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Jim Morrison said that. There was a time when I saw him as a messiah, but now I think he was just a drunk fuck. Anyway, nevermind him. May his soul R.I.P. But today I saw death. It was just after crossing the intermediary ring road, as I was approaching the yet-to-be-inaguarated airport road flyover. Ahead of me, a little pomeranian was trying to cross the road and a big white Sumo ran over it. Sure, the dog was a little dumb, but just after it got run over, I passed by its side. It turned around in pain, as though crying for help, whining in a feeble voice. And I just moved on. It was tragic. A couple of cars behind me slowed down to avoid running over a dying mutt, and that’s all I saw in my rearview mirror before making a turn.

 It was only yesterday, when I was waiting near that very same Airport road junction, that I saw a street dog, all smart and integelligent, standing right in front of a traffic cop waiting for the traffic to stop so that it could cross. I was amused by the dog’s patience and  intellegince. Did it know that the traffic cop was the one who’d stop the traffic? It waited for saying a minute of two and then realised that the barrage of vehicles isn’t going to stop soon, so it just walked away to find something else to do.

When I was young, I used to feel very emotional at the sight of dying animals (or cut trees). I felt the same today, especially with the sight of the dying dog turning around, playing over and over again in my head. I was no angel. I just moved on.

Bubba’s sister was pregnant and was in a bad car accident, which
caused her to fall into a deep coma.

After nearly six months, she awoke and saw that she was no longer
pregnant.

Frantically, she asked the doctor about her baby.

The doctor replied, "Ma’am, you had twins - a boy and a girl. The
babies are fine. Your brother came in and named them."

The woman thought to herself, "Oh, no! Not Bubba; he’s not that
bright!"

Expecting the worst, she asked the doctor, "Well, what’s the girl’s
name?"

"Denise," the doctor answers.

The new mother thinks, "Wow! That’s a beautiful name I guess I was
wrong about my brother. I really like the name Denise."

Then she asks the doctor, "What’s the boy’s name?"

The doctor replies, "Denephew!!!"

I have not seen it on Split-magazine yet, so decided to put it up myself. Click here to see it.

Sandeep shot this when we covered VH1 Rock Rules some weeks ago. It’s a 10 second exposure at 8 pm. The clouds have moved quite a bit

Thanks to BPC, I finally managed to sell my Adorama Slinger bag for a good price. I am now contemplating on what next. I have a choice between the Lowepro Micro Trekker 100 and Lowepro Nova 2 AW. The former is a backpack, the later a shoulder bag, and has a rain cover which makes it ready for ‘All Weather’.

With a shoulder bag, I can quickly reach for my camera. But the load is not evenly distributed so carrying heavy lenses all day can get painful (not that I own heavy lenses….yet :p). I won’t face this problem if I go for the Micro Trekker, but then I would have have to go through some extra steps to take the camera out. But the good thing is that the Micro Trekker doesn’t look like a camera bag, so is less likely to be stolen. But then, it is not weather proof. Aaaaaaaargggggghhhh. Difficult choice. I need to sleep over it.

Update 

Looks like the Lowepro Mini Trekker AW Backpack is a good alternative, although a tad bit more expensive. 

Actually, the post of this title should read web hosting search blues. I have been considering moving to a different web host, mainly because of the need for more web space. There are a zillion sites offering reviews of web hosting products, and some of these reviews are indeed helpful. Here is what I have gathered after painstakingly going thro many reviews and web hosting offers:

• There are only few consistently good web hosting companies out there. Bluehost, 1&1, Siteground are some of them.
• Almost all these companies have their products similarly priced. If you see something too good to be true, then it means you have not read the fine print. One such very annoying fine print is the pricing structure. At the face of it, you may read that for $5 you are getting an amazing deal of 5GB webspace and the works. But when you read the fine print (some of which is hard to find), you’ll realize that it is $5 only if you pay upfront for 12 months. For monthly payment, the same deal would cost you $8 which is no different from what most other sites offer!
• Some sites have ’setup fees’, ‘backup fees’, ‘domain name fees’ etc. If you need to back up your site, you might have to shell out upto $24!!
• Not all sites have a standard control panel. Cpanel is on my current web host, and it is really awesome. But very few of the good hosting companies use Cpanel. With Cpanel, you generally get something called Fantastico. This neat little tool automatically installs several software via scripts. So you need not get your hands dirty installing Wordpress, Gallery and the like.

I am disappointed not to find anything below $7, and in the >1GB range. C’mon, I am never gonna use 5 GB, so why don’t you offer me something like 1GB and charge me less? If I pay $7, I may not be making the best of the 5Gb until maybe 2 years (by which time I may have a HUGE image gallery), so what’s the point in me paying for so much webspace upfront?

Nevertheless, the search is on, and I hope to stumble upon something good soon. Meanwhile, I totally love my current host and couldn’t recommend them enough for their low price products.

No, I am not a big fan of football. But my dad is. And so when he asked me to get a printout of the World Cup 2006 fixtures, I did a google and was disappointed not to find any site giving printer friendly timetables. Then I stumbled upon two interesting sites:

• BCentral (whatever that is) offers the MS Outlook Calendar compatible fixtures here.
• Excely.com offers a really cool (and smart) MS Excel file of the World Cup calendar here. You can even find out the timings in your country by choosing from a drop-down list!

Ok folks, have fun!

Sandeep and I had a great time covering Vh1’s rock rules concert last night at Palace Grounds, Bangalore. We got media passes because we were shooting for split-magazine. Thanks Arun, for arranging this. The press pit is a nice place to catch the action Sandeep and I both took turns and photographed the bands, and the snaps should be up at the site soon.