Mission STS 132 : A dream come true

Alright for those who dont know, I'm a space enthusiast. Yeah lets get back and write some boring stuff "AMBITIONS". I had like 3 ambitions. First I wanted to be a test driver for the super car companies, second aerospace engineer, third astronaut. Guess what I ended up being a couch potato starring at the laptop. The  glorified software engineer.

Anyways end of digression back to the point "SPACE". I used to follow the rocket launches, Space station build, Mars landing etc and always wished to see a rocket launch live. Luckily I'm in Florida and the Kennedy Space Center is like 2.5hrs drive from my place, they had a shuttle launch (Mission STS 132) scheduled last Friday and its summer vacation I dont have any classes.

We ( 5 of us ) decided to head to flag off the shuttle. Augmenting the excitement we got a Pontiac G6 with 3.5L V6 monster under the hood.

We started at 11am. Had an awesome drive till Orlando other than annoying toll booths on the highway. WTF. America is so rich still toll !!. Anyways we took a short break at Orlando at Mcd. The Cape Canaveral  launch pad is like 40 mts drive from Orlando. We had a 1 hour buffer. Then comes the traffic. I lived in bangalore for 4 years and I have seen worse. At least here it moves. But still we thought we r gonna miss the launch. After 30 mts the traffic got less and I used my Indian driving experience, floored the gas pedal  to 95-100mph along with crazy lane changes . Thank God I guess cops went for the launch as well.

Yeah we reached the river were most of the people camp for watching the shuttle launch. The place is like 3-4 miles from launch pad. We asked a guy when is it gonna lift off. He said "Dude u've got 15 seconds". Oh boy that could have been a  near miss. The final count down begins 10, 8 ,7 ....1, lift off. Its the best thing I have ever seen. Two long flames from the solid rocket boosters and short flames from shuttle engines. In 10 seconds from lift off we could feel the sonic boom. The cars that parked were kinda vibrating. Well here are some pics. We didn't click the lift off as we didn't wanna miss the initial show.

Seeing all this I got jealous of the astronauts who are in the shuttle. I felt as if they are looking at me and saying What the heck are you doing down there you have better things to do !!. Oh yeah i can do better things. Hey astronaut r u seeing, You are floating at 13000mph.. I'm sitting idle, enjoying the beach breeze and gravity and I'm gonna get "high" soon !!

Tabspace in vim

For those vim users who care about code intendation.,You may put this in vimrc. For those who not or your favourite IDE is gonna auto intend for you then exit(0) ;)

set expandtab (Tab key will create spaces)
set tabstop=4  (If you need 4 spaces for a tabkey. thtz wht I use)


set shiftwidth=4 (The auto indent aligns putting 4 spaces for the nestings for loops etc..)

Totally useless..unless you are in UFL

This is the schedule of classes at UFL. Here people say I have class at period 1, I'm free at period 6 etc. I always get confused with the mapping between period and their scheduled timings. I decided to put it here, so I can quickly look  up.

Period 1     7:25                            
Period 2     8:30                            
Period 3     9:35                            
Period 4     10:40                            
Period 5     11:45                            
Period 6     12:50    
Period 7     1:55    
Period 8     3:00              
Period 9     4:05                            
Period 10    5:10                            
Period 11    6:15

Google chrome on Linux

Today Google released the chrome browser for Linux. I was desperately waiting for the release. And u know why. I'm a big fan of the porn mode.;) oops !!! the in-cognito mode in chrome. I don't like the private mode in Firefox as it opens a new private session after saving your current session.  When you close the private session, ure old session will be restored. Gosh !! its way too complicated. Chrome simply opens an in-cognito window.

Again Thank You Google...

Family restroom

Ever heard of a family restroom. Well seeing is believing

Found it in KOHLS Gainesville during our thanks giving morning walk. Here is an excerpt from wiki about Family Restroom

Another recent development in public toilets is the gender-neutral toilet or "family restroom". These areas contain multiple stalls designed for maximum privacy and a communal washing area for use by both genders. The family restroom is designed so that a parent with a young child of the opposite gender can take the child into the restroom without the concerns associated with single-gender restrooms. Family restrooms have started appearing in newly-built sports stadiums, amusement parks, shopping malls, and major museums.

F-spot

Hey its not a so called bad word like ****.  Its an open source photo management software for Linux.  I dont know if  **** is the motivation behind naming the software. Anyways i liked the software very much. The best feature to be highlighted is the way F-spot imports photo  from your digicam. The import is done in a hierarchical manner. Oops am i getting too techy !!.. Well lets take an example. Suppose you are going for a week long trip to Canada. Everyday you took pit stops at say Montreal, Vancouver, Toronto respectively and took your  favorite snaps. After the trip you are back at home. You put the digicam memcard in your laptop and copy the pics. Lets say you want to share  only the photos from Vancouver. Well you have to sort the pics with date and select them accordingly. Here comes F-spot.  F-spot imports the photos from your memcard  and separates them based on the date which you took them.

The created folders will be of the Format

Year/Day

You can navigate to the day where you visited Vancouver. see and share the pics.

You can do all sort of basic photo editing like you do in picassa. With export to web albums feature, You can upload your pics to picassa, flicker etc..

Try F-spot and let me know the feedback....

Wish List

1)  Sky diving

2)  Drive a Ferrari and Lambhorgini Diablo

3)  Wing suit flying

4)  To fly a F-35 Lightining

5)  To spend a week in International Space station 

Well I'm looking for sponsors..Let me know if anyone is interested :)