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I have been delaying my promise to take my son to a “Zoo” in Chennai to see animals for few weeks now. Even though today was a Saturday I had some office work to complete (accounting related to be done before 31st March 2009), I completed them in the first half and returned home early. I took my son and we both went to “Guindy Children’s Park”, the Children’s park and the Snake park (same campus) are both part of “Guindy National Park” situated in Adyar. The Guindy National park along with the adjacent IIT Madras campus and Raj Bhavan as seen in the Map here gives Chennai the much needed lung-space with greenery.
The last time I went to the park was when I was in school and I hardly remember from that visit, so I was not sure on how good the Children’s park will be. Whether there will be enough parking for cars, will it be too crowded, opening timings, etc. Anyway I decided to go and check it out. I should say I have been pleasantly surprised – there was enough parking (even on a saturday), though there were lot of school excursions we never felt crowded as the place was big enough to accommodate all. The parks seems to be reasonably maintained, with few places you feel the authorities (Tamilnadu Forest Department) could be doing a better job at cleanliness and animal care. We did notice new name-boards and fences and more being built by workers.
The parks close by 6PM with the last visitors to be allowed at 5:30PM, we went to the Children’s park first by 4:15PM so we had a comfortable visit to both the parks and was out around 5:45PM. The parks are open on all days except Tuesday. The entry fee for Adults in both Children’s Park and Snake’s Park were Rs.5 each; with the Snake park alone charging for Children that too only Re.1. To see the animals (Hyena, Deers, Peacocks, Birds, Monkeys and others) in the Children Park it took us only about 60 minutes (we went slow and never rushed anywhere) and the next 20-30 minutes in Snake’s park. The Children’s park has animal enclosures and a large area for kids to play.
Saravana Stores maintains the only available food-stall/canteen with a limited offering – Popcorn, Juices, Cold-Drinks, Ice-Cream and some snacks. I recommend you wear a comfortable walking shoes so you can walk the full park easily and a cap for the summer days in Chennai. Remember to carry Drinking Water with you. The rest-room facilities are not that clean and are limited in number (we could see some new one’s being built) so please plan accordingly.
Overall, if you are in Chennai I recommend a visit here. If you are visiting Chennai, I will suggest you go to Arignar Anna Zoological Park (a.k.a. Vandalur Zoo) which is 30Kms from Chennai and to Chennai Crocodile park in ECR Road (my earlier post here on Crocodile Park).
Part 1
If you are like me who grew up in 1980s, you will no-doubt have a huge collection of old Audio cassettes (Tapes) that contains your childhood favourties but now lying somewhere collecting dust. Today you should be lucky to be having a cassette player in working condition to play them. A decade back I started hunting for my favourite albums/movies and managed to buy most of them as Audio CDs or MP3 CDs, but I still long for digitising my old tapes so that I can listen to them where-ever I want. So few years back I bought an inexpensive cassette player which has a stereo speaker out (1/8" TRS Jack in USA or 3.5mm miniature EP Jack in India, which is the standard type used in your iPod, Computer speakers) . To record involved four steps:
- I connected the Speaker-out from the player to Line-In in my PC using a standard 3.5mm Stereo Audio Patch cable like the one shown below. The audio quality depends on the quality of the cable and the pins used, so buy the best looking one or a branded one that you can find in your local electronics store.
- Recording quality turned to be good, but to set the correct volume level in the player and Mic-level in PC was tricky. That part took me few hours to set it right, too high the volume in player then you can listen to the audio in your PC speakers but nothing gets recorded and too low the recorded song can’t be heard while played back.
- Setup Line-In as default "Recording Device" in Windows. This can be done in Windows Vista by Right-Clicking on the Speaker system tray icon (bottom-right before time) and selecting "Recording Devices". Then in the dialog (as shown below) that appears Right-Click and select "Set as Default Device". You might want to double-click on the Line-in Icon and adjust the audio-levels for fine-tuning. If everything is working well, then when you play something in your player you will see the bars on right-hand side of the Line-In row moving up and down.
- The software used to record took some experimentation as well but was easier. I settled down with using the free Windows Media Encoder to record the songs as WMA files and then converting songs that I needed in my iPhone alone to MP3 files using Nero WaveEditor. I was not comfortable with directly recording into Nero WaveEditor or the free Audacity equivalent. If you are using Windows Vista, you can also try the in-built Sound Recorder as well that now supports durations longer than 60 seconds but it doesn’t offer the level adjustment controls found in Windows Media Encoder.
That’s all it takes to record your tapes as WMA/MP3 files. You are now good to throw-away your cassettes.
Part 2
Part 2 of this story happened about six months back when during my trip to USA in June ’08 I had purchased a device to make the conversion easier. The device was ION Audio’s Tape2PC. I saw it online and ordered through Amazon for $130 or so. The device claimed to make it easier for converting the tapes to MP3 using bundled software and the USB connection (so no cable hunting). I presumed the software does auto rewinding to beginning of cassette, identifying each track automatically and auto-reverse once one side of the tape is over, so that we don’t need to baby-sit during the entire tape.
After I got back to India, I never found time (or the interest) to set up this device until last Sunday. That’s when I unwrapped the box, connected the cables and without a moment’s thought switched the Power-ON. I got the display lights for a second and the device went blank. That’s when it stuck me that the device was 110V and I connected to 220V (in India), and the power supply inside the device should have got burned . Next day I gave the device to my local Electronic Repair shop (Rajam Electronics, Station Road, West Mambalam, Chennai -33. Phone: 044-2474 0106) to fix it. They diligently worked on it, fixed it and gave it to me today. They charged me Rs.400 (USD  towards their service charge and for replacing the 110V transformer to 220V and few other components that got burned. I brought the device home and plugged in, Windows Vista promptly deducted the device as a USD Audio CODEC and it worked just fine. The burning episode was a blessing in disguise, now I don’t need to keep connecting every time a 220V-110V Step-Down adaptor.
The device turned out to be a slight-disappointment. The audio quality was great due to the USB interface, but the software functionality was limited. No Auto Track Identification, No Auto-Rewind, No Auto-Reverse – you need to baby sit throughout the cassette play time, no escape from that. The in-built software (EZ Tape Convertor) does make it easy to mark each tracks, tagging easier and moves automatically the completed tracks to iTunes. You can find a detailed product review of Tape2PC from UK’s PCAdvisor here – I suggest you read it before you decide to buy this device. My opinion is that if you don’t mind spending few minutes extra for each cassette and you don’t have that many cassettes then you can safe yourself some money by not buying this. Instead go with my alternate method suggested in Part-1 of this post.
I am not active into Twittering. Frankly, I didn’t get the idea of it for quite some time after its launch – even after I created a twitter account two years back. But over the last few months I am seeing more buzz around twitter than ever before. For me it is becoming to be an interesting tool as I seeing more use for twitter as a professional business tool. Marketing agencies using it to follow it buzz around their products, business houses using it for networking and so on. Today Microsoft’s PR agency Waggener Edstrom released a tool "twendz" a new tweet-analysis tool. Few months back there was this blog post on the CEOs around the world who are twittering.
With all this around, I dusted my twitter account and have started to use it. Let us see if I do it with some discipline and at least the same frequency I do my blogs (of course tweets are supposed to be quick tiny updates unlike a blog). You can follow me on twitter here.
I read a review of this book in Business Week and purchased the book some months back. Over last two weeks I finished this book – Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good by Sarah Lacy. The title made the book appear to be an interesting read on how the web 2.0 businesses have fared compared to the ones that came up and died quickly in the dotcom burst.
On reading the book, it turned out to be a coverage of the story of Jay Adelson (Revision3), Kevin Rose (Digg), Max Levchin (Paypal and Slide) and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) and passing coverage of Marc Andressen (Netscape), Ben & Mena Trott (Six Apart), Chad Hurley & Steve Chen (YouTube) and of Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn). At the end of the book, I felt I have learned little about the business of these companies than I know before reading the book. The book is more about which restaurant in the valley is frequented by these people and their VCs, their likes and dislikes and so on. Though the author has tried to show the individual/human side of these people, it somehow iconizes them more than ever. If you are living in the Bay Area and want to have topics to discuss (and names to throw in between) in the Tech party circuits this book is a must-read, for rest of us I will rate it average..
The Author (Sarah Lacy) is a reporter on startups and venture capital in Silicon Valley and writes a biweekly column for BusinessWeek and co-hosts Tech Ticker on Yahoo! Finance.
My views on international politics (and in India politics) are in general formed based on issues rather than personalities or political parties. I normally refine myself from forming strong opinions on US politics (especially between Republicans and Democrats) on their domestic issues – and of course there is enough to occupy oneself with what’s happening in our own backyard (in my case Tamilnadu). On the other hand I can’t be without an opinion on USA’s international policies, as the world’s only remaining super-power their policies affect every one on this planet – including every Indian in some way or other.
Over the last 8 years, I was disappointed with Bush Administrations "Cow-Boy" style of operations especially on all sensitive world issues – IRAQ War, Palestinian cause, Russia and others. One area where Bush administration should be credited by Americans is the way they secured USA "borders" from terror attacks repeating after the devastating 9/11. In a way with the unjustified war on IRAQ they took the "War on Terror" to someone else’s backyard and secured their own borders. With Obama’s administration I am pleasantly surprised by the reversal of various US International Policies. Today I saw in papers the news about Hilary Clinton presenting to her Russian counter-part a big red "Reset" button symbolizing a new beginning. Though critics can argue this to be a childish gesture, I feel it is a nice beginning and a great symbolic one which clearly communicates the intentions – it makes your foreign policy easy to understand and doesn’t require a PhD to interpret.
I just wish this new beginning goes beyond symbolic gestures and moves into substance. There are many important world problems which can be influenced by USA for a possible solution – including ever present ISRAEL/Palestinian issue, Terrorism in Pakistan & Afghanistan and above all the crumbling World economy.
The annual Chennai Trade Fair that happens in Island Grounds is a popular tourist event. You get all round entertainment for the family here – some shopping, rides, booths and government department stalls, etc.
Nowadays every year I go there to take my son in the Toy Train they have here. This year they seem to have added Horse rides, and few other attractions for kids. The Dora House was a total waste of money – just had two dolls of Dora and flashing lights. Tomorrow is the last day of this years’ event, so we finally came here today – there is not much crowd at 7:30/8PM and they are open till 11PM, and we had a good time. We tried coming here last sunday but the parking that day was full and flowing till Gymkhana club, so turned back. In the shopping stalls you get a variety of plastic items, toys, garments, cotton cloths, eatables, spices, herbal oils and so on. This year I saw a book shop too. I forgot to carry enough cash and there are no ATMs inside the fair or near-by, so we had to control our shopping urges which was good in a way. My wife says I did this intentionally!
BTW, this year the parking charges have been increased to Rs.40 (8 times the normal Rs.5 charged elsewhere by Chennai Corporation).
Few days back I joined my son while he was seeing in Pogo channel this movie – Mr. Bean: The Movie. The movie is a full length comedy just like any of the Mr.Bean’s series. I had a thorough laugh for the 2 hours+ of the movie.
The story is a simple line but was enough for Rowan Atkinson to exploit to his fullest advantage. Bean works as a caretaker at Britain’s Royal National Gallery where his bosses want to fire him, but couldn’t because the chairman of the gallery likes him. They send him to a Los Angeles (USA) art gallery instead, where he’ll have to officiate the opening of the greatest US picture ever (called "Whistler’s Mother"). There David Langley, curator of the LA museum invites Mr. Bean to stay with his family and Bean begins causing problems to David’s marriage and family. Bean is given a few minutes alone to study the painting for his grand "speech", however, Bean sneezes on the painting and wipes it with a handkerchief, not knowing that it is covered in blue ink. Terrified, Bean tries to fix it but causes more damage.Rest of the story is how during the night, Mr. Bean hatches a plan and restores the painting by keeping a copy. In the climax, Bean is mistaken for a doctor and pushed into an operating theatre containing a policemen, who has been shot. While the other doctors and nurses are distracted, Bean unconventionally retrieves the bullet and saves him. Overall, the movie is a total comedy riot – enjoy it.
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