Synthetic Narrative

Let’s see. What happened in September? I got an HD video camera (Sony HDR-CX150) which is also pretty good at stills, and I got an adapter so I can use it with the IR filter and wide angle and fisheye converters from my Nikon CoolPix 950. I’ll be posting some videos once the post-processing and editing is done. Flickr accepts videos of up to 90s so there will be a lot of 90s clips!

I went to Chennai for the Open Source India conference where I was the moderator of a panel on Open Source Programming Languages and a panel member for Open Source Databases and Open Source Web Application Development Best Practices. I ditched the conference on Sunday afternoon to see a bit of Chennai. On Marina beach I met a lot of people whose lives were destroyed by the tsunami. I took my auto driver to lunch and then met his family — here are the neighbourhood kids hamming it up.

It’s hard to go on a photo walk in India and not get an entourage of curious kids who want their photo taken!

Look closely and you’ll see me and a big Buddha head. Well … not a Buddha head, some female deity, but then again, who is the Buddha not? Shiro’s is Bangalore’s premier source of awesome sushi and out-of-order order execution.

Now that I have an apartment and a bank account, I have some shopping to catch up on. This past Wednesday was a work holiday, so I took Thursday and Friday off to get a 5-day weekend. Shops were open on Wednesday so I got most of my housewares and random widgets. I had to get cushions, curtains, shower curtain rods (and shower curtains), and other such bits, but my quest was centred on an obscure item, a filter for my Videocon Multié 6000 semi-automatic washing machine.

This shopping trip was one of the most fun things I’ve done in Bangalore. I went to Commercial Street and found a fixture shop which had springy curtain rods. Their floor model was busted, so I waited for 10 minutes while they found another one. It looked good, though I wasn’t sure it was long enough, so I told them I wanted two and would return for them later. Then I asked about the filter, and they pointed me to a shop around the corner. The directions (as usual here) were a bit odd, but I was able to find it. They didn’t have it, but maybe a shop on the previous street did. Nope — but maybe a couple of blocks that way? After seeing many blocks of the maze I was ready to give up, at which point I tried one more shop. They said they had one, but it was in their workshop, and would I wait 15 minutes for it? I was not looking forward to sitting around in this shop until I noticed the kitten, a one-year-old black cat on a twine leash, and then two 30-day-old fuzzballs, and two older cats (including momma) curled up in the corners. I was happy that it actually took 20 minutes for the part to appear, because I got to play with kittens!!! I was so happy with this that I also bought an oven toaster (as opposed to a toaster oven). This item has no thermostat, only a timer, but has a mini-pizza sized tray and fulfills its primary function ­— making toast!

I’m sorry I didn’t take any photos of the kittens. I was too busy mauling them.

I then returned to the fixture shop to pick up my curtain rods, and popped down the street to get cushions and curtains. Then I took an autorickshaw to my apartment to drop it all off, then back across the city to SP Road, source of all things technological. It’s kind of like College Street in Toronto, except that it is a maze of one-lane roads, full of honking motorcycles, horse carts, and surrounded by three floors of shops.

I got everything I needed on SP Road: a wifi router (D-Link DIR-600), an Ethernet switch, two UPSes, a new Logitech Trackman, a set of speakers, and some extra cables. The router has 4 Ethernet ports on it, but I don’t want my dodgy Internet cable tracking under three doormats to get to my computers … hence the extra switch and UPS. The D-Link thingy lasted less than 3 days — at some point the wireless half of it just stopped working. I tried resetting it, firmware upgrades, firmware downgrades, reboots of my laptops, using Windows … no go. So today (Saturday) I returned to SP road and they gave me a replacement with no questions asked!

I had my camera out and wanted to capture a sense of how SP Road looks … which attracted the attention of some way-too-cute kids which you see in this photo. I even let them take some photos. In this one, I didn’t realize that they were imitating my silly expression until I got home!

Right next to SP Road is another area of plumbing hardware, submersible pumps, and the like. There are lots of street displays of mostly-sorted random rusty tools.

The submersible pump neighbourhood seems to be larger than SP Road, but it also has machine shops, and all sorts of plumbing. Bangalore seems to have a neighbourhood like that for everything — later on I walked through the tarpaulin district, the fibreglass roofing zone, the car stereo avenue, and the cow pissing promenade. Oh wait ­— that last thing is everywhere. I would find it very hard to ignore a cow pissing in front of me like some people seem to here.

These guys really wanted their picture taken.