Irrelevance Glorified

For once, a post not about hiking! Back at the end of July, I traveled back to Chicago for a long weekend. Why? Well, for one, I hadn’t been back in a little while and hadn’t seen anyone in my family since February, so it seemed like a decent idea. Secondly, my sister Sharmila had recently had a kid, so I was up for seeing my new nephew Sachin. And thirdly, my other sister Vandana and her husband Rich were coming up from Orlando, which is a fairly rare occurrence. So I took a few days off from work and flew in to Chicago. Thursday was spent doing chores around my Mom’s place, such as cleaning gutters and stuff. Friday we drove up to Sharmila’s place on the North Side, meeting up with Vandana and Rich. We spent most of that day goo-gooing over the baby and taking a little walk out to Lake Michigan. Saturday’s forecast called for rain, so we decided to do something indoor, namely go to the Art Institute of Chicago. I hadn’t been to the Art Institute for a really long time, so I was definitely up for that (although I was very disappointed when I realized they had removed/hidden the medieval armor and weapons gallery). They had recently opened up a new Modern Art wing, so I was curious what they had there. It was….interesting, to say to the least. I took a few pictures, although not so many as I always tend to feel like I’m stealing from artists and the museum when I do so. Afterwards we went out for Tapas, and Sunday was time to return to our respective homes.

Flickr set here.
Slideshow below.
Pictures after the jump.

Continue Reading »

Back in May I visited Portland for what may be the last time in a long time. You see, when I’ve gone to Portland it’s been for the express written purpose of visiting Bruce and Tina (and Nile). Soon, Bruce will be moving to Walla Walla, so Portland probably isn’t much in my future.

This trip was great because Jesse and his wife Anne were able to come out on Memorial Day weekend as well. We did a bit of hiking, a bit of lying around doing nothing, and a bit of wine tasting. The pictures and videos below are what I took during the trip. Sadly, Tina is under-represented because her pregnancy made it hard to join in on the wine-tasting and hiking. But she was with us in spirit.

As always, hit the Flickr set for pictures and video, hit the slide show below if you’re lazy, or hit the jump to see everything at once.

Continue Reading »

Since Bruce moved to Portland, I’ve visited there a decent number of times (4…I think?). However, I was in the mood for something…Norther. So I decided to visit Cameron, who is now up in Seattle. As a first time visitor to Seattle, Cameron took me around to some of the most pictured places, so that I could jump on that bandwagon. Gina actually arrived from Korea that weekend, but due to the jet lag she didn’t actually feel to participating in much. However, we did go see the new Star Trek flick (lens flares anyone?) I was pleased to find out that Cameron and Gina’s cat, Maki, still remembered me. Anyways, I took some pictures, although never as much as I intend to, and am posting them here. Either hit the Flickr set, watch the slideshow below, or hit the jump to get all the pictures in a row with descriptions.

Continue Reading »

Back in February, my Mom visited me for a week, and we did a bit of traveling around. Now, February isn’t the best time to visit the Bay Area. In general, it’s pretty rainy, and this week didn’t disappoint — it rained most days. However, we soldiered through and still did things.

First, we went up and visited wine country. The two most obvious choices in the Bay Area are the Sonoma and Napa regions. Napa is the more well-known, more expensive, and more pretentious valley, while Sonoma is more up and coming. So Sonoma it was. However, the wine tasting would have to be more about ambiance rather than actual, you know, wine, because I would be driving and my Mom is a tiny person who rarely drinks. Because of this, I didn’t care about maximizing the number of places we visited, and cared more about doing things that seemed interesting. Hence the visit to Korbel, with pictures below. Also, since I’m an idiot, I forgot my camera, so all I did was take a few pictures with my cell phone.

The next weekend, we went down south to San Simeon to visit Hearst Castle, at my Mom’s request. Incidentally, this visit was the 2nd in a two-hundred-something part series entitled “Better Know a California State Park.” Part One occurred during Yusuke’s visit back in December, when we visited elephant seals at Año Nuevo.

So, hit the jump for more pictures (and explanations), hit the Flickr set for pictures at the source, or just hit the “play” button below if you’re lazy.

Continue Reading »

In honor of Martin Luther King’s birthday, I spent the holiday with perhaps the whitest guy I know. And because I’m lazy, they haven’t been posted until now. But hey, better late than never.

I visited Portland back in January to see Bruce, Tina, and little Nile. This version of Nile was a little bit more interactive than the last time I visited, but not yet mobile enough to be a full-fledged monster. Normally, I’ve just done a picture dump of these things, replete with explanations, but after seeing Bruce introduce slide shows to his webpage, I thought it came off acceptable. Of course, my pictures are typically poorly composed, so explanations are usually necessary. So, hit the jump to see all the pictures, hit up the Flickr set (and increase my Flickr traffic), or just passively watch the slideshow below.

Continue Reading »

I feel really bad, but I’ve actually been sitting on these pictures for months. Specifically, since about Christmas. That’s when my good friend Yusuke visited with his wife (Megumi), kid (Itsuki), and sister-in-law (Kaori), and Yusuke’s parents visited from the Chicagoland area, converging on the West Coast in a compromise that benefited me (and Cameron) greatly. I’ve spent a lot of travelling time with Yusuke’s family, since they were in Japan for both of my visits (in 2003 and 2006), and they more or less treat me like a member of the Nakane’s, so I’m totally up for a road trip when they’re in the area. We spent our time mostly in San Francisco and the Monterey Bay area. Here are a bunch of pictures and videos that I’d taken at the time. I always start these trips thinking I’ll take a lot of memorable pictures, but true to my anti-social nature, afterwards I look through my pictures and realize that I didn’t really take a lot of pictures of people. Mostly, I hate herding people together to get their picture. Luckily, Yusuke and his dad, Masaki, sent me their pictures, which has made up for things somewhat.

Hit the jump for the pictures; you can also hit my Flickr Set and YouTube Page for the individual pictures and videos, with the requisite geotagging. Continue Reading »

Week 51, December 15th – December 19th

5-Pointed Star

Yet another star. I’m not real sure if I got this right, though…the instructions were sorta vague about this.

Gift Card Envelope

There’s an actual gift card in there. Who’s the lucky person who will get it? Well, I’ll tell you it’s no one who’s reading this. You bunch of ingrates.

Peacock

I feel like they have the same attitude as me. They’re not even trying anymore.

Scrunch Tree

Not sure what this is about, but once again it’s got a bunch of double folds and some reshaping, so it does not get the seal of approval from me.

Shell Decoration

This didn’t quite turn out the way it was intended. All those…ruffles were supposed to look like the pattern on seashells. Somehow…it’s less impressive than that.

As always, these origami designs were found in the Origami Page-A-Day Desk Calendar.

Hey everyone, it’s been a while since I’ve updated. Seriously, it’s all because of one stupid page that I’ve been working on. And, I really didn’t even do most of the work for it. I’ve been somewhat disappointed in my postcard map, so I’ve been thinking of ways to improve it. And by “thinking of ways”, I mean that I kept talking to Cameron about it until he did 98% of the work for me. He whipped up a script to make a Google Map that grabs the images in my Postcard photoset on Flickr and marks their locations. It took me about two weeks, though, to figure out how to embed it within my WordPress page. I was dealing with a lot of stupid “autoformat” stuff, and hopefully the changes I had to make to the code of the website doesn’t horribly break it. You can find the Postcard Map in the sidebar to the right, under “About”, or you can click here to go to it. I think it’s pretty cool, because I won’t have to do anything beyond adding pictures to the postcard page. And you don’t have to do anything except look on the map, find an open area, go to that area, buy a postcard, and send it to me. It’s pretty easily done.

Oh, and sorry, Sara, for not having your postcard up there, but I’ll scan it in soon. I’m just trying to head off the whining before it starts.

Do you ever have a hard time figuring out where to go for vacation? In this day and age, vacation days are few and far between, and if you have the two-body problem, scheduling can become even more sketchy. With such demands, you need to make things count. A mediocre vacation is worse than no vacation at all! If you’re not going to go all out, just go ahead and send me the money you would have spent on airfare, and just sleep for a week. You’ll come out ahead.

But where to go? At first glance, the possibilities seem endless. Well, I’m always here to help. First of all, 2/3 of the world is covered by water. Unless you like to swim and have a large supply of shark repellent, I would recommend visiting places on land. So that cuts it down quite a bit. Secondly, you should always be broadening your horizons. And, it’s a known fact^* that the best way to broaden your horizon is to send me a postcard from a place that I don’t have a postcard from.

“But Ranjeet”, you ask devotingly, “how do I know what postcards you have?”

“Stop being so impatient”, I will respond condescendingly. “Check my Flickr page“.

Yes, I’ve added a new set to my Flickr connection, again the address is

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ranjeetrao/sets/72157607401290658/

To better serve you, you can check out the Map page by clicking here. Unfortunately, it only shows 21 pictures at a time on the map, but hopefully I can change that.

For the most part, I keep all postcards I get, so here is about 70 postcards that I’ve received since 1991 or so. I’ve cheated and included postcards that I’ve bought myself (mostly because a lot of postcards show picture angles that I can’t achieve with my own camera), but that still counts because at least I’ve traveled to the place that I bought the postcard for.

If you’ve ever sent me a postcard, there’s a chance that you might recognize some of the items. And if you don’t recognize something, maybe you should be spending less time on the internet and more time sending me postcards.

I look forward to your contributions, and your praise.

Update
Sara’s comment suggests that I narrow it down even further than I have already done so. So, here are some suggestions:

• Any place on the continents of Australia, Africa, or Antarctica. Mad props if you mail me a postcard from Antarctica.
• Someplace from Mainland China, like Shanghai or Beijing
• Iceland, Greenland, or Scandinavia
• Toronto
• India
• Danville, IL

^*this is not a well known fact

In the beginning of May I went with Cameron and his boss, Elizabeth, to the Maker Faire: Bay Area 2008 convention in San Mateo. Maker Faire is put on by the publishers of Make and Craft magazine, and is really a celebration of do-it-yourself-ness and unguided experimentation. Read on for pics of some of the things I saw…
Continue Reading »