The first 10K!

Yay!!!! I did it! My first official run! The 10K in Lorton, VA on September 12 2009! The feeling is like none other!
The day was perfect. We reached in time to collect our packets and warm up. I started the race really really slow. I was worried about my shin splints. I had the shin and calf sleeve on and was in my old shoes. (Am a little skeptical of the new Nikes). I guess the combination of the sleeve, old shoes, proper warm up and the ultrasound I'd done last week helped. Minimal splint pain...or rather tolerable splints I should say. The terrain was pretty hilly, I should say (or 'hillier' than I practised). But somewhere midway, I thought, it's okay...just let go and stop. But for some reason I didn't. It was nothing to do with 'saving face' or determination or anything of the kind. I just went on I guess. Good for me!
I badly wanted to finish the race within the hour. Even during the practice runs, it never occurred to me to go beyond 60mins. But I finished in 61:23. So a little disappointing, but very satisfying I should say. Hey! You got to see where I come from. A little शाबाशी certainly is due. :)
Madhura and I finished at exactly the same time.
And this thing IS addictive. I cannot wait for the next one. Where? When? Did not register as yet.
Just for posterity, here's a snapshot of the results:

A nice sumptuous breakfast followed by good sleep and a movie in the evening with wife and friends. Nice!

Running

I have been running for the past 10 weeks now. Madhura got me this great book: "The Beginning Runners Handbook - The Proven 13-Week Walk/Run Program".
It has motivated me enough to stick to its plan for the past 10 weeks! Can you believe that! I am following it every bit. So much so that I have bought a pair of dedicated running shoes!
Frank is the only marathon and ultra-marathon and 100 miler I know of. I always thought marathon runners were some kind of legendary figures. You know...the ones you see on TV and thats that. He's guided Madhura to stick to her plan and she's run a 5K and a 10K in Michigan. But then, well, she doesn't need much prodding to stick to plans anyways. Unlike me!
One fine evening Madhura kicked my butt on one of her casual run days. I found I just could not run. All those months (or has it been years) of inactivity, puffing and drinking did no good to my lazy muscles. So I am like..."Let's try this. I am going to give up anyways. Since I am home, it will at least tire me enough to help me sleep. Once I land a project and am away, its all going to fizzle away."
But I am holding on! For 10 weeks! Inspite of the move and all the hullaballoo. 3 more weeks to go and I should be able to run a 10K (6.2 miles). Groovy! Me talking of running 'miles'. I sincerely never believed I could run more than 1.5 miles. How did I arrive at that number? That was how much I could do after huffing and puffing for 20 minutes and on the verge of collapsing on that darned treadmill! But that program's put me here where I can now run 5 miles for sure! Kudos Amit! 
Problems so far? Let me put that up in another post. What say?
I found this cool iPhone app and site to log your runs too. That too in some other post.
Madhura's egged me all the way, so far. She's registered us to run for this event on Sept 12th - South Fairfax Chamber of Life Without Limits 10K run. And I am nervous as hell. Just have to stick to the training plan and I think I should be able to get to the finish line. Conscious.

Bollywood songs on your iPhone

We all know that there are not many iPhone apps out there (actually, I didn't find even one) that plays Bollywood songs. Even Pandora does a pathetic job. Thats sad! Considering such a growing population of desis using the iPhone. Did I just give away a good App idea to a developer? :-)

But then, we, as always are resourceful, aren't we?

Check out m.dhingana.com. You gotta go through the Safari browser.

Lo and behold! It's a beautiful and easy interface right there.

What I like? You can minimize Safari and do other stuff. The songs play in the back ground. Except, of course, if you were to access the internet, and the songs stop.

Eliminating the blind spot

Found a great way to eliminate the blind spot while driving.
Simple and easy: Sit as you would normally drive and adjust the rear view mirror the same way you would usually do - centralized view of the rear window. Now, move your head between the driver and the passenger seats (yes, lean over) and adjust the passenger side rear view so that you just see the edge of the rear bumper in the mirror. Next, come back to your normal driving stance, and move your head one head length to your left (don't have to 'lean' as much) and then adjust the driver side rear view mirror so that you just see the driver side rear bumper. Done!
It takes a little time getting used to the new rear view in your side mirrors. A couple of hours of driving, at most, I would guess. But, believe me, it's much better than craning your neck every time you want to change lanes.
Let me know if this works for you. Or if there's any tuning required.

Mail2blogger

Blogger has this great feature where you could post to your blog
directly from your phone. Here's a sample...
Go to Settings > Email and format your Mail2Blogger email ID there.
Select if you would like the blog to post immediately or would like it
to sit in your dashboard to review and post later. Next time you want
to blog on-the-go just send an email to that address. The email will
be your posting and the email's subject the title of your post. Nice!

Sent from my iPhone

Outlook voting and tracking

Sharon showed me this great functionality in Outlook: Voting and tracking.

It's a pretty cool feature. Say you want to get an opinion from a bunch of people regarding, say, "Do you want to go out for lunch today?". Conventionally, you would send out an email to all these guys and try keeping track of who voted what. Well, use the voting and tracking feature and things would be easy.

Compose a new message just as you would normally do. Use the 'Options' button to open up the 'Message Options' and check 'Use voting button'. Scroll down the list to select their options or enter any options you want making sure each option is separated by a semi-colon.

Compose your message as you would normally do and send it. The recipients receive the email with an option to vote. She votes and can send the message back with editions. You get the reply with her vote.

To keep a track of the votes, go to your sent message and hit the tracking tab. Voila! Your recipients' votes are all displayed in a nice form out there.

Simple and very effective.

Swoopo.com

Lisa mentioned about this auction site...Swoopo.com.

After going through it for a while, I must say it is quite a brilliant idea. I have not registered and bought anything there as yet. But I do see myself going for it one of these days.

The concept is brilliant: The auction starts off at $0.00. I have seen 50" plasma tvs go for something like $150! Bids increment at 6c or 12c or 24c! And if you put in your bid in the last 20 secs, the timer jumps up another 20secs. So technically, there is no set end time for the auction. Now here is the catch. Every bid you make, costs you 60c! Aha! So in actuality, if the winning bid was say $120 with a 12c increment, there have been 1200/12=1000 bids made. So, the site actually roped in (1000 x 0.60 = $600). S&H separate. So you see! What a terrific concept! Would I try it? Yes! Sure...for checking it out.

More updates when I try it out.

A new beginning

A lot's been happening for the past few months. My honorable intentions of maitaining a running commentary have proven, if nothing else, a broken promise. Well, life happens, I guess.

So without further ado, let me try and recoup.

We got out of Michigan on the 24th of July 2009. It's been 5 years

that I have been in and around Auburn Hills, MI. Thats where I landed my first job, made a lot of good friends, and Madhura too! It was a bitter sweet moment - leaving Michigan. And thats the longest I have lived in one city in my life! Well, I guess change is good.

Our plans to move to San Diego were washed away after I landed a project with the State of Delaware. Almost overnight we did a 180degree turn and decided to move to Virginia. We cancelled our tickets and ALL those detailed plans to move to SD and booked a Penske truck to move to Virginia.

I drove to Nitin Kalra's place (in Gainesville, VA) on 18th July and then to Delaware. Found a nice place. The boss here and other developer folks are gre

at!

Flew back the next weekend to load up the truck. Gautam, Nate, Taylor and Girish helped us. Slept the last night at Gautam's place and left early in the morning. It took me 11 hours to get to Nitin's place with Maggy a total wreck. She wouldn't eat we

ll for the next 2-3 days and started her puking again. And then the new place, new people...sure was quite difficult for her. Anyways, she managed to pull through.

I had to leave Madhura and Maggy at Nitin's place and drive back to Delaware. Madhura did a terrific job the next couple of weeks balancing the job hunt and apartment search and being a good guest and a good mom to Maggy. There were some stressful moments there. But all in all, she landed a good job with IRG. And we landed up in Fairfax, VA. :-)

Thats as of today.

Last two weekends have been busy getting the apartment set up. Its quite a lot of fun I should say. Planning with Madhura. Playing with Maggy. Beautiful place.

All in all, so far, we are pretty happy with things inspite of the haphazard way they have been happening. :-)

Mozilla Firefox's add-ons

Now that I am between jobs, and have some time on hand I thought, let’s maybe contribute or share or just throw something out there.
Let’s start off with some sites worth going to, some applications worth loading up to juice up the Internet experience.
Before all that, it’s worth mentioning that if you don't have Mozilla, it would be worth your while to install that first. It kind of makes you feel you are incharge, you know. I don't know how anyone could ever use IE. I have installed all these add-ons that it becomes hard for me to use the Internet any place else than my good ol' lappy. Add-ons worth installing, that save you time and make the interface nice and fancy are:

• Clipmarks
  
• Cooliris Previews
• Internote
• Mouse Gestures
• Permatabs
• Research Word
• Speed Dial
• Tab Effect

All these make Internet a better experience.
All these any hundreds more can be found here.
More as and when I find and install more. Let me know if you know of more interesting ones. If not, try one of those and you will thank me.

Subhamangala Saavdhaan...

A lot's happened in the last year. I met Madhura, proposed to her. She accepted and we tied the knot on the 2nd of April 2007.
Meeting her was an adventure on its own. Getting her to come out for a cup of coffee took 5 full months! All I thought to myself was, "Give me one chance, one chance is all I need". Well that day was the 30th of September 2006! I was out helping Ashish-Meghana move when Timcy tells me that Madhura has emailed me asking me to meet her at Caribou coffee at 6:00pm. GAWD!!! For one, its 4:00pm and I am an hour's drive away. And I DO NOT like the coffee. Even pouring 12 sachets of sugar and loads of creamer doesn't make it mild enough for me. (Lest did I know then that Madhura LOVES coffee!) Well...there's a point of dispute right there!
So I unload all of Ajo's stuff at his new place and drive like a maniac, just in time for a quick shower, throw on a set of pressed clothes, pour on that fuckin exorbitant perfume on myself (the one that was shelved for 'special' occasions, you know) and rush to Caribou. I was late by 10 minutes (after getting a half hour extension already). She looked lovely! I could barely control the drool. I wonder if she noticed my googled eyes. Well, she didn't notice that I had sliced myself while shaving. We struck off pretty good. Numbers were exchanged (that's a positive sign!). I mentioned to her that I was off for Dandiya that evening in Dearborn. She had another party to go to.
That was one date I am not going to forget in a hurry!
And one year later, we still make it a point to celebrate every month-end with an elaborate date. Go out for a nice dinner to the different restaurants around town.
She did turn up at the Dandiya place. And Deval told me there, "Mein bhi PT hun." Thats one joke that is going to be repeated over and over and over again.
One thing led to another. Love was in the air, then a breakup (that didn't last too long), a proposal with all the will-you-marry-me bells and whistles (yes! I went down on my knees, at Caribou coffee (AAWWW!!), on Valentine's Day, with a diamond ring). I am not going to do this ever again, so I thought, might as well make it memorable.
So well...the parents meet up back home, all's okay. Madhura leaves a week before I do and the wedding bells ring in Pune on April 2nd. It was a nice wedding. Everyone made it and most importantly, everyone enjoyed.


The honeymoon was in Switzerland! Don't even ask what I had to go through to get all those arrangements finalized. Well, everything's well that ends well. Switzerland was like living a dream. We were like two love-birds. Perfect weather, perfect location, perfect girl with me...what else can a man ask for?
We'd been to Zurich, Interlaken, Lucerne, Jungfrau.

Now this is supposed to be the highest place in Europe. A man is entitled to view everything that is 'viewable'. Guess that all changes after you tie the 'noose'.

I hated it when I got back and had to go to work. We set up base at Beacon Hill Apartments. This was a place I fell in love with the first time I saw it when I was looking for apartments in Michigan. We have this nice cozy place. Set off on a shopping spree and got about setting up this place. I like it so far. So far this is how it all looks like...

Ooppssiiee...wrong one!

Yeah...those look like the right ones.
We've traveled quite a bit since and have plans for more.

More on the travels part later...
Bless us all who read this.