Barneys Birthday

One of my former NASA associates Barney Pell threw a birthday party that I went to this weekend. It was a fun party with tons of people. I couldnt stay too long as I had to give someone a ride back to south bay (but Barney if you ever read this post: I promise to party hard the next time!!)

Barney is cool.. he has been in a bunch of places cambridge, whizbang, nasa, mayfield and now has started a new company in the search space called powerset.

Maan going back into the city is fun.. havent done that in a while... must do that more...

Off to a one man play

One of my co-workers is performing an one person play. Sameer has previously played roles in a couple of movies and this time he is both writing and acting this piece. The performance is somewhere in Noe Valley... should be fun..

Heading back to the US

Am heading back to the US from a thoroughly fun but exhausting trip. I think I was at home for only 5 days!! The rest was spent travelling!!

I am not looking forward to this plane ride back. Am flying singapore airlines via singapore and seoul to SFO. Singapore Airlines is a great airline but things have been going down in their standard over the last 4 years. My biggest complaint is with the food which to me is so plastic and inedible that I rather starve!! The service is not up to mark either..though when I do get help, the people are very nice. On the whole I am quite disappointed with SIA but maybe its because they used to be so good.

Maybe they should just allow people to bring their own food and give us a break in price!! Or let us buy a meal that is fresh packed rather than freezer packed!!

Trip to Vaishno Devi

Just after my trip to Bangalore, I left to go the famous Vaishno Devi temple . Sanjay from Singapore (on hearing about my plans to go the temple) also decided to join and was able to make arrangements within a couple of days. This is one of the biggest changes in India Travel arrangements can be made very quickly and reasonably reliably.

To go the temple, we had to fly to Delhi where we were met by our friend Sudhir. We spent the day there till around 4pm when we left by train to Jammu (on the banks of the Tawi river). This was my first trip to the beautiful state of Jammu & Kashmir. From Jammu you take a tourist taxi to Katra which is the base camp town for the 14.5 km hike to the temple.

I took my new Garmin GPS 60CSx on this trip and here is a link to the kmz file that shows the trek. Load it into Google Earth and you can see my entire trek!!

I had a great darshan of Mata Vaishno Devi.. and everything about the trip was great...well everything except that I couldnt sleep on the train and hence hadnt slept for 3 days in a row with a 30+ KM trek thrown in!

All the same it was great to be about in a part of India that I had never been in!!

My impressions of Bangalore

So I was in Bangalore for 2 days. My impression was of a city growing very fast in terms of money and people but not in terms of infrastructure. There is talk of citywide wireless access but roads and electricity infrastructure isnt there! The housing market in Bangalore is in the typical asian skyrocket mode. Just like Hongkong and KL, prices here have shot through the roof! Current prices for a luxury apartment are about Rs: 2800 per sq feet (~ Us $ 63). This is twice the price it was 2 years ago! Not even in California does the price double in 2 years!!

Still its less than the CA price of ~$ 375 per sq feet!!

my short trip to Bangalore

I just got back from Bangalore where I met two of my friends: Sunil and Gosakan. It was quite nice to see them well settled with homes and kids. Their lives seem so much different from mine.

This was also my first experience with India's cheap airlines. I flew on Air Deccan.
The tickets were quite cheap (~ $60) and I was able to book through the net. However note that security at the airports require you to carry some kinda printout to show that you are a passenger. Their organization at the airport seemed a little confused but not too bad. In contrast to a US traveller, I was not asked to provide identification at any time in the airport. The flight was a ATR 42 and did go on time. However my return flight was delayed by about 2 hrs. This is because they operate on such tight schedules that they need an incoming flight to turn around.

The other cheap airline that impressed me was Air Sahara (which has recently been purchased by Jet Airways). Unfortunately they seemed to ask for some kinda indentification which I wasnt sure I could provide. Later it turned out that I could have given them a CA driver's license number (I thought I had to provide an indian issued ID).

I'll write in my next post about Bangalore...but before I sign off here is a plug for Gosax's company:Get excellent cost effective patents done at IP Procure. I act as their west coast rep.