The Aptly Named, Sam’s Blog

I sent the following out to my friends and family in the US and abroad, then decided to share it here too.

Dear friends,

Congratulations!

Hope you are well. What an awesome night. Liz and I are elated and the mood in Portland is ecstatic, as it is in several parts of the US and the globe. Everyone I know is happy. With the state of things, there are probably tough times ahead but this makes it so much better. In whatever way you may have contributed to this day, I thank you.

Cheers!

Sam

Obama FTW!

Engaged

New version of LazyEngine

I’ve never blogged about my birthday before, which is strange because I’ve had thirty-one of them. A few seconds ago I turned thirty-two.

Here are some personally memorable events since my last birthday:

• October - Made a trip to India for dad’s 60th birthday celebration.
• January - Got all four of my wisdom teeth extracted. Two had to be dug out. Was on a soup diet for a couple of weeks.
• February - Created the first version of the LazyEngine.
• March - Asked Liz to marry me. She said yes. Bought a Wii. The engagement was decidedly more memorable, but the Wii has been fun too
• April - Attended a concert by Zakir Hussain and met him.
• May - Went to the hot springs at Brietenbush. Sis and niece came over to visit. We all had a great time.
• June - Moved to a new place right next to the river in NW Portland. Liz spoke at Ignite Portland 3.
• July - Liz and I made a trip to Maine to visit her parents and to spend the 4th of July holiday with them. Later that month, I traveled to Porto, Portugal to attend a conference. Lovely little city. It was my first time in Europe.
• August - Liz and I had our Portland wedding. Our New Delhi wedding is in December. We went to Crater Lake for a weekend. Beautiful place. Our first time there. I traveled to San Francisco to showcase my work.
• September - I hacked together ff2tweet. Hope to refine it further in the future.

It was a wonderful year and I’m looking forward to the next one.

And lastly, here’s more about the number 32.

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There’s plenty going on.

My sister and her daughter came by to visit me from India last month. They were here for about a week and we all had a great time going around the Portland metro area and nearby to the gorge and coast. Here they are at Cannon Beach.

Around the end of May, my landlord and I had a disagreement on the terms for a lease renewal at my current place. So, I decided to move out and started looking for a new place. I found a nice two bedroom condo right by the river in NW Portland and will be moving there this weekend.

I got a paper accepted to a conference called SECRYPT. I will be going to present it at Porto, Portugal during the last few days of July. I just applied for a Visa and am looking forward to my first trip to Europe.

Ignite Portland 3 happened last night. This time Liz was a speaker. She spoke about her experiences of traveling to Afghanistan. She has a ton of stories and did an excellent job of squeezing a five minute rapid fire inspirational talk from them. There was a good variety of topics, just like at the last Ignite Portland, which made the evening quite entertaining. This time we went to the after party at Imbibe and had a great time with friends, old and new. You can see her slides and video right here. They go quite well together.

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And lastly for now, Liz and I decided to start a blog together to document our adventures. I kicked it off tonight with a basic theme and a first post about how we met. Check it out and subscribe for more stories in the future.

Trip to Porto, Portugal

On March 21st, I asked Liz to marry me and she said yes. She was elated that I asked her on a full-moon vernal equinox
We are both very happy and excited. I don’t know who all read my blog, so probably you’ve already seen me mention this on Flickr or Twitter or in an email. The wedding will be on December 10th, in New Delhi, India. We’re really looking forward to it.

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I just moved this blog here from it’s previous incarnation at http://samgrover.wordpress.com/. I’m quite impressed at the ease with which I was able to export the previous blog and import it here intact with the entries and the comments. My thanks to the folks behind Wordpress and Movable Type. Subscribe to the new feed!

That move was simple. Now I have to move to my new place in real space this weekend. Unfortunately, that will involve some more work! Portland has five quadrants. Yea, five. Portland is weird. I used to live in the Southwest and then I was in the Southeast for the last 18 months and now I will be moving into a small house in the Northeast. It will increase my daily commute, but overall it will be great! By the way, the fifth quadrant is North, in case you were wondering.

Improving the sound quality of iPod earphones

Early experience with a rangefinder camera

One year with a Voigtländer Bessa R2A rangefinder

It’s been a while since I updated this blog. About ten months. I’ve been an intern at Intel during that period and I recently joined as an employee.

Also, now it’s been one year since I moved to the SE Portland. I like it here. I have a hour-or-so long commute each way on TriMet, which isn’t terribly bad as it gives me time to read. However, public transit doesn’t work too well when there are more things to do in a day, especially in different parts of town. Even though my schedule at work is quite flexible, public transit can become a bottleneck. That occurs when I want to do more than go to work in the morning and return home in the evening. I thought that was sufficient excuse for me to go in for a car and placed an order for a new Mini Cooper S in April. I expect to have delivery within a month and am looking forward to that. It will be my first car.

My photography has been up and down during this time. In January, I sold off my Nikon D70S digital SLR and bought a Voigtländer Bessa R2A film rangefinder. After playing with cameras and photography for a couple of years I had come to realize just the kind of camera that would work best for me. The Bessa fit that bill quite well. It was also quite affordable as compared to another option. My previous experience with a rangefinder was definitely a motivating factor. I will write more about my experiences with this camera in a future post.

The way we were

Updated website and migrated blog

[Snacks] Warren Zevon, Dali Atomicus, a smoothie recipe…

I was on my short commute today when I got a text message from my father in India. It said, ” … All ok in Mumbai. You may not be able to contact them as lines jammed …”. He was referring to my sister and her family. I didn’t know what to make of this. I thought that perhaps the Sunday incident had flared up. I hadn’t read the news this morning, so I called him and he told me about the bomb blasts. Seven bombs went off on board various trains of the western lines within one hour (Mapped locations). For more info and details from the blogosphere, see Ultrabrown, Vantage Point, Sepia Mutiny, MumbaiHelp, and Metroblogging Mumbai. Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time this beloved city has been a target.

Just the other day, in conversation with friends, I was reminiscing my experiences with riding the trains in Bombay. I grew up there through most of the nineties, mid-teens to early twenties. Rush hour travel is the kind of thing you’d remember fondly only if you were nostalgic. The train cars are sometimes packed so tight, one could travel upright without either foot on the floor. 4.5 million people commute on the trains everyday. With that in mind, the horror of these events is inescapable. Emotions will run high, we’ll all mourn, but the people of Mumbai will not be terrorized.

In 1993, in the days after the thirteen serial bomb blasts in two hours, there were billboards proclaiming that the city got back on it’s feet within 24 hours. In memory of those who died, I hope that spirit prevails, that the aftermath is peaceful, and that the perpetrators are brought to justice.

Trip to Porto, Portugal

Meet Liz. She likes to travel. When she isn't traveling, she might be in Portland or Nepal. Right now she is in Asia where she is on assignment from Village Focus International. Through her words and photography she will bring to us a taste of the life in Cambodia as she documents the grassroots development efforts of village folk. She will put nuggets of it on her professional blog.

Her personal blog is Galactic Traveler. There you can read her story and experiences over the years. Many of the posts tell interesting stories about her time in Afghanistan working for the UN for the last two years. See the one about the changes in Afghan society, the one about the bombing outside her office, or the one about Kabul, which has a really cool photo.

She has a wonderful spirit of adventure and discovery, coupled with courage, resolve and that elusive human quality that makes instant friends of strangers. As one of those erstwhile strangers, I wish her the very best in her endeavours.

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My cousin sent me some scans of old photos. She is the little one in the pictures. These are from 1986/7 and were taken at our house in New Delhi. We all used to live as a joint family, ten to fifteen people spanning three generations in one house. Anyway, the photos brought back memories and I wrote about each one of them on flickr. See the photoset.

Photo mosaic made with fd’s Flickr Toys.

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