Entries from April 2007 ↓

Mumbai is abuzz with drives to save electricity. We have faced more energy problems in the last one year, than last five years put together. I studied energy crisis, green house effect, global warming etcetra in school. Was scared to see The Day After Tomorrow and An Inconvenient Truth (of Al Gore).

Mumbai drains a lot of electricity. Reports say that Mumbai’s demand strains the supply. High levels are meeting to discuss the issues - to decide if the city will face more load shedding or not, and the supply to other parts of the state. And earlier government had said Mumbai will not face problems.

Amongst all this, Mumbaikars are getting more aware of the problems. Billboards are sporting “I will (save electricity), Mumbai will” ads. We are putting of lights when not needed, and we are switching off the television after watching.

Save Power! I will, Mumbai will!

Do you face difficulties matching colors? Want to try out color combinations easily? Two interesting tools allow you to do this easily. ColorBlender and Adobe Kuler. Both are fantastic, what I like is simply the visual of colors matching automatically and showing up side by side! You can also customize colors, save for later use and more! Worth using!

Thanks to Shuklendu for the lead!

Taking on from the lead from Kapil, and my initial post, I am set for a full day of photography in Mumbai on the coming Sunday. A few friends have already shown interest including Kapil, Harsh and Kartik. Would be great if more people can join.

Here’s the idea:

Amateur / Professional photographers take a day tour of Mumbai, clicking shots based on 3 distinct themes. Everyone submits 12 best shots from the ones they have taken, and we pool them together. All participants may meet at the end of the day and share their photos and stories.

What do you get?

• Privilege of participating in first such event in Mumbai
• An opportunity to experience Mumbai
• A reason to freak out

So what are the themes?

• Roadside Mumbai
• Mumbai Rush
• Tourists in Mumbai

Drop me an email if you would like to join. The email is nirav (at) mehtanirav . com

Let us know your comments in any case!

The number of unread blog entries was rising high, and I took some time to look at what happened in the last two weeks on my favorite blogs. Started reading, and I have so much to share going through just a few posts. Here are some interesting reads.

• Sujeet wishes a very happy birthday to spam! Yes, thirteen years ago, the first spam post appeared.
• Sujeet also has a good collection of fools day news - including Skype for Cows and Sony-Ericsson’s new phone robot.
• Kapil posted a link to Getting more variety in your travel shots from the Digital Photography School.
• My wanderings then took me off to Seth Godin’s posts and found an interesting one! New Order Business School offers MBA programs suitable for entrepreneurs. Complete in a year, only about a fortnight worth of classes and achieving on top three reasons to do an MBA! Cutting out the crazy ideas, it’s still important to understand the state of MBA education. I am considering doing one
• This led me to Personal MBA, an inexpensive way to get all the learning that you may get in MBA! The list of books is superb and I would go on and read all!
• Rajesh sent a link about Yahoo! opening up their mail APIs. Interesting development. Are you the creative one who’s coming up with a brilliant idea to use them?

And other than that, Magneteers rocked my terrace on 10th April. We celebrated my engagement with Nikita with an energetic DJ party! Pictures are up!

I have been taking a lot of pictures lately, and one problem I found difficult to deal with was the noise in them. Some of the images come up very clean, but some - especially the ones taken in low light and high ISO are very noisy. I set out to find out how to reduce noise from the images. After a bit of reading and some looking around, I figured there is no simple way to do this for me.

There are some Photoshop plugins and actions available to reduce noise. A lot of tips on how to do this and other techniques of getting better photographs. I couldn’t find something simple that I can do on my Mac! Something that could even integrate with iPhoto.

So for now, I am sticking with better lighting and normal ISO rates! If you expected some nifty tricks on the topic, sorry for letting you down!