My fav. shots of 2009

Here are some of my own favorite shots taken in year 2009.


Had a great snow season early this year in Dublin.


Taken during several dublin walks with my camera :)


Ireland winning the Grand Slam - 6 nations Rugby.


Got a new macbook pro.


Graffiti by Maser


Southern Californian Sunset


Beautiful moment - crashing waves on the sunset


Amazing Sunset Colors


Disney Concert Hall - LA


20 sec of LA


Japanese Kite Flying festival with friends


Almost 10,000 ft - great hike


Yosemite welcomes with a storm, it was my first ever drive in mountains + storm didn't help :) but it was amazing


This place is just beyond words, calm, peaceful, beautiful, scenic, river flowing sound, the granite drops .......


at Kings Canyon


Pillars of our world - Redwood Trees


feeling of how vast landscape in CA is


as I left it in my mind last time


Nostalgic


To my wonderful friends in Dublin, THANKS.

Nostalgic Empire

Nostalgic Empire, originally uploaded by Mohan S.

Applications crashing in Snow Leopard

I upgraded to Snow Leopard last week and overall it was a smooth transition, but it also had the biggest problem (at-least for me). Firefox - the most used application on my Macbook Pro CRASHED, like every time I start it - it crashes n crashes. It was extremely annoying. And 1Password was not working in Safari, so I decided to move a close second of Firefox, i.e. Flock which worked much better than Firefox but crashed occasionally, until today when it refused to start up too.

Mozilla and Apple forums have few threads complaining of such but there was not a clear answer in any of those, so the problem persisted for me until I found this "Snow Leopard Crashes and Problems" and problem is with the Fonts in Snow Leopard. After the upgrade (esp. if you have extra fonts installed), few of them are corrupted.

So I followed the simple step of reseting the font caches first (as mentioned on the page). Type in terminal "atsutil databases -removeUser" and restart your system so OSX can rebuild the fonts. And after the restart - check the Font Book and remove duplicate fonts or validate fonts, if any. In my system, even after the restart, some fonts were not working - so I revalidated them.

And this seems to resolve the problem of firefox crashing due to font issues (not sure of other applications but some of them are caused by fonts)

Am happy Firefox is working smoothly now and hopefully it will continue to do so :)

Real sunset sky

Real sunset sky, originally uploaded by Mohan S.

@Laguna Beach, Orange County, California

Photo Meetup at Dana Point, OC

DMV thoughts from West Coast

• Went to DMV last week, it was not as bad as they show in TV/movies :)
  
• Glad I went by appointment thou, as the line was just too long.
• Being CA and home of silicon valley and all other computer stuff, you would expect it to be lot more computerized and all. But the biggest surprise (atleast to me) was the paper-based written exam. Easier for me :) but still paper-based, who does that.
  
• Best part - they corrected the exam in 10 sec. (39 questions) - they had a stencil of correct answers to do it.
• And here is my CA license, as I already had a NJ license (expired), no behind the wheel exam

I need to stay in one country long enough to have a permanent long term license. Gotta do this license thing every time I move. Hopefully will get full Irish license when I get back to Dublin.

Thoughts from West Coast

highlights:

• some wonderful tea flavors at Cha for Tea (still ginger black tea with milk is still best) but its nice to have cold tea flavors in this weather
• speaking of weather - its 35 C .. living in such hot weather in quite a loooong time
• speaking of weather again - nobody talks about how good the weather is here, sun is always shining; its also nice how back in Dublin, life sort revolves around good weather
• got a credit card (of 100 USD limit :D) for building US credit history or thats what the bank lady told is a good idea
  
• likes the vegetation here (apart from the palm tress), feels like back home in India
• Indian food is def. way better
• there are lots n lots of Asians in Irvine .. almost everyone :)
• almost impossible to do anything without a car .. ok i already knew that but thought might be different

Best Landscapes seen from Airplane

On the way from NY to LA, somewhere over Colorado, Utah and Nevada. I haven't looked out of a plane window so much. It was amazing watching all this landscape from high above.








Didn't take pictures of Great Lakes in Michigan, but they were HUGE, for once i thought which ocean are we crossing now. Amazing.

400th Post from Long Beach, LA - Highlights Only

I am moving to Irvine for few months for summer n fall for work project. Thou' am already in LA and no, I didn't get the tickets for the MJ memorial, heard on news, some of them are going for 150,000 $$$ on ebay.

Here are some highlights of the trip already:

• Watched LIVE car chase
  
• Local news about animals escaped from somewhere to somewhere
  
• Mountain Dew
• Cheap Sushi
• Meal portions are huge
• Normal is just not normal anymore
• 5 lane (10 total) highways
• Who said there is car recession - all those fancy brand new GM's!!
• After watching all that Daily Show, had to see Fox News (wow)
• Pics of awesome landscape (prev. post)
• Its actually Hot
• Using AC to keep room temp at 21 C .. ??
• Feels different than east coast

Ah, best part (not exactly after 2.5 months delay but still), no immigration checks in US (only for flights from Dublin/Shannon, Ireland, all stuff done in Dublin airport) .. was good.

Cold Shower

Best Summer in Dublin. Sun is shining :)

Mo's Rainy Sunday Receipe

Red Kidney Beans (Rajma) Curry

Grind to a paste - 1 Onion, 2 Chillis (I added one red and one green so as its not very spicy), big chunk of ginger, 4 Garlic cloves and mint leaves. Add oil to a pan, before you add the paste, add cumin, and coriander seeds until light brown. And then add the paste. Fresh spices smell awesome :)

Keep stirring until the oil separates from the spice paste as seen below

Cut 2 Tomatoes, 4-5 potatoes and 1 can of kidney beans

Before you add tomatoes, add little bit of garam masala (mix of indian spicies), salt to taste and pinch of Turmeric.
And then add tomatoes and stirr until they mix properly

Seen like this

Add Potatoes and Kidney Beans and Add 2 Cups of Water and cook (slow heat) until potatoes are cooked

Trust me :) .. u won't be disappointed if you like Indian food

Dessert (am no expert in this now) - Most times, they end in disaster. So this time I went for something very very simple (thanks to lil for suggesting it)

Got 1 sliced mango with skin, plain yoghurt, saffron and tiny bit of milk to mix saffron

Grill the mango with brown sugar or plain sugar sprinkled on top

Mix the saffron in warm milk and add to yoghurt and mix throughly

Final product: Topped with pecan

Graffiti Selective Coloring

Dublin in Selective Colors, originally uploaded by Mohan S.

I took this shot near upper camden street, graffiti art done by Maser. You can see the original one here. I decided to try selective coloring on it. Have seen some real good ones on flickr. Trying to avoid photoshop :), I decided to do it in Adobe Lightroom (which btw is a great photo management software, only if it could be free). But after several tries, it didn't seem to work properly. Its very easy to start with, go to Brush tool, make it BnW and then erase the parts you wanna do selective coloring on. But somewhere midway, it seemed to just crash, not exactly crash crash but the eraser tool just won't work right, also cudn't switch between eraser n brush to correct minor details. After 4/5 half tries, time to go back to photoshop. Also was thinking Lightroom might be easier on memory n stuff doing simple selective coloring but no, it took ages n wait'd for seconds (n I'm using latest macbook pro). Photoshop - to my surprise :), lot more easier for selective coloring than lightroom. Import the image, do a background copy of the original layer. From adjustments, selective BnW and then make a mask layer on top of it. Now on the mask layer, just use the brush tool, to erase the parts you are interested in. You can zoom in and do minor details. If an error, switch to black background and erase to get the original parts back. This is important if you want to get the colors right precisely. It was like doing graffiti on original graffiti. The resulting image looked nicer, its bit rought on edges if you see the bigger size of it on flickr, but otherwise looks nice :). Also I only did it using mac trackpad, no mouse.

Mo's Mint Thai Red Curry

Coconut Milk + Mo's Special Mint Paste

Saute Vegetables + Chicken

Final Product with Yop

5000 years ago

Knouth, Newgrange in Co. Meath, one of the worlds most ancient, better called prehistoric, places.