On August 7, 2009 (i.e this year) on the 12th hour 34 minutes and 56 seconds, the date and time will read as

12:34:56 07/08/09

Witness such a coincidence for it will never happen again. This is the first and only instance of the clock and date reading as

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

It was a single day trip, to Makedatu which is located about 80km from Bangalore. We hired a cab for the journey to be undertaken by 3 people including 2 of my friends.

It took us about 2 hours to reach the first destination of the journey called Sangam. We started early from our houses reaching comfortably by 9:30 am. ‘Sangam’ is a Hindi language word meaning meeting place for rivers. It is a place where Cauvery and another river merge. Makedatu is about 5 km from this place. Makedatu is a Kannada language term comprising of “Make” meaning ’sheep’ and “Datu” meaning ‘gorge’. Thus the saying that the gorge was separated so close that even a sheep could cross it.

We got off the cab and had to cross the river. On the other side of river was the starting place for a bus service to Makedatu. The river was knee deep and we enjoyed crossing it. After consulting we got to know that the bus would start at 11:00 am. We had one hour with us to explore the surrounding place.

We could see rocks everywhere and water flowing around it. Since it was not monsoon season water level had receded allowing us to go quite inside the rivers. The rugged natural terrain was also looking good in bright sunlight.

We were done with the exploration in about 30 minutes and inquired again for departure of the bus. The service was now postponed to 1 pm as there were not enough passengers to fill up the rickety bus. We decided to trek the distance of 4 km.

The trek was Read more

As mentioned in my earlier post on Halebeedu and Belur, it is a photographer’s delight. The temples stand in grand pose for you to come and shoot them.

The architecture and the skill of artisans is displayed in its entirety and grandeur. As the temple took around 2 centuries to be built, some of the craftsmen would not even have seen the complete state during their lifetime. You are the lucky one to be seeing them.

Below image will lead you to the complete gallery of selected photos from my trip.

The place has recently some under preservation from government and is prevented from further theft and damage.

Around the temples is the regular small town life and the locals do not seem to worry much about the prized possession of their town. I think I mentioned it earlier as well but would like to reiterate to hire a guide to understand the history behind the temple, dynasty it related to and the purpose why it was built.

The place and the photos that are captured are so good that I have some of them selected in my heritage gallery.

The Sun can be dampening and a water bottle is must. I have no idea about the availability of local transport as we had gone in our own vehicles. During the entire trip I found no buses plying on the route we took to see the different temples.

My suggestion to you would be to hire a vehicle and then traverse the place. If you are around this place then do not miss the opportunity of visiting this place.

A slightly different post from the topics which I concentrate on this blog, but it is one of the important milestone of my life and career.

My first book has been published! It is related to the full time work that I am involved into apart from being this site’s owner.

In my professional life I am an engineer on the Adobe Fireworks team. For people who don’t know about this product from Adobe (originally from Macromedia), it is meant for web designers giving the versatility to work with bitmap and vectors tools with equal clout. There are many minuscule features which can be real time savers.

I am not a sales or marketing guy but I feel it always helps to know a bit about something unknown to many folks around. Adobe Fireworks is one of them.

Coming back to focus of this post now,My First Book, it is printed by Friends of Ed under Apress publications and can be bought from your local stores or from Amazon. It is also available electronically on Kindle.

My roles on this book are compounded as I would see sometimes wearing an author’s hat or an editor’s hat to an advisory’s hat. Apart from these roles, I am the official technical reviewer for the entire book. Now you know who to blame when you find a problem in the text contained.

It was an amazing experience over the months and seeing the book preparing itself to hit the press machines. The wave of work involved and the different kind of experience I had from the regular software engineering job that I do from 9 to 5(It goes to 6ish).

The amazon link mentioned above has a mixed bag of reviews from 2 stars to 5 stars(Highest). It is an interesting approach for an individual towards a book and the expectations from it.

A six author book from the experts of Adobe Fireworks, focusing on the CS4 release was welcome and appreciated internally. Urge you to give it a try and see if the book means a 2 star or a 5 star to you. Questions on Adobe Fireworks are welcome.

Dubai is a city which has risen from desert to spectacular buildings pushing architectural engineering to its limits. The map of world is being redesigned with man made islands like "The Palm" and the much more lavish and bigger projects like "The World" and "Palm-Jebel Ali".

I was on my maiden visit to United Arab Emirates, mainly Sharjah and Dubai for the Christmas 2008 and New Year 2009.

The country is beautiful and a tourists’ delight to explore the city life and also get to indulge in one of the best hotels offered globally. The country is quite liberal embracing people from all religions with open arms and allowing them to make this country their home.

I will post separate posts in the future about the trips and various places I visited in the long 3 weeks vacation I had there. In the meantime I managed to click some photos and send a few to Gulf News newspaper. This is the largest circulating newspaper in the region.

Below is the photos which I took on our way to Jebel Hafeet in Al Ain, a table top region popular for panoramic views and picnic spot for locals.

The photo is part of a gallery and the complete gallery can be viewed here. My photo in the gallery can be found at the 6/20 location.