Hallowin Signout

Okay... guess this will be the end of the day - it's hallowing! And Aishwarya Rai's birthday... 10 mins to midnight... Since last two years this is the day and time (1st nov between 1 AM to 3 AM) when I always got in to a car accident - a nearly fatal ones. oh... need to eat something... should be going to Nanuet for that cool diner I'd found... will keep blogging if am alive tomorrow :-)

How To Blog

Just finished making this blog page! Wow. It took exactly 5 hours. When I started, I was going to program this whole stuff by myself and almost on the verge of firing VS.Net. And then I saw this site Blogger.com. As per the 10 commendments of programming world, never spend time in writing programs which has been already done and which are reusable. And this site was great. I created a template so that user will see blogs as integral part of my site. No fuzz. Though I'd to pay $15 to remove ads. Other complains include lack of ability to post comments and no built in search engine. But otherwise, I nearly saved atleast 3 days worth of coding. I really wonder why I've started so late... so many good things will now remain un-blogged... lol.

Autumn Fall Foliage Long Drives

I've some more time and it's my first day doing blogs so I'll put down few more tid bits...

This one is about fall foliage traveling I did this year. Last year I went out to 3 day trip to New Hampshire and drove through much of the state. This year I decided to went down North-east Pennsylvania. The driving route at Bucktail State Park was listed as 'one of the most beautiful spot to be' in foliage by Yahoo Travel newsletter. There is some 75 miles of Route 120 which passes through scenic mountainous areas and small towns. So I rented Mustang convertible and started the trip on 20th Oct. Passing through Rough 80 west from NJ to PA was absolutely stunning. Unfortunately you can't stop on highway to take photographs and there are not many view points on Rt 80. So just look around and drive slow. While entering on Rt 120 at Lock Haven, PA I realized the peak was already passed and there was around 40% or less leafs on trees. A big sigh! But this was anyway as predicted in Foliage report at FallInPA.com. But whatever was left was still absolutely gorgeous. You can tell how beautiful the peak must have been looked like. So after passing Ronovo I decided to drive down south were peak was still expected. I took Rt 144 and I glad I did. This some 70 miles long road was continuously covered with fall colors, passing through deep forest, valleys in curvy snaky ups and down fashion. What a treat! Next year I'll be back here with proper timing :-).

Anyway this was not my first trip and not the last also for this year. The first trip I did was to Windham, NY at Catskills. It was annual ADK (www.adk.org) fall weekend with lots of hikes in around the area. I did the 3 summit hike at Thomas Kole (6 mil) and one another 4 miles hike next day. Fall colors were just starting to appear. You can look at photographs on my web site http://www.ShitalShah.com or their real host at www.dotphoto.com (the name of the album is First Of Autumn).

The next fall color trip WILL be at NYC this weekend at Central Park. I'm missing Autumn at NYC since last two years and it's hardly 40 mins away from my home! Sure NYC is jungle of building but Central Park is just a magical place. I saw some Central Park foliage shots in movie Autumn in New york (it appears just when movie starts, good because you don't need to see rest of the crap). This weekend I guess is peak weekend in Central Park.

The Pen With Dictionary And Voice!

Now this is something I was absolutely looking for. A device which scans the printed word in a book and tell you it's meaning and pronounces it through voice! Sure there are lots of hand electronics dictionaries for this but it's still work half done because you have to cut your chain of thought and type in word in it. Guess what, there a pen shaped hand held scanner that does the same thingy - you just move it over a text and in seconds it gives dictionary entry and pronunciation! It's called QuickLink or Quicktionary handheld scanner pen. The mfg site is at http://www.wizcomtech.com but sadly isn't available at stores like Best Buy. All of the e-tailers including buy.com and amazon.com I tried were mysteriously out of stock and the manufacturer has kept their direct prices higher then any retailer (this really sucks). I will be buying a version called SuperPen - that one you can also use for storing lines of text you have jotted down and transfer to your PC later. Also it can translate scanned text in to many languages. very cool! Past few months I came across many many cool books and I wished if had this thing...

Gizmos - Backup Drive, USB TV, External Dolby Sound Card

Here's some of the very cool gizmos I've found:

I was looking for a backup device for a long time. I've some 200 gigs of stuff scattered around and I realized much of it isn't really junk!! So gave thought on DVD writers but I have no wish to carry 20 DVDs around. And then suddenly I found this 120GB external hard drive. It's perfect. One from Iomega comes for around $290 and it's 7200 RPM (look in Amazon).

Another thing on my wish list was portable TV tuner card which I can connect to my laptop or home PC. It might surprise you but I've gave up on those "idiot box" type TVs since around year and half. I've Radeon All-In-Wonder showing TV on my 20" PC screen. And then there's Creative 5.1 Dolby card which sends sound signal from my PC to 600W home theater system. Neat, isn't it? I can use sophisticated program search, record program on my huge hard drives in MPEG, take stills and even view all channels at once (very slow though). But my PC died few days ago. It won't power up because of that buggy CLSUS II motherboard bug. And now I'm missing South Park and Seinfeld. And so I realized I need to have something that I can plug in to my notebook on the go and watch TV! And I found more the what I asked for. For $80 you can get KWorld external USB TV tuner device which is also an FM tuner! It works on PAL also so good for traveling with laptops to UK and India. Watch out for few others like WinTV - they don't have these things.

Yet another thing that I was looking for was external Dolby 5.1 sound card. For those who have bought expensive computer speakers, well, guys you wasted your money. You can always get 600W home theater system (i.e. amplifier and speakers) and connect it to Dolby 5.1 compatible card. Until last year only such card was Creative Live! 5.1. Now there are many but I guess Creative still rules because they give you optical as well as SPDF outputs. The beauty of external card is that you can carry it with your notebook and instantly start a sort of night club wherever you can find amplifier and speakers (say, your friend's bachelor party) streaming out your favorite MP3s. As you might know, most non-geeks who have home theater systems don't know how to connect it to PC.

First Of Blog - How To Carry 10,000 CDs With You

This is my first blog... wonder why didn't started this already!

First what's Astrila? I can't tell for sure but it probably means "sparkling snow in star light" in Eskimo's language. Well some don't agree however.

I've my personal web site at http://www.ShitalShah.com - that's my name Shital Shah.

This blog I'm gonna use for putting down my valuable findings and here's few samples.

I'm always on look out for new music. Already have few thousand songs here and there, but too much is not enough! There are now two online music services available: Yahoo' Launch and Lycos' Rhapsody (it's playing "Pure Moods III" right now on my laptop). The Yahoo Launch is free and it will sequence up the new music for you by looking at your likings and ratings. Very cool. It did correctly picked up many of my favorites from some of the sample ratings I gave to it. A relief for someone like me who have exhausted out of choices. It has tons of online free videos. That's super cool because MTV sucks at showing music videos these days and I desperately needed some on-demand music video service. And here it goes! Saying that, however, Launch collection isn't really very big - i.e. it doesn't have 10s of thousands of songs - just few thousands. There steps in the Rhapsody. They charge $10/mo and you can listen online to their collection of some 10000 CDs. It's like carrying that many CDs to your work or a hotel or Starbucks :-). You can even burn selected tracks to CD for $1/track. But there is no videos. Many of my favorites I found there: Matchbox 20, Lincoln Park, Enigma, Moby... Some I didn't found were Jewel, Enya and many others. So it's kind of balanced collection but imagine, full CDs - right there waiting to get played! These days if anybody recommends me any album/artists I first listen on Rhapsody and they think about buying it.