Happy Diwali!

If I thought Diwali was strange last year, this year beats it hands down. I'm sitting on my couch surrounded by boxes. We are shifting home tomorrow. Diwali was always a time when your house looked its best all lit up and sparkling clean. Mine couldnt possibly be worse. If its not the boxes, its the paper and bills all over which are driving me a little crazy.

A first time when I am packing the contents of my house myself and coming to the conclusion that I have far too many clothes and shoes. Sentiments are fine things except when you come across boxes of childhood memorabilia that need to be transported and then arranged somewhere. With the paucity of space in London houses, that is always going to be a problem here. So not only do I have my stamp and coin and other collections, this year I had stored all the wine bottles we drank too - just to see consumption levels at the end of the year.

God, I am a hoarder!!!

Some new technologies: my only problem when I come across new technologies is comparing them to what currently exists. I feel like I have been living in a blackhole.

Well for starters, how do we currently access Internet on our mobile phones. You have a WAP enables browser and the mobile operator has, at teh very minimum, a GPRS network. Thereafter, the web pages which can be browsed comfortably are

Aging Europe

I think I was off my blog around that time and forgot to record the events of the August bank holiday. We had planned to spend the weekend hiking, with Innsbruck as the base camp. My job had started just a couple of weeks ago and we were still getting used to me spending such a lot of time away from home. Well, as I and a lot of other intelligent folks have said before - absence makes the heart go fonder - so well....there was a lot of romance in the air.

We reached on Saturday afternoon, checked out the town, got our tickets for the cable car and by the time we got back to the hotel, it must have been around 6-30 in the evening. And that is when we realised that some of the essential elements for a romantic evening were missing. Not a problem, right? - after all, you just have to run down to a chemist/ pharmacie. And thats where you are wrong. Saturday evening, 'late' evening, not a single pharmacy open in the whole town! Most embarrasing but we still went around asking in a couple of shops, just in case they have some emergency stock for tourists. From the reactions we got, you would think that we had asked for, at least, marijuana if not harder stuff. People drew back beind their counters with utter disbelief on their faces as if to say - 'How dare you even ask me for such a thing'. If this was not enough, nothing opens on Sunday - NOTHING! Is it the age or lack of passion - still dont know what to read from the experience.

Anyway, here are some pictures - from the trek, from the cable car - which, by the way, was an amazing experience - me never having sat in an open cable car in the mountains before and finally from the Swarovski museum. I thought that would be a tick-off from a list but it turned out to be really worthwhile.

Facebook

I have been bitten! - one more to join the club of the mindless followers. As usual, it was curiousity which led to my downfall.
Whats all the craziness about??
So I entered the fatal words and pressed enter. A perfectly innocuous page appeared asking only for my email id and password....and before I knew it I was hooked.
A way to catch up with friends, which is good - am much to busy to be able to write long drawn mails these days; end up thinking of them during the long waits at airports or on flights - 'I wonder what she is up to these days' etc etc..
A way to remember what I read over this year, my thoughts as soon as I finished the book, the phrases I liked through the course of the book - WOW! Wish I had this when I was reading Moments of Being....and by the way, I loved the title of that particular book more than I liked the book - Moments of being.......
So I have spent a lot of useful hours on the facebook site this weekend - hours that should have been more usefully spent packing the house - lets see how long it manages to engross me.

And heard this one on Scrubs, liked it: 'More than a feeling', Boston

VC fund raising

Trying to make a note of VC firms that I come across which have raised funds. Shasta Ventures - raised a fund of $200 million; interestingly, they also make investments in software. I have been searching for European VCs which are making investments in the SAAS space and didnt find any!