Posts by: Kalyan Varma

After spending more then 2 weeks in the urban wildlife, heading back to the forests to spend a while there. I miss my monkey’s, the animals and the fresh air. Also elephant census is happening there today and tomorrow and I hope to work with the forest department on that. I got myself the Nokia 6600 yesterday. So far I’m quite happy with the phone and the interface is not as slow as I thought it would be. I’ve also gotten used to the weird shape and the new menu system. I’m yet to configure the phone for GPRS, but…

After the Air Deccan folks said it would take few hours to get the flight fixed, we (me and my sister) headed into Hyderabad city and wasted out time at a coffee shop in one of the city malls. Luckily there was a scheduled LJ meet of community in the evening. 5 min into it and the airline folks call me up to find out if I was interested in taking the 6:30pm flight to Bangalore. I jumped at it and rushed to the airport (thanks nash_the_basher and premshree for giving us a quick drop to the airport). I was…

I didn’t think this would ever happen to me, but my plane got hit by a birdie while coming from Vizag. Currently I’m stranded at the hyderabad airport and I should have been in Bangalore by this time. Don’t know when the plane will get fixed, but looks like it will be a long wait. I pity the airline staff. They are taking all kinda abuses from the passengers and some are even accusing the airline of worrying about the security too much. Thank god Thanks atul for getting me hooked on to GPRS. I hope the plane gets fixed…

I’m really really annoyed. All this while I was under the impression that Yahoo! mail displays thumbnails of jpg/gif attachments in email. Today I was reading few of my mails on yahoo and the page just went on and on and since I’m on a sucky link, this went on for more then 20 min. I did not realize this was happening as I was on an another browser tab trying to figure out why the other pages were loading slow. Then when the page finally loads, I right click on the thumbnail and select ‘Show Image’ and voila the…

I have *loads* of pictures which I’ve shot over the past couple of months and most of these are really really good ones. I’ve always wanted to post them here, but somehow was too lazy or had limited access to the net. Now I want to post all those pics online one by one, but I’m not sure if people are really fine with that. I mean many people still live in the dial-up world and I, for one find it really tough to load all my friends blogs when I connect from my blog. So I could either post…

I’m in Vizag this week on a family-work thingy. This place is so damn hot and sweaty, I feel like someone has poured some glue into my shirt. I don’t think I’ll ever used to the coastal climate and I personally think the Indian east coast is lot more hot and humid then the west coast. Atleast my old phone seems to be holding up a little now, so I actually might get to be online often this week.. and hopefully often enough for me to upload few of my recent pictures.

http://www.adtmag.com/article.asp?id=10959 Three entrepreneurs in San Diego, who are in the final throes of launching a company that will offer software development off the coast of California—three miles outside Los Angeles, to be specific. The three plan to buy a used cruise ship and station it close enough for a half-hour water taxi ride to shore, but far enough to avoid H1B jurisdiction. By stationing the ship in international waters, the company, called SeaCode, will be able to remain close to U.S. clients while picking and choosing IT talent from around the world—something that tightening H1B visa requirements have made difficult…

Last week my Sony Ericsson T610 totally gave up on me. The phone is going into this infinite reboot cycle and nothing seems to change that. This phone is probably the worst electronic device I’ve ever used. The UI is non-intuitive, the joystick hurts the fingers, the navigation is just way too slow and the reception is terrible. I’m currently using an old Nokia 3310 and man this phone rocks. The navigation is lovely and the speed at which I can look up address book etc is amazing. I really wish Nokia came up with a 3310 & bluetooth &…

I know, I know everyone will hate me after reading this, but here goes… While coming back from safari today evening we noticed a mongoose cross the main road and slip into a small hole. After coming back to the resort, me and malini (naturalist intern) went back to this spot in my car to see if the hole was its den. We got to see the mongoose and got some decent shots too. Just when we were about to turn back, a jeep come by and they told us they had seen a tiger some 10KM down the road….

So I finally got the much needed permission and managed to stay in the forest for a while. To start off, We (me, malini and narayana the local tribal guy) went there at 7pm and it was quite dark already. I parked the jeep on the road, about 10m away from the kill and waited. Last week I bought one of those LCD lights which you can strap on to your head and use for night treks and stuff. I thought this was a good time to use the new light, so I put it on my head and switch…