Books in my shelf

What are the books in my shelf and which are half read or yet to be started.

How Life Imitates Chess – Gary Kasporov

Freakonomics - Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

What Do I Do When I Want to Do Everything – Barbara Sher

Creativity – A. Dale Timpe

Mahatma Gandhi: His life and ideas – Charles F Andrews

High Performance Entrepreneur – Subroto Bagchi

I have the habit of buying at least 2 books per month, but sometimes fail to keep up the speed of reading with buying. Before I get into a bookstore next time, I should make sure to complete minimum of two from the above list.

For Blind

Last week I saw an article about few college students doing a project on designing a special computer keyboard for blind. It was mentioned that it allows the users to type 40 words per minute. My basic doubt is why a specially designed keyboard is required for blind and why can’t they use a normal keyboard to type 40 words per minute. For them using a computer should be more like interacting with humans than just working with a machine. This made me ponder on how the visually impaired people use the computer.

I did googling and found that there are many devices to help the blind to use computers. Few of them are given below.

Braille Displays: An electronic braille display is a tactile device that is placed under a conventional computer keyboard, or laptop keyboard and enables the user to read the contents of the computer screen by touch in braille. Each cell has eight pins made of metal or nylon, which are electronically controlled to move up and down, to display a braille version of characters that appear on the computer screen.

Screen Reader Software: A screen reading program sends screen text displayed on the screen to be spoken by a speech synthesizer. Common features include the ability to speak the full screen, a user defined area of the screen, a line, a word, individual letters or the phonetic equivalent of a letter and punctuation. A screen reader allows menus, dialog boxes, tool tips and system messages to be read back.

Braille embosser or braille printer: Embossers print braille output from a computer by punching dots onto paper. They connect to the computer in the same way as text printers and can also be connected to notetakers and other devices with a serial or parallel port. Used in conjunction with the embosser is braille translation software that translates printed text into braille.

Voice Recognition Software: Voice Recognition Software enables the user to have an alternative to typing text into a computer. This is where the user talks to the computer and the computer talks to user (interactive software).

I think the voice recognition software should be the best solution for any work which involves typing. It might become a really difficult task to correct the mistakes committed while typing and a person might also doesn’t know in case of errors.

There are many other devices like these and quite a lot of research is being done on this front to enable easy usage of computers for blind.

When I was thinking about the latest technological developments and their usage for everyone, the first thing which struck my mind was iphone. Is iphone user friendly for blind? I googled again and found this interesting link “Does the iPhone shaft the blind?”. You should read the comments for the posting and look the beatings the author took from iphone fans :) . I don’t want that to happen for me. So let’s leave iphone aside.

Considering the population in India and the number of visually impaired people in India, can they use everything like what the normal people like you and I use. A simple task of withdrawing money from ATM should be a Herculean task for the blind. I still doubt if any blind person had ever visited an ATM. Does it have voice interactive software for easy access? Likewise I can think about many day to day needs and don’t find anything which is easily accessible for visually or physically challenged persons. Not sure when we start thinking about these simple things?

Trip to Dubai - Part II

What else is there in Dubai for the sight seeing? Malls, Malls, Malls, Jumeria Beach and Malls. Yes, Dubai is packed with shopping malls and every famous mall has some unique feature with respect to theme, size, shape etc.. I didn’t get a chance to carry my camera to all the malls I visited, but most of them have their own well designed websites explaining the details.

Mall of the Emirates – This is supposed to be the biggest mall in Dubai and is famous for its first in-door ski resort in Middle East. I visited this mall after my office hours and due to the limited time factor didn’t get a chance to try skiing. But managed to take few pictures.

I never visited a shopping complex of this size before and it was quite tiring for me to roam around. After an exhaustive walk I felt like having a good coffee. Few months back, I read the book The Starbucks Experience and wanted to find out what’s so special about the Starbucks coffee. I started searching for Starbucks in the store map and followed the directions as given in the map. Getting fed up of searching the shop for nearly 20 mins, I decided to go back to my hotel and went to the taxi stand. Not able to give up, I gave one last try and enquired the security standing near the taxi pick up area. He pointed towards the exit gate. Oh my gosh, the shop is just adjacent to the exit gate outside the mall and I have been searching inside for such a long time. I tried Frappucino (blended with banana flavour) and the taste was amazing.

One of my colleagues introduced me to his friend Sachin in Dubai. Sachin is a very enthusiastic person and was quite patient enough to roam along with me in Dubai. He took me to some interesting places which he himself has explored recently. We went to an amazing place called Century Village. It should be on the must do list of everyone visiting Dubai. The Century Village is a small oasis of fine dining restaurants, in a relaxing atmosphere of fountains and greenery which allows you to almost forget that you are in Dubai. First I and Sachin went to the Irish village tried Guinness (dark beer) and had good time chatting in a typical Irish country side setup. It is one of the very few places in Dubai that you are allowed to sit outside while having an alcoholic drink. After having couple of beers we went to an Arabic restaurant few meters away from the Irish village. We had an awesome feeling as soon as we entered the restaurant. The room was filled with flavoured smoke from hookahs, an Arabian singer playing Oud (Arabian guitar), singing and people were dancing for the music. The experience was enthralling and didn’t miss an opportunity to try strawberry flavoured hookah. After a great evening we came back to our hotel at around 2:50 AM.

Next day we went to Ibn Battuta Mall, the largest themed mall in Middle East. The architectural inspiration behind the distinctive design of the shopping mall is based around the travels of renowned 14th century explorer, Ibn Battuta, a man who travelled over 75,000 miles during his lifetime. The mall is segmented into six distinct architectural zones, representing key destinations visited by Ibn Battuta.The six courts are comprised of the Andalusian Court, the North African Court, the Egyptian Court, the Persian Court, the Indian Court and the Chinese Court. I liked the Chinese court very much because of its rich colours and architecture.

We also went to City Centre in Dubai. The place is as busy as the City Centre in Chennai with its size 5-6 times bigger than the complex in chennai. It has got nearly 4-5 multi storied buildings for car parking alone. Don’t miss to try Cinnabon in Cinnabon shop. The taste was awesome.

I missed to visit the famous open Jumeirah Beach. Heard from my friends the place is good to play volley ball and other water sports.

Even though I stayed in Dubai for a short duration, it was a happy and eventful experience.

Trip to Dubai – Part I

Last month I was in Dubai for few weeks and thought of sharing about few interesting places in Dubai. Dubai International airport is very famous for its size and the duty free shops. I had a chance to take few snaps of duty free zone and did little bit of shopping before my departure from Dubai.


Duty free shops in Dubai Airport

I bought this decorative Hookah for 60 Dhirams in a duty free shop.

The Dubai skyline might soon beat the Newyork skyline. Look at these skyscrapers on both sides of the road. The tallest building in the world Burj Dubai is under construction and nearly 140 floors are completed. Still 55 more floors to be completed. You can also get the information from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burj_Dubai.

My office was 25Kms away from the hotel I was staying and it used to take nearly 25-40 mins to reach the office by taxi depending on the traffic congestion. The public transportation is not good and people have to rely on taxis or own a vehicle for commuting. Taxis are quite costly and I used to spend 40-45Dhs one way everyday.

A visit to Dubai is incomplete without going to a Desert Safari. This is one of the most exciting and thrilling drive I have ever experienced. Checkout the video clipping taken with my camera.

We halted at a campsite and took a camel ride, wore traditional dress (dishdash or thawb) and I tried Henna too. Sumptuous dinner was followed by a wonderful live belly dance show.

Graceful Belly Dancing. This lady had amazing abs. My camera batteries went down at the right moment and missed to capture the video of the dance. But you can find quite a lot of videos in Youtube.

More to follow in my next posting.

7 Years and still going on..

Yesterday I completed 7 yrs in my current organization. On July 17th 2000 around 22-23 guys from different colleges joined along with me to undergo freshers induction training and as on today there are only six of us from the group still working here. As the days passed on, our paths took different directions and headed towards unknown destinations. Personally, I am emotionally bonded with the organization. Even though there are few bad experiences the takeaways are many and I am happy about that. End of day the desires and aspirations are going to be the driving forces in our lives.

Great ECR Run

The run was fun yesterday. We all started running at around 5:15 AM and headed towards Mahabalipuram. Weather was very pleasant in the morning with overcast conditions. I started well and was leading the pack for few minutes (probably 15 mins), then I slowly began to drop my pace and continued running at the same pace for nearly an hour. At around 55th minute I stopped running and walked for a minute and this is when I started thinking about the distance and worrying about completing the remaining 18-19 Kms. Somehow managed to run/walk/crawl and completed 25 Kms in 2hrs and 40mins. I hit the wall, stopped proceeding further and took a shareauto to reach the destination Coral surf restaurant which was 3-4kms away.

During the course there were moments when I thought no more long distance running, but how many times I have thought about quitting alcohol after a hangover?

More detailed narration of the great ECR run in Kk's and Ram's blog. A very big thanks to the volunteers and Chennai Runners group for making this a memorable event. I admire you guys.

Few Pics from Ram's Flickr..



Before Start



After the run

ECR - 30 Km Run

It’s been nearly two months since I have joined the Chennai runners group and tomorrow the group is doing a 30Km run in ECR starting from Toll booth to Mahabs. The run would start at 4:30AM.

My last longest run ever was 25Km in 2005 Chennai Marathon. I am looking forward for this and I can take this as a benchmark for the forthoming Bangalore and Chennai Marathons.

More updates after the run.