Racquetball

Well summers are now over and the temperature is reducing everyday, still we can have few outdoor activities until october end. But most of my evening activities like Sand volleyball, Tennis and Soccer are coming to an end for this year. We still play soccer on Tuesday but we can see lack of interest due to changing weather.
So I need to plan for winters, last winters I spent a lot of time in understanding the stock market and analysing whats good and whats bad and making some investments but this time I would prefer to do something more physical then mental. So I chose Racquetball, after having a good hold over volleyball, I think its now time to learn one more new game. For those who dont know what racquetball is, its something similar to squash thats played in a closed room and you can have 2 or 4 players playing the game. Its a high energy game requires a lot of thinking and you need to be very quick. I have a friend of mine who plays national level championships in US and he helped me with information to understand the game. I use to think its similar to tennis but its way different, in tennis you get a lot of time to think, move and plan your game but in racquetball you need to be quick both physically and mentally, you would run a lot and would sweat even if you play for 30 mins (unlike tennis). In that small room you have so little to do to beat your opponent and you still have so much to do to save yourself from a dropped ball. I am learning, with everygame I try some new shots, some new serves am trying to do some multitasking by moving with ball and still planning the next shot so that opponent cannot pick the ball.
I have 2-3 friends who play racquetball and am planning to play with them regularly atleast 3 days a week, play volleyball on wednesday and spend rest of the time with Ishaan.

Communication Technology

Communication ... hmm its way different now, it has changed a lot in last 10 yrs. I remember when I was a kid we use to book a trunk call to speak to my nani once in a month or so and I think it was expensive to do that. I use to think why cant I have this facility on my phone why should I call someone and wait for him to connect me. So here was the answer STD facility which we took on our landline phone and use to lock it, I remember I was the one to dig out the process to place a STD lock on phone.
But still sometimes we missed calls, or were not able to call our relatives or friends because we were not at home. To resolve this problem there came the Cellphone revolution. When I was doing my MBA, only one of my classmate had a mobile phone and most of the communication was through missed calls because an incoming call was like Rs 5/min and an outgoing call was Rs 12/min. We use to laugh at him why he is carrying the mobile phone if he does not wants to pick our calls. We never thought at that time that mobilephones will be so much part of our life, like TV, electricity and cooking gas are. I always thought mobilephones are evil because that will make you available for 24 Hrs which is not good so I wont ever buy something like that.

After I worked for about 2 yrs, in yr 2002 everyone around me had a mobile phone, moreover it was easy for my family to contact me if I had a mobile and also the call price had gone down still incoming calls were charged by the service providers .. So I bought my first handset motorola (dont remember the model number) which looked like a cordless phone and was very heavy it had no other feature but to get incoming calls and outgoing calls (see the picture).

At every stage when I changed my mobile phone between Motorola and now, I was reluctant to club any other functionality with mobile phone. I always thought mobile phone should always be used for calls and nothing else. If we want to take pictures we should use camera and not mobile phone, if you want to surf internet we should use laptop and not mobile phone. But now last week when I bought iPhone, things are totally different it has everything that you can think of for communication, it has high resolution camera, it has video camera, internet surfing, games plus thousands of application which you can have to think how can you use them. It has totally changed the way to communicate, and it has the quality assurance from the best company Apple.
Now because I have started using all in one instrument, after doing some brainstorming I found iPhones dont really have everything that they could have, they are missing few very basic features.

1. Multitasking - You cannot have one application open on iPhone and use the second application as well, like using facebook application while the radio application is on ... thats not possible. I am wondering didn't apple think of this basic feature which is present in all laptops and computers.
2. Video calling - How good it would be to have a webcam in the iPhone where you can call your friend who has other iPhone and do video conferencing or call you family on Skype and show them fall colors while you are at New Hampshire in the month of October. I dont think it was a difficult thing to do for iPhone if Nokia N97 and a dozen of other phones in market can do that iPhone can do it easily.
3. Interface with TV- A good to have interface where we can connect iPhone to TV to watch a you tube video.
Similar to my previous requirements of STD or Cellphones even these requirements will be catered and am sure Steve Jobs would be aware of these limitations with iPhone, either its too tough to do and maintain the quality or Apple wants to limit the features in each release so that they can keep selling iPhone for long time with some upgrades in every release.
I am still rethinking if I should keep this iPhone or wait for the next release which might have all these features and so many others which might give me a true all in one instrument.

Summer 2009

Its been a long time since I wrote, was too busy with going around places this summer. Every weekend we had some or other plan. I think am done with east coast and mid atlantic region now, I have seen and enjoyed everything that could and its time now to move out of this region for my trips.
This summer started with an amazing trip to Miami and Bahamas and we then had lot of small trips in northern PA, upstate NY and Norther NJ region. I also had to travel a lot to washington for my new house. We did lot of adventure activities like camping, rafting, mountain biking, hiking etc and got close to quite a few good friends. Also got a very good volleyball group where we played 2 seasons at King of Prussia and finally won the championship. I think I was fairly regular at my sand volleyball on Monday nights. Although this summer weather was not as good as it use to be, we had a lot of wet days but all in all I enjoyed a lot this year.
I missed a chance to go to Canada in first week of August, just bcos I was too lazy to apply for Canada visa, I regret I should have done that trip as well.

My list of things to do and places to visit is still too long and am not sure how many yrs will it take me to visit all these places. This yr I have more than 3 weeks of vacation left but am not able to decide where should I spend these 3 weeks I have few options like Dubai, East Asia, Spain or Europe, South America or Vegas and California. The last thing I would do is spend this time in India but lets see.