Visiting the hell hole: Las Vegas

To begin with I was soooo excited about the Las Vegas Trip. In fact, all of us have been looking up to it since Pittsburgh. I have heard so much about this place that I wanted to know what the hullabaloo is all about. I swear, but, this place is nothing short of a hell hole! Just a few days before the trip, I had a strong intuition that I should not go to this trip, and I won't enjoy it. But commitment was already done, and arrangements made. I had to go against my intuition, someone that has never failed me.

I won't go into the details of WHY I didn't like the place. Boozing, promiscuity and gambling probably would top the list. Suffice to say that most of the world's black money flows in and out of here. All the vices culminate here, are born here, nurtured here that too !@$#ing OFFICIALLY! Everything that you wouldn't want your kid to do, or taste, is done here.

Trying to survive the 133F+ heat! From Las Vegas

Part of disappointment also came from the fact that no one wanted to play gambling and yet (some of group members) wanted to visit every @!$#ing casino! Damn, once you have seen one, they all look bloody same. The mercury was soaring 120F+ (50C+), and food wasn't good. Nothing, not a single thing was exciting on this trip. Even the extravagant hotels look the same after the first few.

Hotel Bellagio From Las Vegas

Hotel Luxor From Las Vegas

To quote Chief Navigator (aka Vikram): I personally believe that if the entire city of Las Vegas is shut down, then there will be a significant impact on global warming (IN A GOOD WAY!) What a waste creating a random city like that in the middle of the burning desert. That's why everyone must go to Vegas once in their lives and like it or hate it!

In Death Valley, detour on the wayFrom Las Vegas

If you don't like to booze, gamble and promiscuity turns you off, don't spend more than a night here. Spending the 4th July long weekend here was a criminal waste of precious time :( Hope you would be wiser.

Links:
0. My Picasa Album: http://picasaweb.google.com/princeatul/LasVegas

Visit to Pittsburgh Zoo

This was my and Vish's *very first* visit to any decent place outside CMUniverse and our den. Ever since we have been wanting to visit the Pittsburgh Zoo and PPG Aquarium.

When our grand plans to visit New Jersey went down the drains, we became even MORE desperate to tread outside. Zoo was the perfect choice, since we all love animals (for the time being, lets keep aside the argument: If you love animals so much, how come you like to see them in captivity!). So the usual trio, myself, Raju ki maa (aka Moti... err Ritu) and Raju (aka Vishal) all set out early morning for the zoo!

The Trio: Ready for some kicka$$ adventure in the rains!

First step outside the apartment and my reaction was: #@$! WTF!!! It's raining! Why the !@$# we didn't see the weather forecast (which, btw, unlike India, is pretty accurate here in States!) and plan the day :( Damn! The only plan to go to a decent place is gonna be screwed. Heavy hearted, opening our umbrellas we all tread along, just in the hopes that rain will soon stop by the time we reached the bus stop. Alas! We were wrong, and I recommended going back home, since it would be waste of time and money to visit zoo in this weather. As most of the enclosures are open to sky, I argued no animal would want to drench in this nasty rain. Vish & Ritu insisted we stick to the plan.

Still raining, we reached the Zoo, paid the entry fee ($8) and I asked the guy if there was even slightest chance we could glimpse even half of the animals advertised on their website. He gleefully said 'Most Certainly, Sir'! Still skeptical, we moved on, silently cursing ourselves for just throwing $$$s and time down the drain. We certainly should be crazy to do this... Looking at the map, we strode inside the zoo...

A way into the wilderness...

Lo and behold! Good Lord! Was my first reaction... and all the gloominess sublimed in thick moist air! It was raining, unwieldily maneuvering our umbrellas and cameras, we tried to capture the a really really huge tiger, into our virtual world of digital photography. But wait, he refused to go away... Blissfully playing and rolling around (videos to come soon, once I edit out noise and put a real cool NatGeo-like music in!). Wow! We all smiled at each other, this is gonna be freaking awesome! Thanks to Vish and Moti, rain, after all, wasn't a deterrent for these mighty beasts! The zoo, I should take a moment to say, is REALLY amazing!
I believe the $8 fee is way too little for the quality of zoo this is! It's so well maintained, and all the animals, seem, to have been taken care of pretty well.

3 wild-n-mighty beasts in one single frame!

3 Cheers for the tiger!

Kings of the kings: rather listless today :(
(probably the 2 had a fight last night over what channel to watch!)

Then came a VERY huge artificially created Tropical Rain Forest enclosure, where there were a variety of monkeys. The place is meticulously controlled for it's resemblance to actual rain forest: the light, humidity, ambiance, temperature, etc. Pretty impressive. Outside, while having hot (but absolutely tasteless) burger, we could watch this huge bear:

Kodiak bear (from Grizzly bear family) trying the strength of his mighty teeth on the log!

The indoor aquarium was just breath taking! You name a fish, tiny, small, big, huge, really really huge, anything, and it was here!
Someday, I'll have a this waterfall and aquarium kind of arrangement in my house too!

Waterfall and the fish aquarium

Beautiful Emperor Angel Fish

This fish is REALLY BIG!

Straight out of a fairy-tale book: Sea Dragon

Another beautiful indoor aquarium.

Touching the sting ray and small shark!!!

Family reunion :-P

Suse Linux!!!

But *the* best part was seeing Polar Bear playing with a rubber ball! It is one of the most spectacular wildlife moments I've seen! Now, as you can see, the zoo is REALLY very well architect'ed: you could see these polar bears from top, kinda bird's eye view, or through a glass enclosure, where water level reaches your knee, or from an underground glass tunnel, which is MOST exciting of the views! You can so closely see the Bear's graceful movements that you will be mesmerized, just like us. We spent good part of 45 minutes just observing the bear!
Here's a video:

Here are more videos for you to watch: Pitt Zoo Videos. Plus, Vish has uploaded the whole album on Picasa, a good 325 photos from his and my cameras. I'll do it soon too. Meanwhile have a look at the pictures and videos Vish has uploaded.

Maa, we are tired, ready to go back home!

Oh, and yes, Wish you all a Very Merry Christmas and New Year!

Links:
0. Complete Album
1. Few of our videos
2. Pittsburgh Zoo Videos

Done with exams!

Back after a long hiatus. The grueling final exams of the Fall '07 had kept me off blogging. The semester wasn't bad, and I'm satisfied with it, though, there are things I would be improving on the upcoming semester, which is what I'll use the whole of winter vacation for. This vacation we (as in me and my roomie, Vish, aka Jay) intend to slog harder than we did through the semesters to achieve the mammoth goals we have set for 3-4 weeks!

It has started snowing here, a couple of weeks back, actually. And I find it very exciting because this is the first time I'm seeing snowfall!!! It looks beautiful around, everything is just white, PURE WHITE! No adulteration! But it's not easy to survive in snow, once outdoors, you gotta be careful to be well equipped: thermals, weather-proof jacket, good shoes (if not snow shoes), nice head-cap, muffler, etc. The wind chills are the worst part, sub-zero winds blowing at tens of kms/hr are not easy to bear. And just 2 days back I had been to Robinson Mall's Walmart, and the wind actually strayed us away from our paths while we were walking on the highway!!!

Here are some photos, see end of the post for complete albums.

This is CMU's legendary ECE department, aka Hammerschlag Hall.

CMU's School of Architecture

Lying down for a short nap...

Naah... it's pretty cool down and you bet don't you stay any longer than a few moments, lest it freezes your nice little butt into a hard rock.

Once lush green lawns of CMU are now all snow-clad, no trace of green colour anywhere!!!

Cute snowman that some beautiful girls made (wish they too were in the photo :-P )

Thanks to thermals, Vish's attempts to freeze his a$$ is foiled!

Snow everywhere!

This is how parkway looks like after snowfall through whole night. Taken from Namrata's house.

Brave boy!

Only the braves dare tread in such heavy snow and lethal wind chills...
On our way back home, after we went grocery shopping at Walmart the previous day, that's what's in that HUGE ruck-sack.

Raju ki maa (scolding): Badmash Raju, drinking wine?? Aaa???

Apart from these, writing my own shell, exploiting buffers to open an interactive shell on remote system, developing small yet completely functional proxy server, and a zillion other projects kept me busy through the post-midterm part of the semester.

What I promise my readers this winter break are:
0. vim: a beginer's guide
Only because, I believe true programmers use ONLY vi[m]
1. Why vim?
Why I believe 0 is so true
2. New and revamped homepage
3. Why simplicity rocks: in light of Unix design

As I promised, and as usual if you have read so far, then you deserve to get bored a bit more... here are some albums that Vish has put up:
0. Snow in Pittsburgh
1. More Snow in Pittsburgh

Photo credits: Vish

Vacation to Far East: Itinerary

In continuation to my earlier post: Vacation to Far East: Avoid Travel Agencies! which grew too long to include detailed intnerary...

Here's my detailed itinerary. I've included hotel names, you can use them for reference when you plan your own trip. Most of the hotels were good, except where noted.

Day 0 27-Oct-06

• Assemble at Sahar International Airport

Day 1 28-Oct-06

• Arrive at Kuala Lumpur Air port
• Crash into hotel "First World" at Genting High Land
• Outdoor Theme Park at Genting

Day 2 29-Oct-06

• Arrive in Kuala Lumpur
• Hotel Grand Continental

Day 3 30-Oct-06 (still in Kuala Lumpur)

• Half Day City Tour (Man, we missed going on top of Petronas Tower, it's closed for visitors on Mondays)
• Train to Singapore, at night

Day 4 31-Oct-06

• Arrive in Singapore in early morning at Hotel "Windsor"
• Shopping the whole day!

Day 5 01-Nov-06

• Half Day City Tour
• Sunset Sentosa: Sentosa Island (one of the sexiest place out there!)

Day 6 02-Nov-06

• Board the flight to Bangkok
• Drive to Pattaya, hotel Beverly Plaza (this wasn't a great hotel)
• Alkazar Show

Day 7 03-Nov-06

• Coral Island Tour: Another SEXY place!

Day 8 04-Nov-06

• Drive to Bangkok hotel "Bangkok Palace" (Baiyoke Sky Hotel is much better, but we didn't get a room there)

Day 9 05-Nov-06

• Safari World: This is where I fed the Tiger Cub

Day 10 06-Nov-06

• Half Day City Tour

Day 11 07-Nov-06

• Shopping
• Alas!!!! Flight back to Mumbai

Vacation to Far East: Avoid Travel Agencies!

I know buddies that it has beeen really long that you guys are eagerly waiting for the next post... but as you might have guessed, things are not cool here :-( with 3-4 releases AT A TIME on my head, it is not easy to handle :-( I have an angry boss after me, too much work to complete, loads of personal work to do at home, angry friends, angry family, etc.......zzzzzz hey you there, please don't sleep!!! I'm coming to the point...

Before I post Day-01, I would like to talk about the travel plans aka itinerary. Would have made more sense had it been before Day 00 post.

Everything was planned by my Godfather, since he has been there 'n' times. He knew all the streets byheart, which Indian restaurant to have food at, what places to visit, what places NOT to visit, etc. Bookings for hotels, flights, private mini-van, etc. were done via an agent in Mumbai. Since it was a private tour, we had the luxury to cut the crap and only visit the places that are worth our time.

Here's one lesson I've learnt: Never, never, never, never, ever, go through any damn tours and travels agency!!! (For records, we had booked with a travel agency, but thank God, we cancelled it over some issue with the their attitude!) You have hundreds of advantages when you don't go in with tours, will try to list a few, to keep this post short(???):


1. You are 'free'!!! And that matters! (Ever heard of FSF?)
You are tired today, and want to just go somewhere closeby you can do that. You are not interested in historical monuments, you can cut it off!!! You want to visit a nearby park, you can visit it. You can do anything you want to!!! You can alter your plans on the fly! We saw the plight of a group who HAD to get their a$es up at 6 in the morning and join the parade to board the bus, roam around aimlessly around the city and crash in the bed at the end of the day. Too mechanical. You guessed it right, they were with some travel agency. If we felt toooooo tired, we could just spend an hour extra in the bed and then make up for it by hurrying on breakfast, or shopping, or skipping places or two.


2. Privacy: Matters a LOT when you are your own group of 10-20 people.
You can be just yourself! If, like me, you don't like tooooooo much crowd, avoiding with tours agency would be disappointing. You will have a bus full of people with everywhere you go. Most of whom you don't know, lest, you might not even be interested in knowing them. Of course unless there are beautifu......

3. Save on time: You don't necessarily have to visit every God damned historical monument only because it's free of cost! The Tours' people will insist on it just to say that he showed you so many places. With them, you can't just walk out of the group.

4. Save on money: I don't have the exact metrics, but you do save a lot, because you are cutting down 1 level of indirection. Besides whatever you save is worth it, even after taking into account the effort you have to put in planning it. You can actually save more if you eliminate the agent by booking things online.

Well, there's one disadvantage, if you are pure vegetarian like my gang. Difficult to get good vegetarian food out in Far East. This is the only point where travel angecies have advantage: they usually take their own cooks & so is easier to cook to travellers' taste and needs.

But that said and noted, nothing just falls into your lap. You should have GOOD prior study of places of interest, how to reach there, time it takes to commute, means of commuting, entry fee if any (after all the trouble it should be afforable!), etc. Most often, you will find all the relevant info on net. There are some books like Lonely Planet which are talked about by travel enthusiasts. Don't have personal opnion on that book, though. And other very reliable way is to talk to people who have already been there.

(Note: detailed itinerary in next post, this got tooooooo big: Vacation to Far East: Itinerary!)

Vacation to Far East: Day00 Airports

I know all of you have been waiting too eargerly for the snaps as well as the detailed blog on my vacation. There are just tooooooooo many photos, from 6-7 memory sticks, all unsorted. Sorting them day-wise itself took me well over 4-5 hours of non-stop work. In all, I had been to Malaysia (Genting), Singapore, Pattaya and Bangkok.

Now, I'm uploading them selectively day-wise, in all for 10 days. Hope you enjoy reading my story and seeing the photos. I'll start small, so will talk only about Airports I visited on Day00!

27 Nov - 28 Nov 2006 Bangkok and Malaysia Airports.

In all we were 12 people, 6 elders and 6 youngsters, all family friends.

(L-R: Mom, Alekha, Daddy, Neil, Mamta Aunty, Godfather, Zebu, Vabs, Satara's Collector, Kanchan Aunty)

It was my first time out of India, so was very excited to fly, and see places outside my comfort zone. I was speechless the moment I steped down on the Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi Airport. If this were to be compared to a 5-start hotel, our own Sahar Airport is not even close to roadside dhaba!!! About the airpot, one can bloody keep walking on and on and the airport would still refuse to show a dead end!!! I believe you can spend the whole of 3-4 days just exploring this wonderful place. So huge it is that 76 flights can operate every hour!!! It has two 5-storey car park buildings with a combined capacity of 5,000 cars. Man, it really has to be HUGE! After all, Size Does Matter ;-)

Here, have a look at my album of Day-00.

Day 00: Far East Bangkok & Malaysia Airports

You can even visit this album, see which is faster for you.

by princeatul: Day 00: Far East Bangkok & Malaysia Airports

Vacation Blues

Well, a LONG gap tells that something happened... Yes, indeed something happened!

(feeding a cub at the Safari World, Bangkok)

(My younger bro, vabs, aka bulldozer, kissing the sexy Dolphin!!!)

I was on a 10-day vacation to the far east: Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. Being first real vacation in 4+ years, it was AWESOME! Away from computers (real tough!!!), coding, debugging, review meetings, and such other mundane worldly activities, it was a welcome break. Will post in more detail soon, this post is just to indicate that I am still alive and kicking asses harder than ever!

Vacation Blues

With vacation over, today I'm finiding it really difficult to concentrate on work :-(
Where I left my work, where to pick it up from, what to do, new deadlines... GOD! These tasks seem so stupendous. I believe it will take some time for me to come out of vacation blue.

For completeness, here's story of remaining days of my vacation...

On the last 2 days of vacation, i.e. 31st & 1st, I was to my ex-hometown, Mumbai (I still prefer calling it Bombay). It felt so good! Had some work out there & travelled a day sooner for a shopping spree to Heera Panna! WOW! It was so much fun. Though I didn't buy too much, it was fun to see all the clothes and electronics! Enjoyed eating junk food all the day long. Man, food on stalls in Pune is so poor in quality! Eat food on in Bombay stalls once and you will never ever feel like even looking at Pune stalls! Driving there was fun as well, everyone driving to their lanes... you can be just 3 inches away side-to-side to a bus and cruise at 80kmph! A feat you can NEVER think of achiving on Pune roads with Puneri drivers! If attempted, there are 99.999% chances that you will find yourself in hospital soon (and that too *only* if you are lucky enough that GOD is too busy to admit you in one of his rooms up there!) On 31st I shopped so hard that I had no energy left to do anything else, slept too early to give anyone New Year Wishes. Of course the next day, I had to face the heat of my relatives and friends for doing that!

That was all about material world. Philosophically, 5 day break from grinding routine presented an opportunity for deep introspection. Helping me understand what-when-how-why of corrections I need to apply to my daily life. Don't worry, won't bother you with gory details of the same ;-)

Contrary to what you might expect, this is pretty much all about my 5 days vacation! Nothing too exciting, but not boring either. Now getting back to work...
ZZ