Seeing that my last post was back in Dec. 08, I can look back on the year in progress and have the luxury of being able to say I’m doing a lot better in life and in work.

To blog. To read everything interesting that I want to. To do the things I really want to do. To be the friend I wanted to be. To keep in touch with all my friends and family. To hang out with interesting people. To make a list of things that I don’t have enough time for.

I’m going to try harder to not let time pass me by. Life’s too short, as the old saying goes…

On August the 1st, at long last, I went to a place I usually avoid like the plague- Forum Mall in Bangalore, and bought my dream machine- a sexy black Macbook! It sports a vivid 13.3″ screen, 2 GB RAM, a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, and built-in everything except an SD Card reader/ PCMCIA card slot/serial port. To add icing to the cake, and because I dislike using the track pad, I went to the Reliance iStore on MG Rd. and splurged on the Apple Mighty Mouse, a wireless, Bluetooth mouse with a laser pointer that works everywhere except on glass tables. The Imagine store was out of Mighty Mice on that day. I also purchased the slick  Apple Front Row remote control for convenient access to my music, movies and photos.

I had to return my first Mighty Mouse the very next day because it would only scroll down but not up. ll the other buttons worked as advertised. The nice folks at the iStore exchanged it for another new mouse with no hassle, and even helped me test it on my Mac to ensure that it worked. To date, this defective first mouse, and the fact that both USB ports are located too close to each other, preventing 2 devices from being connected simultaneously (if one of them has an extra-wide body like my Tata Indicom Plug2Surf CDMA modem), has been my only negative experience with Mac ownership.

The sales staff at the Imagine Store at the Forum, which is not an Apple store by any means, albeit an Authorised Reseller, were very friendly and helpful. They were puzzled by my insistence, before parting with my cash,  on seeing if the keys on the keyboard could be popped up from their standard QWERTY configuration, and rearranged in my preferred DVORAK keyboard configuration for better ergonomics and less RSI. I had read on instructables.com or some such site that a Macbook could be reconfigured this way, but wanted to be 100% sure just in case the keyboard design had changed since that article was posted. Lo and behold, not only was this configuration supported by Mac OS X (as it is in Windoze and Linux), but it took barely an hour for a busy but helpful technician to prise and rearrange the keys to my favourite configuration.

A couple of days later, after being disappointed by the meager selection of laptop bags at the Imagine Store, the Witco store and at the new-to-India Staples office-supply chain, I bought myself a Samsonite backpack from the company store on Residency Rd. There are better packs available abroad, and some of the Crumpler and Targus bags were nice too, but didn’t meet my requirements for a bag that I could tote to a clients’ offices and around town in general.

Then, to ensure added protection to my prized new machine, I bought a slick black neoprene case from Case Logic, whose CD cases have impressed me over the years with their functionality and durability. Neoprene is mostly used in diving suits, and helps repel water, though I believe it is not a fully-waterproof material.

My new MacBook worked like a dream from day 1, and I revelled in the user-friendliness of its operating system, known as OS X Leopard. Sure, many things were different in Mac World after migrating from Microsoft Windows. All windows have their minimise, maximise and close buttons on the top-left, as compared to being on the top-right for Windows. After changing any settings, there’s no “Save” button, as all changes are applied on the fly. Really slick.

I downloaded Firefox 3, my favourite browser, as well as VLC Media Player, HandBrake for DVD ripping, Adium (a neat multi-protocol chat client that lets me use Gtalk and Yahoo Messenger within one application), as well as NeoOffice, the Mac version of the popular OpenOffice free office software suite. To install apps in a Mac, you don’t double-click on the .exe installer file like in Windows. The Mac equivalent is called a Disk Image File, and you just have to drag that .dmg icon to the Applications folder to install. What I like is that OS X will ask you to enter your master password for all installations and major changes to system or user settings. This way, it’s harder for any potential Mac viruses out there to install themselves and wreak havoc.

Using a computer has become a joy now, compared to the headaches inflicted on me by Windows XP for so many years!

Like millions of other loyal FF users waiting to upgrade from FF2, I too downloaded the 7MB installation file in the first few hours of its release, and it does work a lot snappier than FF2 in every respect. The memory footprint is a bit lighter too, usually hovering around the 105MB mark, with my usual 4 to 5 tabs open.FF2 used to hog as much as 140MB and cause my WinXP PC to hang frequently!

Many of my favourite extensions like Ad-Block Plus, Safe Cache, and Down them all! didn’t work at first, but a few of them did get rapid updates within a day or two of FF3’s release. Hopefully the boffins are busy updating my favourites like ImgLikeOpera and TryAgain (both currently incompatible with FF3) and will push them out ASAP!

Not surprisingly, most of the early adopters (the Twitter and FriendFeed crowd) are already raving over FF3, with over 8 million downloads within the first 24 hours of its release! Get it! It’s that good!

I’m posting this right from my browser and not WordPress to test Scribefire. It seems to be a great idea and should make it much easier to post content to blogs for most users. It got great reviews at various sites so I thought I’d try it! I’m still recovering from the massive dinner my Mom cooked up for the 8 visiting family members (mostly Mom’s cousin and her family) today! So just a short exploratory entry via Scribefire!

PS: My RD 350’s chrome parts have all come back nice and shiny from the plating shop. Next item: repainting everything that needs to be painted!

Nearly 3 years ago, I switched to a DVORAK keyboard from the lousy QWERTY system that comes standard with 99% of the world’s keyboards. I’m much faster and more accurate with this system, and have much less fatigue typing, compared to when I was using QWERTY. Try it out sometime! You may love it too! Windows, Mac and Linux systems all support this keyboard layout. Just change a few settings and swap your keyboard buttons (that was easier for me than finding an actual DVORAK keyboard out here!), and you’re on!

It’s scientifically designed to make typing easier and less of a strain, since it wasn’t designed to prevent frequently-used letter keys jamming up the old mechanical typewriters. It keeps all the frequently-used keys right in the middle row and gives equal weight to both hands while typing, unlike Qwerty keyboards.

It sucks when the de facto standard is based on a flawed design! Did you hear the one about Qwerty being so arranged so as to allow typewriter salesmen in the early 20th century type the word “typewriter” using keys arranged all on the same row on the keyboard, while demonstrating their product?

Here are a few links, including one to an excellent comic ( pdf)  that explains the difference between the keyboard systems:

http://dvzine.org/zine/pdf.html

http://www.mwbrooks.com/dvorak/index.html

http://discovermagazine.com/1997/apr/thecurseofqwerty1099/

Yeah, at long last, and with the encouragement of my buddies, especially Roopin (the ultimate biker guy!), I got my growling old 1985 (or was it ‘86? Gotta check the docs…) Rajdoot Yamaha RD 350 2-stroke, twin-cylinder, 6-speed bike to my friend Harsha’s hardcore bike garage in Basavangudi, Bangalore. She’s been lying unused since I left her in perfect running condition back in November 1995…the year that I probably had the most fun- ever!

When I got back from the States in mid-2003, the rust spots all over her chrome were big splotches, and hearing that my old friend Satya (the “Doc” for bikers!) was no longer working on bikes but at a car/ SUV service center, I lost my enthusiasm to restore her to perfect running order. You see, no one else was allowed to touch her main mechanicals but Satya. So TMB, as she’s called due to her Madras (now Chennai) registration, sat in my back verandah at my farmhouse for another four and a half years, relatively sheltered from rain and shine…but not the insects, alas!

Hopefully this short video clip taken my my friend Shashi will upload all right. It’s my RD350 getting moved to my old buddy Sunil’s Maruti van, which Roopin and Shashi used to transport TMB to Top Gear, Harsha’s garage.

Update: somehow WordPress is saying my video is not a standard format so I can’t upload it! It’s a 3GPP video so I don’t see what the issue is…ah well, I’l try and convert the format and upload some other day!

So here we go! My first (or is it second) blog! I think I’d started one in Blogger (don’t even remember the name!) just to check it out, but reading blogs is way more fun than writing one,  I think! Heard about WordPress from some of the many tech/ geeky blogs I read daily, so thought I’d check it out! Nice work- way easier to use than Blogger and Blogspot, is my initial impression.

Some say it’s therapeutic. If so, I’m surely going to try blogging when I have something to say. Maybe I’ll link my FriendFeed or Google Reader or whatever to this blog, so that people can see what I’ve been reading or bookmarking! And hopefully some interesting (or at least readable) material will show up on this page someday!

Wait and watch, I say. Later…

Welcome to my blog at WordPress.com. Hopefully I’ll get to update stuff often and experiment with stuff to put on here! Bear with me as this gets beaten into shape!

Sid