India Trip 2.0
Posted : December 28, 2007 at 12:42 pm [America/Los_Angeles]
We are leaving for India in a few days. As some of you may already know, I have an obsessive desire to stay connected to my family and friends. In other words, I like being online. The last time I went to India (India Trip 1.0) in 2003, I was a single guy and my claim to being prepared to being online was an an IBM Thinkpad laptop with an internal Wi-Fi card. I was also armed with Cisco’s DES card so that I could get inside of Cisco, if I could go online. On the mobile front, I am sure I had a cellphone, but I don’t think I had much of a need to carry it with me as enabling International Roaming was way beyond my means, or at least, that’s what I thought. I do remember VPNing into Cisco from the Singapore airport and a couple of times from a Rukku Cafe in Noida. That is, before I got my parents hooked up onto the Internet and was free to use IMs and software based VoIP services like Skype. Google Talk was not around at that time. In essence, that’s the extent to which I was “connected” during that trip. I did not blog, there was no Facebook or Twitter in those days. I did have a Flickr account, but I did not try doing much with it while I was in India as the upload speeds were doubtful. One more thing: I do remember making one call to US using my dad’s prepaid phone and being impressed by the sheer simplicity of pulling it off. That was all.
In a few days, India Trip 2.0 starts. This time around, I am a happily married man, have a beautiful baby and the world is far more flatter than it was back in 2003. The three widgets above will be my way of keeping in touch with my online readers. The first two widgets will show pictures that I upload to Flickr (one in a non-slideshow mode and the other in a slideshow mode) using my iPhone. And since I have signed us up for the unlimited data plan for iPhone, I am hoping this widget will show one picture a day (if not more) of our stay in India. The second widget will be a brief running commentary of our trip, in case anyone cares, thanks to the Twitter microblogging service.
If the widgets above don’t work. India Trip 2.0 did not go as well as we thought. And in that case, do not despair. As there is always going to be an India Trip 3.0.
- Anand
Category: Personal |
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