I am "feeding" more now

I had been reading a lot about Feedburner and although I was signed up in there I really didn't bother much about it's potential until a few days back when I read some article (sorry I lost the link) about Feedburner being able to take in multiple feeds and generating a common feed. Which means multiple inputs giving single output.

Interesting? Indeed. I plugged in my feed from Kapil's Korner here and also the flickr feed, which means now if you add the new feedburner to your RSS reader you will be seeing updates made to this blog and also to my flickr album. And as I write this I am thinking why not also add the feed for my Khana Peena Blog.

If you would be interested in keeping a tab on my blogs/photo album simply add this feed to your RSS reader. http://feeds.feedburner.com/kapsi

Tags: Feeds , Feedburner , Kapil's Korner , Khana Peena , flickr , RSS ,

Hey Google, that's my home

Google Earth has been making quite some noise. It started out as a great tool, but now seems to have attracted some flak from government agencies and other top organizations across the world. Not wanting to be left out I thought let's catch the action before it's banned or the program is aborted.

A 12MB download was needed to load Google Earth and then it started rolling. The interface is pretty simple and didn't take much time to understand. But it sure does a while to get a picture of the world when you are up there supposedly 1000 ft above the surface of the earth.


The simplest was of course to narrow down in the area I live. Hey, can you recognise what part of Mumbai is this?


Now I was in my locality, I decided to pin down my building also. My dad would just not believe what he was saying and was pretty kicked of the fact that we could actually see a snap-shot of the world sitting right in here. I am sure he too would love to experiment.

Havoc here as a great Mumbai Darshan (More pics from Google Earth).

Tags: Google , Google Earth

Rojo.com - My new blog reader

A few weeks back I wrote this about My Yahoo! Of course I don't think anyone at Yahoo would ever end up reading my blog here so most of my wishes would just remain those - "Wishes".

However, the other day I read about Rojo on Quick Online Tips and I seemed to have liked it. They have an extensive tour of the whole website, but I was too impatient so I just went straight ahead and signed up for an account (it's free, so why not!). You can find extensive reviews online but I am going to make this real simple if you want a good online blog reader/manager. If you have been using an offline tool, it may take a while for you to make the switch.

• You can view all thumbnails used in the blog NO image loss
• Option to view Read / Unread posts in a simple screen
• You can tag each posts based on the keywords you select and then also get an option to read only those posts which have your keywords.
• E-mail this story - You can share posts easily with friends right from inside Rojo.

Will give an update on more features as I add more feeds. Meanwhile as a small gesture to promote Rojo, I inserted the chicklet to my blog template.

Look Ma, I am shooting

Working with an Ad firm as it's own pleasures. You are part of photo shoots, sound recording and even film shootings. Although stressful, the excitement and experience is good. Last week we spent time shooting for a corporate training program film. And I was lucky to be selected as one of the models for the film!



I reported on the sets (a shopping mall) at about 8AM. We started shooting by about 10AM and took me a good one hour to film just about 30 seconds of the script. Whew! I got some make-up done which was kind of a first for me (Actually the whole shooting thingie was a first). The next shift was only at 8PM which was very very stressful after a long day at work, anyways. We were shooting till the next morning 8AM. That was about almost 12 hours on the set. By the end of it I had spent about 24 hours on the job wide awake.



On an average we did about 4 takes for each of the 30 second capsules (which the crew tells me was NOT BAD for a newcomer). By about 4AM I was too stressed out rehearsing the shots over and over again. With no place to rest in sight we decided to spread some shopping bags on the floor and give rest to our body.



When I got home I was left thinking with only one thought if a 16 module film took us almost 48 hours (post production yet to be done) to shoot I wonder how they managed to complete a full 3 hour movie with so many different sets, locations & costumes. I really wish I can be part of the film making team, SOON.

It's getting perfect now

I am no professional photographer. But thanks to colleagues at work and boss himself I get a lot of expert tips and guidance on better photography. Recently I was introduced to understanding the Manual mode of my Canon. It has been rather interesting to play with the aperture and shutter speeds. I haven't been able to get a real tech-down into the subject. But what I did realise was that playing with the settings and assigning them to certain combinations helped me get some really well exposed photos. I hate using the flash most of the times, unless the situation really calls for some light but otherwise I like to work without the blaring light. I have been able to change the intensity of flash in the Manual mode which has kind of helped.

Finally the other night I was at a shopping mall and trying my hand getting some good shots, I looked at this really sexy poster as a back-drop at the jewellery section. With no one to disturb me around that area, I took about 6 shots with the manual settings and was able to finally get a "perfectly exposed" photo as I would like to call it. How do I define that?

Well, from whatever little I understand using my simple Canon A510 I believe if your aperture and shutter have been set to such that the camera shows the exposure meter at +/- O on the top-left corner before you make the final click - It means the photo has been perfectly exposed. Of course the experts may have lots to tell me on that, but hey I am learning and will get to the depth of this. Meanwhile I leave you with the perfect photo and also a technical report if you're interested.

More of Kapil's Photo Magic

My Yahoo! could do better

I have completed about a year now, blogging and reading other blogs. It's been a shift from using RSS readers to using the simple plain My Yahoo! RSS collector. It helps keep a tab on the updates at the various blogs I read and yet gives me the option to read the posts in their blog environments rather than a stripped version which most RSS readers provide.

And then on the other hand I use Blogrolling to keep the blog list updated at my own blog. Now since I log into My Yahoo! everyday I tend to tweak and refresh the list a lot more as compared to the one at blogrolling. Which kind of makes it a little boring since I have to go about doing the same edits in blogrolling as I have done in My Yahoo! I really wish Yahoo could come up with an Export feature which generates a file with all my bookmarked blogs. I could then very well just go to blogrolling and import the same. Would make it so much easier.

While I am at the wish list mode - let me ask for one more. Could we have a simple reminder everytime we made a comment at some blog which could notify us if there were anymore responses to the post. Many a times I leave comments at blogs I visit randomly but rarely do I bookmark them all or even remember to go back and take a "dekho" if the author replied. Word of advise: Not replying to comments made on your blog, is something like giving out your phone number and then not wanting to pick the calls. So now you know, if you comment I will reply :-)

King of Comedy

Too much is written about the Indian Laughter Challenge. So I am going to talk of comedy from across the border. This evening, I got a yet another chance to view the King of Comedy - Umar Sherif, this man is a very popular face on the Pakistani comedy plays. I have been a great fan of his since I was about 8-10 years old. Considering I didn't understand the Urdu or even the excellent hindi they use in their play, at that age too I toppled with laughter (So says my mom).

With nothing much to do on this Sunday evening, Pankaj came over with some of his DVD collection and we choose to watch the Comedy King. It kind of takes a good while before you can actually start enjoying him. Some of the characters are rather loud in his play. But his one-liners and dialogue delivery is hilarious. He makes comedy look so natural on-stage rather than make it sound very scripted. What I really admire about stage actors is the ability to twist the script incase of a dialogue slip or scene cut. If you really want to see some of his good shows, here is a recommendation:

• Budda Ghar Pay Hai
• Bakra Qiston Pay (I & II)
• Bakra Munna Bhai M.B.B.S

That ends another weekend and tomorrow starts yet another week of client nagging :-)

KhanaPeena gets moving

After almost a week's delay, I finally got posting at the new Khana Peena blog I set-up. It should be an interesting ride. Let me know what do you think of it?

More on this blog, later.

Men in uniform

Me with my Boss
Originally uploaded by kapsi.

Tuesday morning was hilarious. We had almost three client presentations lined up for the day. I decided to wear my white shirt because it really has a great shine and the grey pants went very well.

My boss Sangram who hates formal wear, for some very strange reason decided to wear a white shirt and grey pant on that day itself. When the two of us got to office and looked at each other we realized we actually had dressed up in a uniform. With little choice to us, we continued through the day. Shalini thought this was a moment which had to be caught, so here it is.

5 cakes & 1/4 of a century

4th September is when I completed a quarter of a century. I turned 25 and it's been a rather eventful birthday indeed. 4th being a Sunday, the celebrations started on Saturday itself with my office team organizing a cakeand we had a lunch party too.

Saturday night I was witness to a great surprise party organized by my dear friends. I think Tushar, Pankaj & N did a splendid job organizing the entire night. It was indeed a great way to be with close friends and besides celebrating my birthday we also celebrated Pankaj's birthday which was a few days back. N give us a good one in the cake when she arranged for the "duo-celebrations". Of course the biggest bonus of the night was when my parents walked into the party just moments before I was about to cut thecake. Yooohoooo! Catch all the action at Flickr

It didn't just stop there, on Sunday I spent time cutting two more cakes - Hows that for a birthday? 5 cake cuttings? It's been a memorable birthday and I am glad it all happened with great joy. Although I put the photos online much earlier I couldn't get this post to go online earlier - it's been a crazy start for the week. Two account presentations and one pitch in the pipeline. If it wasn't for the support of a great team at work we would have ended up working for the entire night. The presentations went smooth and we seemed to have bagged the account, which only means the next two weeks are going to be crazy trying to wrap up all the project deliverables.

Today is Ganesh Chaturathi and a HOLIDAY at work. I have been exhausted so practically had to spend the day resting at home. However it gave me some time to get the photos organized and even send out thank you notes for the birthdaywishes.

Update: Read more about my birthday cakes at the KhanaPeena Blog.