Thought Flickr's

Recap of Bangalore -2006/07

Heres my cost recap of Bangalore and  the city. I am rounding of the exchange rates to be about Rs40/- per Canadian dollar.

Accommodation is OK. I got myself a semi furnished 2 bedroom apartment for approx 15K INR for a month. Thats about CAD 500/-

Travel is cheap. Most of the time I spent an average of about 50-75 rupees to travel from here to there. This was using the 3 wheeler auto-rick's.  However, the traffic and congestion is horrible. A white t-shirt looks gray by the time its afternoon !! A Chauffeured driven car costs Rs2500/- per day.  [Note the Yellow toped vehicle - thats an auto]

A bouquet of flowers costs about Rs.150/- and thats a nice bunch of flowers. The same flowers will cost be no less then $75/- in Canada.

B/fast can be picked up from anything like 10-20 Rs. most of the time I was feasting on the dosa's, idlies and vadas. The filter coffee is great.  A bottle of water (1lt) is only 12Rs.

Dry cleaning costs about Rs15/- per piece. This includes washing and hand-pressing changes. The time I did my own washing (yeah, one drys their cloths on a a cloths line), I got my pants and shirts ironed out by the local ironing man, just at the side of my apt. It costs like Rs5/- per shirt or pant. [ heres a pic of the guy at the corner of my road]

Cover fee  for a club is approx Rs200/- (weekday). This comes with a free coupon for a beer too. Beers in the pub costs like rs90/- and a Bacardi costs about Rs360/- . All in all - a nite clubbing costs a little less then $35/- Oh yeah, the chics are hot- very hot :)-

Shoppin malls are very crowded. No elbow room to move around. Boutique shops are better to  get some fun stuff.

An average meal for 4 people in a 3star resturant works out to about Rs 2000/- , or about Rs500/- per person.  Fancier places can work out to about Rs2000/- per head too for the evening:)-

Most of the old building are knocked down and multistory apartments are all over the place. Heres a  pic of an old buildings. This seems more like the old facade of banaglore that I remember. 

My Old Mentor my EXO's  garden is still the same. Beautiful and green !!

yeah and say hi to Sandy, My Aunts Dawg, who inisted on sitting between us , while we were chatting !! :)-

More Pics and Other insights forthcoming, as I try to recover from my back back and bad fever and cold :(-

In the middle East now !!

I am visting my Brother on this tour and re-living my former "tour of duty"  places :)-  Heres a couple of pics of the old nizwa fort.

Will post more as I get back to a proper internet cafe..yeah this is bad, I can't detox myself totally from the web and emails !! :(-

CN Towers & Meshcon

I'm mesh'in at the CN Towers !

Corsin Joined me for lunch at the 360 restaurant at the top of the CNtowers. So I quickly snapped a pic on the way out :)- This is how the ground like when you look down through the glass view point

Corsin is actually from the Alps and had something to do with Google and its services at the Zurich Lab's - 'nuff said. He now does some freelance works. He will be joining us for Mesh Conference 06 in Toronto.

BTW- Meshcon is SOLDOUT and NO I can't get you tickets :)-

Stuart --sez that approx 400 participants  would be meshin for the event !! Kudos to the organizers for their tireless efforts. I certainly look forward to this conference.

Updated : As per Corsin - corrected spelling :)-

2006 NFL Super Bowl XL -Security Alert

To all my Canadian Superbowl fans. Read this. Its Important !! :)-

From protecting Americans against terrorist and terrorist weapons from entering our country, to ensuring that football fans are purchasing legitimate merchandise, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is supporting several security functions at the 2006 NFL Super Bowl XL. In cooperation with the Detroit Police Department and dozens of additional federal, state and local assets, CBP has been working for months to ensure that visitors to the Detroit area enjoy one of the most-watched sporting events in the world.

      CBP is providing a variety of support including:

·  In an unprecedented cooperative effort to shorten wait times for visitors crossing the U.S.- Canadian border on commercial busses, advance passenger information will be transmitted to CBP approximately one hour before the expected crossing time for vetting purposes.    Passengers, who are aware that their name, birth date and citizenship is being shared will have a similar experience to U.S.-bound international airline passengers. This advance information will help to determine if any passengers need a more thorough interview upon their arrival. If necessary, they will have their issue resolved off the bus and will be put on the next bus from the same company. This will allow the original bus to continue to its destination without holding up the entire crossing process. Greyhound, Windsor Transit and all busses associated with the NFL host committee are participating in this program.

·  Explosive detection canine teams will be deployed at the bridge and tunnel crossings between Detroit and Canada. These teams brought in from locations throughout the country will work to expedite inspections of vehicles while checking for explosives. …

·  CBP Officers will work within the Joint Operations Center, Intelligence Operations Center and Joint Information Center in locations throughout Detroit supporting various different functions.

cocoruder exposed 2 more MWF flaws

New vulnerabilities were posted to the Bugtraq security mailing list on Monday by a hacker going by the name of "cocoruder."

All three flaws concern the way Windows renders images in the Windows Metafile (WMF) format used by some CAD (computer-aided design) applications, but these latest flaws are far less serious than the vulnerability that Microsoft patched last week, according to security experts. That vulnerability was serious enough to cause Microsoft to take the unusual step of releasing an early patch to the problem, ahead of its monthly security software update.

Via :Robert McMillan

Solution:
Microsoft has not develop the patch,please unregister the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer (Shimgvw.dll)(see MS06-001)

DustStorm in Mars

Susan brings me this nice little dust devil !!

At first, the rover team relied on luck. It might catch a dust devil in an image or it might miss by a few minutes. Using the new detection strategy, the rover takes a series of 21 images. Spirit sends a few of them to Earth, as well as little thumbnail images of all of them. Team members use the 3 big images and all the small images to decide whether the additional big images have dust devils. For this movie, they specifically told Spirit to send back frames that they knew had dust devils. Update : Susan sez I steal her Image , therefore I am leaving her pix totally visable for ALL to see.  How Can I be stealing something, when its still on her server ?  The discourse is available here. Note, Full attribution has been given to Susan on my orignal post.  However, if one were to  link into Flicker Image's set , its just about ok eh ??  I mean after all Flicker images are not stolen and anyone can hog the bandwidth there..correct ??  Nope,  I am fairly tolerate person and I don't really think that there is slander in Susans Image and calling me a thief .. I have been called worse :)-

I wonder what Scobles thinks of this .. after all he is hoggin 2.6% Susan's bandwidth via his link blog. Anyhoot that what she sez !!

Holland Trip

I have just uploaded the first round of pictures of my vaccation of The Netherlands. Meet my family in Holland in picture form !! :)-

More updates follow during the course of this week !!

Take note of my comments below each pciture !!

Link :http://peterdawson.typepad.com/photos/holland/