Sleepless in Seattle

Ever since I crossed over the Atlantic and moved to US, my friends back in Europe have always been complaining that I am not pursuing my photographic hobby any further. Well, while in Italy my work routine was pretty different as compared to here and hence I could manage to create time to travel around the continent. While traveling around Europe you often end up taking some great photographs. Thats how I had managed to build a good photo gallery on Flickr. In Seattle, my work does not give me much leeway to exercise my creative cells and my traveling is now reduced to just between home and office.

With a sizeable Indian community in and around Seattle, there are plenty of activities happening on weekends. Cricket is one such activity which is scheduled on my weekends. There are couple of leagues for recreational and professional enthusiasts. So the hiking and climbing I used to do on weekends (in Trento) until last year has now been replaced with cricket. On some occassions I do get a chance to carry my camera around and click some shots of the city. So, all my freundeskreis aus Deutschland und giro di amici dal'Italia, please subscribe to my photo feeds on Flickr.

The new iGoogle interface

The new iGoogle interface is such a pleasant change. The new version of the optimized home page experience from Google is available only to developers initially and is being made available to select users in a phased roll out approach. After the announcement last month, I was hoping this month they would expand the selected customer list to reach my ID ;) But the wait seems to be a little longer than expected. The new interface gives a very at-home feeling for all the plugged in gadgets. An instant view management for Gmail and Google Reader would be a big relief for me. So each time I open my browser, I hope my iGoogle page has been optimized :)

Gmail Contacts issue

Gmail has decided to drop off its feature of adding contact names automatically when you compose your mails. Earlier, whenever you wrote a mail to or recieved a mail from someone, that mail Id was automatically added to your contact list. And names from this list would be suggested to you automatically in the address bar. Honestly speaking, I was so used to this feature that I rarely remembered any mail Ids of my contacts. In the new version of its contact manager, Gmail allows a list for holding the "Suggested Contacts" names along with the "My Contacts" address list. For some wierd reason, I havent still had access to this new feature of Gmail Contact manager, but I hope I get back that auto-adding feature soon, such that I can create my list of frequently mailed contacts once and later not worry about remembering their mail IDs