Sir Edmund Hillary, one of the greatest adventurers of our time, passed away today. Sir Edmund, was the first man to climb Mt. Everest along with the Nepalese sherpa Tenzing Norgay. I personally believe, his humanitarian deeds eclipse his physical achievements. Think the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Ms. Helen Clark, said it best “He was an heroic figure who not only ‘knocked off’ Everest but lived a life of determination, humility and generosity”
Google does it again..
The almighty Google has come out with a new toy for me to play with :). I don’t claim, that I am a programmer by any means, but like to dabble in scripting now and then. So, I was really excited to see this new simple API from Google for creating charts. I can already imagine, how this can be used in generating some cool reports. Here’s my “Hello World” graph using the API.
The code I used to generate this graph is
“http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=s:hW&chs=250×100&chl=Vinay|Rocks&chtt=My+Hello+World”
Looks like some smart and entrepenuring programmer is already making some money out of this API :). Check out this link for a very cool and smart implementation of the API
Weekend of bumming around in Napa Valley
On a whim, I decided to bum around in the Napa Valley for the weekend. And it was a pretty bad time to have such a whim :), with California experiencing some of the worst weather in recent history. I persisted, and luckily I had a great time. As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.. Here’s a picture trail of my weekend
My adda was the RedWodd Inn in Napa Valley. Not the most romantic place to stay, but good bang for buck. It only cost me $49 a day.
Since, I didn’t have a lot of time, I was only able to visit one winery (Castello Di Amorosa) . Don’t ask my why, but this entrepreneur decides to build a winery in the form of a medieval castle for $37MM. But boy, did he build it with style. Apparently, he spent 13 years building the winery and went through the pain of building it with 100 year old brick to make it as authentic as possible. Here’s a snapshot of the Winery from outside
Here are some pictures with the wine barrels and some cool interiors
And for what ever reason, there is a torture room in the Castle. Guess, how this was used!! 🙂
After the tour, being the sucker that I am, I spent ~$200 on buying wine and moved on to hike at the Bathe-Napa valley state park. One word!!, alright six words :), Best value in the Napa Valley!!. If you are into outdoors, this is the place to visit in Napa. Forget the snobby wineries :).
So I came
I conquered
And ran into this surprise at the peak
I never ran into a GeoCache before. And being the outgoing person I am (that is a joke BTW 🙂 ), I took the opportunity to put my signature on the GeoCache.
(only problem was that I messed up on the date!! 🙂 )
If you have all the time in the world, you can browse the complete list of pictures here.
Pearls of wisdom from a Taxicab driver..
I took a cab recently, to get to the airport and ran across this very interesting cabbie. He was a Rastafarian and shared these pearls of wisdom.
- Life is like the traffic. You need to know, when to merge to maintain harmony.
- Life is like the traffic, there are always signs to look out for and a destination to reach.
- You have two ears and only one mouth for a reason. Listen!!!
- If you don’t touch the plow, you cannot taste the crop.
Whats more pathetic???
United rolling out a 1 meter piece of red carpet in front of the boarding gate and calling it “premium experience” or the guy, who insists on walking on that small patch of carpet, since he has a business class ticket????
Here’s a picture of the famous red carpet :).. You should understand my question, after looking at it 🙂
(Picture linked from Greg Virdano’s blog)
S Novim Godom..
Happy New Year!!! Hoping that this new year of Rat will bring you health, wealth and love..
2007 was a very interesting year to say the least. I lost and gained a lot… Am not going to wish for anything in the new year.. Am just going to wait and see :)..
It’s no Mamba.. it’s Samba.
Tools of the trade : Site24x7.com
Anyone working in IT Operations, knows that numbers are really important :). Esp, numbers showing availability, downtime, response time etc. I have used, several tools and services during my career to capture these numbers, but have never come across a service that is cost effective and reliable at the same time. I discovered site24x7.com, while was evaluating some products from their parent company AdventNet.
Site24x7.com offers external monitoring for your key network components, at the fraction of the price charged by others in area. I wouldn’t put them on the same scale as Gomez or Keynote, but for they are very reasonable for the features they offer. Also, while they are lacking in the customer service area per se, they are very quick to add features based on feedback. I provided them (and I am sure several others) some feedback on adding a feature to have setup scheduled maintenance (so that it doesn’t skew with the availability numbers) for the services monitored and they added the feature in less than a month.
If you are looking, for a reasonably priced monitoring service, look no further..
Food for thought..
Did you know that fear of the number 666 is known as hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia. Try pronoucing that!!. Very entertaining article on the BBC, of how one town has decided to change their area code from 666 to 749. Guess, there is nothing better to do 🙂 (no offense to anyone’s beliefs).