Found this book while surfing the web. The reviews on Amazon resonated loudly with my world view of 33 years of existence. I realized how much pride I take in not my life’s trivial achievements, but my ability to think about and understand the gravity of the overpopulation problem. It saddens me to no end that the reckless, parasitic growth of our race is eradicating wilderness and wildlife at a breakneck speed. It is shocking that our population grew more in the last 40 years than in the previous 3 million.

I know I can’t do much about it. I can’t defuse the population bomb and the calamity that is about to ensue. But I am awfully proud to make the most impact a single human can do, by staying childfree. This is the best decision of my life and I wake up full of energy every morning because of this. I am most thankful to my lovely wife for sticking with me on this “uncommon” life path. I wish more and more people like us would muster the courage to defy the endless societal brainwashing, and think harder before bringing new lives in this screwed up world. It is going to be nothing but a grueling existence for the poor souls.

And then it struck me. The knob was already at the position to take the cable release in order to trip the shutter. That meant only one thing – that while all afternoon I enjoyed handheld photography without the cable release, I moved frame after frame without actually tripping the shutter. Unbelievable. More than the loss of film and my time, my patience finally eroded beyond the point of no return.

My biggest resolution for the coming year is to simplify my life. I need to reduce my things to the minimum that I need and enjoy all the time. The film gear has to go. I have been justifying keeping them for too long without much of a reward. Processing and scanning film takes too much time and effort and does not give me anything that digital can’t for all my practical needs.

Maybe this needed to happen. I feel lighter and more at peace. I can come back to shoot the waves and the sunset and not get disappointed again. Here is to a very productive 2012.

Happy new year.

- Photostream: a new concept unlike the rigid directory-like album structure in pbase.
- Square thumbnails and the ability to put same image into multiple sets without duplication.
- The community feel, groups, and explore galleries.

I have since accumulated more than 6000 photos in flickr and it is an irreplaceable memory lane for me.

Few weeks ago I started wondering about the future of flickr. After acquisition by yahoo in 2005, it has not added any significant feature besides collections (only one level deep hierarchy) and some other cosmetic changes. Given the abysmal track record of companies/products under yahoo, I figured it was time to really check out picasaweb, the other viable alternative I ignored for a long time.

In two days of fiddling with picasaweb, picasa desktop app, and photograbbr I think this is the way to go. This blog post also sold me to the idea. Here are my observations regarding the switch:

- If I let my pro flickr account lapse, I will still have the photos forever, only that the last 200 will be visible in photostream. Any link to photos from old blog posts will continue to work. I have not much to lose. Besides my 6000 photos are all web sized, taking under 2GB of space. In flickr I paid $25/yr for unlimited, but in picasaweb I will have to pay $5/yr for 20GB (1GB is free).

- I am not sure I like the photostream of flickr anymore. Sometimes I think twice before uploading less-than-best photos since friends will see the latest photos. At this point the rigid album feature makes more sense. I will miss having album-inside-album, but I can live with that, since tags can help.

- One big gripe with flickr is filename preservation. It would make the filename as default title, and I have to manually copy it to the description area if I have to change the title. Flickr gives each photo an unique id and there is no other place where the filename is preserved. With picasa this is no more a problem, the photos get uploaded in picasa with empty caption by default, and filename is untouched. For the migration part, PhotoGrabbr is an excellent app. It lets me download flickr photos with flickr filename, plus an xml document which has all the details about the photo including title and description, one of which has the original filename. The migration should be easy and fast.

- The other major pain-in-the-ass with flickr is its image organizer. I cringe everytime I have to use it.

- I really loved the way picasa works, especially the sync with picasaweb. Photo caption syncs both ways. Super easy to delete the online album and re-upload after major changes in the album. Once an album (basically a folder) is in sync with the online version, I can upload more by simple drag and drop to the album folder. So my workflow is like this: work in Lightroom, export processed photos from RAW to 900×600 jpg, and just drop them in a folder under picasa. The tags stay intact from the time I imported photos in LR. Sweet.

- The integration of picasaweb with G+ android app took me by surprise. Very fast browsing of my online photos over 3G. WIN.

I am kind of sad to no longer renew my flickr pro, but I am sure it would have been 10 times more awesome from its 2005 version had it not gone under Yahoo.

Update: here is my new picasaweb public gallery: https://picasaweb.google.com/107557198667490360767

Our trip took us on I-5, then 97 via Bend, OR. Spent a night with my ex-coworker Katie and totally enjoyed playing with her two energetic kids. Then more on 97 north, a scenic detour along 26 and 35 around the snow capped Mt Hood, then back to 97, then 153 and 20 to Twisp. What a wonderfully scenic route. Twisp is just the perfect small town. Tight community. A good vibe. We camped 15 miles out inside a forest campground, and for $8 it trumped a motel room easily. With our new 20F sleeping bags, the 35F nights were not even perceptibly cold. We had a couple nice hikes over 2 days. Afterwards we took 20 west to western Washington, then to Ebey’s landing, so we could have the exciting ferry ride to Port Townsend. That was Priti’s first and she loved every minute of it. We were not sure where to stay, so kept riding. Luckily we stumbled on the nice Sequim bay state park much before nighfall and set up camp. Met a nice family next to us and dined with them. Next day we hit up the Olympic national park and did a scenic hike to the top. We could see Canada from up there. What a sight, I wished I had my hang glider with me.

[unfinished]

Working at a startup in SF and living in south bay isn’t exactly a good combination for the daily commute. Caltrain is a lifesaver, but connecting home and office to the train station is where the majority of pain is.

Earlier this year, Priti was dropping me off at Sunnyvale caltrain station at 8am and picking up around 7:30pm. I would take my bicycle in the train and ride 2 miles in SF to reach office. It was working pretty well for a couple of months, but I figured it would be better to let her enjoy a few more hours of sleep. So I started keeping my bicycle at my friend’s house in Mountain View. I would reach there with my goldwing, park on the driveway and take the bicycle 1 mile to Mountain View caltrain. It was not bad, but I grew tired of that 1 mile stretch, twice everyday. Luckily my friend had exactly the kind of bicycle rack I was looking for, light enough and fits the hitch on my goldwing. I had to make an extension out of a piece of common stud and voila, I had a very good solution to my commute. Now I can take the bicycle on the goldwing till Sunnyvale, park the motorcycle at an apartment complex close to caltrain station, and the rest is no more harder than before. I hope this works for a while before I can figure out another better way.

Just when I thought I was sick of the parental myth and bullshit, this fantastic post brightened up the day:
The Myth that Must DIE

No kids for us, thanks. We both worked very hard for the life we have now. I consider myself a lucky person to have a wife who cherishes her personal freedom, enjoys hiking the outdoors, and forever ready to take up an adventure together. Given the direction the global economy is heading, there is no way we could throw this life to the trash bin in one fell swoop. We would rather devote our free time in volunteer work, community projects like habitat for humanity, and helping people in need. There is so much to do and so little time. I think it is a great recipe for a simple, modest and an overall happy existence.

I had fun while it lasted. Social networks are nice when it comes to keeping in touch with friends. But in the name of entertainment, there lies a slippery path of addiction. Status of friends. Like the status. Comments to those statuses. Like the comments. Status of the commenters. The list goes on. The distraction model is astonishingly successful. The red bubble for new comments is impossible to not click, even if that means I will end up partly re-reading the whole comment thread.

There is a bigger problem than this ginormous time sink mechanism. As the friend network grows, status updates become more trivial, since it is harder to write any serious or controversial thought for fear of offending a few good friends. Passivity here we come.

Twitter shall remain as my status update tool for it has yet to make unproductive use of my time. Somehow I find it more useful due to the high quality tweets I enjoy from a handpicked list of people.

I am sure facebook is the ultimate social tool for many, but if care is not taken, much of one’s time will be wasted without doubt. And time is much more precious than money.

Adios, Facebook.

Over a week of HTC ownership, I learnt to appreciate a few fine features that trump the iPhone by a fair margin.

1. When you zoom in a long article page to make the font bigger, the paragraphs get automatically adjusted so that you are looking at larger text yet don’t have to horizontally scroll back and forth. An enormous thumbs up.

2. The phone is basically a handy usb storage device. Expandable, too. Can you believe how much pain it is to delete a bunch of photos from the iPhone, say a few hundred of them ? If you can’t go to a mounted directory and run a rm command, just fuggetaboutit.

3. Swype: Blazing fast data input, not even a comparison with iPhone.

4. Built-in camera clicks-on-focus when you touch and hold a part of the screen to bring the subject at the location in focus. On the iPhone you have to touch to autofocus and then click the shutter icon.

5. Widgets, apart from usual apps just make sense for some applications. The unobtrusive notification mechanism is just cool.

6. And oh yeah, no $99 membership to just put my own app on the phone.

I don’t think I can ever go back.

But see, a real life product differs from a software in a very critical part of the build process – the safety inspection. Even the worst software bug can’t come close to the damage caused by a physical injury from a nasty oversight. When the foldable table-cum-cabinet I was building got almost finished, I suddenly discovered a potential finger-smashing pinch hazard from what I imagined as a cool design. The table part on the right side is foldable, so that also means nearly 29 inches of leg folds back and it is hinged close to the right end of the table, right where a person might keep the right fingers when unfolding the plank. Now if the legs have no retention mechanism, they will just open with a smash as soon as the clearance is available in the unfolding process. So I need to do two things:

1. Prevention of the hazard: I added a small retention clip so that the legs will be in its place until the user is ready to unhook it.
2. Protection in case #1 above is forgotten: Added a barrier next to the hinge at the underside near the right end of the table top. This will ensure the fingers stay out of the way of the pinch zone.

Without photos, none of my words make any sense, so here they are: http://therider.posterous.com/sewing-machine-cabinet

I still have to explain the mechanisms to my friend when I hand it over to her. I will possibly make a printout to ensure anyone using it follows right procedures.

You see, when you live 50 miles from San Francisco, one of the world’s best cities, you should really visit it often. And just like I had a million excuses to not explore the NYC area in detail when I lived in Long Island for 2.5 years, I always found myself cringing to the thought of driving to San Francisco. The freeways are always crowded, parking in the city is a headache, and caltrain is not exactly cheap.

Now when the job is a SF based startup, you have no choice. Up at 6:45am, out the door at 7:45, take the 8:13 train from Sunnyvale, reach SF by 9:02, ride bike 2 miles and arrive at work by 9:30. So what did this make me ? A morning person with heightened value of time and appreciation of physical fitness. The migraine headache I used to suffer on most evenings are magically gone now. I have more stamina than before, more energy for work and more ideas of staying productive. Even weekends are no exception to the rule of waking up before 7.

Now let’s talk about work. Being one of 80 people and being one of 14000 is remarkably different. Like a family member vs just another Giants fan. Talk about fast decisions, the excitement of rolling out new products and seeing the company grow. 30 engineers getting solid work done every day. Streamlined agile process with zero overhead. No daily standup bullshit, no wasteful meetings. Stable test environments are a one-time setup. Code changes can be tested on browser within a few seconds. Meaningful unit tests, automated builds. It is almost like Joel Spolsky’s checklist followed by the book.

In short, end of 2010 was extraordinary and the turn of events could not be better. Thank you Yahoo, for this new lease of life at the start of the new decade.