Ramblings

Winter Bike Commute

2009-12-28T17:27:00.000-08:00

One of my long overdue goal is to commute in winter at least a couple of times a week. The bike commute from Capitol hill to Redmond is about 18 miles and takes me anywhere from 50 minutes to 1:30 hours.

The hard things in Seattle winter are rain, cold temperature and the short day light. I’m summarizing below the list of things i need to do in order to be ready for this hefty goal (other than getting motivated :)).

The ride

I’m planning to finish building the the touring bike I started to build with Chris earlier this season. I would require a good frame for the same. I’m planning on putting cyclo-cross tires on them, fenders and of-course use the panniers from Seattle to SF ride.

The lights

This is tough and expensive category. I need light to-see and to-be seen.

Experienced cyclists recommend the Niterider as a backlight and MagicShine as a helmet lite.

For blinkers REI sells the planet bike blaze (1W), and the planet bike super-lasher.

Clothing

I guess i would need to buy -

Facemask
Incandescent Jacket
Thermal Gloves (Gauntlets?)
Thermal bike wear – Performance bike wear?
Rain pants – (I have them already?)

Shoes

Waterproof shoes is a hard thing. I’m planning to use booties over my current bike shoes. Some folks recommend the Shimano MT60’s.

Anything I missed? Please leave suggestions in the comments. I’m specifically looking to buy multipurpose gear and equipment. I already have too much of it from my climbing and snow-boarding.

Costa Rica!

2009-11-21T21:31:00.001-08:00

Myself and Chris, just planned to do an extempore trip to Costa Rica. Riding our bikes earlier this summer one of the deep and meaningful conversation we had was that we need to make a list of things to do if we had infinite time and money, and then try to accomplish it! Costa Rica has been on my list since 2004, every year I had a to-do about going to Costa Rica, so this year may be it will be a reality!

Well this is really extempore, but situations in life & work dictate a lot of my scheduling (*things which i don’t have control on*). Vaidehi is going to India earlier in Dec & needs time to prepare, Maris is travelling to colder continents for blessings from Uncle Sam (Calgary); so the Mexico team is out :(. I convinced Chris (& then he convinced me) relying on the fact that all we need to take off are few working days. Anyways, enough of the why part but life, resources, buddies and of course the onset of Seattle winter has given me the opportunity to explore Costa Rica in seven days!

So what are we going to do?

I was browsing through Lonely planet, WikiTravel and Couch surfing. Here is the current thinking.

Day	Place to sleep	Activities to do	Transport
Tues Nov 24	San Jose, Costa Rica (Hostel Pangue)	Enoy Dallas transit for four hours, and may be go out in San Jose.	Pangue pickup
Wed Nov 25	Arenal (Arenal Backpackers Resort)	Wed: La Fortuna Hot Springs, Volcano Tour (3:30-9:30) Thur: Water fall	71 miles Transit:12:30, 2:30pm Transit time: 4.5 hours
Thurs Nov 26	Monteverde (MonteVerde Backpackers)?	Thurs: Night tour	110m on map Jumbo Jeep $25 Transit:2:30pm Transit time: 3.0 hr
Fri Nov 27	Hiking (MonteVerde Backpackers)	Canopy tour Cloud Forest (7:30, 10:30, 1, $45)
Sat Nov 28	Playa Tamarindo (Tamarindo Backackers)	Rafting (possibly with Astha and group)??, Beach, surfing	Tamarindo is 100m from Monteverde Public transit: 8am, 12pm Transit time: 4 hrs
Sun Nov 29	Playa Negra	surfing, Trip to Jaco	Most likely we should ditch Jaco and take a trip back to San Jose. Public transit: Transit time:
Mon Nov 30	San Jose	More San Jose ..?
Tues Dec 1	-	Trips in San Jose and catch 11:30am flight :).

Things to bring?

DEET
Internet Device (Phone or Laptop?)
Backpack, rain gear, sleeping bag.

Cycling to SF – Ride Report!

2009-10-07T18:19:00.001-07:00

This post is long over due! Back in June myself and Chris Tremonte decided to bike to San Francisco, fortunately I was able to make it.

Here is a brief video summarizing our trip and the feeling we had just on reaching San Francisco:

From July 23 – Aug 1 we made it to San Francisco along the Pacific coast visiting amazing parks and meeting fun people! Chris has a detailed report on each day, however I’ll try to summarize my days in short here.

Day 1, Day 2, Day 3 (Seattle, WA to Florence, Oregon): On Chris’ Day 1 I was still debating if I should go on this bike ride, I had a relatively swollen ankle and my doctor was not very happy about me doing a long bike trip. I don't know what it was, may be it was Chris’ look when he first saw me injured. He showed up the previous Tuesday at work with his newly crafted bike and panniers to show me all the goodies and telling me how he is ready to ride, but instead I showed him my foot, which at the time was in a cast! Anyways! I decided to go for the ride and meet Chris in Florence, Oregon , the plan was I’ll ride for a bit and see how I feel. We started to head down south on Chris’ DAy 3, it took us day to get drive to Florence. Myself and Maris were wondering how Chris got there in three days on his bike! The dude is fast and tenacious, well speaks for his pro-triathlete status.

Day 4 (Florence,Oregon to Sunset Bay – Charleston, Oregon):

I was testing my abilities to ride or not to ride! After a 11am start I had three flats. I had the third flat around 2pm when Maris came to see me, I was almost about to go back with her – damn flats ( & surprisingly not the ankle) had worn me out :(. Anyways this time Chris fixed the flat (I guess expertly). Him & Maris’ convinced me to stay on the ride! After 63 miles of feeling rather good, we reached our day 4 camp in Sunset Bay – Chris wanted to continue riding but i convinced him to call it a short day (one of the many times when I slowed him down :) ). We were just in time at the camp to enjoy the campfire & company of fellow riders!

Day 5 (Sunset Bay to Harris Beach – Brookings, OR): This was my first long day. My knee started bothering me a little but mostly I felt good. As I was riding through this day I felt as if I was almost meditating and I thoroughly enjoyed the beautiful Oregon coast. One of the reasons I took this trip was just to relax, and as the days to come and numerous hill climbs would tell, I did get my fair share of relaxation :).

Day 6 (Harris Beach to Elk Prairie – Orick, CA): This day I decided to focus each day for the remainder of the ride to focus on one of my loved ones and think about how I can improve my relationship with them and also add value to their life. Of course all the details won’t be on a public blog but I rather felt very good about doing this. However I still have a lot of follow ups to finish from these dedicated days of thinking. Hopefully I won’t need another vacation to get to them ;). We befriended an Australian, Andrew, at Sunset Bay he rode with us for the next few days and we had quite few interesting incidents and experiences..

On Day 6 I was almost convinced that we would finish the ride and this was almost in stark contrast to the previous day, we did 106 miles that day and I was thinking man I might need to quit tomorrow and take the bus home. With another solid day backing day 5 I was convinced that I can thrive, although I kept telling Chris and Andrew that I might have to walk the hills :).

Day 7 (Elk Prairie to Burlington Campground): This was one of the most eventful days of our ride! We rode more than 100 miles and got to the Burlington Campground at 7pm and then rode to the nearest village (of course of 150 people & 6miles down the road) and celebrated Chris’ birthday. A fellow biker, Sofie, who was at this Campground also joined us for the celebrations!

Day 8 (Burlington Campground to Mackerricher Sate Park – Cleone, CA): I was starting to enjoy this lifestyle of biking from place to another and meeting new people, and just coming in to the whole new fraternity. I loved the long downhill after of course a six mile uphill through the Redwoods -

Day 9 (MacKerricher to Stillware Cove Campground – Ocean Cove, CA): Our ride-mate took a break here but before he left we enjoyed a long and thorough breakfast. In general breakfast were a big think i looked forward to every day. Most days we tried to ride a good 20 miles before stopping for breakfast and when we did, man the food felt out of the world!!

Day 10 (Stillwater Cove to San Francisco, CA): This was out another 100 mile day we got to San Francisco a whole day in advance than our schedule! One of the goals of our trip was also to help spread the message of HealthDataRights and HealthVault, our discussion with folks in Jenner got along these lines and they were impressed by two young folks trying to better the state of US HealthCare!

Day 11 (San Francisco, San Jose): We idled the day in San Francisco enjoying company of friends and family. In fact. I was in time for Rakshabhandan!

My sister had organized a surprise party welcoming us to California and successfully paddling across the coast (well she complained to my mom about me doing such stupid and crazy things ;) ).

I have done a many multiday mountaineering trips, overnight organized cycling trips but this 10 day bike tour was totally different. It was very relaxing at the same time challenging. This bike tour changed my perspective of few things in life, made me think harder and introduced me to a whole new way of enjoying a trip!! Hopefully in near future I will get a chance to tour more places – may be italy, may be Chile or hey may be you can suggest…I have created a forum for the same…or use the comments …

Festival Of Forgiveness - Michammi Dukdam

2009-08-24T09:14:00.001-07:00

Today is the "Shyamapana festival". Shyamapana is a festival of forgiveness; its popular among folks of Jain faith. This day is a culmination of a weeklong fest of repentance called "Paryushan". To quote an article :

“For 357 days of the year we carry out our responsibilities to our business, our family and our career. We live a very busy, worldly life. In the process, we accumulate a lot of mental and emotional clutter. We gather unnecessary baggage of pride, fear, animosity, greed, ego and delusions in our thoughts and feelings. So Paryushan is the time to clear that clutter and make a bonfire to burn that junk, that rubbish which is corrupting our minds, our lives and our relationships. The Jains have designed the special eight days of Paryushan as a time of reflection, purification and renewal.”

So over the last year if I have hurt your feelings in any way or form, please forgive me -"Michammi Dukdam".

cheers,
Vaibhav
--------------
~~My Jain Influences~~
--------------
Support my bike ride to San Francisco
Support my Mt. Rainier Climb

My Jain Influences

2009-08-24T08:53:00.001-07:00

I grew up in a Jain family and my mother did a lot of hard work for us siblings to understand the ideals of Jainism. To date I’m really impressed by Jain philosophy and a large part of what I’m is influenced by it. I particularly would call out:

Ahimsa – which mean non-violence. I guess I wont have to explaining the importance of this but would like to call out Ahimsa just doesn't mean to not hurt other human beings but actually encompasses all living things.
Anekanthvad – there are more than one possible explanations, particularly in religious terms. This principle pre-empts all Jains from getting in to arguments about whose God is better, I wish this tolerance principle was core of other philosophies.

The most important Mantra of Jains is Navakar Mantra.

Jainism Resources

Discussion List: jainlist@yahoogroups.com
Seattle Area Jains: jainsocietyseattle@yahoogroups.com
English Pratrikraman and Other Literature resources: http://www.jaina.org/educationcommittee/education_material/$$$PathashalaBooks/
Most Comprehensive Directory Of Jain Resources: http://www.cs.colostate.edu/~malaiya/jainhlinks.html

UPDATE (8/24/2009): Yesterday, myself and Maris did the Smavatsari Pratrikraman together. This ritual last about 2.5 hours and in addition both of us were fasting for the whole day (24 hours). The interesting revelation for me during this was when I was explaining the Pratrikraman in English as I was doing it. I used the above English version to paraphrase the meaning of some Paaths to Maris. However I did make a lot of mistakes. If any of you have good English versions of Pratrikraman I would be interested and also do share your experiences in explaining it to folks new to Jainism in the comments below.

Namo Nanasa.

Mt. Rainier Climb – Trip Report

2009-07-21T09:06:00.001-07:00

On Sunday July 19, 2009 (update: silly date mistakes) around 9:00am, my team summited Mt. Rainier via the Emmons Glacier route. In my previous post I took a moment to describe and elaborate on the cause I would like to support as part of this climb. The full photo album of this trip is shared here.

Our Team on the Summit – 14,440 ft!

Maris and Myself at 14,440 ft!

The Team

This climb was part of Olympia Mountaineers club climbs and was led by Colin. Originally we planned on having four rope teams but a few people cancelled on the climb last minute so we had three rope teams of three people each. I wasn’t signed up to be a rope lead but John and Bonnie were gracious enough to let me lead a rope. We planned to hike to the high camp on day 1, do a summit bid starting midnight and come back to high camp and rest for remaining of day 2 and then walk out to cars on day 3.

The Route

The Emmons route compared to the more popular DC route is a little longer and little more technical. I have done the DC route before and I felt that Emmons route showed a little more of the true mountain – lots of crevasses and wind!

Details

Day 1

We started at about 10am from the White river parking lot which is about 4500ft to get to our high camp (Camp Schurman) at about 9500 ft.

I got to lead a rope on this climb, I have been mountaineering for only a few years now and this was my first glacier rope lead. Here is an interesting picture on the first day as we were heading to the Camp Schurman high camp, seems like I’m leading my team to a crevasse – but hey there was a snow bridge there.

We got to Camp Schurman at about 4:00pm and were told by the ranger that no camping spots are available on the rock. For next couple of hours we were digging snow platforms, and finally had our tents set up around 6:30pm.

Day 2

We woke up around midnight to start our climb up on Emmons Glacier. By the time we started (around 1am) there were already a quite a few partied ahead of us. I glitter of head lamps covered the mountain.

We had been informed by the ranger that the route was pretty straight forward expect for one tricky section which has a crevasse on side and a drop off on the other. Here is a picture of that section, while I was coming down it.

At this section – which was about at 11,800ft we spent about an hour and half waiting for other teams to pass, as most of them were putting an anchor before crossing. We were quite a bit concerned because with this lag we were running a quite a bit late, as it was already 5am! and we had about 2500+ ft to go and less than 5 hour before we absolutely need to turn back.

Fortunately, after crossing on top of this serac our three rope teams (Colin's, Josh’s and Mine) moved reasonably fast and we were at the summit about 9:15 pm. Here is picture of our climb leader Colin leading -

It was very windy on the summit. We paid our homage and dedications quickly and started on the way down at about 10am.

As they say the trip up is the easy part and other half on way down causes most mountaineering accidents! Well we did fairly well on the way down, we got to our high camp at about 2pm! However Mr. V, was a little slower and punched through a crevasse. It was only to be realized later than this punching through Crevasse will cause we some ankle trouble and an ER visit!

After getting to the camp we decided to take a quick nap and food break, pack out tent and be walking down by 4pm. This was slight change in the plan because the original climb plan was to stay as high camp on day 2 and then get back on cars on the next day. However the day 1 night was so windy and stormy at the high camp that no one could sleep. In fact, we were grateful than our 3-season vestibule less tent held in that kind of wind! So in the pursuit of some sleep we left the camp on day 2 itself!

The rest of the way down, as actually eventful! Mr. V successfully managed to get his a slight cut in chin while glissading the inter-glaciers. However, skipping the uncomfortable cut the glissade were fun!!!

So by the time we got to the Glacier basin and started hiking out on the trail, my injured ankle had surfaced itself and grown in to an unbearable pain! With a 60lb pack it was increasingly becoming uncomfortable to walk out. I let Colin (our climb leader) know that and subsequently graciously Bonnie and John stayed with myself and Maris to only re-surface at the trail head in 4 hours, around 9pm! Thanks to Maris for carrying our tent for the test of way and thanks to Colin, John, and Bonnie for keeping us company! We did enjoy the awesome meadows and the views though!

When we re-grouped around 9pm at the parking lot we decided to go for a late dinner in Enumclaw! We feasted in Mazatlan Mexican restaurant and every sip of my Dos Equi helped me relieve the ankle pain. After getting to Capitol hill, I made a late night ER visit and had my ankle checked and chin sealed.

The good news is that nothing is broken (as yet) but there is quite a bit of swelling hiding any other issues. Now the bad news - I don’t know if I will be able to go on our planned Seattle to San Francisco bicycling tour starting this Saturday :(.

Thanks to Colin, John, Bonnie, Josh, Ted, Chris, Andrew for letting me be part of this climb and thanks to lovely Ms. Maris was getting me on this climb! Colin did a great job leading the climb, it was my pleasure to be in such an awesome company!

Mt. Rainier Climb – The Cause

2009-07-21T09:05:00.001-07:00

I thought I would take a moment and elaborate on my personal and professional causes which I would like to evangelize as part of my climb.

Personal

Earlier I got email from Aparajita suggesting like Alok’s Rainier Climb, I should fundraise for Asha. I like Asha’s cause and zero-overhead approach, so please donate for Asha to support my climb. Asha has supported a project in my hometown in India – the Mayaboli school for hearing impaired. For those who know me and would like to personally donate for this cause I would be really happy to receive donations for the same. This is the same school for which I fundraised in my last Rainier climb. Please note unlike the general Asha the donations for Mayaboli are not 509(c)3 and hence not tax deductible.

Mayaboli School For Hearing Impaired

Team Cause
I also want to promote my team HealthVault and have this climb help spread the word about need to improve the state of health care, particularly the need for individual citizens to assert right to Health Data.

Endorse HealthDataRights

To share to your success stories and learn more about what other folks are doing to make themselves an active participant in the Health eco-system – do take a look at http://www.iamenabled.com (please note – this is Microsoft sponsored venture).

Share your stories, join the movement

Yosemite – Backpacking, Rafting and Road Trip!!

2009-07-07T13:08:00.001-07:00

So this 4th of July long weekend myself & Maris did a road trip to Yosemite, CA to spend the weekend backpacking with my sister – Vaidehi and her friends Siddharth and Abhinav.

View Full Album

Vaidehi and Siddharth have never backpacked before they were little hesitant to join but I convinced them that this will be easy, fun and I can help them get the required gear. Here is an interesting picture of all that we packed and also how I communicated to Vaidehi and Sid what to bring :).

We decided to backpack John Muir Trail from Tuolumne Meadows to Yosemite Valley, 21 mile route has 1400 ft of total elevation gain and is very scenic – perfect for a comfortable beginners backpacking trip of 3 days! Yosemite park requires a permit to backpack and for the John Muir trail all the permits were sold months in advanced. However there was an option of walk-in permits which are issued 24 hours in advance, so myself and Maris decided to drive to California a day in advance so that we can get the permits for the long weekend. The drive to Yosemite was relatively swift we kept ourselves entertained by exploring the powers of my newly bought iPhone 3G-S and Maris knitted a yet to be named crochet concoction.

Let me digress – I was really impressed by the things you can do with the iPhone in fact we bought a few audio books from iTunes and it made our trip a pleasure. I discovered a really cool American author Jack London, we heard his short story – To Build a Fire. We also heard Mark Twain Sampler and numbers podcasts from NPR and Travel and Leisure themes. One word of caution though, a few books I bought new downloaded even though i was charged for them!! Its kind of lame of Apple to not prioritize the paid content for delivery through the carriers. Note that these books where less than 10 MB (one cant download anything more than 10MB through the AT&T cell network, you need to be on WiFi or dongled to a computer).

Anyhooo… we spent Thursday setting up our tent in the backpackers camping ground in Tuolumne Meadows and driving around the park. We kept our car on the other side in Yosemite Valley so that we have a transport when we get out of the trail on the other side. We took a rather comfortable $8 shuttle/ YART Bus back to Tuolumne Meadows from the Valley! Vaidehi and Sid joined us late on Thursday night.

Backpacking Day 1

After a great breakfast at the Tuolumne lodge we started our hike up to the Cathedral lakes. This was the toughest part of the backpacking trip in 3.5 miles we gained 1400ft. Vaidehi and Sid did very great on the way up, we were really impressed by them even though this was a first backpacking trip for them. In fact we took 0.5 mile detour to go look at the lakes and join Steffen & friends (we pleasantly ran in to them at the Tuolumne lodge, Steffen took some great pics with his new camera so we have to wait for those pics).

However the lake was infested with Mosquitoes (apparently the Mosquitoes as in high season until 3 weeks after the snow melts). Vaidehi got really pestered by the mosquitoes, her newly bought hiking shoes had silently troubled her as well.

When we got back to our trail we figured that Vaidehi in fact has sprained her ankle and the new shoes were biting her. Given that this was her first backpacking trip, trucking a sprained ankle for almost 17 miles ahead of us would be no fun, we made a call that she should go back. Sid graciously decided to accompany her. Myself and Maris then thought of finishing the trip in two days rather than three and meeting Sid and Vaidehi back in the valley for Day 3.

It was almost 4:30 pm, so Maris and Myself continued hiking and reach our day 1 camping spot – Sunrise high camp at about 6:30pm covering 10 miles in total since our start at 11:30am. This camp was infested with Mosquitoes as well so we decided to hike a little further along until we find a nice spot. We went about a mile ahead and camped in a very cool spot with great views, at about 9700 ft. I went down to the swamps and found a small stream and filtered some water for us as a swarm of mosquitoes feasted on me.

Backpacking Day 2

We woke up about 7am on Day 2 and started our hike at about 8am after an oatmeal breakfast prepared my our chef de excellence – Ms. Maris Lemba. This was a relatively easy day as we had about 13 miles ahead of us but it was all downhill. We hiked down to the Sunrise creek and had lunch there. Surprisingly I had cell phone coverage there, I called Vaidehi and told her that we will be down to the valley around 4pm. On our way down from Sunrise creek we passed the great half down trail, from a near wilderness experience we suddenly were amidst hoards of hikers. The trail from here became steep and the continuous downhill pounding troubled my knees quite a bit. We reach the lower Yosemite valley around 2:30pm and I decided to take a dip in the Merced river it was awesome!! This originally was our day 2 camping spot.

From there on we continued our journey downward seeing couple of falls. We camped at the backpackers area in the North pine camping ground in the valley. We met another backpacking couple at the camp and chatted about great hikes and climbing areas around the valley over a bonfire and some wine :).

Highlights of the trip

Here are pictures of some interesting flora and fauna we saw on the trip.

Fauna

Rattlesnake

Flora

Unknown flowers

Day 3 - Rafting

The third day we were again joined by Vaidehi, Sid and Abhinav. We spent sometime sight seeing the valley and then did an awesome lazy rafting trip through the Merced river in lower valley!

Towards the end of the day Vaidehi, Sid and Abhinav went to the Glacier point but for some reason we took a wrong turn and never made it there. On the way to point we witnessed some forest fires (the first I have seen).

This was an awesome trip, thanks to Vaidehi for suggesting it.

Road Trip Back Home – Scouting the route for riding to San Francisco

On our way back to Seattle we continued with the iPhone books :). But we had another project as well to scout the route for my bike trip from Seattle to San Francisco. It was great to see the number of bikers on highway 101. Our original plan of 95 miles a day seems a little too ambitious now that I have seen the terrain, off to re-planning it now :)!

Seattle to SF – Bike Ride, are you game?

2009-06-26T13:37:00.001-07:00

UPDATE: We successfully completed the ride, detailed ride reports on Chris’ blog. I still need to finish mine but here are the pics.

Myself and my colleague Chris Tremont are planning to ride from Seattle the San Francisco around July 24 – Aug 3. Now, Chris is almost a pro Triathelete and he wants to do this 800+ mile ride in around 10 days.

I’m not exactly any athlete so I’m taking a sissy approach and I'll join Chris in Eugene and ride to SF from there. I’ll take the Amtrak CoastStarlight to Eugene. Eugene is 50 miles from the coast and about midway between Yachats and Reedsport.

Route Research.

Great route description in this blog.
The mountaineers book, and the lonely planet guide.

Our Plan

We will shortly put together close to final day by day itinerary* (with elevation gain, camping spot) but for now here is how it look like:

Start	End	Day Mileage	Cumulative Mileage	Date	Potential Place To Stay
Seattle	Centralia	94.2	94.2	Fri 24 July
Centralia	Kelso	55.7	149.9
Kelso	Astoria	57.2	207.1	Sat 25 July
Astoria	Manzanita	37.8	244.9
Manzanita	Netarts	40.1	285	Sun 26 July
Netarts	Lincoln City	48	333
Lincoln City	Yachats	49.9	382.9	Mon 27 July
Yachats	Reedsport	48.8	431.7
Reedsport	Bandon	54.8	486.5	Tue 28 July
Bandon	Gold Beach	57.5	544
Gold Beach	Crescent City	55.8	599.8	Wed 29 July
Crescent City	Orick	39	638.8
Orick	Eureka	46	684.8	Thu 30 July
Eureka	Redcrest	41.8	726.6
Redcrest	Leggett	55.8	782.4	Fri 31 July
Leggett	Fort Bragg	43.4	825.8
Fort Bragg	Point Arena	44.4	870.2	Sat 1 Aug
Point Arena	Jenner	51.6	921.8
Jenner	Point Reyes Station	42.5	964.3	Sun 2 Aug

* Thanks to Chris

Now few things which suck about the above itinerary, there is no time to party in SF. Well I’m going to pain Chris to start early so that we can keep some time to be in SF!

So what is the cause ?

Personal
Earlier I got email from Aparajita suggesting like Alok’s Rainier Climb, we can fundraise for Asha with our bike ride. I like Asha’s cause and zero-overhead approach, so please donate for Asha to support our cause. Asha has supported a project in my hometown in India – the Mayaboli school for hearing impaired. For those who know me and would like to personally donate for this cause I would be really happy to receive donations for the same. Please note unlike the general Asha the donations for Mayaboli are not tax deductible

Mayaboli School For Hearing Impaired

Team Cause
We want to promote our team HealthVault and make this a road trip to spread the word about need to improve the state of health care, particularly we want to talk to individual citizens and express the need to assert right to Health Data.

Endorse HealthDataRights

Share your stories, join the movement

How are we going to roll?

We still need to finalize our gear but this will be an essential part – the Helmet Camera. (if Chris can get it time).

We will also post our progress on twitter with geo location, and potentially make a graphic of our progress. For now here is feed from our twitter account:

Call to action

Join us - I know this is call to all my friends, well-wishers and bike enthusiasts, saddle up and join us!!! Seriously if you have any inhibitions let me know, and i can help you put them at ease.
Endorse the HealthDataRights
Share your story on IamEnabled
Donate

My First 5K Race - Lesson Learnt : Pace Yourself.

2009-06-07T11:45:00.001-07:00

This morning I ran my first 5K - the Susan G. Komen Race for cure. It was a great experience, I was astonished my the number of people who showed up to show their support for the breast cancer cause. Microsoft has a booth showcasing HealthVault, and thanks to Anna, myself and Maris could participate in race as part of HealthVault team.

I started a little too fast as the table below will show, my first mile was a little too fast (started 7:00, averaged 7:53), which affected the third mile (avg 8:50min). Overall all I finished my first 5K in 26:04 mins, I was hoping to be in ball park of 22 mins but oh well, lesson learnt to pace myself and it was all for a good cause :). Here are the stats for the graphical and analytical folks:

Thanks to Maris for pushing me mile 2 onwards, she paced herself well, caught up with me around beginning of mile 2 and hey seemed like a machine on mile 3 when I was panting and barely able to keep up with her. She could easily have finished the race in 22-23 mins, if i didn't hold her back ;).

Anyways, it was a morning well spent with lots of friends (yay! Maggie...) and colleagues (yay! HealthVault..) participating in the race. Oh and the yogurt at finish line was delicious...

Extended Family

2009-05-24T13:12:00.000-07:00

Couldn't resist it, but a great picture of my sister and brother in law's extended family (including parents). Wish I was in Silvasa :).

WiseVoter

2009-04-10T16:49:00.000-07:00

Introducing a Karkhana project - http://www.wisevoter.org

What is WiseVoter?

WiseVoter is a free demopedia where people can collaboratively keep track of politicians. Most of the data associated with a politican’s profile can be edited via a form (look for “edit with form”) link. The data comprises elements like Networth, Criminal Record, Education etc. This enable to write a lot of analytical tools which give you various facts about your politicians.

How is WiseVoter different?
Currently WiseVoter has the most comprehensive data of politicians contesting in the Indian Lok Sabha elections 2009. The data is spidered using Lok Sabha, Rajya Sabha websites, NoCriminal.org and various internet resource. Other wesbites don’t have this comprehensive data, and we aim to keep adding new data each day. However what sets us apart is that we are allowing this data to be editable by any one, in Wikipedia style. We aim to be around and serve this database for more than one election, unlike most other websites.

WiseVoter is of the people, by the people and for the people in every true sense!

Why Now?
This release of WiseVoter is targeting India Lok Sabha 2009 elections. A profile of a politician can be marked with appropriate candidature field and this information could be used by State or City elections as well!

How can I help?
Please help us -

Add more politicians to the demopedia! - Its simple just click add politician in left column and fill the forms.
Keep information of the current politician up to date. Just click on the “edit with form” link on top of each profile and change any discrepancies you see!
Spread the word - use our badge in your blog, website, facebook - http://www.wisevoter.org/wiki/SpreadTheWord
Give us feedback and discuss the information on the website using the bottom bar!!

Math time!

2009-03-11T01:02:00.000-07:00

Well in the modern age of digital slavery, there are hardly times when something keep our intellectual curiosity engaged instead of fueling our attraction to yet another distraction, be it IM, Facebook, twitter or TV!

I was delighted to notice that CBS is feeding our mathematical curiosity through, Numb3rs, http://www.cbs.com/primetime/numb3rs/. Its also great to see Wolfram fueling this - http://blog.wolfram.com/2009/02/24/are-you-a-math-genius/.

I intend to solve the puzzles. Here is the first one - You have a 7 liter bottle, an 11 liter bottle, and a bathtub filled with water. How can 2 liters of water be measured into the smaller bottle?

Update (May 4, 2009): Project Euler has a good set of problems around number theory, it will be fun to solve them!

WalkMe and 2009!

2009-02-07T20:08:00.001-08:00

Dear Friend and Well-wisher :

Hope things are going great with you. Things have been pretty busy and hectic since start of this year, haven’t even gotten a chance to send my usual welcoming new year email. I thought I will combine that email with another element – WalkMe.

WalkMe was started sometime in December as a skunk works projects with some colleagues of mine. Our management liked it and last week we released it as a “Sandbox for Microsoft HealthVault” project. I’m really glad that this effort is seeing light of the day, I would love if you give a go and provide us feedback. Perhaps, put the widgets on our blog, twitter or facebook.

So – take out your pedometers (or use Manual entry), take WalkMe for a stroll… and walk with us!

2008 – started with an India trip. Myself, my sister and Maris had a great time visiting India. Unlike previous trips this time we kept some time to travel in India, and went around to Delhi, Jaipur and Agra – the quintessential golden Triangle. We had all kinds of experience – loved Jaipur, hated Agra and Delhi was alrite J. 2008 – end with travel as well ! Infact the same group J, myself, Vaidehi and Maris were in Mexico from Christmas to Jan 7^th. It was an amazing trip –we went from Mexico City, to Morelia to Zihuatenejo – loved the culture, crafts and the climate J. In August, my parents visited us for a couple of Months– we had great time showing them around in Washington, British Canada, California and the East coast.

I didn’t get to climb a lot last summer. However I was able to get up Mt. Baker, try some ice climbing and go for a back packing trip along Olympic coast. I also managed to finish the ride from Seattle to Portland with absolute zero training J. This year – I’m planning to improve on this front and try and be outdoors a little more. So do remind me that every now and then when you see me working too hard or spending too much time on computer.

On the work front it was really hectic and successful year. I was able to do some open source at Microsoft – help in a Ruby, PHP and Java library for your platform. I represented these libraries and effort in OSCON 2008. After write quite a few post about how to write libraries and code for HealthVault, my blog is featured on our MSDN homepage. WalkMe is my small drop in the next step of bringing helping bring some eyes ball and viral effect for HealthVault.

On the education and entrepreneurship areas – I finished my 9 month Certificate in Business Development course from UW (I started winesofeast of out of that course in April). I’m also delving in idea of creating a venture fund for startups focused on bringing change in India, currently we are looking for board of advisors if you have a recommendation please drop me a line.

Wont bore with much more, I’m going to put list all of my writings and activities for 2008 on my blog here.

Please do drop me a line and let me know how things are goings. Sorry I couldn’t be personal as much as I would have loved. So wishing you great little less than 11 months of 2009 ahead and keep in touch!

Cheers,

Vaibhav

Welcome 2009 - A month and 7 days later :).

2009-02-07T20:01:00.000-08:00

As Promised here are my writings for 2008:

Welcoming 2008:

http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2007/12/welcome-2008.html

Personal:

http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2008/01/pillars-for-success-of-bdm.html

http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2008/01/fixing-my-overheating-old-toshiba-a65.html

http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2008/02/indian-stocks-for-long-term-investment.html

http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2008/02/things-i-need-to-blog-about.html

http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2008/03/maris-culinary-skills.html

http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2008/03/ideation.html

http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2008/03/to-be-or-not-to-be.html

http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2008/03/salsa-fun.html

http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2008/03/how-to-start-climbing-512.html

http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2008/03/art-of-start.html

http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2008/05/naked-ape.html

http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2008/05/salsa-2a-class-one.html

http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2008/06/visible.html

http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2008/06/backpacking-south-olympics.html

http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2008/07/mt-baker-climb.html

http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2008/07/sponsor-my-ride-help-cause.html

http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2008/07/small-city-india-and-change-we-need.html

http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2008/07/how-to-make-best-sambar.html

http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2008/07/ride-report-stp-2008.html

http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2008/08/ma-and-bapu-in-seattle-week-one.html

http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2008/08/we-struck-gold-what-next-can-we-build_17.html

http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2008/08/vegetarian-nutrition.html

http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2008/09/water.html

http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2008/09/festival-of-forgiveness-michammi-dukdam.html

http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2008/09/where-is-my-data-can-i-use-it-and-can.html

http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2008/09/daily-dashboard-do-you-have-one.html

http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2008/09/ice-climbing-newb.html

http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2008/09/non-voters-cast-your-vote.html

http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2008/10/fixing-my-aging-canon-s400-camera.html

http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2008/11/nurturing-entrepreneurship-in-indias.html

http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2008/11/trusting-future.html

http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2008/11/shopping-time.html

http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2008/12/happy-birthday-maris.html

http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2009/01/writing-style.html

http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2009/01/mexico-trip.html

Professional:

http://healthblog.vitraag.com/2008/01/redirecting-healthvault-applications-to-the-healthvault-shell/

http://healthblog.vitraag.com/2008/01/microsoft-volta/

http://healthblog.vitraag.com/2008/02/linq-to-healthvault/

http://healthblog.vitraag.com/2008/02/healthvault-opens-up/

http://healthblog.vitraag.com/2008/02/offlineaccess-sample/

http://healthblog.vitraag.com/2008/02/updating-changed-user-data-in-heatlhvault/

http://healthblog.vitraag.com/2008/03/openssl-and-working-with-healthvault/

http://healthblog.vitraag.com/2008/03/testing-your-application-on-older-versions-of-ie-web-app-compat-that-is/

http://healthblog.vitraag.com/2008/03/transforming-xsl-datetime-to-healthvault-date-time/

http://healthblog.vitraag.com/2008/03/seven-evangelists-and-a-bus-codetrip/

http://healthblog.vitraag.com/2008/03/visualizing-health-data/

http://healthblog.vitraag.com/2008/04/talking-to-the-public-methods-of-healthvault-platform/

http://healthblog.vitraag.com/2008/04/microsoft-and-opensource-a-new-age/

http://healthblog.vitraag.com/2008/04/long-tail-tale-getting-an-auth-token-sure-openhealthvault-can/

http://healthblog.vitraag.com/2008/05/extending-healthserviceactionpage/

http://healthblog.vitraag.com/2008/05/the-new-economy-computing-big-n/

http://healthblog.vitraag.com/2008/06/curious-about-whats-under-the-healthvault-sdks-hood/

http://healthblog.vitraag.com/2008/06/doing-user-authentication-with-healthvault/

http://healthblog.vitraag.com/2008/06/lighting-it-up/

http://healthblog.vitraag.com/2008/06/scheming-for-method-schemas/

http://healthblog.vitraag.com/2008/07/creating-a-healthvault-child-application/

http://healthblog.vitraag.com/2008/07/oscon-2008/

http://healthblog.vitraag.com/2008/07/whats-your-editor-personality/

http://healthblog.vitraag.com/2008/08/putthings-for-offline-access/

http://healthblog.vitraag.com/2008/09/social-bookmarking-contribute-to-tag-healthvault/

http://healthblog.vitraag.com/2008/09/well-you-can-svn-on-codeplex-now/

http://healthblog.vitraag.com/2008/09/interesting-healthvault-videos/

http://healthblog.vitraag.com/2008/11/security-resources-for-net-web-applications/

Entrepreneurial:

http://www.winesofeast.com/2007/12/04/presenting-wines-of-east/

http://www.vitraag.com/2008/05/welcome/

http://wiki.vitraag.com/index.php?title=Visible

http://www.winesofeast.com/2008/06/22/what-have-we-been-upto/

http://wiki.vitraag.com/index.php?title=IPhone_Development

http://wiki.vitraag.com/index.php?title=Karkhana

http://www.thekarkhana.com/2008/12/working-with-ajax-apis/

http://www.thekarkhana.com/2008/12/seattle-startup-resources/

Mexico Trip!

2009-01-11T18:26:00.001-08:00

This Holiday season myself, Maris and Vaidehi spent some awesome time in Mexico. In the few paragraphs here - I will touch upon some of the great aspects of our trip.

Well, Why Mexico? Because it is warm, when its really the beginning of winter and gloom in Seattle and North America. I wanted to be in some place warm, I was up for doing a cruise but Maris want a more immersive experience and Vaidehi wanted to buy stuff :).

In our, 11days in Mexico we primarly tried to cover the central plateau. We started with the big bad Mexico City. Lonely planet and friend has suggested that the city is really a crime zone, and make sure you dont use the bug taxis. We were very careful of that fact, we just used the taxi's from a authorized center or calling the cental number. We stayed in Centro historico district in Hotel Gillow, it was a very great and convenient place. Centro historico was the place to be, the Zocalo had a huge ice rink (apparently world's largest outdoor rink) and the citizens lined up from 9 in the morning to enjoy their government's gift! Over the three days in Mexio city we thoroughly got acquainted with Mexican history and culture. I read a few pages in to the book "Mexico", it really laid out the lay of land from Teotihaucans, Aztecs , Mayans, Hernan Cortez, French, to Mexican revolution, General Santa Anna, to the PAN, and gave a perspective of why the current PRI gorvernment is so unique!

We thoroughly enjoyed the vegetarian food in Mexico City, especially the Restaurant Vegetariano on Madero and Cafe Vegetariano in Zona Rosa.

We took a day trip from Mexico City to the ruins of Teotihuacan.

From Mexico City we headed to Michaocan - the state of artists. To spend the New Years and immerse in traditional mexican way of living. We stayed in Morelia in a really well accentuated Mexican condo -

The orginal plan was to go to Patzucuaro but Maris and Vaidehi were more interested in the Monarch butterflies and they already did a tonne of Dulce and Artisanians shopping locally. So we headed the to santctuary and man! it was a million of butterflies, simply outstanding experience.

The New Years we relatively low key, we headed to this place Casa de Salsa after midnight in Morelia but it was not as packed as we expected...

Vaidehi and Maris - fell a litle ill do we decided to take a rest day. Go do some grocery shopping and cook at home - ! Maris made awesome soft tacos... and hey my side dish (yet to be named concotion comprising kidney beans...) was amazing...as Vaidehi will vouch....

We headed from Morelia to Zinhuatenjo...lovingly called Zihua just near the popular criuse ship base of Ixtapa. The bus ride to Zihua was very scenic..i never imagined that Mexico would have such a variety ..coming down from central coast to the sea level brought in the much needed and sought after warmth. Our hotel was right on the beach playa madera. I loved this beach the most (compared to the other much commercialized ones), for next three days i was busy catching the waves :). We took a small trip to neary by Manzillino beach which has coral reef just near the beach and did some snorkelling, man the girls went mad.... they just didnt want to go home. I gave up after an hour, but Vaidehi and Maris snorkelled for like 2.5 hours!! It was lovely, colorful and warm!!!

On our last day, we did a tonne of shopping in Mexico City (Centro Historico), some cute silver jewellery and Tequilla....

To summarize, it was a really great trip - we indulged in the histroric, artistic, rural and beach Mexico. It was nice to see, that in this third word country the state of toursim is really a notch up 0 - the buses were we took were really comfortable, hotels very tuned to the traveller and people very helpful! It was surprising that with very little spanish between myself (I specialized in numbers) and Maris (she specialized in directions), we could navigate the Hispanic world and have a great time, may be this calls for a revisit - sometime in future .......

Writing Style

2009-01-06T15:56:00.000-08:00

Being a non-native English speaker and writer as you can read my writings, they are not perfect. The way i choose to write is very conversational and grammatically incorrect. However, I'm taking up a New years' commitment to improve grammar, diction and clarity of my writings.

I tend to use simple, direct sentences but i dont vary the length of the sentences not do i mix clauses to sound them interesting. So inspired by some advice from Strunk and White, I'm going to try and experiment with my writing style.

One other problem I run in to is I dont tend to think the way i write. Infact, sometimes i think in several different languages (including symbols), this being a by-product of growing to learn 3-4 languages. I'm going to try and think as I write and force myself to think the way i write. I hope that this exercise will improve the clarity and thought process of my written work, and may be also improve the way I think.

So here it is New Years' resolution #1 - improve grammer, diction and clarity of my writings.

Happy Birthday Maris

2008-12-14T18:32:00.000-08:00

From Maris' Birthday

From Marrakesh, to Century Ballroom to fighting with Snow balls on first Seattle snow of the year - it was great celebrating Maris' birthday. The pictures are shared at:http://picasaweb.google.com/vaibhavb/MarisBirthday.

Shopping time

2008-11-22T16:02:00.000-08:00

I keep a wish list of things i desire :). However with the coming shopping season and Black Friday i thought this is the opportunity to make a comprehensive list of things we need to buy for everyone and make up for Diwali and not doing household chores in general.

Trusting the future

2008-11-17T18:41:00.000-08:00

I was looking at some personal finance website in India, like this one and this one. Its appalling to see no worth-while content in the Indian scene vs great tools like Mint and Wiki-Invest on this side of pacific.

Anyways i think that this is a great time to take stock of one's financial health. The stock market and various other financial instituions around the world are facing a grim crisis. If you are a believer magic free market even in face of un-controlled and bottomless stock markets, then its a really great time to invest. However the big question is where to invest? Which stocks to pick and oh yes do you make up your portfolio in these times. Over the next few weeks i plan to address this very issue.

To make a modest start I'm ruling out any form of option trading, as the markets are really volatile, and i'm also going to rule out any chance of investing more that 40% of my savings in the cheap stocks.

Now once we rule out that. With a modest budget of $800 per month what can one do? The strategy i want to pick is buy stocks which were ridiculously high at one point and are dirt cheap (prefarably $1) now. However i'll only pick companies how have _real_ assets and a _positive_ revenue in this mix. So what are these companies? F?

View the full F chart at Wikinvest

What do I do with rest 60% well, the dollar to rupee conversion rates are substantially high these days (possibly highest in last 3 years), so i'm going to try and send that money back home to India. I'm not sure though if i want my father to invest that in stocks. He is stock broken full time and has tendencies to over do it. So i'm going to cap that may to 20% stocks and rest as cash. Lets see though, it has to work THE man.

Nurturing entrepreneurship in India’s villages - The McKinsey Quarterly - Nurturing entrepreneurship in India’villages - Strategy - Globalization

2008-11-06T11:31:00.000-08:00

Nurturing entrepreneurship in India’s villages - The McKinsey Quarterly - Nurturing entrepreneurship in India’villages - Strategy - Globalization

"In general, villagers, particularly in the emerging world, have benefitted less from globalization than urbanites have."

"Rural development is crucial for the overall development of a nation’s economy."

"India should seek to empower its villagers and nurture entrepreneurial activity, while also taking advantage of its strengths in the private sector."

Now wait a minute, what do you think of the following one -
"Outright foreign direct investment, by Düsseldorf-based Metro AG, for example, should be welcome, as should joint ventures, like the one between Bharti Enterprises and Wal-Mart Stores. Such businesses"

Fixing my aging Canon S400 camera

2008-10-01T00:53:00.000-07:00

I vividly remember buying a pretty expensive ($450, if i remember correctly) 3 Megapixel Canon S400 camera from circuit city back in 2004! and now for less than half the price you get twice a better camera.

Anyhoo - my aging camera has begun to limp. Just after few minutes of use the batter dies. I have two lithium ion batteries and its the same with both. Also once in a while i do get memory card error. Its unlikely that my battery is dead, but it might be something which this post points. So i'm going to try and reset the internal battery for the camera, if that fails my default plan is to contact Canon.

Non-voters cast your vote!

2008-09-30T18:51:00.000-07:00

I have been meaning to setup something for those who cant vote - one category being us the immigrants! Well here it is a way for you to cast your vote, wish this had the ability to set a date for voting and also ask couple of more bill related questions:

May be someone will create a bill relating voting widget, may be use the VoteSmart API.

Ice Climbing Newb!

2008-09-22T15:57:00.000-07:00

Image via WikipediaOn Saturday I had a great time chomping on the Serac's in the lower Coleman glacier on Mt.Baker! Rob was helping me learn the basics of Ice Climbing. Well both of us forgot our camera's so no pictures. But truly the weather was way better than we expected and we had good view of Mt. Baker and the high meadows were really pretty.

So what all did I learn? The one main thing to learn about crampons is what ever you do try to get the most points in. What this implies is if you are coming downhill then do freaking edge (you will trip!), but try to roll your ankle towards the downhill side and get more points in, and better is dont edge at all!

One trick of the trade of secret I learn from Rob is how to position and balance myself. The idea is to swing the tool, hand from it with your wrist and then then move your legs up such that one leg is on either side of the tool. Once you are in balance and have three point of contact just stand up and swing the other tool. This way one doesn't barn door and uses much of legs.

I over used by hands, had a very tight grip and was very sloppy with my footwork. Well the result is i gotjavascript:void(0) a little sore and ran out of gas much earlier than i expected.

I have a lot to learn, but meanwhile just for shits and giggle check out this nice beginner video on ice climbing. And yep! thanks to Rob for hauling me in and introducing to Ice Climbing!:

Daily Dashboard - do you have one?

2008-09-16T16:13:00.000-07:00

My experimentation with Camtasia studio and an attempt to idea-shake to improve my daily dashboard. Suggestion? Ideas??

Where is my data, can i use it, and can it help me??

2008-09-10T10:37:00.001-07:00

In the quest to live a better, organized and more productive life you need all your data! And that exactly has been my quest for a long time, I have lots of data:

Financial : Money and Quicken files from last 6 years (2001-08), Paper bahi khata from Seven Years (1995-2001) and Excel Sheets from several years (2005-2008)
My day, what did I do: Paper based time tracking (1995-2001), Outlook files from (2003-2008)
Health data, workouts: In Excel from 2002-08
Contacts: In GMail, In Outlook (fortunately synced with my cell phone!)
Blogs: In Blogspot and Wordpress since 2001
Website: 2001-2003 (http://cse.ucsc.edu/~vaibhav and personal http://www.vitraag.com)
My pictures: Organized in folders marked in format YEARMONTHDATE-EVENT since 2001
My Videos: Roughly 8-9 disks in DV format!
Friendships, Social Networks - Facebook, LinkedIn, Orkut
Bookmarks - In Google
Work related files, code and documents since 2001!
Music: Songs as MP3 and ripped mp3s!

So as you can see I have a lot of data!! and I have been a big fan of measuring and tracking things. However I feel that I was more productive and has a better of things when I did paper pen tracking of how I spent time and money! Now i'm at loss - the primary symptom of digitization is that my data has lost its focus - I have data scattered everywhere for example what I do daily is scattered between outlook, google calendar, and mobile phone (ofcourse i'm less organized now :)), I have no good way of keeping track of my day....

I know this is tough problem for the computer industry etx.. but first and foremost I want peace of mind.. now a days my brain feel soo much scattered I feel like I dont have good handle on things and need to read more and understand things in order to do anything. I have come to believe that this is some kind of a dis-order may be ADD but i dont think I have been a non-focus kind of guy - just the thought of me not knowing about my stuff makes me a want to read and organize more which in turn leads to more reading and organizing and the end result is that I have very little time to get anything done! So this might be a bigger problem but I have come to believe that the cure needs to start with centralizing my data and creating a dashboard for it and all this has to have a very concrete tracking mechanism and a goal against it...

Festival Of Forgiveness - Michammi Dukdam

2008-09-05T17:37:00.000-07:00

Water!!

2008-09-04T12:34:00.000-07:00

THIRST

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: design crisis)

Vegetarian Nutrition

2008-08-17T15:39:00.001-07:00

I have been trying to keep an excel sheet of what i eat. However i think i'm going to try and babble about my thoughts on diet, so that i can be more clear and get some feedback. In addition to my diet i'm also trying help my dad (who is obese) to figure a better diet.

So, things which are deficient in Vegetarian diet are Protein, Calcium, Vitramin B12, Iron and Zinc.

Few initial general tips:

Tofu can be an amazing source of protein, iron, zinc, and calcium.
Vitamin B12 - The best source is fortified cereal.

Some specific Obesity tips in general:
When BMI (Weight / Height Squared) in kg/sq.m is more than 30 its termed as Obesity. Treatments include -

Low Calorie Diets
Exercise - spinning, walking
Make a goal (half marathon walk??)
No Caffeine
More water 64 oz ie 8 glasses
Measure Cholesterol

We struck gold, what next? Can we build Indian sports?

2008-08-17T15:39:00.000-07:00

We struck gold, what next? Can we build Indian sports?

It’s a historic moment in the history of Indian sports. First ever individual sport gold medal in the Olympics! Abhinav Bindra has made us all of proud. United States has an450 men old Olympic team while the Indian contingent is just about 59! We might not have quality sportsmen to qualify for the big event but the hope of 1.1 Billion Indians is revived by this feet.

Some cynics remark that every 30 years India gets a gold in Olympics so the next will be due in 30 years. Do you think so? Can we do something to change the dire state of Athletics and Sports in general in India? Can we get the nation to think something more than Cricket? Of course all of the nation wants to think something other than Cricket but they need a pillar they need a hero to hold on to. Abhinav might be just it -? We the NRIs (right ? - I'm one now) give quite a bit back to the nation in terms of supporting education, aid during natural disasters etc. But how about if we have a Hope fund for Indian sports! Especially the individual sports? The idea is that this fund trains may 5-10 Indian sports stars from early on - gets them the appropriate coaching from abroad and nourishes their dreams and ambitions. We need more Bindra's to make our believe in themselves and something must be done about it - more on a consistent, quality driven and citizen fueled approach.

A common result of such success it media hype and melodrama. We often have seen that we the desis fall so much to emotions and just get over-whelmed by feelings. The next steps , action and what we ought to do is usually missing! And thus our circles of misery and overjoy continues :). So what could be the next step to promote more athletics in India. Among the NRIs and at least in North America is very popular to try endurance sports like Marathon, Cycling etx. Usually these events are coupled with fund-raising - so how if we associate these events with the cause of moving the state of India sports one notch up. Concrete how if on the Marathon event we invite one of the athletes from India to participate. Usually a fund raising marathon team is about 40-60 people. So if everyone contributes $75-100 we have enough to sponsor an Indian athlete to participate in the event!!! What do you think of the idea?

Ma and Bapu in Seattle - Week One !

2008-08-11T01:14:00.000-07:00

I have been looking forward to my parents' visit. They arrived to Seattle last Sunday and below is a video diary and here are pictures of what we have been up to last week. We had a fun time camping in Fort Casey State Park on Whidbey Island - this was first time camping experience for my parents :)!

I took extra care to make the experience a little pleasant! The forecast was rain so we headed for a little less damp and open area. I also switched to an air mattress instead of sleeping bags - and yep brought in all the big pleasures of car camping like chairs, grill, firewood and yep - watermelon!! Oh my parents love the sweet corn!

On a side-note I have been trying to motivate and encourage my folks to pay more attention to their health. The great success is now they track their weight and blood-pressure every day!! A sweet result of this is that now we can correlate the days they have high blood pressure to the days when they are sitting at home!! So yep going on walk is an incentive to see those numbers do better. I think the next step for me is to get a pedometer for Dad so that he can keep track of how many steps he walks every day!!

However the big deal in whole deal of parents' health is healthy eating!! With typical east indian cuisine a lot of oil, and unhealthy fat makes way in to ones diet. My elder sister who is a Dermatologist gave a tip to try and control the salt intake first, and stress a little more on fruits. I need to make sure that Mom now starts cooking healthy stuff and yep! not give in to pressure/ craving from me or Dad :)!!!

Ride Report - STP 2008

2008-07-28T00:07:00.000-07:00

This year I'm doing a video report of our Seattle to Portland 2-day, 200+ mile bike ride. Be gentle with my experimentation in movie making and spelling skills, and if you have not donated already please consider supporting this ride, by making your contributions here.

I have shared the pictures of ride here.

July 4th Weekend - Hanging out with my favorite gals :)

2008-07-27T23:55:00.000-07:00

Vaidehi came over for July 4th weekend. After all the busy weekends only this weekend i got some time to get the pictures ready and share the goodness. It was really fun time motorcycling, biking, salsa dancing, strolling and climbing with her and Maris. :).

How to make the best Sambar - Vaidehi Style

2008-07-27T21:40:00.000-07:00

My sister - Vaidehi is one of the best cooks. Here she is in live action showing the intricacies of making sambar from left over dal and frozen mixed vegetables. This is really quick to make and tastes wonderful!!

The Small City India - and the change we need!

2008-07-05T15:11:00.000-07:00

SiliconIndia, apparently one of the primere India professional network reports that India has degraded in its Forbes business potential ranking. The prime reasons it gives is high inflation and increased personal freedom.

For a while we have been the media has been focusing on every form of outsourcing, technology and the big business cities. But the "gross" in the India GDP comes from small city and small town India. The inflation is attribute of the increased disproportional spending of this small city India. Bit city India was always able to do this! What pains me is that the core problems of the economy are not made a day to day problem talk:
- How is the O of outsourced economy going to finally reach small city India?
- How is the T of technology affect the education in small cities
- How is that bright young folks can find employment in small town India to make a not only local but a global change. Can an infrastrucure to support this be built?

I gradually moved from a small town to smaller town to wealthy city to wealthier country. There is immense opportunity on all this levels but we publicize and want to go after only the top notch ones. It will be great exercise to actually start building the belief in local oppurtunity, and i love that my friend Nipun is doing something like that. Check out Karma Tube is a set of inspirational pieces motivating the change which can happen locally.

Sponsor my ride - help a cause!!

2008-07-03T15:31:00.000-07:00

Every year I do the Seattle to Portland bike ride as a part of fund raiser. Next weekend I will be testifying my bike + butt endurance skills for 202 miles between Seattle and Portland. If you are interested in supporting Asha for Education and it’s cause of bringing change through education in India please support my ride by pledging and donating here. One of very personally gratifying things I was able to do with support of Asha was to help sponsor a school for hearing impaired back in my home town.

Enjoy the long weekend and happy Independence day.

Mt. Baker Climb

2008-07-03T14:13:00.000-07:00

Maris and myself went for a Glacier climb with Mountaineers June 29-30. This was my first this season and Maris' second in a week! Pictures of the trip are shared here and a video is below:

The weather was really awesome! We started from the trail head about 11:30am and reached hogsback around 3:30pm, we decided to set our camp (base camp) here since we had running water and roping up and getting up to high camp, melting water + dinner would put us to bed pretty late. By the way the journey to the camp was not as easy - the trail is in a really in bad shape and we had to scramble our way in and walk over thin logs with a 50 pound pack :). And Oh! one interesting thing happened, Maris dropped her pole on a shitty slope and i volunteer to go get it. I had to go through some loose gravel and some snow but as soon as i grabbed the pole on of my feet slip and before i realized i was doing a butt ride towards a raging creek :). Fortunately i had my ice axe and i could self-arrest in time and make my way up safely!! This was a pretty freaky i think everyone was a little haired up seeing it ;).

Anyways we started our climb around 2:00am from 5700'. After making our way up the first slope one of the rope mates felt a little weird to after a lot of back and forth Jim (the leader) decided to go back with him. So we were then five folks on one rope 50m rope ! Anyways the weather held great and we were on the summit at about 8:30!! We made our way back down to camp at about noon and headed out from the cars at about 4pm to have the much missed Mexxi-Mamma burger ..

Backpacking south olympic coast

2008-06-23T00:08:00.000-07:00

Here is the Video account of the backpacking trip Maris, Myself and Jessica (Maris' ex-housemate) did this Memorial day weekend.

Pictures of the trip are shared here.

The three day trip was a fabulous excursion in the Pacific Northwest's flora & fauna, tide charts and yep the longest wilderness coastline!! All of these were unparalleled to my any relevant experiences before! I can go on and on about how i loved the coast but i think i'll leave you guys to enjoy the video for now!

Visible

2008-06-22T15:00:00.000-07:00

Recently my team did the following presentation for our business development methods class:

The project was to find ways to propose a new business for a local company Treemo. We collaborated with the COO - Jeff Yee. Jeff was really a pleasure to work with, he almost instantaneously replied to our emails.

Anyhoo the presentation as you see here is proposing a company to help folks focus and improve the visibility of their amateur sports! The presentation and the related financial analysis and marketing research was very well received. We got comments like - "best presentation", "can I go check this out? Is this real?" , "I would love to have something like this, especially since I'm a soccer mom".

We also got very consturctive feedback like focussing more on a niche - may be niche of high school students wanted to get university scholarships via sports or may be a family oriented hub niche!!

The entire excercise was very frutiful for me, Mark & Cam. But we dont have customers or funding yet... any one out there???

Salsa 2A - Class one!

2008-05-03T23:57:00.000-07:00

In an effort to link all my online sites, I'm importing posts from some other places. I took Salsa 2 a year ago.

So finally i'm writing my salsa steps one more time. Yesterday i attended Salsa 2A class at Century and it was amazing! I figured out the mistake i was doing in cross body lead, basically i was trying to cross over my left foot, move right foot towards the follower and then move left foot. This would get me in an akward position so actually the steps were to cross left foot , shift weight in it(1) , shift weight on right foot in place (2) and then uncross the left foot and shift weight on it(3)!

We learned quite a few interesting moves.

Move 1: Cross-body lead (1-3), make sure you hold her hand and move her ahead , one-and-half-inside-turn (5-7)

Move 2: Spin the left arm anti-clockwise, change hands (1-3), do an outside turn (5-7)

Move 3: You are right-to-right, take a back step on left foot pull her towards you and be in go-to-movies-pose (1-3), take a back step and send her out (5-7)

Move 4: You are in cross hands situation, with left hand over right, do a cross body lead and at the same time ask her right hand on top and leave her left hand (1-3), send out and do an inside turn (5-7)!

I have a full 30 second salsa clip with move 1-4 now!!!!

Naked Ape!

2008-05-03T23:52:00.000-07:00

In an effort to link all my online sites, I'm importing posts from some other places. Naked Ape is a book i read a couple of years.

The Naked Ape, by Desmond Morris gives a perpective of an ape to human. We are not these super-species just an ape!! It touches the raw emotions and its at times very controversial but non the less a good read. It borrow it and read this as a recommendation by Ruchi.

The Art Of Start

2008-03-29T18:25:00.000-07:00

The Art Of Start - the classical Guy Kawasaki work outline the five basic Entrepreneurial principals - Make meaning, Make Mantra, Get going , Define your business model and Weave a MAT (Milestones, Assumption and Tasks). That a very expressive list of getting going but above all i love his statement that Entrepreneurship is all about doing!

I have put that as my litmus test for picking up partners - if you want to do lets get going !! :), What else should one look in a partner? Ofcourse few things which come to my mind are - complementary skill sets, tenacity ....

How To Start Climbing 5.12...

2008-03-29T16:27:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of people aspiring to climb 5.12, well for me 5.12 is the ceiling ! Last year i could lead 5.8, atmost 5.9 trad and 5.9 (consistently) and atmost 5.10 sports. Well thats all numbers and very geeky rock rat talk! What i really aim to achieve is getting more comfortable on the rock. When i first started rock climbing two years ago I feared heights :), well the reason i climbed was just to get over my fear! Now i have come along long ways :).

Last season I started leading trad, I learned a lot of composure and mind tricks! Almost everyone can climb 5.8/5.9 but when it comes to leading it all in the mind! While doing a leading harder stuff i learnt from a friend and colleague (Damon) a very cool trick of extending your arms and using your legs. Damon is an awesome climber and when he climbs it almost looks out of a video, also note that most rock climbing books and websites stress on the fact of using your legs and not relying on hands. It was sort of 'AHA' moment when Damon showed me how to hang on hands and move your legs up and then stand on a good hold, and keep repeating the same tactic. I wish i had a picture or a video to illustrate. This has helped me a lot, many time i'm just able to cruise up on the juggy 5.10's without any problem using this technique. Well, no only if I had a cool technigue to negiotiate the tiny handholds i would be a 5.10 champ :).

Anyways, to the point this season i'm planning to use this book to first get the 5.10's and then move on the oh well.. lets see :). But from what my friends (Wayne) have told me about the book, it seems to lay out a great process of trying to make training pyramid of grades you can climb to grade you want to achieve, end of the day its all about miles and constant tiny improvements with 'AHA' moments inter-spread.. sounds familiar ??

Salsa fun!!

2008-03-23T13:09:00.000-07:00

Back to Salsa! Its great to realize that almost after a six month break i havent lost that much of touch, but really i would love to be able to do the spins and flaps like the video above - Maris agrees too :) I should step it up !

To be or not to be..

2008-03-19T15:59:00.000-07:00

Interesting points - why this guy left Microsoft to join Redfin, why this guy left to join Ontela and why this guy loves startups and what reason this guy has for you to leave the Empire and try something different.

I would summarize a little and add that its not just about finding a new culture and also a new way of life! In the above links i liked the idea of creating a forcing function to move on!

Whats your take on the big empire?

Ideation~!

2008-03-17T11:55:00.000-07:00

Ideation if done structurally really helps us to think outside the box. It a fairly organic process but in order for one to be successful wrt the out of the box solution one has to understand the properties and limitations of the box fairly concretely. One way to think outside it is churn and innovative on one of the limiting factors of the box picking proven solutions for the same problem in totally new areas.

e.g Using cool icebreaker from party scenarios in to business meetings -

Split folks in groups - share 2 unique things about everyone, test on the same.

Maris' Culinary Skills

2008-03-16T22:59:00.000-07:00

A short video showing innards of a very healthy vegetarian meal, inspired by Madhur Jeffrey's World Vegetarian.

Things I need to blog about

2008-02-25T11:06:00.001-08:00

I have a pile of things I need to blog about, let me know if I have missed anything!

India Trip

The Golden Triangle
Startups in India
WinePark of Vinchur

Having a complete comprehensive to-do list the must have for time management
Improving Snowboarding Skills
My active HealthBlog - http://healthblog.vitraag.com
Techniques in programming - timestamping and compression

Indian Stocks for Long Term Investment

2008-02-06T15:41:00.000-08:00

Do you think the following make good stocks for long-term investment in India?
DLF, PUNJ LLOYD, RELIACE, TATA STEEL, ICICI BANK, HDFC, HDFC BANK, L&T, BHEL, SBI, BHARTI, TATA POWER, NTPC, ONGC, IFCI, GMR INFRA, HPCL.

Fixing my overheating old Toshiba A65

2008-01-06T20:29:00.000-08:00

I'm in process of fixing my old Toshiba A65 laptop, apparently it shuts down after overheating. It seems to be a very commong problem and http://www.laptoprepair101.com/laptop/2006/01/04/toshiba-laptop-overheating/ has a very guide to fix it. I'm in process of following it, so far i have removed the harddisk and the cards, next is taking the chassis apart :). Hopefully the problem is clogged heatsink and cleaning it will help resolve the issue. I want to give the computer to mom to pair it with the desktop, and replace her already departed Viao :)!!

Pillars for Success of a BDM

2008-01-02T14:50:00.000-08:00

A seasoned BizDev resource tells me that following skills are pillars for success of a business development manager:

Negotiation Skills with proper business conduct
Business Modeling with ROI asset evaluation
Organizational Maturity Skills
Deal Strategy Skills

Whats your opinion?

Welcome 2008!!

2007-12-31T14:41:00.001-08:00

Dear Friend:

Just wanted to take a moment and reflect on the year in past, look forward to the coming year and share it with you! In past I sent a greeting card to friends and family on the new years'. This year I'm sending note in form my year book, a summary of my blog posts and just a blurb about what i have been up to - Hope you find it an interesting read and have words of wisdom/advice for me to share here!! Wish you a happy new year, and may 2008 fulfill all your dreams!!!

2007 has been quite an eventful year for me with lot of up and downs! The year started with a fabulous trip to India and UK. Back in Seattle i tried to buy a place and fortunately didnt succeed in it but moved to a amazing airy apartment in Capitol Hill. Did plan a lot to do snowboarding but never found time for it, neither for Whistler trip. However i went snowboarding on Dec 27 this year just get out of that jinx :).

The summer as amazing fun - I started to lead on Rock climbs!. Biked to Portland with (my sweetheart) for Asha, it was amazing to see her pick up biking long distance so quickly. However on our next trip to Vancouver (RSVP) she met a terrible accident on RSVP. After her graduation in May, Vaidehi (my sister) moved to Bay Area to work for Cisco, I visited her in July to make sure she is settled and after much back and forth decision we bought a nice car for her. During the same time i was trying also to do a small project/startup - A health tool FitLive and a simple facebook application IOU resulted in collaboration with my artist friend Eddie. In Fall I decided to move to a new team. It was a little stressful time trying to finish all my obligations to Windows Mobile (I completed my feature for the next version which will allow the updating operating system to update itself on those devices) and move to Microsoft HealthVault. The great part about Fall was i joined the Certificate Program in Business Development at UW and really enjoyed it. I continuing the Business development for wineofeast throught it! Continuing the stress and vigor of Fall- Winter so far has been really busy for me - in my one month at Microsoft HealthVault i have already managed and coordinate one release of the SDK - have a pretty active health blog as well. I'm saying goodbye to 2007 from Bay Area from Vaidehi's place - I'm happy to she her really settled in the place and is doing great!!

From what it looks 2008 is going to be a challenging year for me! I will atleast try to get more snowboarding in the winter/spring and probably help Maris a little in her basic climbing and do a little more climbing in summer. Right now I'm looking forward to upcoming trip to India with Vaidehi and Maris. We are planning to visit the golden triangle and then go for cousins wedding. I'm not sure how 2008 will unfold, if my Maris & friends will convince me to join a startup in Seattle, or friends/family in Bay Area will make me move here or I will set out for a around the world trip ....

Wish you happy new year!!!

regards,
Vaibhav

My 2007 Blogs

Personal
http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2007/01/feeling-smarter-in-oxford.html
http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2007/02/fun-times-in-india.html
http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2007/02/london-longings.html
http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2007/04/tulip-festival-and-airshow.html
http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2007/04/lead-on-traditional-rock-climbing.html
http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2007/05/proud-graduate.html
http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2007/05/turtles-and-double-turns-advanced-salsa.html
http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2007/05/finishing-vancouver-marathon-in-style.html
http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2007/06/fitlive-coming-soon.html
http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2007/06/backpacking-with-mountain-lions.html
http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2007/07/star-chek-and-climbing-in-squamish.html
http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2007/07/stp2007-and-new-bicyclist.html
http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2007/07/support-my-206-mile-journey-to-portland.html
http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2007/08/simple-facebook-app-iou.html
http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2007/08/personal-finance.html
http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2007/11/budgeting-to-be-millionaire-in-seven.html
http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2007/11/market-research.html
http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2007/11/setting-up-home-office.html
http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2007/12/last-year-almost-gone-reflection-time.html
http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2007/12/planning-india-trip.html
http://vitraag.blogspot.com/2007/12/happy-birthday-maris.html

HealthBlog
http://healthblog.vitraag.com/2007/12/querying-healthvault-with-where-clauses.html
http://healthblog.vitraag.com/2007/12/microsoft-common-user-interface.html
http://healthblog.vitraag.com/2007/12/adding-health-vault-search-box.html
http://healthblog.vitraag.com/2007/12/microsofts-peter-neupert-voted-1-it.html
http://healthblog.vitraag.com/2007/12/healthvault-as-discussed-by-bill.html
http://healthblog.vitraag.com/2007/12/working-wih-health-vault.html
http://healthblog.vitraag.com/2007/12/health-vault-devices-windows-portable.html
http://healthblog.vitraag.com/2007/12/search-engine-optimization-for-health.html
http://healthblog.vitraag.com/2007/12/my-first-health-vault-application-with.html

Last year almost gone - reflection time!!

2007-12-30T11:31:00.000-08:00

Year end is always a great opportunity to evaluate the past year, say hi to your friends and make plans for the next year!

2007 has been quite an eventful year for me, there have been more up and downs in this particular year than i remember from the past. Trying to buying a place, starting to lead on rock, biking to Portland with Maris, Maris' accident on RSVP, helping Vaidehi settle in Bay Area, deciding to move to a new team, moving in with Maris - everything has been a mixed bag (as life is :)).

In past I sent a greeting card to friends and family on the new years'. This year i'm planning to send a note to my year book, a summary of my blog posts and just a blurb about what i'm up to. Hopefully i'll get it done today!

Next year is again a year of un-certainity for me, I might consider to move to Bay Area, join a startup or do both :). But for now i'm happily looking forward to visit my folks in Jan and a little traveling in India!!

Planning India Trip!

2007-12-25T23:06:00.001-08:00

All right I'm getting a chance to go visit home!! Eh..hoo!! Here is the rough plan -

Hopefully, I can make all the other stuff work. If any of you guys are around do let me know!! More details getting added soon!

Happy Birthday Maris!!

2007-12-16T15:06:00.001-08:00

IMG_0417,
originally uploaded by vbha.

We had a blast at Maris' birthday yesterday.

The original plan was -

1. 5:30 PM Meeting at Seattle Centre for a Bonfire
2. 7:00 PM Get Dinner at Bamboo Gardens
3. 8:30 PM Hit the Ice rink at Seattle Centre
4. 10:30 PM Enjoy Piano Duet at Chopstix,
5. 12:00 PM play games at Marisa's place or do as the group pleases!

From 6pm to 2:30am - we had a tonne of folks. We started at 4 folks became 8 then 5 and eventually tailed off to Myself, Maris and Marisa!!

It was really really great time!!! We didnt catch much of Bonfire but the dinner at Bambo garden was pretty good, and at the ice rink we witnessed a new record in Maris from not knowing how to skate to be able to skate backwards!! And yep.. we were able to put her on spot when the pianist sang for her at Chopstix (but i was in more akward spot because he sang "Dick in the box" on my behalf...)!! From 6pm to until about 2:30am this was a blast......!!

Oh the preview pics are here - http://www.flickr.com/photos/vaibhavb/tags/marisbirthday. more pics are coming for her Camera as soon as she returns from Estonia....

Thanks to folks for making it a success...

HealthVault-MSN-Search

2007-12-03T13:12:00.001-08:00

HealthVault-MSN-Search,
originally uploaded by vbha.

Budgeting to be Millionaire in Seven Years, Is it possbile?

2007-11-12T21:20:00.000-08:00

I had blogged earlier about the personal finance tools available on internet. But after a long bout of finance management failure, I'm going to try and experiment by publicly doing my finances (of course some numbers are fuzzed but are close). I want to be able to get my net worth to a million dollars in seven years, is it possible?

With about $2000 of Cash flow every month what sort of rate of interest should i aim for ? So for this saving to become 1million i need a rate of return equivalent to 45%, as this calculation shows!!

So short question, can I achieve a consistent rate of of 45%? Is very unlikely! Which implies that i should increase by savings! This takes me to saving almost about 65K a year!!! Lets see!!

Next in this line of thought I want to see what my current rate of return is. I know its less than 1o%!! So point number one is something needs to be done about this poor investment strategy!

The bigger point and most import is budgeting! Is my money doing what i want to do? I'm I using money to buy things which will improve my quality of life? Or am i buying products or services which are improving my quality of life? Clearly i spend a lot on following items:

Climbing gear - 2000$
Camping gear - 1000$
Cycling gear - 1000$
Motorcycle - 1000$
Eating out/ drinking - 3000$

However i dont spend enough on the following

Travelling
TV, Computer or other electronics
New Car

So how should one divide the quadrants of quality of life so one can balance budgeting for better life versus being frugal to have more money to invest wisely!

Market Research!

2007-11-12T17:04:00.000-08:00

I was wondering if there is more insight and suggestions wrt tools for Market Research.

I recall from the class the various tools one can use

- Industry associations
- Competitor websites
- Public financial reports of competitors.

Particularly i wanted the ball mark data on quantities, customer segments and overhead cost which wine distributors reckon with. I couldn't get enough information from the industry associations or competitor's website and was wondering what else could i try. I need data to estimate the bulk and $$ required to sell wine to adistributor (typically the wine industries middle men).

Setting up a home office!

2007-11-11T20:27:00.000-08:00

This weekend I was busy setting up a home office. The idea is to make use of my huge living room to share it as a office and living room. Just moving the book shelf from one side to next has given me a huge wall free. The next is to add a huge 8 ft by 4 ft white board on this wall! Eddie is helping me in this project. I have also added an exta desk in the room, i'm hoping to make the place comfortable for 4-5 folks to work. But Eddie's counterpoint is that we shoud buy nice desks and chairs so that we can make the place look cool!! Well lets see, where we go with this..

A simple facebook app - IOU

2007-08-29T00:25:00.000-07:00

So today finally we released a simple version of the IOU facebook application, Eddie already has posted a review and comments on what need to improve in the application! The general idea is this little tool should be able to handle "I owe you" "You owe me" kinda scenarios between friends! Right now its just beer though!! :). Enjoy and drink cautiously....

Personal Finance!

2007-08-27T13:40:00.000-07:00

Will we ever make a personal finance application which works seemlessly! I tried Quicken for a while and liked it but for some odd reason i switched to Money and man! its so often misconfigures my accounts, i can no longer reliably keep track of my accounts by using the auto-sync button. I have my old quicken and money files and i'm looking for something which will allow me to import them and yep! something which if i start using will still be usable 5 years down the line. I was looking to use some web 2.0 sites like Wesabe, Expensr which claim to have cool community support and very easy to use interface, but i hate the idea of downloading and uploading my bank account files all the time.

Well it happens that i can probably try Wesabe. It lets you schedule uploads if you use firefox. I should rather concentrate on tools to make up and realized financial goals rather than money accounting. Goals are the most crucial aspect of financial management. Well whats your money worth of, if you cant use it for anything@!

So what would be one's financial goals?

Save 50% of Salary
Build Equity of 50K
Achieve rate of return of atleast 10% on Savings
??

Star Chek and Climbing in Squamish~!

2007-07-26T10:30:00.001-07:00

IMG_0077,
originally uploaded by vbha.

Wow-~! last couple of days flew pass!! I had an amazing time climbing with Wayne, Jeff and Nick in Squamish, BC.

We arrived in Squamish late Monday night and were fortunate to find a spot in the climbers camping ground. Apparently even on a weekday a tonne of folks were waiting for the weather to clear out so that they can climb~!

On Tuesday as planned we went to Star Check to do the 4 pitch 5.9 sport climb, which according to Wayne will bring smile to your face!! Unfortunately due to the rain in the past week or so the route was totally moss and wet! We gave up on that and actually headed to Smoke Bluffs to try some single pitch cragging. During the whole day i lead two climbing one 5.6 and other 5.8 and followed Wayne on 5.7 (which i couldnt lead as i kept slipping at the start) and other two start 5.7. I was almost spent and pumped out by the time we wrapped off. While in the other area Nick and Jeff were trying to get out a stuck cam, but after trying several times with no luck we gave off and around 6pm or so we headed for the recreation centre for a quick shower, a hot tub dip and then had a great meal in the town! Over the meal we dicussed and i concluded that i wont be up for Diedre, i didnt want to crap out on pitch 4 and have Wayne haul me back. So the plan for Wednesday was Jeff and Nick would do Diedre and my-self and Wayne would try some other climbs near the climbers camp.

Wednesday morning Jeff and Nick went ahead for Diedre with a backup plan to do other difficult ones in case its crowded, and myself and Wayne went to the 5.8 near campground. Our climb was a little damp towards the start after trying for a bit Wayne and myself decided to go try something else. Well!! actually we ended up going to Star Check! We started climbing star check around 11:15am. Wayne lead the first pitch, i was a little scared with the exposure and the raging river beneth. After getting up to first belay station I was in double mind weather or not to lead the next pitch Wayne convinced me that if I can lead this one (5 bolts, 5.7) then i can lead the 5.9. Well i went for it a little sketched at the beginning but as i got on the arete and clipped in the second bolt i was little more confident and actually i enjoyed the rest two bolts. I did out a piece in between the first and second bolt. I belayed wayne for the second pitch. Wayne lead the third short pitch which could have been combined with the second pitch. After coming up the third pitch I looked at the 5.9 and said no way i can lead it, i was under impression that the route had only three pitches and we were done ;). After a little chat with other pair of climbers who were rapping down Wayne headed for this pitch. He looked really at ease on the 5'9 move! I had to struggle a little while following on this move but didnt actually feel that bad! Voila after completing the pitch i really felt great and a combination of fear and smile crossed me :). It was really a great experience.

After finishing Star Check myself and Wayne went across the road to do some climbing near the water, we tried some 5.6-10a friction stuff on a small wall there. Where as Nick and Jeff were doing a 5.10a variation of the St Vitus' Dance extra since Diedre was crowded. We could see them rapping from the parking lot. While they rapped down we headed to the amazing rec centre for some hot tub!

We started our trip back to seattle around 6:30pm and all along the way i kept thinking of the raging river and the awesome views Star Check offered..it definately feels like a great experience in hindsight and something which i will remember for a long time!! Thanks Wayne, Jeff and Nick for dragging me along!!

STP2007 and a new bicyclist!!

2007-07-16T14:01:00.001-07:00

STP2007-Finish,
originally uploaded by vbha.

Wow~ this weekend was awesome STP weekend!! The 206 miles to portland where really fun and amazing. Maris actually finished it in style almost doubling her bicycling lifetime career miles!! The first leg until seward park was a little sketchy as Maris constantly complained about her arms and i was a little worried if we can make it! But the fast stretch from Seward park to kent convinced me about athletic abilities of Ms. first time biker on a brand new unridden K2 whirlwind! We took all the designated stops and tried to sample the un-impressive STP food. I almost wished i packed some stuff but unfortunately the food on the ride was so good in previous years that i didnt feel like carrying weight. This year was a disappointment not only in terms of quality but also the limited food!

After meeting our whole group of Wheels of Change riders at the REI stop we continued and kept meeting our fellow fund-raisers until Centralia - the official midpoint. It was amazing to see such a hugh group ride great and keep a good pace!

The 7 miles from Centralia to our camp site in Chehalis were quick. After arriving there at 7 we found that we had less than an hour to get food and take a shower so without ado we got on it! Too bad that we didnt have enough time to enjoy the swimming pool of this amazing town. At about 9pm we set up out tents and then pulled our mats out to enjoy the dawn lying on the grass it felt amazing!!

Next morning we started our ride to Portland at about 7:00am (even though the original plan was 6am ;),...). We kept a very decent pace and my about 10:30am we were at the lunch stop and met up with other riders from our group. Unfortunately one of the riders Arvind had to stop due to knee pain but man! he was a tough guy to make it all the way to 145th mile, even though he was not feeling that great!

After almost an hour+ lunch stop and a little treatment to Maris' hurting knee we scurried to get to the Lewis Clark bridge so that we can enter Oregan! and if nothing else just make a ride from Seattle to Oregan!! The passage over the bridge was a little spoky as my metal water bottle came off and almost hit a rider on a recliner. The dude was really mad at me, i feel sorry especially since we met up with this guy on and off on the ride and he kept cheering us up as well as our fundraising cause! Well i did talk to him at finish line and apologize - stupid me i bought a useless metal water bottle...

After the food stop at St. Helens Maris' biking confidence and almost exponentially increased and we entered the finish line almost keeping up a constant 20mph pace in around 2 hours! It was really awesome to see almost all of the team to enter the finishe line with strength and compassion for the cause.

Now its time for doing more of Change!, please contribute your little towards Asha's cause and support our ride.

Support my 206 mile journey to Portland

2007-07-13T14:34:00.000-07:00

I’m really thrilled to see our team grow from 5 folks 2 years before to 15 this year!! This year being my third year in the Saddle I would love if you join me in the ride to make a small difference. The first year was grueling and I was sore for few days, the second I stuck in and finished the ride, this year I’m trying to enjoy it and have Maris attempt it!! Hopefully I will be able to keep up with the Marathoner!

Donate per mile or donate in kind! Support my ride!!!

FitLive Coming Soon!!!

2007-06-08T19:25:00.000-07:00

Backpacking with Mountain Lions, RattleSnakes and Maris!

2007-06-01T22:34:00.001-07:00

IMG_0008,
originally uploaded by vbha.

Man! memorial weekend was awesome, we went backpacking on the lakeshore trail! More pics at http://www.flickr.com/photos/vaibhavb/tags/backpackinglakechelansummer2007/ the two days of 17.5 was action packed with sightings of mountain lion and rattle snakes. We did make it in time for the ferry back from Stehekin to Fields landing and yep! we did manage to get lunch in Stehekin!. Oh ya !! we also figured out how people in stehekin get their cars!

Well! this isnt exactly detailed but more interesting details coming up, soon!!

Proud Graduate!

2007-05-23T17:55:00.001-07:00

IMG_0511,
originally uploaded by vbha.

It was delightful to see Vaidehi graduate this weekend. I'm really proud of her, after her more than successful and eventful stunt at University Of Maryland, College Park she is going to join Cisco in Bay Area. While her MS in Telecommunications she successfuly pulled out the stunt of being in news twice, and doing lucheon with the Dean!! She has made our family proud, way 2 go gal!!!!

Turtles and double turns! - Advanced Salsa it is!!

2007-05-16T00:40:00.000-07:00

Alrite, i'm moving on to another level at Centrun Ballroom to learn more of Salsa! The 3-d class is teaching some rapid movements. Altough i couldnt dance yesterday because of my sprained ankle (yes, thats another story - i sprained it while rock-climbing, took my first trad climbing leader fall...).

Anways, the double turn involves switching the hands behing the back and then doing a pizza in 8 beats. Its then followed by Turtle where the gal through inside turn and across, then follow it with blocking her hand at elbow and having her do three quick inside turns in half a cycle.

So that way Salsa 3-d class 1, wow! I plan to keep a dairy of my salsa learnings here and hopefully i'll learn faster and be more elegant soon :)...

Finishing Vancouver Marathon in Style!

2007-05-07T15:26:00.001-07:00

IMG_0481,
originally uploaded by vbha.

Maris finished the vacouver Marathon this weekend in 3 hours 50 minutes (well 3:49:58 to be eggact). Way go to!! Thats an amazing and impressive time for a first time marathoner!!. More pics at http://www.flickr.com/photos/vaibhavb/tags/vancouvermarathon2007/

Tulip Festival and Airshow!!

2007-04-30T13:52:00.001-07:00

This year along with the ritual tulip festival, we also saw an airshow in Mt. Vernon. The day was awesome and i was glad to hangout with friends from Bay area and Maris. More pics at: http://flickr.com/photos/vaibhavb/tags/tulipfestival2007/ . Yep! believe it or not I kept the shopping zeal of last weekend and also bought some stuff from the seattle outlet malls!

Lead on traditional rock climbing routes - woho!

2007-04-16T13:54:00.000-07:00

I'm a new man today!! I lead few respectable trad routes this weekend :). I was freaked out but felt really good as i was doing it, I did the clamshell crack (almost 30+ ft), other route on middle clamshell and lower clamshell.

London Longings!

2007-02-24T21:01:00.000-08:00

IMG_0245
Originally uploaded by vbha.

After the fabulous rest in India I had an hectic week in London! First couple of days i spent in oxford with Srikumar and next 3 days i spent in London with Axel, I met Tanushree for a brief moment as well!! Well@ Oxford times reminded me of the 17th-19th century mighty and brainy Empire!! and the times in London where the 20th Century fun! I loved both!! London was a mix of the tourist sight-seer and the party animal!!

Friday we hit the bars as soon as Axel got to the hotel and we ended up disliking the fact the bar closed at 11pm!! and for a other one we had to walk few blocks with no success tho'.

Saturday we spent seeing the bukingham palace, london tower bridge, the russian new year celebration and yep! then we hit the party scene at Leicester square - damn it was cool!!!

Sunday was the day of Madame Tussauds!! We spend a tonne of time posing :). Well in this picutre you have to make out who is Mayor of London. Apparently Axel fooled a tonne of passer bys by posing as Mayor of London, it was hilarious!!! And in the evening we couldnt keep ourselves from hitting the Leicester scene one more time!! This time we were greeting with Live music, and you know what happened then! Well none of us got enough sleep before the flight next morning :).. hehe.. nothing more..;)/

Fun times in India!!

2007-02-24T20:17:00.000-08:00

IMG_0083
Originally uploaded by vbha.

Yep! yep!! I have been really bad about pinning down India trip tales! Well now i'm getting to it. My first week was pretty hectic and spent most of the time at Samit's wedding, followed by hike to Trambakeshwar with Pravin and Gang! The next week was work week, well the think week paper i submitted that week got reviewed and commented my Bill Gates (can you believe that !!). Anyways i made a trip to mumbai in my third week and met with Akshata, Saurabhs parents and the site visits to Asha projects didn't work out :(. Well in the same trip Vaidehi was welcomed!! The next week and half was pretty hectic celebrating the 1st with a family party and dance, my folks actually danced! woho!! We did a trip to Shirdi and Yeola. A family vacation out didnt work as Sweety got sick, and we didnt have time to plan. Btw, in addition to chilling i did manage to get some workout (I joined a gym - health fitness--?) , a run (did the KTHM Marathon :)..) and lots of rest and good food!!!

Well there are many small things i noticed different in India, compared to last year. The westernization has really caught up - my friends are thinking pretty liberal now a days, things are expensive - a small auto ride is alteast 15 ruppees and the growth oppurtunity in terms of job and finance is tremendous!!

Now!! you may ask what about marriage, rather what about arranged marriage? Did you hook up?? Ahuh! well this time my parents really made an effort to get me see some gals. Well i'm 28 now and I had made clear that i dont wanna marry for another year but my parents thought may be i'll change my mind. As a courtesy to a family friend/relative i did see one gal formally but made it clear to her that i'm not interested in it for a year atleast. There were couple of other incidents of matrimony but i think i managed to get out of them!!! I know you might say its time for me to hook up, and i'm not entirely against arranged marriage but hey i want to give a full committe d year to see if i can make a small dent as an entrepreneur and then w'll think about rationalizing..

That was pretty much a bland travelogue:).. well the next one is about my time in London!!!

Feeling Smarter in Oxford!

2007-01-11T10:10:00.000-08:00

IMG_0136
Originally uploaded by vbha.

Wow! I'm enjoying the univerisity town of oxford. With huge gothic (?) sculptures around and the plagues like the one in pic, i'm all of sudden feeling like i'm part of intelligentsia..hehe.. ! I'm getting ready to do a night biking tour of oxford may be check out the Alice's shop and then head to the pubs, with Srikumar!!

Snow in Seattle -!!

2006-11-28T12:49:00.000-08:00

IMG_0022
Originally uploaded by vbha.

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.. :)...

I actually finished the half marathon!!

2006-11-27T11:07:00.000-08:00

SeattleHalfMarathon-Vaibhav
Originally uploaded by vbha.

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 !!!

Can i run a half-marathon?

2006-11-18T17:07:00.000-08:00

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

Halloween 2006!!

2006-10-30T11:04:00.000-08:00

IMG_0108
Originally uploaded by vbha.

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!!!

Oktoberfest birthday bash

2006-10-16T10:09:00.000-07:00

IMG_0106
Originally uploaded by vbha.

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...;).

Sometimes a to-be-judged-workman needs to quarrel with his tools and fix them

2006-09-18T16:08:00.000-07:00

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 (?)!

What have we achieved in Software in last ten years?

2006-09-14T17:23:00.000-07:00

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.

Orcas Islands - Camping heaven

2006-08-21T16:50:00.000-07:00

ViewFromTopOfMountConstitution
Originally uploaded by vbha.

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!!!

Mt. Rainier - A Blissful Climb!!

2006-08-07T18:23:00.000-07:00

Vaibhav at Mt. Rainier Summit
Originally uploaded by vbha.

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.

Ready To Go To Work!

2006-07-19T13:59:00.000-07:00

ReadyToGoToWork
Originally uploaded by vbha.

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...

STP 2006 Story

2006-07-17T20:07:00.000-07:00

STP-story
Originally uploaded by vbha.

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/

Sahalee Peak - Glacier Cimb

2006-07-11T00:43:00.000-07:00

At the ridge
Originally uploaded by vbha.

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!!

My First Summit!!!

2006-06-05T17:12:00.000-07:00

Unicorn-Panorama
Originally uploaded by vbha.

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!!

Social Networking Phenomenon

2006-05-23T18:21:00.000-07:00

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.

Excursions In Mountaineering - Snow Camping and Glacier Climbing

2006-05-07T23:15:00.000-07:00

TheBaricade
Originally uploaded by vbha.

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.

UMD Soormay - Gabroo in action

2006-04-20T11:17:00.000-07:00

UMD Soormay

My sister, Vaidehi in her quintessentail dance action! go!! gal!! :). Here is the maestro in action.

World Economic Forum - India and the World Scenarios

2006-04-13T06:39:00.000-07:00

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!!

Rappelling

2006-04-04T13:06:00.000-07:00

Rappelling
Originally uploaded by vbha.

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 ...

Rock Climbing Mt. Erie!

2006-04-03T17:48:00.000-07:00

Patrick trying rope three
Originally uploaded by vbha.

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 :).

Mathilda Reinvented

2006-03-13T19:09:00.000-08:00

Mathilda Reinvented
Originally uploaded by vbha.

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

2006-03-13T18:39:00.000-08:00

Crozz Country Trailz
Originally uploaded by vbha.

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.

Fitness Tips - LifeStyle Routines

2006-02-10T12:27:00.000-08:00

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.

MayaBoli School For Hearing Impaired

2005-12-15T01:16:00.000-08:00

MayaBoli Deaf and Dumb School
Originally uploaded by vbha.

On 1 Dec 2005 I got the opportunity to visit the Mayaboli Deaf and Dumb school in Yeola. This is a rural area in Nashik district in Maharastra. The school is a proud symbol of what dedication and good will can do even in a resource less environment.

The school houses around 80 deaf or dumb kids. Most (around 70) stay in the school. The school is currently on a rental property which is doubled as a hostel. It has no dedicated financial resource but largely survives on the effort Mr. Arjun Kokate. Local donors have made it a tradition to celebrate occasions like birthdays by contributing to this cause. The school has been functional since last 10 years and it currently up to grade 7. They do follow the curriculum of state board. It takes about a year and half or more to teach a normal school year curriculum to these kids. Of course preschool is much elongated. The staff is around 20 people, including teachers, cooks and other workers.

Pictures are can say more than what I would attempt to paraphrase, , please check them at: http://www.flickr.com/groups/mayaboli/

The goal of this project is to have a self sustainable school upto 10th grade atleast, making sure that the students which it trains are able to stand up for themselves rest of the life. The founder of the school Mr. Arjun Kokate is very well known social worker in the area. He has dedicated his life and so has his wife to the cause of education.

Freakonomics

2005-10-26T03:24:00.000-07:00

This was really an interesting read, which i finished last week in my couple of Flu days :). I was sick but i still enjoyed reading this book.

I read the book from cover to cover, yeah! But it was not that engrossing from what i remember it gave me a message to ask freaky questions and try to find answers for them. Like how important is parenting? Why do Druglords live with their mother? Or still so im my context i would ask Why does an average india spend atleast 5 times his salary on a marriage? Why does US capture 30% worlds GDP and China+India combined capture only 8trillion of the 40? Why there are more female engineers in India than USA? Why is mans journey to moon still controversial? Agree-ably some are good and some bad questions but the gist of the book is to ask akward questions and try to answer why. And yeah! that the only thing i like about it :).

Or another interesting question which is the next book i read is Why capitalism succeeds in west and fails in east?

AllGoRhythms 2005, How did it go?

2005-10-24T01:06:00.000-07:00

AshaAllgoCoordsShakingOut
Originally uploaded by vbha.

The photos from AllGoRhythms 2005 show presented by Asha, Seattle on Oct 22, 2005.

The show was sold out and the band played bollywood masala music for about 4.5 hours and a number of once more! The audience never got enough of dance numbers!! It was lovely to see folks from all ages crowed near the stage to shake with the dhinchak zatka numbers:).

Monadlogue

2005-09-24T21:58:00.000-07:00

Starting a blog for Monad ramblings!! Here is the first port about the Monad Package Manager i have written, its very very alpha and needs a new scriptdepot. But hej Microsoft is going to move fast to win the web but until then i'll use what serves my purpose. So here it is Introoducing MPKG - the Monad Package manager

Introducting the Monad package manager. You can download it from http://www.cse.ucsc.edu/~vaibhav/scriptdepot/mpkg.msh.

The scriptdepot contains a bunch of monad scripts to experiement with. To install the package manager copy the script to your msh directory and run it as follows: mpkg.msh -install http://www.cse.ucsc.edu/~vaibhav/scriptdepot/mpkg.msh

You are all set to explore the package manager. It allows you to search the internet for scripts just type mpkg.msh -search [query].

Fun! fun !! ride enjoy!!