Andamans....

Its about a month since I posted my last blog. There wasn't anything exciting this new year @ the beginning. The same old TV programs of movie starts and movies for 31st and 1st. Pongal was a slight change as I went to Thanjavur and Salem for the festival after about 2 years.

Might be, the new year could have arrived on the lower tide of my bio-rhythmic cycle. Last week was overwhelmingly impressive & upbeat. It was all due to my Andaman vacation which was one of the best planned in my life. Nature has created this part of the world with great care and it shows in every view that catches your eye.

The best among the lot was the 3 hour deep sea snorkeling. My god! so many varieties of corals and their denizens. Its believed that the assortment of the corals here are more than anywhere else in the planet.

The next was the sunset. We had to wait for nearly 1 hour (although we spent it without even knowing it pass by) to see the last 10 mins, where the sun turns into an orange ball and disappears slowly into the unknown behind. It was absolutely an unforgettable moment and I went berserk trying to capture the beauty in my cameras.

It was also a great to visit the cellular jail as a homage to the great people who fought for the freedom that we enjoy today.

Some other things that kept impressing me as a territory in India are, There is almost zero crime in here. There are 5 local languages here (hindi is the common communication language and you can find every other name board written in tamil too!). This land is truly Indian for the point 'unity in diversity'.

The good thing is that, the Islands were not flooded or popular among the 'software programmers' as a tourist destination. To enjoy the Andamans, you must know how to respect and value mother nature. Its highly unpolluted and thats why one of its beaches is rated as the most beautiful beach in Asia and the 7th on the planet.

I'm summing up the trip as a preface to the many that I'm going to make there. [It is a truth that when I started from here, I thought it would be my only trip to Andaman]

Using you mac to sleep better

Time and again, things continue to impress me as I discover how people develop thing around mac. While delicious library, multialarm, macsaber were some of the stuff from the recent past, this time its Dream Recorder.

http://www.dream-recorder.com/index.html

You can use this amazing (Hope its as good as it sounds coz im yet to test it) creation to analyze your dream and understand sleep cycle. And it doesn't end with that. You can use it to sleep better by making you computer detect the times you get dreams and play some related music which will influence your emotional ambiance and help you to get a good sleep. Will post my experience with this software later when I can really test it out (Alas! I lost my digicam which I might have used now)

Ofcourse it can't be better than how Bush had put Saddam to sleep (who would want a sleep like that)

The Abdul Kalam in me

Uuufff! Finally Im on the way back to chennai which ends my week long tour. Man! I just traveled across almost 4 states in 5 days. Sad story is that I lost my Cannon S2 IS in this trip. I hardly owned it for a year. It costed Rs. 22,000 at the dubai duty free when I went on a vacation there to kick of the 2006. By Dec '06 I lost it :(

"Be careful when you carry costly things while you travel and always carry only what is necessary." Yet another lesson learned in life and that is how I'm writing that 22k off.

Coming to the topic relating to Kalam. I'm happy about the training I gave to the lecturers @ LBS Engineering Collage. Again the reason for my feeling of accomplishment is that I have made them realise what I want to do in this part of the country's education. "If we teach our students the same way in which we were taught, we are stealing their tomorrow" - What a great piece of verse is that from Jhonny Deway! This was the most instrumental part of my keynote there. I'm happy that my year long efforts in the Kerala education is starting to yield its results.

One day I will change the pedagogy of education in Kerala and then in Karnatakka, Pune and the whole of India.... ;-) (does that make some sense for an analogy with Dr. Kalam)

Celebrity @ Symbiosis

I became a celebrity @ symbiosis by accident. Yes! How else can I describe the day on which I went to symbiosis where their annual student festival was going on and I had an extempo opportunity to address a gathering of about 50 students. 25 mins was my slot which the audience extended to 1.5 hours. 30 mins after that, their director himself personally came to my place and summoned to meet him for a discussion. I was asked to repeat it again for 300 students! Thanks to the delayed flight of my colleague who was supposed to address originally.

I'm going for a picnic with the pune office team tomorrow to ghadge farms. Myself and Rajeev are the special guests from HO for this :p So gotta sleep early (ofcourse after a beer to celebrate the symbi success) so bye....

The most secure laptops

One of the very common questions that people ask me when I try to promote Apple laptops is "My HP laptop comes with biometric reader. What are the security features in yours?"

Simon would be my best reference. He, as he quotes himself, is not a Mac bigot. And, the article was published in Computerworld and not Macworld. The article can be found here.

Hurray!

Hi,

Welcome to the very first blog post of applechap (Technically this is the second one after an unsuccessful attempt earlier). This one is going to be short.

The whole idea of me creating this blog is to share things that I have learned so far and those that I continue to learn everyday. This will be focused only on the technologies, history, gossips and tutorials of Apple Computers, the most illustrious technology corporation on the planet.

Noooo... it may not be another technical forum or blog purely confined to technology. Its more of personal thats related to my work. (Will english allow me to call it semi official?)

Articles posted in this space will also be simplified for the non geeky users. And some may be targeted at the average Indian Mac Users, as I keep fighting to build that society and save mankind from Micro$oft Windoze.

Cheers,
AppleChap