Its only been few days since I bought my new camera and since I don’t get time to go to some picturesque locations for a shoot during the week, I had to limit my experimentation around the office and home. I still have to learn a lot of tricks because the camera offers a lot of choices and it takes time to figure out when to use what.

Edit: I posted the pic of my dirty shoes I talked about in the last post on the request of two people but then decided to just give a link to that pic on flickr. Go watch it there and if you find it gross, don’t complain.

Anyhow, here are some of the pictures I have taken with my new digicam.

Some small different colored flowers in the office campus.

Some plants in the office campus.

A giant cloud as seen from the office terrace.

Hope you like them. You can see these and few other new pics on my flickr page as always.

Note: I do not plan to turn this blog into a photoblog so I won’t be posting pictures here unless there’s some special reason. You can always find all my pics on flickr.

16th July, 2004 was when I came to Bangalore and yesterday I completed 2 years in the city. The city has been really nice to me in these two years. I have grown really attached to the city. I consider it my second home. And I feel good about Bangalore these days. After a development drought of several months, the city is getting some share of development. Roads are being rebuilt and repaired; long delayed flyovers are finally getting ready, new sidewalks are being made. Things are looking up.

As one might have noticed, I didn’t write a post in the last 10 days or so and since it’s important that I blame someone, I would like to place the entire blame on some people in my blog neighborhood who also happen to be my blog’s loyal readers (at least three of them) for not reading my blog and commenting on the posts in the past couple of weeks. The only consolation is that they are genuinely busy which can be proved from the fact they’ve not been updating their blogs. So it’s not like they are just ignoring my blog.

Last Saturday, amidst all the rain and the accompanying madness, I bought a new digicam. It’s a Canon Powershot S2 IS. It’s absolutely fabulous. What this means is that you’ll soon get to see lots of pictures on this blog. None today though cos I haven’t taken any worthwhile pictures yet except for a pretty neat picture of my dirty rain-soaked shoes.

Its now more than a week since I joined the new company and I still have two months of training left.

But in just one week, my life has changed a lot.

My old office was quite centrally located on Infantry Road which is just 4 km from my home and one could easily walk to Cunningham Road, Commercial Street and MG Road from there. My new office is in Whitefield, completely outside the city. There is nowhere to go from there. There are big office campuses there and nothing else.

Also, since my home is far from my office, I need to take the office shuttle. The shuttle comes to my stop at 7.15 am in the morning which means I have to get up at 5.30 am. Tragic! I even had to run half the distance yesterday (I woke up late) with people on the road looking at me all funny.

Anyhow, the first day I went to catch the office shuttle, I saw something completely new. A world I never knew existed. There were only buses and cabs belonging to software companies on the road apart from a few private vehicles. And there were atleast 20 people waiting for their respective buses/cabs. It was surprising.

I’ve almost got used to the new routine and all the commuting somehow makes me feel more like a part of Bangalore’s IT brigade.

Update: Forgot to add a funny incident. One evening I was sitting in the bus as were 4-5 other people. The driver came in and held up a book which said, “Know Your Limits”. Within a second, it was clear that he had found it in the bus and wanted to return it to the owner but I wondered how funny it would have been if he had actually bought it and wanted everyone to read it and then stay within their limits. Maybe its one of those things where you have to be there for it to be funny bcos it was really funny and I couldn’t control my laughter, which I finally had to bcos there were other people there (who I don’t speak to) and they would have assumed that I’m nuts.

Its been a hectic week or rather a hectic first half and too relaxed second half.

I got relieved from my first company on Tuesday and joined the new one on Wednesday which was great because I didn’t take a single day’s break. But my first day in my new company was shortened because a huge (not in size!) film star had died. Coincidentally, my first day at the new job also turned out to be the first day I saw burning tires in the middle of the road. Exciting!

I got a long 4-day holiday and was able to eat lunch on Thursday only because an Army-run supermarket in my neighborhood was open.

I don’t know what to say about the shameless things that happened in the city. I am just mad at the police for not firing on the low-lives. I mean they lost a constable and only 5 morons died! This is so unfair. They had a tremendous opportunity. The scum of Bangalore was gathered together in front of them, which happens rarely, and the police could have easily wiped them out. The death toll could have easily been 5000 and I would have been a happy man.

Coming back to the job change, people in my (now previous) company were very helpful and I felt really bad about leaving the job. I felt equally sad about saying goodbye to my office PC. I did transfer my personal files to pen drives before leaving though.

In other news, I made my first “real” trip to a bank this week. It was a nice experience. ICICI bank is far better than I expected it to be.

I haven’t been able to read blogs but I’ll try to catch up on all of them now.

That’s the post talking in the title because the last two posts were too short to be called real posts.

I’ve noticed that it’s not just me whose post frequency has gone down but a lot of other bloggers I know have slowed down as well. I’d like to believe that it’s because of me. (Cue for people to say, “Yes, I miss your posts so much that I can’t get myself to write anything!)

That I haven’t written too many posts is no reason to believe that there’s nothing interesting happening in my life.

Just last weekend, I was looking for a particular “Main” and “Cross” in the godforsaken place called HSR Layout. And yes, it’s called so because nobody in the department, which names areas, was smart enough to come up with something better than Hosur-Sarjapur Road Layout.

In any case, I saw an aged man sitting outside his huge mansion and I assumed that he might know about this place but he only spoke Telugu or so he said. He directed me towards his neighbor’s daughter (or maybe granddaughter) who was playing with a football. She must have been 9-10 yrs old. So I thought to myself, “What does she know? She’s a kid!”

But I didn’t want to insult the old man so I went ahead and asked her the address. And guess what she said! “I don’t know. I’m just a kid!” It’s difficult to believe, right? She had the exact same thoughts as me. I smiled and said, “Its okay. I’ll ask someone else.” and got out of there.

In blog news, something huge happened on 11th March when somebody (from IIIT, Allahabad, according to Statcounter) wrote the longest comment on this blog and then few minutes later topped it up with a far bigger comment. Sure, most of it has been copy-pasted but so what? I would like to encourage others to write such long comments too in the future.