Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

We’re discussing blogging. This is a surprise picture. Nobody knows I’m posting a picture of them while I’m talking to them. That’s the cool thing about moblogs. They can be really discreet.

Sree’s camp office. This is the command and control centre.

One of the cool things about a boot camp style training camp is, you get to do cool things like rescuing mattresses from the rain, waiting at airports for people, and showing people how to run their own moblogs.

Asia Source begins today. I’ll be at camp for a week and mostly offline. Have a good week, folks!

thaths, sriniram and I have the best seats in the place.

An evening of fine music. If you’re in Bangalore and enjoy jazz and Indian classical fusion, you don’t want to be missing this.

A juice shop that also fixes computers. Do they send back fruit flavoured machines?

Hyderabad’s Hussain Sagar lake—better known as Tank Bund—provides much needed open space in the heart of the city. The lake’s shores are lined with parks, walkways, memorials, and some excellent commercial spaces like Eat Street on Necklace road, the venue for Saturday’s LJ meet.

Eat Street is a strip mall of eating joints with seating on the terrace, where you can dine in the cool breeze and gaze into the vast waters. It’s easily the best location for a get-together I’ve ever been in. Eat Street makes chump change out of Bangalore’s Forum.

We sorely lack a space like this in Bangalore.

It drizzled in Hyderabad yesterday. The clouds went dark, the breeze picked up, and then a fine rain swept the roads. The weather turned extremely pleasant, and remained so until the train pulled out of Secunderabad station. What a lovely parting!

What happened to Bangalore while I was away? Taxis! Black and yellow taxis with a fashionable red stripe. I’ve never seen one of these before. Where did these come from?

At least the railways know how to strike a compromise between formality and hipness.

Good old Hyderabad. Good to see the place hasn't changed much. There are still no traffic lights on these roads. To cross, you use the age old protocol of looking to both left and right. In case of a conflict, the heavyweight wins. Oh, and most roads are outfitted with disco lights that go red, yellow and green, but nobody seems to know what these are for.

Clothesline in my grandmother’s backyard. The clothes must be a tenant’s, since she doesn’t wear bright colours. Two dogs descended the stairs as I framed this picture, then proceeded to make an emergency exit, bounding from stair to compound wall to street. Dogs may not have the dexterity of limbs to climb like cats, but they sure do make good use of available facilities. Poor brainz had an unnerving experience when the dog sailed directly overhead.

1. Go out. Stretch. Make tea.
2. Hit Reload over and over again, hoping to see something other than “communication failure.”
3. Get paranoid and buy a bus ticket.
4. Swear at the moron ticket booking agency that bought a sleeper class ticket waitlisted at 241, when they were clearly instructed to get a higher class ticket if sleeper wasn’t available.
5. Wonder what on earth the babus were thinking, running a website that only operates 9:30 AM to 6 PM. Even websites need to shut shop and go home for the evening? Websites are not allowed to provide better service, since that would put human jobs at risk?

A scooterist last night. Can you tell what he’s carrying?

Looks like the police themselves need grammar policing.

Presenting the lakemobile, complete with bad spelling. The name’s down by the side, and possibly illegible in this picture.

Plus points for finding a way to say no to plastic bags without using words.

In Hyderabad. The parking assistant’s job is to drag that ramp around for any vehicles parking or leaving. That means these chaps actually do something more than just smile and demand your money. And here’s my host for the weekend, brainz.

Woo hoo! GPRS again! Here’s a couple sprawled out at the Pune railway station waiting room.

Three of my housemates went to the same college and graduated together. They frequently have friends over for the night.

Unfortunately, there’s a shortage of mattresses.

Found this in the shelf. Since I see very little daylight these days, I might as well try indoor photography, where time and composition are in my hands. My only source of light was the tube, which lined the bottles with a distracting glint, so I shaded these with a towel for 30 seconds. A green towel, resulting in a very green picture.

Much fiddling later, this is what I got. I’ve obviously got a lot to learn about subject arrangement and colour manipulation. The hair-like thing you see by the left edge is from my CCD. Time for another cleaning.

And now for today’s usability annoyance, the Flickr Mail system:

From: mail@flickr.com
Subject: [Flickr] You are [bleep]’s newest contact!

You’ve been sent a Flickr Mail titled:
You are [bleep]’s newest contact!

To read the full message, click here:
http://www.flickr.com/messages_read.gne?id=[bleep]
…

Think about this: you’ve received a message telling you that you’ve received a message elsewhere. What’s with the brilliant idea? Why not just send the message here and dispense with Flickr Mail, the way LJ handles comment notifications? Not only do I have to delete it from my email inbox (after reading it), I have to go to Flickr Mail and delete it there too. What an annoyance!

And in positive news today, I upgraded to WingIDE Pro 2.0. For Python programming, WingIDE seriously rocks. It’s the best IDE I’ve used since Delphi in the late-’90s. The more I use it, the more I love it.

Their customer support makes it even better. They respond the same day, usually within the same hour, and consider all suggestions and bug reports seriously. They give me the sense of security that even if I’m stuck in future, the license fee won’t be a dead investment.

When you are in college, rules exist only so they may be broken.