Raam Dev’s Weblog

I don’t know what it is, but I love the desert. Endless roads, warm air (115°F), wind (it’s hard to tell but in the picture above the wind is blowing 30+ mph), flat land that seems to go on forever, and of course, very few people.

Crossing the the border between Nevada and California, a desert mirage looked like a giant lake. A few minutes later, I spent about an hour covering 10 miles of I-15 due to a truck that turned over going through Mountain Pass. I entered the Mojave Desert from the North through Cima, CA. The US Post Office for Cima looked more like a shack in the middle of the desert until I saw the original Post Office:

I tried driving up a dirt road, but turned around half way when I realized there was a chance I could get stuck (I had a Toyota Camry). So much for my sense of adventure.

Driving on I-40 the views were incredible (and so was the heat).

Before entering Death Valley, I thought of filling my gas tank. I decided to skip it when I saw the gas price was 4.91. Later, in Shoshone, CA, I ended up buying gas for 5.39 a gal. The sun was setting fast (and the smoke from the forest fires didn’t help) and I wanted to get through Death Valley before the sun set.

The mountains and roadside were more barren than ever going through Death Valley. I read signs that said to be aware of the extreme heat and along a particular stretch of road there were “radiator water tanks” every few miles. I was passing through around 7PM and it was still 115 degrees, so I can’t imagine how hot it must have been during the day.

I was only half-way through Death Valley when it got dark. A big section of route 190 was through the mountain with roads that curved left and right a thousand times. Many of the corners had no guard rails and whenever I dared to take my eyes off the road and look down, all I could see was pitch black. It was definitely nerve racking going around each corner not being sure if there was a big rock lying in the middle of the road (plenty of signed warned me of that possibility). I saw dozens of snakes crossing the road during the night, but decided not to get a closer look and risk being stung in the middle of no where.

As I exited Death Valley and approached 395, I could see the mountains to the West glowing orange. I quickly realized they were forest fires and pulled over to take some pictures (timer, 30 sec exposure, the roof of the car, and the camera strap for balance). After taking the pictures I drove South on 395 and ended up going through all the smoke from the forest fires. Driving on the highway at 75 MPH in 110 degree weather, white ash started falling like snow. Animals that were running to escape the fire were on the left and right side of the highway. As I approached them, they would look up at me; their blue, gray, and green eyes shining through the thick smoke. It was surreal.

Total miles driven: ~580

Friday night Sanjay dropped me off in front of the Bellagio on his way to the airport. The Strip was crowded as hell. I noticed everyone was looking out towards the Bellagio and realized they were waiting for the fountains to start. I found a good place to steady my camera and when it started I took some photos of the fountain.

Then I looked for the fastest, cheapest way out of there! It had only been about 20 minutes and I was already sick of the place. I took the monorail back to the Hilton for $5 and then caught a cab to the Plaza Hotel, which was North of The Strip. $12 including tip.

The Plaza Hotel was crap. I got a smoking room (they didn’t ask me what I wanted), the TV was broken (it turned on and off randomly), and when I fell asleep with the TV on, a security guard opened my hotel room door, woke me up and asked me to turn down the TV… at 2:30 in the morning.

The next morning I needed to find a way to the airport to pick up my rental car. The person at the front desk said the shuttle to the airport arrives every 1.5 hrs and that a cab costs about $25 to the airport.

After having a coffee and waiting around a bit inside, I decided to get some fresh air and sit outside (the ceiling of the place was covered in bulbs). When I asked the security guard about the shuttle, she said it arrives every 30 minutes, but that it will most likely be full because it requires that you reserve a spot. She also said it has lots of stops and that it will take awhile to get to the airport. She said a cab is about $40 and that I should take the city bus; it comes every 30 minutes and is a lot cheaper. However it’s a long 1 hour ride to airport because it makes lots of stops.

So I walked half a block and waited for city bus. When it arrived, I realized I only had a $1 dollar bill and a $20 bill (fare was $1.25). The driver said he has no change and that I should go find change elsewhere. As soon as the bus drove away, I realized I had 25 cents in my LEFT pocket (normally I only put money and change in my right pocket).

So I decided to wait for shuttle and ask the driver if there was room. He came 10 minutes later, I paid him 8 bucks. I was the only one on the shuttle, and he went straight to the airport in 15 minutes.

There was a single building for all the car rentals and the place looked like a mini airport! There were about 100 people in line for the shuttle back to the airport.

When I purchased something at the concession stand, the persona at the register said, “Have the best day!” instead of, “Have a good day!”. I later realized a lot of people in Nevada said “Have the best day”.

The car I rented was a Toyota Camry. It was rated at 35 MPG (I later tested my real fuel economy and discovered I was getting 37 MPG). The rental for three days was a bit expensive, but since I knew I would be doing around 1,000 miles and with gas prices where they were (between 4.50 and 5.80 a gal out West), having good fuel economy would definitely be worth the extra cost (I ended up doing 1,241 miles over the three days).

After picking up the rental, I drove towards Lake Mead on E Lake Mead Pkwy and then realized a better route would be to come down through the Valley of Fire. So I went back, took I-515 North to I-15 North, and came down route 167 through Logandale and Overtron.

Finally, I took route 147 to 166, and then onto 93 where I visited Hoover Dam. They were rebuilding the 93 highway with a new bridge that goes across the dam. I can see why. The current roads are very narrow and easily create a bottleneck in the flow of traffic.

I stopped briefly in Boulder City (which was beautiful) and then found a place to stay in Henderson, NV called Hawthorne Inn. This room was much, much nicer than the Plaza Hotel and it only cost me $50!

I will let the pictures and the map do the rest of the talking. Keep in mind that I took the majority of the pictures while driving. I just held my DSLR in one hand, and stuck it out the window over the passengers seat (yes, I kept a hand, and my eyes, on the road). Keeping the camera level was difficult and I had to learn how to judge where I was pointing the camera without actually looking through the viewfinder. With the amount of driving I was planning on doing, I couldn’t afford to stop and take pictures!

Total miles driven: ~240

I went to Las Vegas, NV last week to attend InfoComm 08, the largest Pro AV show in history.

We arrived Tuesday morning and setup the booth without much difficulty. I have set up many show booths in my lifetime (my parents used to attend gift shows every year around the country) and setting up the booth in three hours was a breeze compared to the ten-plus hours it would take to setup my parents booth.

The following three days consisted of me doing a lot of standing between 9AM and 5PM:

The experience was not much different from the gift shows I had attended. Instead taking orders for product hanging on the walls, I needed to ask (and answer) questions about the company’s product and talk to the people who came by the booth.

My boss let me take breaks to walk around the show and I saw lots of really nice screens and cool technology. One booth was selling remote control helicopters with HD cameras attached to them. He flew the smaller one around his booth and over peoples’ heads while I was there. That’s one way to attract a crowd of men who are fascinated by technology! Unfortunately I didn’t take my camera with me, so I don’t have many pictures of the show itself.

Taking down the booth was just as easy as putting it up, but we had to wait a good two hours for our boxes to arrive. Once we had the boxes we were out of there in an hour. My boss was flying back later that night and I planned to walk The Strip and then find a room for the night.

My landlord paid me to pull up the weeds and grass in the front yard and replace it with landscaping fabric and mulch. It couldn’t have been a nicer day for yard work.

I spent the day helping my brother-in-law and my sister put up a fence in their yard.

I didn’t realize how cool the MacBook keyboard lights looked in total darkness until I turned off all the lights to, ahem, save energy. I took a few photos with my Nikon D50 using 8, 15, and 20 second exposures, a timer, no flash, and a tripod. For a couple of the pictures (like the one below) I turned my display brightness all the way down.

I’ve been seeing so many WordPress blogs with integrated Flickr photo streams showing off their photos and it’s really making me want to do something similar with my photos. If I had an easy way to share photos I think I would do a lot more quality photography (just as this blog allows me to easily write and publish anything).

I created a Flickr account awhile back and uploaded some photos to my account to try out the features. Flickr is OK, but I hate the idea of relying on someone else’s service. Plus, there’s the whole paying-for-extra-storage thing that I really don’t want to think about. I’m sure I could modify the script powering my current gallery to make it integrate more nicely with this blog and perhaps even take some design lessons from Flickr.

Today consisted of more than four hours of driving, exactly four hours of snowboarding, and over 5 hours of wiring and crawling behind walls breathing in fiberglass insulation.

I’m too tired to write anymore than that, so I’ll leave you with some pictures. Check out the snowboarding album and a few photos of the (unfinished) phone and network wiring.

I keep a small ladder and a snow shovel in the bed of my pickup truck. I have both of them locked together with a cable lock and secured to the truck. Lots of people have commented about how I must live in a pretty bad neighborhood to need to lock up a simple ladder. My reply has always been, “I’ve learned my lesson enough times… it’s better to be safe than sorry!”.

Well last week I was on the highway delivering furniture for Aerva’s new office. My truck was packed very full so I had to stuff my ladder between some boxes. While I was on the highway I suddenly heard a loud swishing sound. I looked in my mirror and watched the ladder fly into the air. Luckily it was tied up, so it didn’t get very far:

I couldn’t help but think how many lives the simple decision to keep my ladder tied up may have saved. It was rush hour on the highway and that ladder could have done some serious damage.

So, why do I keep my ladder tied up? To save lives my friend, to save lives.

I’ve seen the $14 Steadycam “The Poor Mans Steadicam” in the past and always thought it would be a cool project to tackle whenever I have some free time (aka never). Even though I own more tools than I’m able to name (when you take care of your own rental properties you need a wide array of tools!), the large number of tools and parts required for the “Poor Mans Steadicam” always turned me off.

Then I saw this cool $1 Image Stabilizer video from MetaCafe:

$1 Image Stabilizer For Any Camera - Lose The Tripod - The best free videos are right here

Sure enough, I found an immediate need for an image stabilizer when I took pictures of the box for my new MacBook Pro power supply. I had some rope in my closet and I remembered the tripod adapter which screws into the bottom of my camera already had a little hole that I could loop the rope through. It took two minutes of my time to tie the rope around the tripod adapter. I then stood on the excess rope and pulled up to steady the camera:

It worked great! Here is the first picture I took without the stabilizer and here is the second picture taken with the stabilizer. You can clearly see the difference!

My co-worker, Raf, spontaneously came up with the idea of using a giant rubber band instead of string or rope. Just as he was laughing it off as a silly idea, I told him I actually have giant rubber bands that I use for fitness. As I was writing this post, I decided to try out his idea:

It also worked well, however the because the rubber band needs to loop around the camera, it was uncomfortable and also difficult to access the camera controls. Besides, not only would I not want to carry around a giant rubber band, I also wouldn’t want the camera to slip out of my hands and go crashing to the ground just as I lifted it to take a picture!

I love the way pictures come out when taken with natural light (no flash). However, when the camera detects low light it slows the shutter speed down so it can absorb enough light to make a clear picture. Even the slightest movement during this slow shutter speed will cause the picture to come out blurry. It’s quite amazing how such a simple image stabilizer fixes that problem!

The only thing they stole was my new $200 iPod Nano. By habit, I always put it underneath something when I leave the car, but apparently it was still somewhat visible. They used a big piece of tar to break the window, which can be seen in this picture.

So much for thinking I live in a safe neighborhood.

Aerva, the software company where I am employed, has created software called AerChannel, which provides its customers with the ability to create and manage content on their own digital signage network. An added bonus to AerChannel is Aerva’s MoApp technology which enables viewers to interact with the screen by sending SMS text messages.

One of our customers, BarCast, has screens in several bars around the Boston area. As you can see from the screenshot above, they have created a poll to allow viewers to vote who they hate more, Payton Manning or Eli Manning.

Luckily, I can vote for both.

As I was cutting these red bell peppers this morning, I was surprised when an open cut on my hand started stinging really bad — as if I had been cutting onions or hot peppers! I knew it wasn’t the water on the peppers because I just took a shower and I had washed my hands without feeling any pain at all. I’m guessing the pain was caused by the trace amounts of capsaicin found inside the bell peppers.

Red bell peppers, like their close relatives the hot peppers, contain capsaicin. Capsaicin is what makes peppers hot, however the bell peppers have a recessive gene that eliminates the capsaicin and allows us to eat an entire pepper without our mouth catching on fire.

Red bell peppers are an amazing food and contain a huge array of vitamins and minerals. They are very high in vitamin C (higher than oranges!), contain high levels of antioxidants, and have more beta-carotene than green or yellow peppers.

I ordered Verizon FiOS last week and this morning a Verizon technician came by an opened a gray box hanging from the pole outside my apartment. He was probably doing something in preparation for my FiOS install scheduled for next week. I was a bit surprised when he opened the box without a key, but maybe he had some type of RFID transmitter on him that unlocked the box some other way.

I’ve never seen fiber inside those boxes before so I grabbed my DSLR, put on the telephoto lens, and took some pictures from my window. The closest I could come to finding a name for these boxes is a “cross box”. If anyone has more information on them, please leave a comment!