General Nonsense

Cleaning Up

Submitted by Vishal on Wed, 2010/09/01 - 4:32pm

Cleaning up
As some of you may have noticed, the site is a shambles. Sure, it looks okay, but it's now cobbled together from a pre-existing theme, ever since my old theme wasn't going to work with the new Drupal upgrade. Since updating I've been inundated with comment spam. This is ironic, since I upgraded Drupal because I was getting comment spam.

So for the foreseeable future, I'm shutting off comments on this site. Sorry about this. I'm hopping on a plane in less than twenty-four hours and do not have the time to deal with this right now. The site itself needs a total overhaul at some point soon, but hopefully comments will be back long before then.

In the meantime, you can contact me by mail (allvishal at gmail) or on twitter.

V

Choosing the Right Camera Travel Bag

Submitted by Vishal on Mon, 2010/08/16 - 12:38am


Any photographer, be they professional or photo-enthusiast, will tell you that taking care of your equipment is one of the major concerns of the hobby. After all, it just wouldn't do to show up and be in the position to take a great photo, and discover that your camera's broken.

The delicate nature of cameras is something that has only been magnified in the move to digital. Where earlier light-proofing the film chamber was the biggest deal, now it's keeping all the little electronics and tiny moving parts dust free and safe. Even the most rugged of SLRs is not something you want to toss around like a stuffed toy.

My Awesome New Raygun Toy

Submitted by Vishal on Wed, 2010/08/04 - 2:41am

I don't mean for this journal to turn into just a documentation of whatever new toys I buy, but in this case I couldn't resist putting up a video.

My House is Now Protected by Big Barda

Submitted by Vishal on Thu, 2010/07/01 - 11:17am





Mums the Word

Submitted by Vishal on Wed, 2010/03/17 - 12:44pm

My new chrysanthemum plant

As is typical, I went to IKEA for one thing and ended up with something else. In this case, the one thing was a shower curtain (which I did end up buying, though I seem to have forgotten about it) and the impulse buy was a potted chrysanthemum plant.

It was beautiful. It was cheap. I mean, really: it cost less than a coffee at Starbucks. I've shied away from keeping plants at home since I live in an apartment with not a whole lot of sunlight. In Oman we used to live in a villa which had a fairly large garden, and perhaps in envy of those times I've never considered putting some in my new concrete jungle surrounding.

Recently, however, I picked up a little basil plant, and three months later its new leaves have been tiny, but at least it hasn't died on me.

Next step, a trough-shaped planter for my sill, more herbs, and maybe even a few more flowering plants!

V

Like Fish for Parking Spaces

Submitted by Vishal on Sat, 2009/05/30 - 5:14pm

My mobile phone is a gadget that has many of its cool-circa-2005 features going unused in my hands. Hindsight tells me I shouldn't have spent a small fortune on it -- money that I could now be putting to better use (camera lenses and beer) -- and that whenever I next buy a phone (i.e. whenever this current one conks off) it'll be cheap, tough, and filled with features that were cool circa 1995. For I never use it for anything beyond the basics of mobile phone communication; voice calls and SMS text messages. I can't update my facebook status, or twitter a tweet, make a scandalous desi MMS video that spreads like wildfire, or tell you how to get from one end of the mall to the other using GPS, and god knows when the massive tsunami that is the Google Wave eventually crashes into our always-on internet lives, it won't be doing any waving whatsoever.

And I like this about it.

The Cat at the Cafe

Submitted by Vishal on Thu, 2009/01/08 - 12:32am

Image of a white cat on a fence, looking down
Finding a decent cup of chai in Dubai isn't as easy as one might think, so over the years I've compiled a mental map of places dotted around the city which serve cheap, strong, 100ml shots of the good brew. The number has dwindled over the years, with many of the cafes -- usually attached to old petrol stations -- being replaced by shiny new refurbished stations and their cookie-cutter MacDonalds and Burger Kings.

allVishal is now on Twitter!

Submitted by Vishal on Sat, 2008/12/27 - 11:20am

allvishal on twitter image
I'm not an early adopter. I'm not even a late adopter. So I'm probably the last person on the entire interwub who's signed up to Twitter, but now I have!

V

The Landing Lights of Deepavali

Submitted by Vishal on Tue, 2008/10/28 - 6:22pm

picture of two Deepavali oil lamps, with modern electric lights in the background
So a few thousand years ago a guy and his wife set out for home after fourteen years of exile in the spiffy jungles of peninsular India, and having just rescued his missus from the clutches of a very bad guy with ten heads, he decided that he was totally entitled to the guy's flying car for the journey home -- spoils of war and all that. This being the days before the IATA and GPS, the folks back home tried to make things easier for their returning king (whose slippers were doing a fine job of running the kingdom in his stead, apparently) and lit up the entire city so he could spot them from the air.

Hang on -- did Laxman have to walk home?

Prince of Persia Revisited

Submitted by Vishal on Wed, 2008/09/17 - 12:18am

screenshot of the original Prince of Persia
At the cusp of the 1990s, every home PC had to have one killer app installed. When you’d go round to a friend’s place and they’d show off their new Amstrad or IBM beige behemoth, the first question out of your mouth would be, “How did you convince your parents?” The second would be, “Do you have Prince of Persia?”

Jordan Mechner’s seminal 1989 game (published by Brøderbund) was the high watermark for computer games at the time, a title that combined fluid graphics, exquisite music and challenging gameplay into an astonishing final product. I remember the first time I saw it in 1990, on the PC of one of my parents’ friends. He fired it up for us, to keep us kids busy, I suppose, but I don’t think even he would understand quite the impact the next hour or so of play had on me.

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