We are having a snow induced holiday today in Seattle!! It snowed a lot yesterday afternoon and evening. I saw a bunch of car accidents on my way home on the free way! Basically everyone here has tough time driving in rain and now if you add snow, you bet things are going to go hay wire! The APLDC conference got cancelled today and every one at work is missing owing to hazardous driving conditions, but i'm here trying to spend time blogging and getting some work done before i head to not-so-snowy India.. :)...
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Monday, November 27, 2006
I actually finished the half marathon!!
Well yesterday my human soul was able to achieve the feat of finishing the seattle half marathon, under pretty harsh rain, wind and snow:). I completed the 13.2 miles in 2 hours 26 minutes chip time and 2 hours 30 minutes and 18 seconds official time!! I was amazed that i didnt break any of leg parts!! and actually i was delighted that i could achieve my personal time goal of 2hours 30minutes!!!
I started the run at 7:30am with a pretty jovial bunch of folks who were upbeat even though it has just snowed (!!) a few minutes before. I finished the run at 10:00am braving the constant downpour and winds. At point I was little worried if i could finish the half marthon with my time goal as i was already timing 1:19, but then i paced myself a little faster, I walked hills, ran hard on downhills :) and steadied out the flats taking about 1:17 to finished the rest of half!! And yep, i felt strong and wasnt limping as i has imagined i would!! May be it was one of the great days!!!
Now...comes the fun party yep! today i'm feeling pretty soar :)..well its not as bad as i felt after my first STP though. But i'll wait until tomorrow to say anything for sure because it seems the worst hit is two days after the marathon!!
Along with me several Asha runners completed the run!! Way to go Miles For Smiles !!!
Saturday, November 18, 2006
Can i run a half-marathon?
Alrite! I dont know why am i doing this when i dont know if i can do it, but i want to support the 45+ Asha runners running the Seattle Marathon on Nov 26th and making huge leap towards a cause I believe in. Constantly i have been puzzled by how people and especially some of my good friends can make one stride after next and finish miles! I always feared runnning but this time i'm taking the jump and with just about few training runs, I'm going to be at the Seattle Marathon and participate running or walking (more of later) in order to get rid of my fear, support my friends and a cause!! Please contribute to my run/walk and more so i would really love to see you on next Sunday in person supporting my run, each of your cheers will make me brave and pump me to take the next stride!! Love you all! cheers, Vaibhav
Monday, October 30, 2006
Halloween 2006!!
This halloween I dressed up like a 80s disco dancer, very characterisitic of bollywood actor Mithun Chakravarty. Initially the plan was to be a cook cooking war or a broken voting machine, but hey both of them were way more work than this. And yep! finally i got to wear my red polka dotted shirt!! Wohoo!!!
Monday, October 16, 2006
Oktoberfest birthday bash
Alrite!! I turned 27 last week. The bash was on Friday patched with Oktoberfest. The pics are on flickr. A tonne of folks showed up and it was hella fun!!! We made jungle juice and house special berry mix!!!
As you will see in the pics there was tonnes of booze, dancing, jackassing and debauchery involved :).! Well i'm young, biatch...;).
Monday, September 18, 2006
Sometimes a to-be-judged-workman needs to quarrel with his tools and fix them
Wow! thats a mouth-ful of a blog title! I'm spending most of active workhours today trying to improve the way i work with my tools! So yep - what are my tools and what do i do? Well I'm a programmer and a compiler, debugger and build system are my tools!!! So i need to constantly learn to make optimial use of these tools. But the real truth is that i'm a knowledge worker and i want to improve my workprocess to a level where i can effectively reutilize what i learn each time with minimal overhead, so that way my efficiency will increase. I'm thinking of writing few visual studio snippets which i can use each time i'm doing a familiar task, also have some stubs ready for testing and yep! design/prototype-design before i write :). Just a passing thought in my evolution as an engineer (?)!
Thursday, September 14, 2006
What have we achieved in Software in last ten years?
As i troll day in and day out doing my day job, I'm wondering what has my discipline achieved in last tem years. I'm amazed that i cant say anything much, since the internet happened i think we are stuck! I want the profession to provide the rapid fire flexible solutions which can make our lives easy - not handle like 50 password logins or fight with reinstalling nightmares. Can we really make out software smart? Will the smart phone someday really become smart? I'm experimenting with some ideas and will try to get out the prototypes soon. We have achieved a lot in this profession but i think the engineering discipline could do a lot better and actually put us to an era where we can actually think about things rather than think how we can do something which we have already thought! I know this vague but i promise i'll elaborate this with examples. Currently the running one i'm using is to make my smartphone really smart! - i wont switch from a feature phone until i'm convinced that my smartphone is worth the smartness i get.
Monday, August 21, 2006
Orcas Islands - Camping heaven
Had a great fun time biking, hiking and camping on orcas islands this weekend. Pics at http://www.flickr.com/photos/vaibhavb/tags/campingorcasislands/ !! This is view from top of Mt. Constitution you can acutally see Baker over the water!!!
Monday, August 07, 2006
Mt. Rainier - A Blissful Climb!!
Yesterday I was fortunate to be on Mt. Rainier, such an awesome day, great views and gracious weather. This was one of the most blissful climb i have done. I was enjoying each moment of the climb and the motto was enjoy the journey than the end! Nine of us summited at about 9:00ish am. Pictures at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/vaibhavb/tags/mtrainier2006/
We started the climb on Saturday Aug 5, 2006 at about 9:30am from the Paradise parking lot. We was team of 12 lead by Olympia mountaineer Barney. Going at an easy pace we reach camp Muir at 2:00pm. The weather was awesome and blissful vista. I tented up with Robert. We had our dinner at 5:30pm. I really enjoyed the Mountain house Pasta i bought for dinner! We were planning to start the summit day at 11:30pm, it was going be a one long day from base camp to summit and back to cars! So after cranking up tonne of water from ice got to bed at 6:30pm.
Barney woke us all by 11:00pm the same evening and after roping up we left for destination 14411ft. We had about 4500ft of elevation to cover and the plan was to do 500ft per hour and call if a day if we dont summit by 10am. With tonnes of folks attempting the summit and the RMI light lamp crew we slowed a bunch. At Ingram flats Michael a little fatigued, called it a day and decided to stay. From 4 ropes team and 12 member crew we went down to 3 roped teams with 11 people. For another 3 and half hours we travelled the nasty and steep rock route to get on top of dissapointment cleaver. It was 5:30am and our team was ready to launch from the cleaver! However we doing a very slow pace and with this rhythm we could never make the summit before 10am, however every was feeling quite strong! Barney with Garette and Robert made a call to take back Coleen and have the rest of crew give a shot to the summit!!
Garette from assiting Barney become the climb lead. At 5:30am we just took of for the summit, Garette really pulled hard and I kept up with him while the other rope teams (Robert and Peter) were hauling their asses behind us as well. After about an hour of climbing I asked Garetter to slow down a bit so that i can keep up - man he was just running!! We had to take a de-route from the standard path as lot of crevasses had opened up. After solid hour and half of climbing we were at 13400ft and there we saw the hope of summitting!!! We kept up the pace and at 8:30am we were at the lip of the crater, booyaa!!! We all then shot for the true summit at the other side of crater. Very strangely the whole journey seemed to have a very satisfying resemblance to life, I enjoyed each moment of it but never was really crazy about a great end, but you know if you play it well you do succeed!! Soo.. we took a log of summit pics, signed the log, eat, drank, relaxed, Jeff and Larry even sh*?ed :) at 10am we headed back to the base camp!!!
From Summit to Cleaver to Ingram flats to Camp Muir we were back !! The down climbing had really killed me, my inned thigh muscles and calves are still sore!!!! We got at the base camp at 3, Barney had graciously melt us some water. I immediately guled a bit and stared packing for way down!!! We left Camp Muir at 4pm and reached cars at about 7:00pm, I was really taking it slow and for last mile i almost baby stepped! Robert and Garette hung out with me all the while testing out all the possible trail benches!!!!
From Saturday 9:00am to Sunday 7:00pm the whole journey was blissful!!! I'm really glad to have done this and lucky to have a great team and amazing weather!!
I did the climb to fund raise for a non-profit clinic for the needy in my home area, Nashik. In case you are interested to help out to help this clinic get started please give me your donation checks. This effort is not under any US-NGOs but I’m trying to get this running myself – with local help and charities. Will let donors know about the progress of project as it un-rolls.
We started the climb on Saturday Aug 5, 2006 at about 9:30am from the Paradise parking lot. We was team of 12 lead by Olympia mountaineer Barney. Going at an easy pace we reach camp Muir at 2:00pm. The weather was awesome and blissful vista. I tented up with Robert. We had our dinner at 5:30pm. I really enjoyed the Mountain house Pasta i bought for dinner! We were planning to start the summit day at 11:30pm, it was going be a one long day from base camp to summit and back to cars! So after cranking up tonne of water from ice got to bed at 6:30pm.
Barney woke us all by 11:00pm the same evening and after roping up we left for destination 14411ft. We had about 4500ft of elevation to cover and the plan was to do 500ft per hour and call if a day if we dont summit by 10am. With tonnes of folks attempting the summit and the RMI light lamp crew we slowed a bunch. At Ingram flats Michael a little fatigued, called it a day and decided to stay. From 4 ropes team and 12 member crew we went down to 3 roped teams with 11 people. For another 3 and half hours we travelled the nasty and steep rock route to get on top of dissapointment cleaver. It was 5:30am and our team was ready to launch from the cleaver! However we doing a very slow pace and with this rhythm we could never make the summit before 10am, however every was feeling quite strong! Barney with Garette and Robert made a call to take back Coleen and have the rest of crew give a shot to the summit!!
Garette from assiting Barney become the climb lead. At 5:30am we just took of for the summit, Garette really pulled hard and I kept up with him while the other rope teams (Robert and Peter) were hauling their asses behind us as well. After about an hour of climbing I asked Garetter to slow down a bit so that i can keep up - man he was just running!! We had to take a de-route from the standard path as lot of crevasses had opened up. After solid hour and half of climbing we were at 13400ft and there we saw the hope of summitting!!! We kept up the pace and at 8:30am we were at the lip of the crater, booyaa!!! We all then shot for the true summit at the other side of crater. Very strangely the whole journey seemed to have a very satisfying resemblance to life, I enjoyed each moment of it but never was really crazy about a great end, but you know if you play it well you do succeed!! Soo.. we took a log of summit pics, signed the log, eat, drank, relaxed, Jeff and Larry even sh*?ed :) at 10am we headed back to the base camp!!!
From Summit to Cleaver to Ingram flats to Camp Muir we were back !! The down climbing had really killed me, my inned thigh muscles and calves are still sore!!!! We got at the base camp at 3, Barney had graciously melt us some water. I immediately guled a bit and stared packing for way down!!! We left Camp Muir at 4pm and reached cars at about 7:00pm, I was really taking it slow and for last mile i almost baby stepped! Robert and Garette hung out with me all the while testing out all the possible trail benches!!!!
From Saturday 9:00am to Sunday 7:00pm the whole journey was blissful!!! I'm really glad to have done this and lucky to have a great team and amazing weather!!
I did the climb to fund raise for a non-profit clinic for the needy in my home area, Nashik. In case you are interested to help out to help this clinic get started please give me your donation checks. This effort is not under any US-NGOs but I’m trying to get this running myself – with local help and charities. Will let donors know about the progress of project as it un-rolls.
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
Ready To Go To Work!
Today is the national ride your bike to work day! We had one at Microsoft too! I was there with my Mathilda. Check out the pics at my flickr page. There were folks frequenting at 2fast, WMRRA and other track organizations! You can see it from there scrapped out left-side of tires - all tracks with left turns, well apparently tracks in Portland have right turns:). Any ways some one actually when to this http://www.ononewheel.com to do flip baby!! Looking forward to more riding this season, oh hoo.. now that my cycyling and mountaineering are almost gettin over! Party time...
Monday, July 17, 2006
STP 2006 Story
Myself, Leonard and Murari set to do the 206.2 miles STP in a day this year. We were doing pretty ok but lost a bunch of time owing to late start, broken seat replacement and slowing a little after midpoint. The accumulation put us to finish the ride probably an hour or so after sunset. We didnt want to be un-safe so made a decision to stop at 155th mile with about two hours of sunset left. Myself and Murari came back to start at the same point and finished the ride in about another 3 and half hours, Leonard had a commitment on sunday so couldnt come back to finish it. I was glad to join Raji, Sudarshan and Vijay at the finish line on Sunday. It was fun ride both days with weather being audaciously generous!
You can find our cyclysm details at http://trail.motionbased.com/trail/episode/view.mb?episodePk.pkValue=1061962, thanks to Murari's awesome GPS!!
There were some tough decision we made on our day of ride. We wanted to be safe more than anything but on hindsight it seems that if we would have kept going we could have definately made it. When i went to portland to pick our bags up, I saw people finishing the ride until 11:00pm and many of those who finished at 10:30pm we had left behind. But sure having a better speed would have give us more confidence to go for it.!! My climbing mentor Ed would have so called this as the "Sahalee Clusterfuck", two times in a row they were so close to peak of sahalee but couldnt do it for some reason or other, but hey alteast we did it!!!
Check out the more pics at: http://www.flickr.com/groups/wheelsofchange2006/
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Sahalee Peak - Glacier Cimb
The weekend of July 4th I did the Sahalee peak climb through Quien Sabe glacier. It was such an awesome day, my most scenic climb so far. We slept under the huge and threatening Johanesburg mountain and then hauled about 12 hour day to complete the glacier climb, the last portion of it was a class 3/4 scramble. In this picture I'm traversing a very narrow and exposed ridge making way towards the last pitch! I was holding my breadht - dont fall, dont fall dont fall!! But hey now i'm Mountaineers Basic graduate!! hurray I have completed all my required alpine, glacier and rock climbs!!
Monday, June 05, 2006
My First Summit!!!
So my first summit!! I summited Unicorn this saturday with my mentor Ed. We traversed from the trail head on Unicorn glacier to reach the base of peak. From the base we did a roped rock climb of about 40 feet to the summit. The whole round trip was about 6 hours and the weather was awesome!! This picture is the stichted panorama from the unicorn peak and as you notice the prominent feature in the panorama is Mount Rainier :). Climb on!!
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Social Networking Phenomenon
Alrite! Alrite!! I'm admittedly late here. But yep i killed a couple of hours today to get on all the possible social networks my friends and family have been wanting me to. So you can find me on myspace at http://www.myspace.com/vaibhavb, Friendster at http://www.friendster.com/profiles/vitraag and on Orkut. The demographics of the whole _social_ phenomenon quite clear all my indian friends are on orkut while many of my American friends are on myspace and friendster. I still have to send invites etx for my buddies to link up, but i'm not really sure if can keep up with all that. So largely this blog is going to be my little window to the world! Yeah some-day i'll update my homepage and integrate all this but until next time, so long.
Sunday, May 07, 2006
Excursions In Mountaineering - Snow Camping and Glacier Climbing
This weekend I enjoyed amazing time overnight blacier climbing around stevens pass. I learnt some basic techiques for glacier climbing like stepping, using the ice axe, demo of cravasse rescue and knowing snow you are climbing on.
Here are picture of the trip by rockymountain.
In this picture I'm standing next the bunker tent myself and David (my tent-mate) made up with advice and help from Rayner (our trip leader). This was the first time I camped in snow. Tricks like putting snow between raincover and tent to form an insulating layer, assiting tent access using feet hole and building a brick baricade around tent for protecting - are some of the things we learnt with this.
Here are picture of the trip by rockymountain.
In this picture I'm standing next the bunker tent myself and David (my tent-mate) made up with advice and help from Rayner (our trip leader). This was the first time I camped in snow. Tricks like putting snow between raincover and tent to form an insulating layer, assiting tent access using feet hole and building a brick baricade around tent for protecting - are some of the things we learnt with this.
Thursday, April 20, 2006
UMD Soormay - Gabroo in action
UMD Soormay
My sister, Vaidehi in her quintessentail dance action! go!! gal!! :). Here is the maestro in action.
My sister, Vaidehi in her quintessentail dance action! go!! gal!! :). Here is the maestro in action.
Thursday, April 13, 2006
World Economic Forum - India and the World Scenarios
World Economic Forum - India and the World Scenarios
So thinking on a global level!! Preaching to solve world problems! well so what the hell World Economic Forum does? Rallies the confederation of industries in every nation? Do we really have numbers on effective measures by such organization?
Anyways the link points to the scnerios which deam the future of India for next 25 years on two axes - Integration with world and Inclusive growth and development. This slide was used by Microsoft India MD to lure back folks of Indian origin to Microsoft India from the Redmond campus. The strong points he made was that India's 65% GDP is from Individual spending and Microsoft will get to 1 billion $ revenue share by 2009. Well! yeah and come back to India for glory and family!!
So to the point - what do the axes say? To me it makes no sense. If India makes "Integrated development" Then i think the battle is won!! Integrating the varied and diverse cultures in India itself is a bigger challenge than integrating with world! Infact i would contest that its a superset of the world challenge!!
So thinking on a global level!! Preaching to solve world problems! well so what the hell World Economic Forum does? Rallies the confederation of industries in every nation? Do we really have numbers on effective measures by such organization?
Anyways the link points to the scnerios which deam the future of India for next 25 years on two axes - Integration with world and Inclusive growth and development. This slide was used by Microsoft India MD to lure back folks of Indian origin to Microsoft India from the Redmond campus. The strong points he made was that India's 65% GDP is from Individual spending and Microsoft will get to 1 billion $ revenue share by 2009. Well! yeah and come back to India for glory and family!!
So to the point - what do the axes say? To me it makes no sense. If India makes "Integrated development" Then i think the battle is won!! Integrating the varied and diverse cultures in India itself is a bigger challenge than integrating with world! Infact i would contest that its a superset of the world challenge!!
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
Rappelling
Boooya~! My third climb, I climbed up mainly using the cracks and nice footholds with a backpack and extra water :). You can see me here Rappelling down from this climb, it was awesome, sunny and 1500 ft above sea-level :). Rock-on i would say ...
Monday, April 03, 2006
Rock Climbing Mt. Erie!
Yesterday i did my first rock climbing ever. Through Mountaineers Rock 2 field trip we did some runs on Mt. Erie. It was awesome to do three climbs using techniques like edgeing, manteling, crack climbing etal and the weather was a lot better than I expected. Just couldn't get enough of this thrill. Watch out for some rapelling pics and more of climbing stuff as i learn the ropes of this ride :).
Monday, March 13, 2006
Mathilda Reinvented
So yep finally i got a bike. Its SV650S copper color !! I rode it to work today and i so love it! This is an awesome mechanical horse, gives a real high!!
Whistler Funpalooza
Had a lot of fun this weekend with a bunch of friends in Whislter. Most of us arrived on Thursday Mar 9 and went for the hills on Friday and Sunday. A few people joined us on Friday...along with a mysterious who. Anyways all we did was partyed, played with snow and got massages :).
Yep finally i can now go down a hill with a snow-board :). The instructor was really nice and what i discovered is that i can toe edge better than heel edgeing, exact opposite is true with most ppl!! Weird southpaws! Anyways i couldnot do the double-Cs of what they call diamonds successfully :(. But hey i can toe and heel edge and come down the slope with leaf falls (and some literal falls;) successfully!! Booyaa!!!
So here is Snowboarding101 learn 1. Heel edgeing 2.Heel edgeing with turns 3. Toe edgeing 4. Toe edgeing with turns 5. C- turn with starting with hell edge 6. C-turn starting with toe edge 7. The diamond !! Most important thing to remember is that you cruize on edge of the board and not the surface area!! And oh ya..wax your board before using it.
Yep finally i can now go down a hill with a snow-board :). The instructor was really nice and what i discovered is that i can toe edge better than heel edgeing, exact opposite is true with most ppl!! Weird southpaws! Anyways i couldnot do the double-Cs of what they call diamonds successfully :(. But hey i can toe and heel edge and come down the slope with leaf falls (and some literal falls;) successfully!! Booyaa!!!
So here is Snowboarding101 learn 1. Heel edgeing 2.Heel edgeing with turns 3. Toe edgeing 4. Toe edgeing with turns 5. C- turn with starting with hell edge 6. C-turn starting with toe edge 7. The diamond !! Most important thing to remember is that you cruize on edge of the board and not the surface area!! And oh ya..wax your board before using it.
Friday, February 10, 2006
Fitness Tips - LifeStyle Routines
- Breathe correctly
- Negative contraction
- Hold contraction
- Drink water
Create LifeStyle Routines: Derek Noble way: http://www.bodynoble.com
- Posture
- Breathe: Breath IN the stomach should go OUT. Exhale on exertion.
- Do frequent breathing breaks to get rid of stress.
- Focus touch training, visualization
- Office pump: Squat, Dip, Push ups, Abs (leg crunch & hand crunch)
- Stretching:
Equipment:
- Excercise ball
- Resistance band
Meditation
- Essential for a great lifestyle.
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