in Austin, which is almost at the center of the state, one needs to drive at least 5-6 hours to reach the state border in any direction.

Texans seem to love trucks. They want the biggest, baddest trucks even though they use it only to go to their office and HEB/Wal-mart. I think pulling a huge truck out of a narrow parking lot gives them a sort of kick. The people who park their shiny new BMWs/Hondas/Toyotas next to these trucks pray to the God the most! Some of the trucks, like Ford-350 and Dodge Ram 3500 are obscenely big. They are big enough to be run as city buses in Bangalore ;-) If Indians continue their new-found obsession with big cars, they may eventually sell such trucks in India. If that ever happens, I think bike riders will consider passing UNDERNEATH these monsters, just like they pass all around the small cars now. "Hey, how did the underbody of my Dodge truck get dents?"

Bought a digicam!

I bought Canon A520 digital camera last week. Quite happy about it so far. It has more 'picture modes' than the number of places I am likely to visit while in US. The tradition, followed all over the world, predominantly by males, when they buy a camera, is to post a picture taken in 'macro' mode using that camera. No, this is not about show-off. Just following an age-old tradition. So here I go:

Many moods of Nishanth

This is Nishanth, my sister's son born in March. He was astonished to see the camera for the first time from such a close distance, but he has gotten used to it now.
What is that strange thing you are poking at my face? I have never seen it in my entire life (all of three months) before. Camera?!? What's that?

Oh my GOD! this camera thingie looks quite scary!

I better start crying right away to save my life.

Ha! that's it? Camera doesn't hurt? Time to celebrate then!