Linux-Bangalore/2004 finally comes to an end. I attended exactly 3 talks. Slept through one, the other two were quite interesting and the rest were pure tech talks which frankly I can learn by reading up online. For me, LB has been an excellent place to catch up with loads of old friends, meeting people from online communities (LJ, LUG’s) for the first time (now you can associate a face to that person), people from my college etc. Many folks came up to introduce themselves and mentioned that they read by blog. Cool! Thanks for dropping by to say hi. There…

No wifi, no LAN, no GPRS, no Internet at LB2004. So jace jumps in, dials out via his reliance phone, makes his powerbook a wifi router and now the speaker lounge has wifi access. Yay to jace and may the force be with you. Now back to my slides. Remember : If you want to attend, my talk is at 10am tomorrow.

The trip to bandipur and kabini was *Excellent* and I already can’t wait to get back to this place. Though we could not see many mammals, we had a gala time spotting the birds, insects and best of all the appreciating the flora. Will post some of the lovely plant pictures later when I have time. Eventful week coming up. Me and my IISC prof are doing a combined keynote at the Storage Area Network CEO summit on Dec 1st. This will be my first major talk in front of a non-tech audience and I hope I can print my…

In 5 hours, I am off to Bandipur and kabini again. This time its a longer trip and I’m back again only on the weekend. I will have my laptop to transfer all my images at the end of the day, so hopefully that will mean more pics (== better pics). I hope to spend some time with the baby elephant again. Bye bye polluted world.

After many weeks of waiting, I finally have my laptop with me. Its a Thinkpad T41p and I just love the 1400×1050 resolution that comes with it. Once I have the GPRS connection setup to my phone, things should be rocking. I installed linux and almost everything works out-of-the-box. Still need to get hardware acceleration working for my video card and need to buy myself a wifi router. In other news, Rasmus lost his Thinkpad T42p at a PHP conference. Imagine, a PHP user stealing a laptop from the creator of PHP.

For the past 4 days, I’ve been having heavy lunch and dinner outside everyday coz of Diwali. Yesterday I had lunch at kamat yatrinivas (superb and heavy food for anyone who wants to try north Karnataka food ) and dinner at a friends place. My stomach is so full, I feel like a python that has just consumed a really large pig and now needs few weeks of hibernation. This year I have burst more crackers then ever before. No matter what people say about the noise/smoke pollution, I just love bursting crackers and to be honest I love the…

Every once in a while, you experience an event which will make you stop and makes you think about how beautiful things around you are. How you have been missing the gems of life in your everyday hectic schedule… Last weekend was like that. I was in bandipur forest and on monday morning, I saw a few hour old elephant baby taking its first steps in life. I saw the baby searching for her mother breasts. I saw the baby trying to figure out how to suck milk out of her mother, I saw the baby lose balance, I saw…

I will be speaking at Tuxedo 2004 this saturday ( Nov 6th ) at SJCE, Mysore. If you are around that area, do drop in.. we could have a mini-mysore-LJ-meet. Bandipur National park is just an hour’s drive from Mysore and I am resisting myself from going there 😀

Last couple of days have been really crazy. Been considering all my options and still not really decided on anything. I was floating the idea of starting sometime on my own, but after meeting people/VC’s etc, I realised that’s not such a viable option right now. And let me tell you this : if you want to start off, its better to start off yourself, then via a VC. The VC’s will drink every drop of your blood. Photography is moving slow and steady. I am hiring derherr as my manager. He has more contacts in the industry then anyone…

I shot the above picture at the Bannerghatta National Park. Though the tiger looks like a wild one, its a captive animal, which has been rescued from some circus somewhere. There’s a mad rush to see them as everyone in this country is infatuated with tigers. People come in hundreds everyday to go on the safari just to see the wild cat. Even in the wild forests, everyone wants to see the tiger and nothing else. It turns into this really distasteful circus. The people that have the best time are the ones that are just as happy seeing birds,…