The epic wait is finally over. Almost 3 years of marriage and 12 years of knowing each other and never having the feeling of living together “forever”.

Priti is here now, and first time in her life on a one-way ticket.

A lot of catching up, tons of things to do to make up the lost time together. Taking it one day at a time and trying hard not to get overwhelmed.

Photographs are the best way to remember these euphoric days. My flickr sets of her will continue to grow in the coming weeks.

That’s right. Picked up a nice used semi professional film SLR for 10 bucks. Worth the 90 mile roundtrip to San Francisco on my ST1300. Why 10 bucks for a camera usually available for 100-150 bucks used ? The command dial is broken which is a common issue of that model. It will “click” only in the “lock” position (to switch off the camera) and wont click when changing shooting modes. That means I have to look on the top LCD for confirmation when changing, say from Av to M mode. Not a big deal for me at all. Every frame counts when shooting film and I guess I will notice if anything changes accidentally.

I am having a renewed interest in film, especially bw film, after yesterday’s darkroom experience. I am gonna finish a couple 35mm rolls, and then looking forward to renting out a hasselblad (medium format film SLR) from Keeble & Schuchat.

Interesting times ahead I guess.

The epic wait is finally over. Almost 3 years of marriage and 12 years of knowing each other and never having the feeling of living together “forever”.

Priti is here now, and first time in her life on a one-way ticket.

A lot of catching up, tons of things to do to make up the lost time together. Taking it one day at a time and trying hard not to get overwhelmed.

Photographs are the best way to remember these euphoric days. My flickr sets of her will continue to grow in the coming weeks.

I do not normally post about other blogs, but I will make an exception for this: http://shaunlunt.typepad.com/shootings/

Flying all alone to Alaska, in a single propeller super cub, with incredible photographs - there is nothing else that can give so much feeling of peace. I am a long distance motorcyclist, and I know how to be jealous of this guy. He is having an experience that is easily the n-th power of what I can get riding a motorcycle in those places. And I have to stick to the land, and only upto what can be remotely called a road.

Way to go Shaun, you are the new God to me.

While I was getting confused on what to code on the quarterly hack day, our senior manager brought a Lego Mindstorm NXT programmable robotics kit for some fun. The moment I saw his mail, I ran to his cube to grab it. This was my one chance to enjoy some building and coding fun together in the name of hack.

So I spent the whole Saturday figuring what to make, and suddenly this idea struck me. In this age of social networking mania on the web, why not make an intelligent picture taker which can roam among people in a room and take some cool shots.

This is by far the best toy I ever handled. I always wanted to make toys with servo motors, and the kit has 3 of them. So 2 of them went to the wheel and the last one became a concoction to trip the shutter. Give the right amout of power and it will press just like a human finger. Woot.

Other than the motors, there are 4 sensors - ultrasonic (to “see” like bats), sound (mic), touch and light. Am having a ball of time to develop code in NXC on my Mac. A major part of the fun is in multithreaded event programming, using mutex and semaphores. Downloaded a very convenient compiler from Bricxcc and it is a breeze to compile and send the binary program to the robot over bluetooth. Here are the commands:

$ nbc prog.nxc -O=prog.rxe
$ nxtcom -v -S=/dev/tty.NXT-DevB-1 prog.rxe

To generate the tty for the bluetooth, I followed the instructions here:
http://juju.org/articles/2006/10/22/bluetooth-serial-port-to-nxt-in-osx

I am targetting to have these features for demo on Monday:
1. Front bumper hits something => move back a bit and take a picture.
2. Some obstacle comes in front and stays there for a few seconds => take a picture.
3. Explore the room intelligently.

More photos here.

Thanks to Dan’s super short notice, a wonderful ride happened today after a very long time.

Usual suspects: Dan, Ken, Ron, Jeff. I was surprised Jeff got Nancy along too. And what a guy, just because the ST is a great touring bike, he rode it non stop 130 miles to Cloverdale while Nancy on her first ride on the ST got a hefty dose of hypothermia. Took her a while to defrost !!! I guess at this rate Jeff is gonna ride that wonderful two-up bike one-up all the time, lol.

In short, 11 bikes, 12 people, twisties of CA-128 and CA-1, and an awesome feast at a private ranch on CA-1 near Stewart’s point made a memorable day.

Bikes: 2 ST13, 1 VFR, 1 Concours14, 1 F800ST, 5 Concours and Dan’s awesome ZGRX1200.

Route: Breakfast meet at Star restaurant, Cloverdale. All the way on 101N. Then CA-128 to CA-1 and down to the ranch for a late lunch. Then CA-1 down to Bodega bay and catch up on 101S at Petaluma.

I rode really good this time, thanks to the ST’s sportiness. But I still got stiff on the sharp curves of CA-1, when I could catch a glimpse of the pacific far down below. Makes a lot of difference (and panic) in the mind.

That’s right. Picked up a nice used semi professional film SLR for 10 bucks. Worth the 90 mile roundtrip to San Francisco on my ST1300. Why 10 bucks for a camera usually available for 100-150 bucks used ? The command dial is broken which is a common issue of that model. It will “click” only in the “lock” position (to switch off the camera) and wont click when changing shooting modes. That means I have to look on the top LCD for confirmation when changing, say from Av to M mode. Not a big deal for me at all. Every frame counts when shooting film and I guess I will notice if anything changes accidentally.

I am having a renewed interest in film, especially bw film, after yesterday’s darkroom experience. I am gonna finish a couple 35mm rolls, and then looking forward to renting out a hasselblad (medium format film SLR) from Keeble & Schuchat.

Interesting times ahead I guess.

I finally decided to go with a dedicated domain for my professional photography career. My other site www.joydutta.com will still exist, for this blog and riding related stuff. Bought the domain from nameboy.com, and boy, are they fast ! Within 2 minutes of registration and payment my site went live. I shifted the content from my existing site to the new one in just a minute, thanks to rsync.