Category: Live Journal Entries

It is really a pain when people assume technical superiority just because they are from a “Developed Country” and a double pain when they think that Alpha version of softwares means the best version there is!

So is this the time for surfacing for air kind of post?

I don’t think I have been underground or underwater for long in fact I have been around… there are a lot of interesting, intriguing and insignificant things which have been happening in my life and I have the power of all 27 alphabets at my finger tips to put them here… but it been some time now that my alphabets seem to be in conflict with the words who are in turn breaking apart the sentences in my thoughts – a battle with a forgone conclusion, still I want to resist the temptation to finish the post by writing “Life Sux”, the most powerful of the words ‘Why?’ hurls a stone in the smooth stream of my thoughts. Damn it! I will complete this post.

So whats been so interesting in my life?

I would rather put that question as what I see as having learned, enjoyed, done differently in past few days. The thing that surprised me most was that I tend to pursue my hobbies more intently when I have more daytime work heaped upon I have tried to rationalize it to job security etc but would like to believe thats because I love my work and when I work I like to do more things that I love – confusing?

My current passion seems to have been stalled due to lack of money to buy the lights I want BUT I did attend my first commercial model shoot on Saturday. The complexity of using a minimum of 5 lights seemed like an overkill but Vivek explained with practicals as to why each one of them was necessary, the shoot was for a calendar and stretched more than 6 hours (I guess this was for just three pictures), Since my camera is radically different from D70 I could not use it as the adjustments in lights etc would have been too painful but a big thanks to Vivek for letting me intrude in his work and top it with teaching me.

Work on coding Coppermine continues but I was tickled when sometime during the past week I sat down skimmed the code for Gallery and wrote a Gallery to Coppermine converter. We are nearing half a million download mark at Sourceforge for Coppermine.

For some time now me and Swati have been collecting Guru Dutt movies we now have in our collection
1) Pyasa
2) Kaagaz ke phool
3) Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam
4) Aar paar
5) Baazi
6) Mr and Mrs 55

After a long time I decided to read a book which was not on screen or my PDA – The Ferret Chronicles by Richard Bach and I am in love with Danielle.

Aasim has adjusted to school very well but the flip side is he gets bored on weekends

To Be continued….

Aasim’s school reopened today. He is now in 1st Standard, has to carry books back and forth to school, has school for nearly the full day (Read return at 3:30pm). We were apprehensive that he might not cope very well with having to eat cold lunch, pampered that he has been till now… However all our apprehensions were in vain – he just returned, very happy with the new classrooms, apparently they are huge, knows that the teacher has a 40 day old son, has eaten his lunch and now playing outside.

Yesterday Vivek called up and asked if I was game for some table top photography. I readily agreed and got a three hour crash course in lighting table top subjects, starting from a single light, adding a fill-in light, then adding a reflector and as a bonus I got to use his Nikon D70 🙂

The picture shown is one of the result of that exercise. He criticized me for being afraid to experiment when I wanted a single spotlight on a white background to light up this urn and added an orange plate with a flower! The result while not what I was seeing in my minds eye is indeed eye catching…