The beauty of summer is the fact that there is a winter that precedes it!

Yet another rainy weekend, not quite the way I planned it. WIth laziness ably aided by the World Cup (football/soccer), I decided to stay indoors. The much awaited match between the football-nation USA and the soccer-nation England (although I’m yet to agree with the usage of the terms soccer and football) ended in a rather atypical draw, esp. due to a lackluster display of attack by the English team pulled down to the ground by the weight of expectations! With my team – The Azzurri – yet to enter the arena, I might just have to stop working for the latter half of tomorrow, and stare at the big screens cleverly placed with its back towards me, at the office. Amidst all this, when I finally decided to step out this weekend, down came the Philadelphia rains, pouring down on me and I had to be content with a glass of margarita and an 8oz steak!

So here is to an earlier weekend, when the rains were a little more forgiving as I decided to take a stroll down the Valley Forge National Park – where the great battles were fought in the late 17th century. As I walked through the battle fields, I chanced upon a roadside cannon, perhaps reminiscent of the blood shed that took place on the grounds where it stood.

It was never an easy catch! A pre-order that started a month before its launch date, a case which arrived 3 weeks before the actual product, almost prompting me to judge the “book by its cover”; add on yet another week of delay on the launch on the 3G version of it, when “ships by late April” seemed like the daily “proverb” that kick started my day alongside a dose of caffeine and it finally arrived on 30th April 2010, keeping the promise on “late april” – iPad (wifi + 3G) , yet another member in my Apple Family!

While it did take me a month to completely free myself from the habitual tapping on a laptop that had almost become a part of my system (I must admit, I did experience some serious withdrawal symptoms, at the early stages of quitting), the iPad did manage to replace a vast spectrum of the work that I did on it – from browsing to blogging, from spreadsheets to presentations and even a shell (although not locally, yet) to a shelf (book shelf at that)! Being completely unbiased was never an option for me. But I must say a well written critique would perhaps sound biased anyway! So while I can go on and on praising this gadget for the way it has changed my lifestyle so far – both at work (with this being my notetaker at the meetings and a paperless replacement for the sticky notes that took a liking to my monitors at the office) and at home (being my diary, Internet, blog, book shelf and a partial technology playground through “VNCs and SSHs” of course) – for once let me try and see if I can be on the other side of the fence.

One of the applications that I was most certainly looking forward to, did disappoint me – iBooks. While the application as such gave an experience that was amazingly close to holding a real book (sans the smell of course), the store has been a huge disappointment so far, with the selection of books restricted mainly to NY Times bestsellers, which never was a choice for me. Having said that, the free Amazon Kindle application did turn out to be a life saver. Amazon did manage to make a smart move to let itself free on a gadget that was bound to kill its hardware. And this would keep the Kindle market place thriving even more!

Wise men from the mountains say, a revolution is a forcible overthrow of an existing system. So while iPad is yet to prove itself to be magical, it certainly is revolutionary, threatening to kill the existing establishment where a combination of laptops and smartphones ruled! Now turning it around again, with Apple’s traditional characteristic of bringing down its own market on its existing products through the introduction of a new product (an example being iPods through iPhones), I do see a potential for iPads to have a go at the iPhones; what with the unlimited data plan on it plus a cheaper voice only option as a phone, working out to be way more cost efficient than an iPhone plan.

BUT then came yet another ios (read iOS, that “surprisingly” rhymed with IOS). With ATT making me eligible for an early upgrade, I guess the family is getting ready to welcome yet another member! And yeah, there is a Nexus One soon to find its way in as a black sheep too!

Technology never ceases to amaze me!

Offbeat: I started writing this two weeks back and somewhere along the road, back then, there was a big red board that said “block”! I saw no sign which would let me take a deviation and join back on track at someplace further up the road. They call it a “writer’s block” but I would just term it as the laziness to type more than a few sentences on a keyboard, when all I did at work, was tapping away to glory!

I know, a customary update for a new Apple product has been long pending. But while I work on that, here is a snippet of a new hobby that I picked up through this new gadget – The Starry Art, thanks to Gravilux developed by Scott Snibbe. And here is a highly amateurish version of my first attempt!

From Starry Art through Gravilux

Apart from this, iPad has vastly improved my reading these days, with kindle app doing what it is best known for – delivering books at the quickest! More on these, on my next post! And oh! This post has been updated through my iPad. I guess it does call for a little bit of discretion to flaunt

Why is a “random” non-numeric value entered through a QWERTY keyboard always “asdf” ?!

I’ve been known to make impulse decisions, when it came buying things. However it has always been rare that I trusted solely on my impulses on anything else. And when it came to adventures, I would say I liked to plan at least a tiny bit before I took the plunge. For this same reason, when I decided to hop onto to an R44 Clipper , which stood majestically in front of me, I myself was taken aback!

Everything about the trip was unplanned. A sunny morning that yesterday turned out to be, seemed to indicate a perfect weather all day long and we decided to travel down to the beach. A quick tour around the web world to nail down on the closest beach pointed us to a 70-mile drive to the “Trump City” of the east – the Atlantic City . Having already wasted half a day, through the process of waking up to a lazy Saturday morning, we did not give this a second thought. Relying on the en-route technology aids, we jumped into the car and soon hit the roads.

Although there were indications of an impending surprise, through the occasional disappearance of the sun beneath the mildly dark clouds, little did we expect a strong gush of cold wind to greet us as we park the car and got out! “Wading” through the strong currents, we reached the beach and what we saw was barrens!

Slightly disappointed by the laziness to check the weather before heading out, we decided to take a walk down the pier, before the winds became unbearable. And there it stood in all its majestic elegance, at the farthest end of the pier! We walked towards it, with our eyes fixed on nothing but the clipper. It was as if all of us thought alike. At the counter, the cashier took down our weights, a random number that we told him out of the blue, which I strongly believe was completely off, at least in my case. After another 5 minutes of cash and credit formalities, we were handed our tickets to our 3 minutes of being in the air!

As I stepped out to walk towards the chopper, a sudden wave of apprehension struck me. I wondered how a small and light man-made craft such as this could muster the strength to fight one of the strongest forces of nature, the wind! But there was no turning back. I had already made up my mind.

We were asked to pause, right at the end of the walkway, to take a picture with the chopper. The captain, an old veteran (or as I allowed myself to believe) greeted us with a quick, yet warm smile. I chose the front seat, which gave me a wonderful view. We were briefed on the safety instructions and were buckled up in no time and off we lifted without the usual accelerations that I was used to on a normal plane!

I guess I missed a heartbeat when the chopper took a quick dip right at the beginning, into the Atlantic, but soon I was on the top of the world….

.. looking down on creation!

It was a bliss! Nothing we did after that would come anywhere close to those three minutes of being in the air! I guess its time I started trusting my instincts and impulses beyond just purchases!

It was one of those non-typical Friday evenings, as I got back home “tired” from an unusually light day at work, when the dilapidated condition of my room suddenly struck me. It had been months since I paid any attention to this place where I lived. Clothes piled up like peaks, turning into a giant mountain on one side, and my camera buried deep under it, luckily preserved well from the never ending accumulation of dust; books finding their abode all around my bed, leaving a space resembling the shape of a human, just enough for me to bury myself into every night; empty cardboard boxes from all the gadgets that I had accumulated over the past few months; unpacked baggages from all the trips I had been to since Christmas and I decided, it was time to put them all in their rightful places.

It was a task that even Hercules would have refused to accept. Two days of relentless cleaning, with occasional breaks to reenergize myself with caffeine and of course food, as my weekend started to wane, I decided to end this “beyond-herculian” task in a state which looked bearable to human eyes. And sure enough, I captured those final stages, which perhaps would be the only time I would see it as clean as it was now, before yet another one such weekends when I decide to venture into this process called cleaning.

So here’s an ode to a clean room …

Take 1:

Take 2:

Perhaps a tad too hot for comfort, when it finally arrived, the Spring brought along an aura of bright smiling faces at the office. What was even more interesting was the sudden change in moods of people as the surrounding changed from the air conditioned office floors to the bright open space, as they revolved through the doors that separated the two. Amazing how weather can play a great role in people’s moods!!

So here’s to the change in weather!

Alright, so I’ve been terribly delayed, horrendously defaulting and wonderfully ignoring this little place that I have, called the blog for the past few months. Reasons are varied – a relaxing vacation back in India that ended with a nail-biting finale, a plunge into the busiest of days at the office, right after I got back, and the snowiest of winters that Philadelphia has seen over the past decade closing down traffic, shops and even life around.

And as the sun slowly started to peep through the black clouds filled with rains, giving hope for an already delayed spring, here I am taking my first real “break” after January for a trip up to Boston. There is so much to talk about, a myriad of thoughts, opinions and even a new member arriving soon to my Apple family. But let me hold them off for my 7 hour train journey to Boston, where I hope gather all those thoughts scattered across my phone, laptop, notepads and my mind. With “Argumentative Indian” for company, I set sail tomorrow for a 4-day break.

Offbeat: Its interesting how some of my thoughts never changed over the years!
This was what I wrote about “packing” back in May 2005 - “Applied all the theories of “closed packing” that I learned in chemistry years back, but in vain !!!”. And this was how I described it in July 2008 – “Being weak in Chemistry as I was, cubic closed packing was never my favorite term either!”
The reason for this retrospection – Its been 5 years since I started blogging here and 6 whole years since I entered the blog world! Never thought I would take it this far, when I started it all!

This was perhaps the longest I’d been away from my blog. A new year has swung by and as usual, no resolutions this time too! The past three months were as eventful as eventful can be. Lots to talk about, and zillions more to write about. So until this turbulence settles down, here is an easy way to get this place back to life.

After all, life is just a balancing act, ain’t it?