Catching up...

There was a time when I had so much of time but so little to do. Nowadays, it seems like there is so much to do, but no time to really do them.

With so many information sources at our disposal nowadays, we are seriously suffering from information overload. Just sample all the items in my queue

Books
The Monk who sold his Ferrari - Robin Sharma
The Road Ahead - Bill Gates
An area of Darkness - VS Naipaul

I haven’t even started on all my digital media consumption. I just about manage to keep up with all the podcasts that I subscribe and listen to during my workout at the gym. But, I’ve got a backlog of around 50 episodes (over 7-8 hours worth), mainly from CNN-IBN, BBC’s Documentary Archive and NPR’s Science Friday.

I’ve got around 10-12 DVDs that I have yet to watch, including the Departed, Devil wears Prada, Dor, Kabul Express etc. There’s atleast 3-4 downloaded movies still. I’m 5-6 episodes behind on Lost Season 3. I just started watching a new series Heroes, and have to catch up with that too (it's currently at Episode 18 of Season 1). Luckily, I hardly watch much TV nowadays, or else I would be even further behind.

At work, in addition to the daily tasks, I'm reading a couple of technical books, Excel 2003 Bible to brush up on my Excel skills and also an introductory book on IBM mainframes so that I can make sense of what my team is telling me. I also started learning Visual C# by downloading the eval copy, but never got around to finishing that.

I wish we had summer holidays at work too, so that I can catch up…

LCD TV Cool features

One of the really cool features of the Panasonic 32LC500M LCD TV is the ability to record to flash based memory as MPEG4 files. I tried it yesterday with an old SD card that I had lying around. It can fit around 60 minutes on 128 MB, which is really neat. The downside is the poor resolution and the fact that it can only record from RF.
It’s utility as a DVR is fairly limited, but its atleast better than nothing while I wait for a proper DVR to come into the Indian market. Until then, the old Sony VCR will still have some work to do.

Government at work

The good people at BMP/BDA finally paved the road in front of our apartment last week. The problem is that these geniuses left out the intersection between our road and the road running perpendicular to it (19th Main road). Until that 60 feet of road is paved, the dream of a smooth drive from home to office still remains out of reach. Soon, hopefully...

LCD Televisions - Update

I had posted a while ago about LCD televisions and how bad they looked. I was quite categorical and called it crap. Well, last weekend, we were just going around Koramangala and happened to drive past the Panasonic brand shop. For a change, it was Vidya that suggested that we go and take a look at the Plasma televisions. They didn't have the Plasma high definition set, but he showed us the LCD sets, both in 32 and 26 inches. The demo made me realise that all LCD brands are not made the same. The earlier one that I had seen, Samsung was crap. On the Panasonic, the same Tata Sky broadcast looked wonderful. The salesman also played a demo DVD, upconverted to 720p and that looked mindblowing as most demo DVDs do.

Given my misgiving earlier, I didn't want to jump in without doing some more research. I came home, did some research on the web and on Sunday, we went an bought it. Its a Panasonic Viera 32LX500M. It cost around 70000, a little above the average price, but then its a slightly higher end model.

We've had it for 3 days now and I'm quite happy with the performance so far. The colours look fantastic. We've mainly used the 4:3 mode for watching TV, as the 16:9 mode makes everything look stretched. We don't have an upconverting DVD, but even standard DVD's look fantastic.

Exercise update

I have been extremely regular with the exercise ( I did 23 days in February), it does not seem to be helping on the weight loss front. Part of the reason could be my diet, the Hershey Kisses dark chocolate that Denish brought from the US. I also felt that my workout has become monotonous and need a bit of variety to maake it interesting again.I’ve made a few changes to the routine over the past week

- Instead of a 45 minute jog, I do 25-30 minutes on the exercise cycle, followed by 10-12 minutes of jogging at 9 kmph on the treadmill. This is followed by around 10 minutes of weight training and 30 situps
- I also came across HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training). The idea is that your body gets used to a certain routine and fat burning potential diminishes over time. With HIIT, you constantly vary the pace of exercise. Today, I tried it for the first time on the exercise cycle, 3 minutes of warmup, 1 minute of extremely high activity (as fast as I could go) followed by 2 minutes of cooldown. I wanted to do 8 rounds, but I couldn’t really do it beyond 7. I’ve read that HIIT is fairly hard on the body, so I intend to restrict it to once or twice a week

I’m thinking of the following schedule
- Day 1: cycling 25 minutes at constant pace + 15 minutes on the treadmill
- Day 2: running 30-35 minutes on the treadmill + weight training
- Day 3: HIIT workout for around 30 minutes + weight training
- Day 4: cycling at steady pace for 25-30 minutes
- Day 5: long run 7-8 km on the Ring Road
- Day 6: Brisk walk for 1 hour plus
- Day 7: rest