New Sense

This year I have decided to revert back to the way I used to spend the evening of New Year’s eve, years ago. The reason for the change is partially coz of circumstances but mostly coz it feels like thats what I want to do

The last couple of years I have been out with friends on new year’s. Two years ago were on the road most of the night and last year it was a nice bonfire party followed up with hanging out at a friend’s place. But back in college I used to have a standard way of celebrating New Year’s.

People who have known me for a while know how much I love movies… So what I would do is keep aside one movie to be watched on New Years. This movie would be one I already knew I would love, movies that received critical acclaim and something I knew I wouldn’t forget for a very long time.

Movies I have watched include Saving Private Ryan, The Pianist, Schindler’s List, The Patriot and a few more. They always had a way of making the new year very special.

This year I have narrowed it down to three classic movies:
Godfather 2 : I have watched The Godfather twice but havent got around to watching the remaining parts of the trilogy.
Rear Window : Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller is near the top of the best movies of all time.
Citizen Kane : A classic I have been waiting a long time to watch.

I am currently inclining towards ‘Citizen Kane’ as my first choice. Lets see what my mood will be by evening

Sometimes when your thoughts and motives are not focused there are things that happen that leave you wondering about how things work. You wonder how random things seem interconnected and if all this is a part of a bigger script.

Off late there have been too many coincidences happening around me. Some seem like fluke occurrences but some simply left me amazed.
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I decided to give Panoramio a try a few weeks ago. For people who dont know, Parnoramio is the web photo service that puts photos on Google Earth. Considering I was geotagging photos from my trips, I thought it would help out people by allowing them to access them thru Google Earth.

Anyway I uploaded a bunch of photos to Panoramio and was disheartened to find that the photos did not show up on Google Earth. Apparently the geotagging is not enough and its only when the photos are ‘accepted’ to be displayed in GE, that they would show up there.

When I checked the site today to upload one more photo(above) there, I realized that all my photos were accepted You can find them on Google Earth (try searching for “Belwadi, Karnataka, India” I seem to be the only one with photos of the Vishnu temple there ). You can see my photos online here: http://www.panoramio.com/user/2475318

I took the above series of photos near the Goravanhalli Lakshmi Temple near Tumkur on Christmas Day. The short trip was peaceful and the place, very delightful.

I usually use the Photo Stich application that came with my Canon camera but for this image I decided to try something different. Right now iTunes and Photo Stich were the only (major) apps I was using Windows for and wanted to find a good alternative on (k)Ubuntu (Linux).

The above Panorama was created using Hugin. There seem to be a lot of alternatives out there but this one seemed to have the right balance of usability and features. I was very happy with the results

In the past year there have been a couple of incidents that happened that I wanted to write about but was unable to. Sometimes I never had the words, sometimes I was just plain lazy to put down my thoughts. The following two are such incidents. Incidentally they involve doing something sweet (one for and one by me).
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