Chronicles of Superman

Warren Buffet Quote

2006-05-06T12:34:00.000-07:00

I think this is a wonderful quote on the bubbles in the housing, gold and other markets -

'Once a price history develops, and people hear that their neighbor made a lot of money on something, that impulse takes over, and we're seeing that in commodities and housing...Orgies tend to be wildest toward the end. It's like being Cinderella at the ball. You know that at midnight everything's going to turn back to pumpkins & mice. But you look around and say, 'one more dance,' and so does everyone else. The party does get to be more fun -- and besides, there are no clocks on the wall. And then suddenly the clock strikes 12, and everything turns back to pumpkins and mice.'

Carcissism

2006-02-09T17:20:00.000-08:00

Here's photos of my new pride and joy, my new car, a BMW 2-door coupe in Titanium Silver ! A 'Bimmer' as some call it. Notice that these photos were taken when it had no plates.

And my old(er) car, the black Honda Accord, is right next to it.

A 5' 8" snowman

2006-02-09T17:12:00.000-08:00

Ever seen so much snow that you could keep rolling 6 foot tall snowmen all over the place ?
Here's one snowman (which is taller than my 5' 7") and I'm on my way to building another one...was easy, I just rolled them down a gentle slope.
I couldn't drive anywhere (because of the snowstorm, of course), so this served as a good distraction.

More photos of the snowstorm aftereffects here

EzPass in New Hampshire

2005-07-13T10:50:00.000-07:00

I was on 93 N yesterday and noticed that New Hampshire has now gotten on board the EzPass system which has been in use all over the North East for years.
However, I chose NOT to use my EZ-Pass...why, you ask ?

Because, the toll is 75 cents but if you use New Hampshire tokens, it is only 37.5 cents ! I stuck my transponder in the glove box and paid with tokens.

Why the difference of a 100% between the tokens and using the EzPass ?

War of the Worlds

2005-07-11T13:54:00.000-07:00

The movie stinks, it is just another of those epic arty movies that Spielberg has been spewing out for the past few years...he's a good director, but the storyline was too thin.

A white belt

2005-03-13T13:04:00.000-08:00

I now have a white belt in Taekwondo - all it means is that I can do some clumsy kicks and punches, it won't really help me in a real life situation. Yet.
I need to get a year or two of Taekwondo training before I can instinctively deploy the fancy flying kicks and punches that they're teaching us. For now, I have to stop for a second and think about which foot and which arm needs to go where before I can make a move.
We also got to break a board with our fists, I have a nice photo of my A+ board ! :-)

Photos back online

2005-03-13T12:38:00.000-08:00

The good old webserver - http://kalele.homelinux.com:8080/gallery - is back online again.
I didn't like the Smugmug interface, plus it had really slow upload speeds and limited me to upload 100 MB at one time.

New photos at girish.smugmug.com

2005-01-21T14:33:00.000-08:00

I finally got a new place to put all my digital camera photos.

http://girish.smugmug.com

Unlimited storage space, but limited to 2 GB/month. I don't think I'll be using up that much.
It was 25$ for 1 year, but I figure that if I get more people to signup using my email address as the referral, it could end up costing me less.

"You can save a friend $5 on a smugmug subscription and earn $10! It's simple: have your friend enter the coupon code MLoWVZtQIzXG2 in the 'Referred by' field on the signup form. We can credit your smugmug account right now, or soon, we hope to have PayPal payments. It’s your choice. "

Long term reliability

2005-01-17T10:04:00.000-08:00

After my recent filesystem corruption issues on my linux web server, I've decided to try and find hosting for my 2+ GB of photos elsewhere. Not only is it better from the long term reliability standpoint, but also it will cost the same as the electricity that I use up keeping the machine running.
There are 3 options -
1. Get a SmugMug account (for 30$/year you get unlimited storage and 2 GB/month).
2. Get an iPowerWeb domain name hosting account (for 96$/year you get 2 GB storage and 30 GB traffic/month, not to mention SSL/PHP/SQL/CGI/POP accounts etc) with my own domain name.
3. Move to my friend's home linux server (which will be free).

Reliability-wise, SmugMug seems to be the best (zero maintenance) option for the photos, but there's only 2 GB/month and no other features.
Thinking feature-wise, the iPowerWeb account gives me a sandbox to play in. But, I'll have to 'administer' it myself.
If I move to my friend's server, I am spared these expenses, but since it's a favour, there is no accountability for downtime or failures.

Decisions, decisions...

Vegas trip

2004-12-05T09:00:00.000-08:00

quick update - finally I have the Vegas trip photos uploaded....all 147 of them !
http://kalele.homelinux.com:8080/gallery/Vegas2004

A few clicks and a few years later....

2004-11-26T09:16:00.000-08:00

I woke up to check the latest news from my bloglines page and was checking out the Wired News feed when I noticed this Travelzoo article.
Having been blisfully unaware that Travelzoo had now gone public, I was surprised to learn that they were now trading at 82$ per share ! I had clicked on some vague offer in 99 and registered for some free shares. I had been bored and was just surfing around. After reading this article, I promptly logged in to check and found I have 14 shares in my name !

So, a few clicks and a few years later, I made 1148$ !

I can buy a couple more gadgets/toys this Xmas.
:-)

P.S. Now, I'm going to find out all the people I referred to sign up, and tell them about their good luck too.

Happy Diwali

2004-11-13T09:26:00.000-08:00

Happy Diwali to everyone !
Check out this link for our Diwali Fireworks in Nashua this year.
It was a lot of fun (mixed in with fear, cause we weren't sure if people would call the cops).

My personal 64-bit supercomputer

2004-10-25T10:00:00.000-07:00

I ordered an HP AMD64 3200+ desktop computer last week. I've been stuck in slow-computer-land for so long...a 1.7 Ghz laptop, and a 500 Mhz AMD K6-3 are all I have. I realized that I've been putting off trying some things just because I don't have the horsepower to do it. Things like compiling Gentoo Linux from Stage 1, or copying the Seinfelds from my ReplayTV and chopping out the commercials, remastering to MPEG and burning to DVDs.

Last time I tried to compile a Linux kernel on my AMD K6 400 Mhz, it overheated and died. Hence the 500 Mhz processor I have now.

I am planning on installing a 160 GB SATA drive, plus a 200 GB IDE drive, Gentoo 64-bit Linux and ReiserFS with kernel RAID. That should make it pretty fast.

In 1994, only a supercomputer/mainframe would have had a 2.2 Ghz 64-bit chip with 500 GB of data storage, 1 GB of RAM and a Gigabit Ethernet connection. Now, I have one on my desk.

To put this speed bumpup in perspective, the POVRay benchmark for AMD K6-2 500 Mhz is 7 hours....for my new processor, under Gentoo, it is 5 minutes 4 seconds !!!

AMD wins, Intel falls behind, Red Sox clawing back, Yankee Hater Hats/tshirts out of stock

2004-10-19T16:56:00.000-07:00

I tried to order a Yankee Hater Hat but they're out of stock. Yankee Hater shirts are also out of stock. This year's Red Sox-Yankees yearly meeting in the post-season has been fun to watch.

Dell released a crazy (50% off 1500) coupon today, I think they are in financial trouble this quarter, need to make their targets somehow.

AMD released their Athlon 64 4000+ chip today...not only is it a 64-bit chip but it's rated faster than any Intel chip AND, wait, the power consumption of an idle P4 3.6 Ghz system is MORE than the power consumption of the AMD 64 chip AT FULL POWER !!!

Intel's Itanic (Itanium) is sunk, the Prescott core is too hot and unstable at 3.6+ Ghz and they been doing low-key development of their best line - the Pentium M...Intel's lost the race.

It has been a wonderful Fall here in New England....here are some stunning photographs from around my office.

Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park, Maine

2004-10-11T08:56:00.000-07:00

Upgrading my ReplayTV hard drive

2004-09-06T10:29:00.000-07:00

Update : The formatting and copying of the primary partition went off without a hitch using RTVPatch for Win2000. This is the open source software from the guy(s) who figured out how the ReplayTV stores stuff on its hard drive. I installed the new drive and now it shows 66 hours of high quality recording time left ! The old 40 GB drive is stand-by, in case this Seagate dies.

A sad thing though is that "someone at home" threw out the packaging with the UPC code. So, I can't submit the rebate form :-(. Looks like it cost me 128$ for this hard drive.

I recently got a Seagate 200 MB UDMA IDE internal hard drive for 60$. It's going to replace the tiny 40GB hard drive in my ReplayTV. Plus, its got a 5 year warranty...the hard drive runs continuously in the replaytv, so I'm sure it's going to die before it's 5 years are up.

Skype Voice over IP software

2004-09-06T10:06:00.000-07:00

My Skype ID is gkalele...short and sweet. I was one of the early sign-ons, though I've not used it much.

Coral Web Cache

2004-08-30T10:22:00.000-07:00

Being one of the many people who run webservers from their homes (I run mine off my DSL line - http://kalele.homelinux.com:8080/ ), I am always interested in ways to offload the data traffic to my website.
I use Gallery to organize and display all my photos, till now, I was using it's cool mirroring feature to pull the actual JPGs off my old school account while outputting the HTML from my home server...it eliminated all the traffic for the photos, it makes my site look like it's hosted behind a fast connection !
However, my old school account has a quota of only 600 MBytes, and my website has gigabytes of content ! How can I offload the traffic load transparently (without requiring any special actions on the viewer's part) ?

The answer seems to be the Coral Web Cache. I can easily change the webpages and templates such that all IMG tags to images on my server are actually via the Coral cache url.
i.e. the photo on my index page, http://kalele.homelinux.com:8080/photos/manhattan.jpeg, is now instead embedded as http://kalele.homelinux.com.8080.nyud.net:8090/photos/manhattan.jpeg. I looked at my weblog, and sure enough, there was one hit from the Coral farm...and then, when I loaded the same page from a different browser (IE instead of Mozilla), there was no new hit...the image had been served from the cache !
It looks like this is going to save a lot of bandwidth on my DSL line...lets see how reliable it turns out to be.

Castle in the Clouds

2004-08-15T09:41:00.000-07:00

In upstate New Hampshire there is a little castle.
Built by a man who was very rich.
Not many people visit the place, but we had to. Given that the next closest real castle is probably in Europe (I'm deliberately ignoring the "castles" in NewPort and other places in New England).

I took some photos - http://kalele.homelinux.com:8080/albums/CastleInTheClouds

Little India in New Jersey

2004-08-09T07:45:00.000-07:00

I went to the Oak Tree Road area in Edison, NJ last weekend. It is like a little India...check out the link, they even have their own website.
There were indians everywhere, and the restaurants are cheap and serve delicious food. It was kind of like being in a busy Indian market.
I didn't take any photographs, but I'm sure photographs wouldn't convey the atmosphere correctly, you have to go there to find out.
There are a couple of shops selling only things that you need for religious hindu ceremonies, called 'pujas', we got stuff for our house...we had been looking for substitutes in Walmart, but there are no brass/bronze items there, apart from lampshades and doorknobs !
There is a plaza called the Mahatma Gandhi plaza (photo below), with shops called Aishwarya, Dimple's etc.
I found three photos, embedding them directly into this post.

The Original Blogger

2004-07-15T19:29:00.000-07:00

Before it was formally known as blogging, my friend Tom (aka Thomas J Weiss) started writing an online journal, describing the places where he lived and all the exciting events that happened.
It's an entertaining read, he has a very subtle sense of humour, kind of like on Frasier...the best kind.
If you're bored and need a fun read, check out his Orchard Street Journal

Radar Detectors and Speeding

2004-07-11T17:20:00.000-07:00

My friend Arnab finally bought a Passport 8500 radar detector. Finally. He has a BMW and he had been hesitating to buy...now that he has one, he's now a member of the reckless speeders club, of which I am a long time member. hehe. If any speed enforcement officers are reading this, ahem, I was talking about Xbox racing, not real road racing.

The current speed limits are based on the post 1970 oil embargo knee-jerk reaction to oil shortages and high gasoline prices. It's just another one of those things....they impose a rule in response to a valid reason, but then never repeal it...even when the reasons are no longer valid.

Cars are more efficient now, safer now...and really, 65 mph is a ridiculously low limit.
I think there are several stretches of highway around the Boston region where you drive for miles and miles at 65...when you could shave hours off your driving time if you drove at 90.
The productivity gains would outweight the gasoline cost.

The radar detector wars are like Spy vs Spy in Mad Magazine...the cops have detectors to detect radar detectors, my detector has the capability to detect these radar detector detectors, and shut itself off (called the fancy term VG2 cloaking). Now, apparently, the cops have devices to detect this cloaking...especially in states where RDs are illegal to operate. New Jersey and DC come to mind.

I urge everyone to get a detector, and to drive faster...so that the speeders can "fit in", instead of standing out from the crowd....hehehe, I'm talking here like 100s or 1000s of ppl will be reading this blog...probably only a handful of people ever will.
Doesn't matter to me though.

Whitewater rafting in Maine

2004-07-11T17:12:00.000-07:00

Trip photos

We went to Kennebec over the july 4th weekend. We had 3 digital cameras amongst us, and I've yet to get the photos from the other two cameras, so the photos above are only of day 1.

The Kennebec rafting trip is a pretty good way to introduce people to white water rafting... several class 3 rapids, and just one class 4 rapid.

We used the same rafting outfit as last year, when we went to Penobscot...the outfit is called Three Rivers Whitewater and is one of the most professional outfits. They have very nice experienced guides, and they have their own base lodge, with a campground and hot showers. They also rent wet suits.

I fell off the raft, the only one from eight rafts full of people !!!
It was fun...the Class 3 and 4 rapids on Kennebec were getting boring to me...I'd done the adrenalin pumping Class 5 rapids on the Penobscot river last year...now THOSE are something!

If you're a novice to rafting and planning a trip to go whitewater rafting in Maine, I would suggest the Kennebec and the Three Rivers people. Definitely.

And, to conclude, another link to the Photo album

Trip to Toronto

2004-07-11T17:09:00.000-07:00

Had a nice trip to Niagara Falls, and onwards to Mississauga and Toronto.
Another trip to the top of the CN Tower, a few jumps on the glass floor (just to test the structural integrity of the glass) and we were on our way back.
Here's some photos taken on the trip -
http://kalele.homelinux.com:8080/gallery/Niagara

6 Gmail invites

2004-06-23T15:15:00.000-07:00

1. https://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-ec55d1238c-219a734d0d
2. https://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-ec55d1238c-b99c39439b
3. https://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-ec55d1238c-ed7fcad7df
4. https://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-ec55d1238c-e7d33fa0dd
5. https://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-ec55d1238c-ba1e4e2155
6. https://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-ec55d1238c-94c23828a8

2004-05-25T14:59:00.003-07:00