Time is an illusion

Been a long time since I wrote anything here. Life’s been stagnant - in many ways, and maybe the word “uninteresting” is a good summary. Today is a lazy Sunday, and I am home reading up links on the www. Been looking at the travel photographs by Christopher Herwig - mostly of Central Asia. Most of it is amazing.

And among the “better” things, I dumped digital. Well, I had Canon digital for 2.5 years, with the EOS 300D, and I do have a D70s body(which I don’t use all that often), but I bought a used Nikon F5, to replace the old and battered F90 body. The F90 was my best camera whie it lasted, and it has been through a lot. And I am liking the F5 - and still learning its many, many features. Walking around with a f/2.8 lens is so much better than the silvery Canon body. All I need now is a nice lil slide scanner

I logged onto Yahoo Mail’s web interface today, and got a pleasant surprise.

After agreeing to test the new Beta Mail, I was asked if I wanted to configure an alias/secondary email to my already existing $firstname@yahoo.com address - and was taken to a neat looking new interface.

What I like with about the new interface is the ability to

• view the message in the bottom pane
• open the message in a new sticky window
• open the message in a popup window(which can be made sticky)

There is one catch however.. I tend to use Mozilla Firefox most of the time, and this new beta “crashed” Firefox .. so all my experiences are with MS Internet Explorer.

All in all, changes which have been long overdue.

Downloaded the second issue of Beyond Shotz. This is a wonderful new photography magazine put together by enthusiasts from Bangalore.

Here are a few photos from the Mumbai Marathon 2006. The Flickr link for the same, here. The run started around 7:30am and there were about 20-25 thousand runners. Was loads of fun.

Here are photos of the winners.

Travelling in the locals at night in Mumbai, can be refreshing. A few days ago, I was returning from work on the Harbour Line local trains, and drifting in and out of that blissful state called drowsiness. Almost empty compartments - put your feet up, and wait for your station.

On this night, I noticed bright lights along an empty stretch of road, just outside the Chunabhatti station. Some sort of fair - music, hawkers, and a large ferris wheel which was more or less the big attraction - decked up in white light, and going round and round crazily. Somehow, the image stuck - and the next morning, I decided to take my camera along, so I could cart off a shot the next night when the train slowed down at the station. And I did just that.

The wheel was turning round and round the next night too, only there was no one in the carriages. An off day at the fair perhaps.

My first digital camera was a Canon EOS 300D, which I bought early in 2003. But as time wore on, I have’nt really been comfortable with it, and have more or less been using my Nikon F90x with slide film.

And, when I saw the newly announced Nikon D200, I had little doubts in adding it to my list of “desirables”. One review at DPreview.com and another plugging review by Ken Rockwell. Couple of pictures of the camera, taken from DPreview.com

And the good thing about it is the fact that I can use my old Nikon lenses. Something that I miss with the Canon - even though I have 3 lenses for the camera. Not really sure when I can buy it, but it looks really nice - feature-wise. First comes the laptop, let’s see when I can budget another gadget buy

After a little bit of research, I finally decided on what notebook I am going to get.. in the next week or so.

It is a Compaq Presario B1803TU. Here are a couple of pics.

The specs of the laptop in decreasing order of my selection criteria are :

• Weight - 1.85 kgs
• Processor - 2 GHz, Pentium M
• RAM - 512 MB
• Battery - 4 cell Li-ion. 3 hours operation
• Hard Drive - 80 GB
• Connectivity - Intel based wireless, Bluetooth, ethernet etc
• Screen - 12.1″ WXGA with Brightview
• Resolution - 1280 x 800
• Optical Drive - Dual Layer DVD±RW/R
• Graphics - Intel Media Accerator 900 (128 M shared)

I tried searching for reviews to check for compatibility Linux, but the only one I could find was a general product review on zdnet. It appears this is a cheap line of laptops that has been released with Asia as the target market. But oh well, let’s see.

In financial news, the BSE Index crashed below the Rs 7800 mark. And this a good article on Amazon’s slump, speculating if Amazon’s grandoise plans are resulting in a loss of its faithful base - users and consequently investors.

Netvibes is a nice little ajax enabled website.

Allows you to add newsfeeds - from its own list of feeds, or any custom RSS/Atom feeds of your choice. In addition, you can maintain web-notes, a Weather box courtesy of Weather.com , websearches from Google, MSN, Yahoo and Wikipedia, and RSS feed from your GMail account. Pretty nifty as a personal start page in the browser.