We reached Paris at 8:45AM local time on 29th July. The flight was quite OK. If we choose English instead of French as the language, then the in-flight personal entertainment system would crash. This happened for Ann also. But both of us were quite tired and we had a nice sleep and this was not too much of a botheration.
The next flight to Amsterdam will be at 11:35.
[I could not find any public Internet, so I am writing this blog offline]
List of the gears that we are taking for the trip:
technorati tags:Vacation, Europe travel, travel Gear
I have just one more day to finish all the preparation for my vacation.
Yesterday, I dropped my daughter, Liza with me parents at Trivandrum. My original plan was to fly with her to my home town on July 27th and come back on 28th. I chose to fly Air Deccan as they offered the most economical package.
After I had booked my tickets, I realized that this was really a bad idea. Air Deccan is known for flight delays and there are many occasions where they cancel their flights also. So if my flight back from Trivandrum gets delayed by more than 5 hours (which I understand is quite common with this airline) then I will miss my Amsterdam flight. This was too much a risk to take.
So I managed to prepone my travel back. As there is limited air connectivity to Trivandrum, prepoing would mean that I will be flying back in the same flight! This turned out to be trickier than I had expected! I had less than 10 min to disembark, hand over Liza to my parents (who were waiting for us at the airport) and board the same flight back.
The ground staff also helped me. When I got out of the plane, there was someone from ground staff, waiting for me. He hurried me through and lead me directly to my parents. Once Liza was safe with them, they again hurried me to the security check, where my boarding pass was kept ready. After all this, I was the last person to board the flight.
But, like they say, "All is well that ends well!'.
technorati tags:Vacation, Europe Trave, air deccan
This is to list the set of web 2.0 tools that I am using to plan and track my vacation.
Google spreadsheets:
We are using Google Spreadsheets to consolidate all the data that we are getting from the web.
This is really useful when multiple people are simultaneously gathering data (my brother and sister-in-law who are currently in Belgium are also actively involved). With this tool, I can share my spreadsheet with multiple people and all of us can simultaneously edit the contents. This also helps in keeping the data always in sync.
Great tool!
Yahoo Trip planner:
Yahoo trip planner helps in trashing out the next level of details in the trip schedule.
The process starts by specifying the start and end date of the trip. Once this is doe, we can start to add meat to the schedule.
Yahoo also facilitates this process:
I have just started my planning here. Again, this tool helps in keeping the plans made by all of us in sync.
Google calendar:
Though Yahoo trip will help you create an agenda for the vacation, if we need more fine grained detail, we need a real calender. That is where Google calendar comes in.
Google also lets you publish this calendar where ever you want. And of course, multiple people can simultaneously add to the calender.
I have published our calender at my site here.
technorati tags:Web 2.0, Yahoo Trip Planner, Google Calendar, Google SpreadSheets, Europe Vacation
My web site statistics (which I maintain through Google Analytics) shows that, most new people (around 80%) find my blog through Google search.
I guess this is normal. But the strange thing is that, the most searched term on my site is "WonderLa". So naturally, the most popular content on my site is this blog entry that I made about my visit to WonderLa theme park.
Till recently, a search for the term 'WonderLa' on Google used to return my blog as the first entry. This shows that flash based site gets poorly indexed by search engines.
So, for those new visitors who are looking for WonderLa, please see the photos that I have uploaded into Flickr.
technorati tags:WonderLa, Google Analytics
I wanted to try out Google Maps API. As a sample I tried to embed a Google Map showing the location of my apartment.
Please find the sample here.
If you zoom out three levels you can see the Bangalore Airport.
The PC that I assembled at home has an Asus K8V SE Deluxe motherboard. This board has a build-in Promise Fasttrak 20378 SATA controller. The Vista default installation did not recognize this controller.
I did some googling and found this article that describes the problem. I tried the solutions that are suggest in the article, but with no success.
I am also having trouble getting Vista to recognize my external USB sound card (Creative Audigy 2 NX).
If someone has any idea on how to solve this, please let me know by dropping a comment.
technorati tags:Vista, Audigy 2 NX, Promise Fasttrak 20378 SATA controller
This is to describe once nice feature that I found in the Beat 2 version of Vista. Vista can display clocks in multiple (up to three) time zones. This is how it normally looks in the tray.
And when you click on it, you get this picture..
This is the settings pane for configuring additional time zones.
technorati tags:Microsoft Vista
As described in her blog, both me any my wife are planning a vacation to Europe. Our initial idea is to visit the following places:
technorati tags:Vacation, Europe Travel
After installing Google Desktop 2.0, I have observed that my Lotus Notes tends to crash whenever I browse web pages from within Notes.
An easy workaround that I found is to configure Notes to use an external browser.
technorati tags:Google Desktop 2.0, lotus Notes
I managed to install 'Windows Vista Ultimate' Beta 2 (Build 5384) on a Dell Precision work station 360. The machine was running a 3.2 G Hz Pentium 4 and had 1GB main memory and 80GB SCSI disk. It also had a NVIDIA Quadro Fx 500 display card with 128 MB graphics memory.
Pre Windows Vista, the above configuration can be considered 'good-enough' for normal usage. But I was surprised to find that the Vista gave it an overall System Performance Rating of just 2!
With this rating, Vista will not enable the 3D desktop features. I guess, 128 MB graphics memory is too little for Vista!
technorati tags:Vista, System Performance Rating
I have subscribed to Safai Books Online. This is an electronic reference library (with over over 3,700+ books) targeted for programmers and IT professionals. It allows you to:
If you are interested, you can subscribe for a 14 day trial here.
Happy online reading!!
technorati tags:ebooks, Online reference
Found this link containing some very interesting papers on Computer Science.
Definitely a 'must-read'!
