a byte of me

While I was browsing a friend's album on facebook, I came across some pictures of me from a long long time ago. Actually, its not that long, but it just seems like it.

Its me and my friend Nga. We're surrounded by a bunch of Native American kids who we played with one evening. It was taken in 2003 on the Native American reservation called Rosebud. That evening, we were to take part in a ritual/ceremony of praying and inner cleansing called a sweat lodge. The elders who were going to conduct the ritual lived in a house nearby and their kids were playing (and other than the house, no matter where you looked, it was flat, barren land). Nga and I joined them in playing Cops and Robbers or something like that where they were the cops and we were robbers and they had to run behind us to tag us!

It was so much fun, oh my gosh! We got caught after making them run around and they climbed on us (so we wont get away) ha ha! Really cool!

Melanie, a friend from Ohio Wesleyan University, and her boyfriend Adam visited the last weekend of February. I've known Mel since freshman year - thats about 5 years ago now, gosh! We had gone on the Vietnam trip together about a year ago.


We went around the city, then to the Mormon Temple and then to the Great Salt Lake. It was my first time being to the lake too (can't believe it)! People dont go there often because it is very salty and the air has a bit of stink in it. But it didnt smell that bad and being away from the city and in the open was fun! The lake is huge. Adam tasted to water to make sure it is indeed salty and they aren't lying. (He wasnt too happy after that)


An artsy picture of the American flag flying in the air above salt lake against the backdrop of sunset!



Tagged: Salt Lake City

Some funny pictures I received in a forwarded mail...





Tagged: Humor

Heres an update on my knee that I fractured while skiing more than a month ago. I have finally recovered enough to stop using crutches after being on them for four weeks. However, those four weeks made me realize how difficult life is for someone who is handicapped.

Suddenly, something we take so easily for granted, like opening a door, becomes an activity that needs to be handled correctly. Since both the hands are required to walk properly with crutches, after pulling the door open with one hand, you have to quickly move that hand onto a crutch and then use the crutch to stop the door as it swings back in. At times people would hold the door open for me, but it always made me self-conscious of my situation. Being an independent person, I didnt always like it. At first, I liked those who didnt care about me and moved on with their business.

But I soon realized that everything I wanted to do had to be planned as to how I would do it. If I wanted to go fill my water bottle, I couldnt just take the water bottle and go to the water fountain. I needed my hands to walk with the crutches. Who would hold the bottle then? So I had to plan and carry my backpack to just hold the water bottle to the water fountain and back. And thats just one case. There was no way around to carrying a dish full of food from the kitchen to sit and eat except for not using my crutches at all. Can you imagine that?

So slowly, I learned to be okay with taking help from my friends. Friends helped me shop for groceries. One friend helped me get medicines from the pharmacy. Others asked me to move in with them in their apartment so I dont have to worry about food and other such chores where I end up walking without crutches because I need my hands to carry something. I thank everybody who was considerate and thoughtful and helped me out in one way or the other.

Although I havent completely recovered, atleast now I am back on both feet. I can put enough weight on my knees that I can walk. But once I start to run, I feel a seering pain go through my knee right up through my entire thigh in just three or four steps. So I can't resume andyhigh-impact activity like hiking, jogging, or skiing yet. I have to make do with stationary-cycling and elliptical machine for now. I can't wait to get better like I was before!

... And its awesome. I am already a convert. I have always used Yahoo! Finance enthusiastically and even though I explored other options like MSN Money Central, Fool.com, Marketwatch, nothing came close to Yahoo! Finance.

But with Ajax, Google Finance definitely kicks ass (There is a reason I am not using the term "Web 2.0" here. Web 2.0 is not only Ajax, and I dont think it is here completely yet). One thing I really love is that the chart view is customizable. Go on over to an example (Google's stock) to see. Not only can you zoom into the chart using 1d, 5d, 1m, 3m, 6m .. standards that Yahoo's chart function allows, but if you click on the scrollers in the centre of the historical chart above, you can customize the period that you view the chart for. And it automatically pulls the news headlines for that time period on the right side. Even better, the news stories are tagged on the chart so you can analyze what major events caused the stock to go up or down.

Now scroll down to the Management section. As you roll over the names, you can see a quick summary and a picture of the person. No more clicking on each page and waiting for the page to load. Yay!

Another cool feature is that it remembers your last few quotes. Next time you go over to the homepage you can see the last few quotes in the "Recent Quotes" section.

I think Google Finance offers pretty much everything that Yahoo Finance offers and makes it better. There's probably more, but I will only be able to explore it more over the weekend.

Lately, I have kind of been mad at the rate at which new web services have been launching, all trying to make use of Ajax. But in the rush to get the product out there, getting it out half-baked. And that is usually very annoying. But I am very happy with Google Finance and I think they've taken full advantage of the new technology and used it appropriately (and not overdone it. This is very important).

Tagged: Google Finance, Ajax, Technology

This is a car I sketched a few days ago. As a kid, I always dreamed of cars. This was when I was in the 8th grade. Rather than dreaming of just cars that exist, I dreamed of creating my own. Of how I'd make my cars. Of owning my own company and making beautiful cars.

Along the way, my friends named my so-called company KMCL. Abit stupid, but I liked it. So I went with it. And so was Kumar Motors Corporation Limited born. At least conceptually. It was kinda cool. I used to sketch cars on any piece of paper whenever I was bored. My drawing was more abstract than I make it sound though. I didnt just set out making cars. I would start with just drawing random lines here and there on a piece of paper. Out of it, would come myriad sketches of different things - people, planes and whatever the randomly drawn set of lines could possibly evolve into. More often than anything else, I managed to convert those random lines into cars. :) And I thought that was awesome.

But, I sort of gave up on sketching once I got more busy after 10th grade. After I joined computer science in 11th grade, I stopped dreaming of owning a car company, for good reasons :). Then suddenly a few days agoI was sitting on my study desk with my work for the day done. I was bored at 2 am in the morning, but I didnt want to sleep. I picked a scratch paper and started drawing random lines. And suddenly all this seemed familiar. And an hour later I had the following car sketched. (I used to name cars in those days. This one is still unnamed.) I am glad though that I am back doing something I always enjoyed doing.

Here is the whole cruddy sketch that I drew on that piece of paper where this car that is pictured above was drawn. With the bunch of lines that I drew initially to start me off, I drew the front of what would be a fighter plane of old ages. (very very light sketch, center. You can barely make it out.) Then (bottom, right) I attempted to make the plane bigger and it sucked. Then came the idea of a front grille and lights with a bunch of curves (left center) to start with. This evolved into a more refined sketch of just the grille and the lights (right center). Then I scaled the grille much smaller and tried to sketch my imagination of rest of the car in the remaining space. :)

Its a coupe, but has an uncharacteristically long bonnet. I like the doors however, with the much larger side window. I kinda like it, but there are many flaws. I myself have spotted so many - mostly related to scaling (of certain parts compared to others) and symmetry of design. But I feel its a pretty darn good start after a 6 year break and it makes me happy.

Tagged: Cars, Design