A new post every day???

I actually started this blog hoping to add content on a daily basis, but I'm beginning to realize that its not as easy as it sounds. You either need to be a rock star with something interesting happening every single day or you need to be Casey Niestat who can make every single mundane thing interesting. You should check out his vlogs. They are actually addictive. 😉

Anyways, its a weekend and thanks to some really unfortunate (nothing serious) events, I had to cancel an amazing trip and all I did was sit home and sulk. Did that help? Not one bit. My sulking and my long face just messed up my mood, but people around me who were supposed to get it, didn't get it and eventually who turned out to be the looser? ME!! Yes me.

So saturday went down the drain and I thought I'll make Sunday at least interesting. I ran into a friend of mine yesterday who told me that there was going to be a Distinguished Gentleman's bike ride today morning. I love clicking pictures and so I thought it would be a great opportunity to get the cobwebs off my cam and go click some pics. I woke up in the morning and was at my friends place at 6:30am sharp as was decided yesterday but there was no sign of him. His maid told me that he had gotten back to sleep after opening the door for her. I thought to myself meh, lets not disturb him and went ahead to the venue.

There were hardly any people at the starting point. Another running event was taking place, so I just drove further on to see if I can find anything interesting to click. I went further on and found this amazing dog meet place and I just loved it. There was so many breeds of dogs there, some of which I didn't even know and they were just socializing. It was so much fun to see these beautiful thorough bred dogs just running around, exploring, making new friends and all that. I clicked some good pics, here are a few of them.

I found them extremely adorable and after spending about half an hour here, I went back to the bike ride venue. Luckily, there were a lot of bikes this time. I was kinda hoping that it would be a bigger event with a lot of interesting bikes, but it wasn't the case. All of them were regular bikes, a lot of Royal Enfields, a Kawasaki Ninja 300, a Harley Davidson Street 750, and loads of bike we see almost every day . There were some classics like a Jawa and a few old royal enfields but other than that, except the Triumph Tiger, nothing else was interesting. I clicked very few pics and left the place.

All in all, it was a fairly uneventful day. Hopefully next week will turn out to be more interesting.

New Technology Addicts

Technology has come a long way. Gone are the days of dial-up internet connection. Gone are the days when cell phones were chunky and were used just for calling. Gone are the days when color display on cell phones was a fad. Gone are the days when internet connection on cell phones was slow 🐌 and a costly affair 💰 (thanks to JIO) and also gone are the days when bathroom 🚽 breaks were short. 😉  With all these changes, a new age group of technology addicts have come up. Oddly enough millennials 👦👧 are not the addicts anymore, its the generation before that 👴👵 . In simple terms our parents are the ones who are more addicted to technology than us.

We as the kids from late 80's and 90's have seen technology evolve. We've been through all the aforementioned phases and have now come to a stage where we use mobile technology like its meant to be. We look for directions, google for stuff, make online payments, book cabs and movie tickets, use mobile wallets and do so many other things which these phone were actually made for. It is our parents who are relatively new to jump into this band wagon who have become bigger addicts. They suddenly have access to so much information that its hard for them to stay away. We no get more forwards from parents in "family groups" than from friends.

Not so long ago when I was away from home, my dad used to call to check on me. Things have changed now. He just sends me a whatsapp message and thats it. No phone calls nothing. In a way its good that they are catching up, but face to face verbal interactions at home are also reducing because each is in their own world on their own devices. Sometimes in individual rooms and sometimes in different corners of the same room.

I dont mind a little bit of alone time after having interacted with so many people at work, but its turning into a routine and that in my opinion is a bad thing. New parents these days are using phones to distract kids and that again is turning into a different kind of problem. I recently read a news article about a kid who started having withdrawal symptoms after the parents disconnected the kid from the cellphone. Now that is extremely messed up.

Well, these I guess are the side effects of technology evolution and I dont think anything can be done about it. All we can hope and suggest is to use technology responsibly and in moderation. Had this random thought today. Penned it down.

My mobile phone journey

Ive always been a Sony fan boy. I used to like it simply because their designs were awesome, I loved their sound quality and most importantly I loved the sony image and video quality. Sony image sensors are still considered to be some of the best in the market.

I started my mobile phone journey with the Sony Ericsson T610. It was nice and small, it had a color display and a joy stick. It looked sleek and for that time, with a 1.3 mega pixel camera, it took stellar pictures provided the lighting was right.

It had many inherent problems. The charging port was just pathetic. The design of the connector was so bad that it had to be kept at an angle so that it would continue charging. The joystick though quite good had a lot of problems. It used to get stuck, it didnt function as well and worst of all, it had very limited memory because of which I couldnt store many images at one time and neither could I have any music on it. Oh btw, it could only play .wav music format. I used it for 2 years and then being a fan boy, I moved on to another sony, the W810.

The W810, will always remain my most favorite phone ever. Sadly, of all the things I love, cherished and safeguarded, this is the only phone I managed to loose and mind you, it wasnt from my hand. I lost it from my bag when I checked in my baggage into Indigo Airlines without locking the zips.

I believe this was one of the best phones that Sony made. It was called the walkman. It was the smallest and the most robust phone I ever owned. It was a major upgrade for me. It had an 8MP camera. Took incredible pics at super high resolution. It had incredible sound quality. The icing on the cake was that it came with these two tiny external speakers which were quite loud and the sound quality was also exceptional. This was also the first time that Sony came up with these in-ear earphones. They almost gave the effect of noise cancellation and I loved it.

The problem with most sony phones in this generation was their buttons. This one had a nice little dedicated camera button and after some time, it stopped functioning. The center joy stick, well it wasnt exactly a joystick. It was a circular button which helped to navigate in all four directions was also quite problematic. Eventually it stopped functioning and I had to go back to my T610 which is when I lost this phone.

So that was two sony phones in a span of about 5 years. I wasn't done with sony yet. I kept up my technical research all the time and in the process I found out about another stellar phone called the C905. 
In  terms of design, I felt this was one of the best there was. It was a slide phone making it extremely compact. It had a small hump at the back indicating that it had a larger camera. The camera had a shutter which had to be slid down for the camera to be activated. It had a bigger screen and it looked plain sexy to say the least. It had a similar joy stick and a dedicated camera and great sound and all the typical sony jazz. I was in love with this phone and took utmost care of it.

But sony let me down yet again with a ton of problems. The camera refused to turn on when I slid down the camera shutter. The slide action had its own problems. The screen stopped turning on when I slid the top part(expected functionality), the charging port was pathetic. Loose contact always and a few other niggling problems which were enough to annoy me to the core and make me want to finally move away from sony all together. I used this one for about a year only.

This was all the pre-smart phone era. After having used these three phones, it was finally time for me to enter the smart phone era. I started it off with the most famous phone that Samsung made, the Galaxy S2. Believe it or not, I used this for a whopping 5 years. I still have it and I use it as my backup phone.

  Ive never been more happy with a piece of technology as I was with the S2. It was relatively bigger and I used to have issues reaching all four corners of the screen with one hand. It had only an 8MP camera but it was good enough for me. It was my first smart phone and I just loved it. I mustve dropped it a million times but it never cracked and it never gave up on me.

It had very few problems. The only problem that I could think of was that it didnt have expandable memory. Over time the battery life reduced and sadly it didnt pick up even after changing the battery but it was good. I was attached to this phone and I was and still am not gonna let go of it.


After 5 years of using this, just out of boredom, I changed phone again. This time it was to a brand which wasnt that famous for cell phones. It was the LG G3.

 The USP for me in this phone was the extremely sleek design. The incredibly large screen and most importantly the camera shutter button and the volume rocker being at the back of the phone. This was revolutionary. The camera was great. It had these amazing gesture controls. We had to make a fist in front of the cam to make it click a selfie. The battery life was great and over all it was a great phone.

I didn't find any major problems with it and would've continued to use this if only it didn't give up on me one fine day. I dont know what happened but the phone just died on me one day and just wouldn't turn on no matter what I did. I eventually had to fall back to my trusted old Samsung Galaxy S2.

Technology had eventually caught up and I couldnt go on with the slow S2 any longer. I needed a fast and reliable phone which was packed with features. I shouldve and wouldve gone for an apple but once you are an android user, you will always be an android user and so the hunt was on for another new phone. A replacement for the LG G3. After months and months of research, I zeroed in on the One Plus 3 and thats my current phone. It is the fastest and the most no-nonsense phone Ive had so far. Its been 2 years and counting and I do not have any plans to change it yet. One plus came up with the 3T, 5, 5T and now the 6 and 6T are coming up but Im quite happy with my One plus 3 right now.

The service networks is quite good and most importantly the dash charging and the battery life are just incredible. In this day and age where the usual causes of frustrations are technology breakdowns, I am quite happy and peaceful with my OP3. I only have to charge it for an hour or two in the morning and most importantly I do not need to carry my charger or an external charger.

I'll write a more indepth long term review of it soon.

I hope you enjoyed reading my cell phone journey so far. Stay tuned for more stories soon. 

Brain Freeze

I think I now understand what a lot of Authors go through before they start penning down their books. Remember those scenes from movies where a budding writer starts to write something, then balls up that paper throws it in the corner and keeps doing it over and over again till the whole room is filled with paper balls? This is exactly whats going on with me right now.

I cant seem to find anything to write about and even if I found something, the words just wont come out in the way I want them to. What I need is to be in the "zone". When I'm in that zone, words flow like magic and before I know it, I fill up an entire page of reasonably ok content. I agree, I am not a wizard with words and neither am I that good of a writer but I feel I do better at expressing my thoughts and emotions in writing and blogging is my attempt at that.

I have a lot of ideas and topics to write about, but like I said, the words just wont come out for some reason. I guess there are too many thoughts running through my head and that's hampering the free flow of words. Lets hope that before the week ends, my thoughts will get streamlined and I will get back into the zone. 

Until then. Peace!

Two personal bests in one week

So, last week turned out to be a great running week. I was able to log two personal bests. I ran my fastest 5K and also my fastest mile and I'm pretty happy about it.

I usually try to run every single day. There is this initiative called 100 days of running which is organized every year between april and august. The rules of the event are that one has to run a minimum of 2 Kms per day for 100 days straight. The runs can be logged using an app called strava in which case the run logs are automatically synced to the 100 days of running website or we can also manually enter the details using any other run logging apps like Nike Running Plus or Gamin Connect or any of the hundreds of other running apps available.

I personally use Strava because the watch I use, the Garmin Fenix 3 (long term review coming soon) and the underlying Garmin Connect app automatically syncs my runs to Strava and I find it extremely convenient to use this.

This 100 days of running event is a great motivation to start running and to prepare ourselves for all the running events which happen during the later part of the year. I've tried this for two consecutive years now and I found it to be very motivating and helpful. I couldn't run for all the 100 days but I did better than last year. Last year I could only run for around 50 of the 100 days but this time I did more than 70 days. I missed runs usually because I was travelling. I tried to push in a run in between my vacation as well which is why I was able to do 20 days more than last year.

These runs helped me a great deal in preparing myself for Hyderabads biggest running event, the Airtel Hyderabad Marathon. I had some very very hectic work weeks before the actual event and I couldn't practice much, but the running I did before helped me and I could finish the 10K easily. The lack of practice showed a little but overall it was pretty good.

Like I said in my previous blog, I recently enrolled into a fancy gym and my runs are getting a lot more consistent now. I paid relatively more as membership for this gym which is my motivation to go every single day and make the most of it. I am running in a controlled environment now on a treadmill which makes these runs relatively easier but it doesn't take away the fact that I still run for 25-40 mins straight maintaining a heart rate of about 160bpm.

A lot more events are coming up. My next event is going to be the Hyderabad 10K which will be held in November. I will do a few more events before that and in the process I hope to break a lot more of my personal records.

Running is very good for health and I personally would encourage everyone to run. It works as a stress buster and also helps keep your weight under control. It also increases your stamina making it easier to climb stairs and keeps you physically fit. It helps more if you keep a track of your runs and to see that there are improvements as time passes.

On to my next record now. Keep running!!

Casey Niestat

I cant believe I haven't followed him all this while.

A few years ago, I saw two different videos of Casey, one where he shows how the first class section of some airline looked like and the other one where he and his wife Candice go to an Indian wedding. I never thought that he was so huge. I got hooked on Video Logs, vlogs in short since only a few months ago. My actual intention was something different but then as you know, YouTube is such a treasure trove and I found this gem as I dug deeper. I was in-fact looking for bike and car reviews as I was planning to buy a new car and a bike and in the process I ran into this guy named Sriman Kotaru. He's very good and I love the way he vlogs and then one thing lead to another and I ran into Casey. Casey's been around for more than a decade and there is so much of his content that I have to catch up on.

The funny thing about Casey is that hes not much of a looker but his content and the way he presents it is just magical. I feel like his vlogs are like a netflix series which we just cant get enough of. The good thing is that there are no seasons and I don't have to wait for years for the next one (GOT for example 😉) .

This guy Sriman I was talking about seems to have been heavily inspired by Casey. I love Sriman's content as well but the more I look at Casey's vlogs, the more I feel that Sriman kinda lifted off the entire idea from Casey. The signature on this vlogs, the way he unpacks stuff, the way he makes time lapses everywhere, his love story and all that bear such uncanny similarity with Casey that I feel there is a slight lack of originality. Well I'm not worthy of saying anything against either of them but I at least have freedom of expression. I think this warrants a bit of a disclaimer now.

DISCLAIMER: Sriman, if ever you read this blog, I want you to know that I do not mean to offend you in any way what so ever. I just noticed that uncanny similarity between Casey and you and just pointed it out that's all. I just love your content and I hope I run into you sometime in the city.

Anyways, coming back to my main topic, Casey Niestat. I've been a petro head since as long as I can remember and I think now is a good time to jump into the vlog scene. I may not have explored moto vlogging as much yet, but I feel there is a huge gap in that area. I see that most of the vloggers are rich kids who own or are somehow connected with guys having super bikes or cars and their vlogs revolve around that and normal guys like us end up drooling over these costly machines and kinda wish that we had something like that. I know these super cars and bikes will attract a lot of eyeballs, but I feel a majority of viewers are normal people who own normal bikes and cars and I feel the need to fill this void.

I am currently doing my homework to prepare myself for taking this plunge. I know competition is huge and I will really need to come up with stellar content. I hope in the near future I will be able to fulfill this dream of mine. Lets see how it goes.

Wish me luck!! 

  

80% diet and 20% exercise

I've had issues with weight since as long as I can remember. I am not fat and I don't have trouble doing any kind of strenuous physical activity, on the contrary I am extremely active, I run everyday, participate in different running events all around the city, play a lot of sports and all that. Its just that my BMI (Body Mass Index) calculated as kg/m2 where kg is a person’s weight in kilograms and m2 is their height in metres squared as per this website, falls in the obese category and I am working my ass of to get below the obese level.

When I was abroad, I got hooked on to this sport called crossfit. Its an amazing sport which combines functional movements and Olympic weight lifting which helps in overall well-being and keeps you physically prepared to do anything. It is considered to be one of the toughest things to do and being the active guy that I was, I gave it a shot. I got very good at it eventually. I was the only Indian in that group and the coach used to call me the Indian tiger. I had been going to a normal gym prior to crossfit but it wasn't helping me much to achieve my goal. I read somewhere that the body has to burn more calories to sustain muscle, so I thought crossfit would be my opportunity to build that muscle which would eventually help me burn away all the fat but for some strange reason it worked against me. I gained muscle alright, but it looked like all my muscle was being build on top or just underneath the layer of fat and because of that, instead of me looking leaner, I looked much more beefier.

I did crossfit for 3 years with hardly any weight loss. In fact I put on a lot of muscle mass which showed on the weight scale. Eventually when I came back to India I completely stopped crossfit, took some time off and then started hitting the regular gym. Crossfit involves a lot of squats (both free and weighted) and that made my legs heavy as my quads had become stronger and I started having difficulties running. I used to feel like I had something really heavy strapped on to my legs when I used to go on runs. If you didn't know already, running is my second most favorite thing to do and so I had to do something about it.

I started working out at my office gym but I was so used to crossfit that I just couldn't stop doing it. I made a few friends there who were also into crossfit and I was back at it full fledged. There was no dress code in that office, so I looked pretty normal in my jeans and T-shirts. I realized how big I had gotten only after I changed my company where I had to wear formals. I started looking like a bouncer and I couldn't stand it. I again joined the office gym and this time instead of lifting any heavy weights, I started running and doing a lot of cardio. After a couple of months I started noticing differences and now I am slowly but steadily on my way down and here I am now, visibly thinner (not leaner) but my struggle still goes on.

As the title of my blog says, its 80% diet and that's where I am faltering big time. I kept a tight reign on what I ate all of last week but today everything went down the drain again. Maybe I can consider this as my cheat day. The good thing is that I will be hitting the gym tomorrow morning and I will surely burn off all of what I ate today.

I paid a 6 months membership at this fancy gym. I hope to do the 80% of my work properly and let the other 20% actually take effect.

Wish me luck!!

x

Caught up in the rat race

Wow! Its been a really really long time since I wrote something. I think I was so caught up in the rat race that I just didn't have the time or the energy to flex my creative muscles and do what was once my my most favorite thing to do. Write.

Writing, travelling and photography are three of my most favorite things to do. I remember when I was back in mangalore many years ago, I always took the time out to go on little photo walks around where I lived and I always ended up getting at least one keeper. I somehow managed to find beauty in very small things. Here is an example of one such photo I clicked. These birds were just outside my flat, they looked like they were in deep conversation and the way it came out was way beyond my expectations. Well, I have to give mangalore the credit as well because it was so small and beautiful and almost every turn had something really photogenic to click. All it needed was an eye for detail.

Here I am now, in Hyderabad, the "Big City" and I hardly have time and more importantly a good place where I can go and click anything. The city is so fast paced and hectic that one hardly finds anything clean or even remotely photogenic to click. I recently went on a photo drive and all I could get were a few light streaks. I liked how the photo turned out, but its very common and not something that I wanted to click. That was already a few months ago and I miss doing that on a regular basis. Added to that, I've had to work on weekends as well and that made it even more difficult to go out clicking. 

Oddly enough all this came as a blessing in disguise. The last few months have been so hectic that I've had to watch vlogs and other YouTube videos to calm my nerves. I've sort of taken a liking towards vlogging and I hope some day I will be able to create my own video content, but until then I've decided that each and every single day, I will write something. Something about how my day went, my opinions about things I read, my experiences and I hope to bring back the creative side of me. I've also learnt in recent times that the only way one can get better at something is by practicing what we want to do every single day of our lives and my greatest inspiration in perusing that is my Mother.

I've never seen anyone who possessed such grit and determination. I am a little embarrassed to say this but my mom has never been good at fine arts but that never deterred her from trying a hand at it. She is always trying to do something new and creative. The downside though for the OCD me is that she usually stops mid way and I have to clear the mess but she just never gives up. She tried her hand at bonsai making, sewing, driving, playing the piano, learning Chinese and Spanish for sometime and finally she seems to have hit the jackpot with painting. She practices painting every single day and now she has become so good at it that we ourselves wonder if this was really painted by my Mom. They are proper wallpaper material and some of her colleagues have her paintings hug on walls.

Anyways, fact of the matter is that, I have decided that from this day forth, I am going to hone my creative side, writing and photography being the two major things that Im gonna work on. Lets see how this goes.