Aero India 2009

6 hours in the blistering heat..perched on top of a chair with two friends..stuck in a sea of cameras, lenses and photographic equipment that I have never seen in action before….armed with my own Canon PowerShot G7…. hoping to catch some good pics….beating the dreaded traffic back home….Dead tired but satisfied after watching a good air show….

…is a terse description of what Aero India 2009 was all about.  To be honest, I thought the show could have been organized better.  Standing under the blazing hot sun with no shelter whatsoever was also not ideal. But you can forget about all that when you see the show that was being put up on the other side of that fence.

I personally enjoyed the Sukhoi SU-30 and the Eurofighter flying maneuvers. It was a breathtaking display of high quality flying skills. The Sarang team was also decent and the Suryakirans were at their clinical best.

The crowd that showed up for the event was a nice gathering of cheerful enthusiastic folks. They cheered for literally everything. And Im not just saying this for the heck of it. During the show, a kite, out of nowhere really, decided to put an exhibition of its own flying skills for us as if to say, ” Oh you think these planes are good! Watch me!”. And the crowd acknowledged by cheering and clapping.

Here are some pics from the event. All uploaded on my Flickr page as well.

Life and Updates….

It has been a while since I last decided to test my typing skills out here. Surprisingly, I have managed to keep myself busy and occupied with lots of stuff…

• I had a nice trip to various places in south India with my family. It was brilliant and a well-deserved break from all the boredom of work-life. Will write about this in some other post.
• Got an admit a few days ago and got a reject just an hour back…. a little bit of    and a little bit of 
• I have been doing a lot of reading up on photography. And I must admit, I am enjoying every bit of it. Trying out new stuff, doing some crazy experiments with my PowerShot G7 camera (atleast to the extent that I can).
• Still reading Shantaram and a couple of other technical books.
• Work with the Krex is finally drawing to a close. Thanks to all those who helped me out. Special thanks to my prof from college Mr. Shivshankar and also my guidelight for this project, Partha. All the slog in the last year has been totally worth it. Finally, this baby is ready to rock !! (Sorry if I am being a bit cryptic here, but I promised to myself that I will keep this under the wraps until the right time comes).

I finally got the Tata WiMax broadband connection at home. It was a tough choice but it was also my only option since both the Airtel and the Hathway broadband cables were not available at this place. So far I have no major complaints with the WiMax connection.The connection is actually based on the Telsima WiMax solution. Enjoying excellent speeds mainly because the Thippasandra base station is at exact LOS from my house. Couldn’t have asked for a perfect place for this connection. The antenna is a flat variant with good directionality. Not sure how it compares to the traditional Yagi-Uda antenna though. This one has four different sectors and each time it contacts the base station to fetch a IP  for that particular sector. If that fails for some reason, the antenna switches over to the next sector and tries to acquire the IP again. Interesting stuff ! Something about which I need to read up more. A simple diagram explaining how WiMax works for those of you who are interested.

I have also been reading up about the Android SDK. Managed to get the Hello World App up and running. For those of you who are interested, this is a very nice walk through to help you build your Hello World App. Download the SDK and the other required packages and try it out today!

Also planning to go down to the Aero India show on Saturday. Got a free entry for the air show but did not manage to get passes for the exhibition. What the hey…I can see the air show for free at least!

More later.

Current Music : Socha Hai from Rock On!!

Current Mood : Sleepy!