Europe Series 2 - Cologne, Germany

The first weekend I was in Germany, me and my colleague (Karthik) went to Cologne (Koln). A fairly large sized city, located on the banks of the river Rhine about an hour's drive from where we were staying. The first thing people notice, as they enter Cologne is the magnificient, huge Cathedral, called the Dom. We went there on a sunny and bright saturday and the weather was just perfect. Since we wanted to visit the Dom, we had to drive around for about 30 minutes till we found a parking tower we could park at. The Dom is located right at the city enter and has a ton of shopping and food joints around it, hence it is almost always tough to find a good parking spot in the area. Having been in Germany for a week now, me and my Karthik were dying for some spicy Indian food. The first thing we did was to find an Indian restraunt and eat lunch. The food was ok, far from good and nothing memorable.

Then we started walked to the Dom. The cathedral is just so imposing and intimidating when you stand close to it. It almost reminded me of a Dragon's castle. The kind that lets fire out of its mouth..like in Shrek! We went in, and it was peaceful and quiet, contrary to the noise and chaos outside. Me and Karthik then went started climbing the 509 steps to get to the top of the building. Karthik gave up half way, but I managed to climb all the way to the top with breaks. The view from top was certainly not breathtaking, but was beautiful all the same. It is always nice to get on top of buildings in Europe and enjoy the views as the architecture is so different and much more ornate than the concrete jungles you see in the States.

After hanging out around the city center for a few hours we started heading back to Wuppertal. We also had a cup of coffee in one of the famous side walk cafe's Europe is soo famous for. One of the things I love about Europe is its laid back culture. Its just so relaxing to see people and families sitting in the sidewalks, enjoying a cup of coffee and just chatting. Although there are side walk cafe's cafes in the States, you just dont get the same feel you get in Europe.

One the way back, while I was driving my car from the parking lot, I made a sharp turn and caused coniderable dents to my car when I made contact with the wall. I obviously was not yet used to the cramped tight parking spaces and ramps of the European parking towers. I since then noticed, Cologne is especially notorious for that. During one of our trips to Cologne sometime later, we once had to close our side view mirrors so they would not make contact with the mirrors of the car parked adjacent to ours.

All in all, looking back now, that trip to Cologne was a great experience. I guess I was lucky that my company paid the 750 Euros deductible for damages I caused to the car. I made several more trips to Cologne after that. Cologne is one of those cities that becomes more fascinating and interesting, the more times you visit.

If you ever happened to go to Cologne, dont forget to try the food and beer at the Peters Brauhaus. Its phenomenal.

Attached below are some pictures...

Thats a picture of the Dom and the railway bridge over the river Rhine. Right beside the railway tracks there is a small pedestrian area where you can walk.


This is a picture of me on the bridge (the one above), with the Dom in the background.



That's a picture of me having a cup of coffee at a sidewalk cafe.

(Europe Series...to be continued)

Europe Series 1 - German Engineering

Roughly 1 year ago (10/23/2005) to be exact, I set my foot for the first time on German Soil. The next 10 months were almost magical where I travelled extensively to Europe and also within Europe. Those 10 months will always be considered as one of the most enjoyable moments in my life. All the Germans I worked with were fabulous people. During this time I developed a great sense of respect and admiration for German Engineering. Sure many would claim it is over engineering and I agree. I saw a lot of machines in Germany which werent really needed and didnt serve the people it was designed for in the most effective manner. But what impressed me the most was not just the quality of the work, but passion most men (Not being sexist here, I worked mostly with men...so I dont really know about the women) had for Engineering. Starting from the maintenance guy at the plant, I worked out of. Once we were talking about this idea for a project which had a little bit of engineering involved and I saw this guy who generally has great inertia get all excited about this. Couple of hours later he came to my office with a bunch of AutoCAD plots with potential engineering solutions. All this was on a Saturday and anybody who has been to Europen atleast once knows how hard it is to get Europeans to work in the weekends.

I am an engineer and I am passionate about my work, so nothing wins my admiration more than seeing people being really passionate and proud about their engineering. Thus I changed my mind from a Lexus 330RX, owning which, I had dreamt of for 5 years preceding my trips to Germany, and got a Germany manufactured BMW 330i.

There are many such small stories that happened during my trips to Europe that are deeply embedded in my thoughts and memories of the place. I am going to attempt to write and share some of those in the upcoming months.


I am attaching the very first picture I took in Europe and Germany. It isnt a great picture. My colleague took it and its a picture of the Autobahn A1, while we were driving from Wuppertal to Koln. The car in the picture is the rental car from National I had for almost 2 months, a diesel Opel Vectra.

(Picture taken on 10/29/2005, 11.14 am Local Time)

Michigan Rocks!!

Its an exciting time to be in Detroit...its been a phenomenal time for sports in Michigan. I moved into Michigan and look at what happened? My favorite college football team Michigan Wolverines has been kicking ass having won all games so far this season. It started the season ranked number 16 and has risen upto No. 2 only behind Ohio State. What's more important is having beat Iowa today, it pretty much got a easy run till it meets Ohio State in November. What a game that will be? For folks who dont follow college football, $50 Ohio State Vs Michigan game tickets are selling for over 1000 bucks a piece on eBay right now. They probably will be well over 1500-2000 bucks a piece by Nov. 18 (gameday).

But it all doesnt end there...the Detroit Tigers are in the world series after 22 years. The first game is going to start in about 40 minutes and I am watching the pre game show right now. The game is being played at the Co-America park here in Detroit and the whole city is excited about it!

With the NBA season starting pretty soon hopefully the Pistons will kick ass as well.

Go Blue, Go Wolverines, Go Tigers and Go Pistons!

My Feeds

Due to popular demand, I have uploaded the exported xml file of my google reader feeds here. You can download it and import it on to your RSS reader if you want to.

While we are on the topic, this site localhostr lets you upload any file upto a size of 20MB and gives you the link to share it. I can see it being really useful if you want to share a file in your blog or something like that. The best part is no registration required. I wouldnt trust it with security related files or as the only source of back up though.

TGIF - This week's Best Blog Posts

Its been a long week and I am finally glad its Friday. I have been travelling the past two weekends and its been amazing fun, but yet somehow I no longer have the zest and enthusiasm I once had about going out on the weekends. The idea of freaking out in the weekends and then going back into the week and putting in 60 hours of work sounds cool, but just not practical. It takes its toll on your body and towards the end of the week this week, after almost 20 days of continuous work (travelling in the weekends and going places is fun, but still work for your body) I was almost braindead. I have decided the next 2 days is just to myself, I will watch movies, maybe even grab a book and thats it.

Here are some interasting posts I read this week

1. I was inspired and invigorated by this post. This is the video of Steve Jobs addressing a bunch of Stanford Graduates. As a matter of fact I printed Stay Hungry...Stay Foolish in a 11X17 paper and stuck it in my cubicle. You can search in You Tube and find the full video is you want.
2. This post in collective genius about how to deal with the situation if you feel stuck (in life in general). Its not rocket science, but a simple concise post to give you a jolt and wake you up.
3. I attended a webinar conducted by David Allen where he talks about how to Get things done and how Mind Mapping Software (Mindjet in this case) can help with GTD. You can register here and view the webinar. Mindjet is a paid software, but googling Mind Mapping Software will give you an open source program which is free. Its got almost all the functionality, but just doesnt look as cool!
4. This software when downloaded and installed apparently lets you watch any channel for free. I still have tried it out, but appears in Lifehacker. I plan on trying it out over the weekend and seeing if I can get any cricket matches.

Alright...thats it for this week. Its 3.30am in the morning and I am ready to hit the sack...(Promised myself earlier that I will post before I goto bed) So guys,

Happy Diwali, may the festival of lights brighten up your life a little bit more and have a great weekend.

P.S> I was half asleep when I wrote this so excuse my typos and grammatical errors if any. I will correct them the first thing in the morning.

Information Overload

For the longest time now, I have been feeling guilty about not reading a lot and also having a lot of books I bought sitting in my bookshelf without having been consumed (Large WIP - Extreme Muda!!). So last week one day I actually sat down and mapped out all the books that I currently have and differentiated them into the following

• Books I want to read, but still havent bought (my Amazon.com wishlist)
• Books I have already bought, but still havent completely read
• Books that I have started reading
• Books that I am yet to start reading

Attached below is the map. I used a mind mapping software to do this and I have to admit, ever since I started using the software, it has given a lot of clarity to my thinking and has made it easier to lay out things in an orderly fashion.



After having done the whole thing, I just realized how consumed I am with just my blogs and journals that I hardly get the time to read anything else. Besides I have what I call a "reading threshold". I cannot read casually. Typically I concentrate immensely when I am reading something, so after 2-3 hours of reading a day, I am already worn out and can take it no longer!

However if Marissa Mayer can work 18 hours a day (see here) and Indra Nooyi thinks there is no substitution to hardwork (see here, second para of second page), then may be I am just not there yet! I am sure I will get there though as long as I stay Hungry. Stay Foolish!

Life come at you fast

Sign 1
I got back from work today and picked up my mail as usual and was stunned to find the November’s edition of the Playboy Manufacturing Engineering journal in my mail box. Not that I am not subscribed to it, but its just that I still haven’t even started reading the October edition and here I already have the November issue. It kinda gave me a sense of how fast time really flies by. Every Monday I wake up sighing and swearing about having to work 5 more long days, but before I realize it, its already the weekend. It reminded me of the “life comes at you fast” commercial, hence the name of the post

Sign 2
Earlier today @ work Novell in my work laptop asked me to change my password. (Thanks to Sarbanes-Oxley I have to remember long complicated passwords and in 2 months forget it and make another one and remember that one & so on…but that’s another post). I had just about gotten used to the old one and it struck on me today that its already been 2 months since I made that one. So here we go again!

Sign 3
I become poorer by a significant amount of money today as I had to write a check to my travel agent for my flight tickets to India this December. Not that I am not excited about the trip, but most of the details of my last trip and still fresh in my memory and it kinda seems like a whole year (almost) passed by pretty quickly!

Moral of the Story
Stop whining and enjoy life, because if you don’t, pretty soon you will be whining about having spent your entire life whining!! Its might not be that credible coming from me, but its true!

Cool Workplaces

I came across this article today which talks about 10 seriously cool workplaces and also documents it with pictures. Pixar and the Red Bull slide (Picture attached below) between different levels were my personal favorite. I was pretty amazed by the creativity tht exists among some of the workforce. Unfortunately I am stuck in a typical dull grey cubicle and that does not help my creativity at all (and there are other reasons too)

I think thats one of the advantages of working in a software company, I some how love the jeans and tshirt, come when you want and work when you want, liberal, work hard-party hard typically Californian culture. It one aspect of the Silicon valley which sometimes makes me wish I was in the computers field.

Poetry

I came across this website Poetiv this week. It has a ton of good poems from a lot of famous poets. I am not much into poetry (writing or reading), but I was glad to find my favorite poem.."Stopping by woods on a snowy evening" by Robert Frost. The poem goes like this..

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it's queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there's some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep

Of all the poems which I read in school, i.e. of all the poems which were imposed upon me by the Tamil Nadu State board of education, this sonnet some how just stayed in my mind. I guess it is because I was able to picturise this clearly unlike any other poem. Also because I think the message in the poem is so clear and simple. I have been thinking reading something like this will be great inspiration and motivation way to start a day or a week.

Photography..

I took this picture of the Grand Canal in Venice, Italy from the Rialto bridge with my canon SD450 in manual mode, with a large aperture opening and long time of exposure. The part I like the most is the reflections in the water and also the light color in the sky since this was taken right around sunset. I think this is one of the best pictures I have taken in my life..atleast certainly the one I am most proud.

What can I say...in the last 2 months I went from a world trotting happy bachelor to a regular single desi guy who goes to work in the morning, comes back in the evening, cooks eats...watches TV and goes to bed! I am still not sure if the change is for good or bad...initially it felt great, not having to live off a suitcase, being able to come back home to a more familar setting rather than a hotel room etc., Yet in the last 2 weeks I have somehow been missing the crazy life I used to live, the fun of travelling, seeing new places, meeting different kinds of people, trying out different cuisines, wine and beer.. etc.,

Somethings have definitely changed for the good though...I have moved to Farmington Hills, Michigan, a fairly plush suburb of Detroit from Fort Wayne, IN. It certainly feels great to live in a big city especially with a ton of Indian stores around, Udipi hotel within 5 miles from my house etc., It certainly is a great releif and much better than Fort Wayne, IN. Attached below are some pictures of my new apartment, which I spent a lot of time working on and decorating (another new found passion along with cooking and decorating somehow sounds more panzy than it really is;))






Well I also bought a new car...well new for me but actually a used car. I bought a 2003 BMW 330i...its still brand new considering it only had 28000 miles on it when I bought it...besides that car was love at first sight...I saw the car at the lot of the first dealer I went to, really liked it, negotiated the price but the dealer refused to come down on the price. Then I walked out and saw and drove a whole bunch of other bimmers, didnt really like any..atleast not as much as I liked this one, so went back to the dealer re-negotiated and finally settled for a price. I have been in love with it since then...its got all the German over engineering and the gizmos which would scare most people, but as an engineer myself I love it! Well needless to say, I made my first payment couple of weeks back and felt a little sick..However here are a few pictures...






Well...thats my life in the past 2 months in a nutshell...lot of stuff happening, some exciting but mostly its just been regular and monotonous...thats about it for now!