Posts by: Kalyan Varma

Traveled to Ranganathittu and Mysore zoo last sunday along with my newly armed film camera. I shot my first 2 rolls of slide film and I am pretty happy with the results. The development and scanning costed me a bomb and the pictures are slightly underexposed and the contrast was too high ( this was due to the slide film I shot with ). The above picture was taken using my Nikon F80 with elitechrome kodak Slide film. Rest of the pictures along with the pictures from my Nikon D70 are here.

Sometimes I wish I had formal Computer Science background instead of Mechanical engineering. There are some things which you only learn in college course, which you’d never go out of your way to learn/master. Maybe its not too late yet.

Few folks in office decided to challenge me for karting and hence 6 of us went back to speedzone and had a proper race with prelims and finals. I managed to beat everyone again (including yathin) with the same 61 sec best lap. If you race there the next time, pick the kart No 6. I think thats the fastest one out there. In other news, I got my car back from servicing today. The brakes were totally worn off the the rattling noise that my car was making turns out to be a worn out bearing which cost me…

Like any other software company, we had the team outing today ( my actual team is very small here.. but I come under a bigger team within the company ) which was karting at speedzone followed by dinner. I’m amazed by the quality of SpeedZone. The track is really big and the karts have 13 horsepower engines instead of the 7 horsepower ones that you find elsewhere. Since the karts were powerful, it did not matter if I raced with a person who was 30kg’s lighter them I am .Surprisingly I made it to the finals and I managed to…

Jeremy‘s written an excellent piece on how people forget the ‘beta’ label on products. Traditionally we are familiar with beta software which we could install on our machine and try out the product before it went live.. and usually there was a gap of couple of months between a beta and the final launch of a product. With Internet services the same cycle continued, but some companies choose to stay in the ‘beta’ mode for longer then usual.. and the company leading the pack is Google. Almost all google products other then search have the ‘beta’ stamp on them. But…

Hellmuth ConzMeister of Photography Couple of weeks ago, I woke up one morning and decided I’ll learn the good-ol-fashioned film photography. From developing negatives to printing pictures and rest of the works in the dark room. Then I met Hellmuth Conz. Originally from Germany, he teaches photography for living in Bangalore. I signed up for the advanced course which includes dark room development and working with lighting etc. I completed the darkroom course last week(Only black&white) and now I can’t wait to shoot in film. Its amazing all the things you can do in the darkroom to your image.. and…

Did you hear the one about the programmer who outsourced his own job? A pseudonymous poster on slashdot wrote, “About a year ago I hired a developer in India to do my job. I pay him $12,000 to do the job I get paid $67,000 for. He’s happy to have the work. I’m happy that I only have to work 90 minutes a day, talking code. My employer thinks I’m telecommuting. Now I’m considering getting a second job and doing the same thing.” From This months Wired issue The Noodle cup is too hilarious.

Late evening yesterday with sun hitting her face on one side.

Lot of friends attrition lately. My good friends ashwinb and puttu left for their MS to USA this week (Good luck guys). My late night pool partner krishi quit yahoo yesterday. He is joining IISc later this month. My batchmates at work Nandu and (who can forget him) have moved to the sunnyvale office this month and tejaswi quit to pursue his Mtech at IIT. These folks pretty much make up the last bunch of people who have joined yahoo along with me straight out of college. Good luck for all you fine folks.

Except for the not-so-nice train journey, the trip was pretty good. I had to take a 4 hour stink of shit on the railway platform, sleepless night thanks to all the people snoring loud around me and the lack of people to talk to as everyone around me spoke only bengali. Decided to fly back and I’ve decided not to make any more long distance train journeys. Met all the “good” relatives with whom you can actually have a decent time and not the ones who annoy you like shit. Ate all the yummy home made sweets and visited all…