Last time playing a tourist in India

Kumarakom, Kerala, a set on Flickr.

We spent our last weekend in India in Kerala. We styed in Kumarakom Lake Esort, which I must say is one of the best resorts I've experienced. We did take a backwater trip by just three of us and went on short sunset cruise on Lake Vembanad, but otherwise stayed in the resort enjoying the facilities.

As I'm typing this, we're already in Finland preparing for Christmas - unortunately without snow. Merry Christmas to all who've kept reading!

All the picture post-processing was done on the iPad with Snapseed, even for the DSLR RAW pics. I'm seriously considering bypassing the PC alltogether.

A rare Finnish bat seen in India

A rare Finnish bat seen in India, a photo by Dopeyrizer on Flickr.

Once I get to Finland I really should figure out what's wrong with my back. It's bothered me on and off for almost 20 years, but nobody's been able to tell me what's wrong with it, exactly. I originally injured it inthe gym doing leg presses but nowadays it gets sore if I don't stretch my posterior chain often and hard enough.

I've provided the local kids plenty of amusement by hanging upside down in the nearby playground. I got these hooks a long time ago, but they've served me well over the years. I can really feel the lower back stretch a lot once I can get all the muscles to relax. I hang for a maximum of 60 secs at a time. I don't know how long I should be upside down to pass out, but want to stay far from the limit.

It's better to do these without too much stuff in your pockets (speaking from experience).

A humbling big number (for me)

My flickr photostream recently passed 1,500 uploaded photos and today it crossed the 50,000 picture views mark. Now I know full well, that in the grand scheme of all things Internet this is very, very little, but for this amateur photo snapper it's an amazing number. Thanks to all who've gone there to have a look and even a bigger one for those that took the trouble to write a comment.

Here are the stats in more detail:

Photos and Videos	39 672
Photostream	5 427
Sets	4 901
Total	50 000

Rajashtan

We did a 6-day mini-tour of Rajashtan last week. It was more "mini" than it was a "tour", actually, as we flew to Jodhpur via and only spent time there and Jaisalmer. Rajashtan would've offered a lot more in Jaipur, Udaipur and so on but this way we didn't have to spend the entire time sitting in the car driving miles and miles under the scorching sun. Two words about the weather: quite hot. It was sunny all the time with not a lot of humidity. The place is inhospitably hot in the summertime but this was pretty close to optimum.

We flew uneventfully (lucky!) with Air India via Delhi and had our driver from Car Rental Rajashtan meet us at the airport. We had booked a car with English-speaking driver for 6 days and everything went as planned. Well, almost at least. To say the driver was fluent in English would've been quite an overstatement, but we understood each other enough. We also booked a guide through the same company for our first and only full day in Jodhpur and Mr. Asfrah Khan who took us around for a day was a real find. If you want no-nonsense info about Rajashtan and Jodhpur do give the good man a call, his number is +919829022090. In true Indian style he did get his pay hiked with commission by taking us to Maharani Art Exporters. They told us an unbelivable story, the same show they put on everyone else, and while we didn't really believe in the pitch we did buy some fabrics for the home. Always makes you wonder if the whole business model is based on lying - in the age of easily accessible information their days must be numbered.

The main part of our tour was to see the Merangarh Fort and it's definitely worth the visit. Not only are the views to Jodhpur fantastic, especially to the old city with it's blue buildings, but the inside of the fort is a real sight to behold as well. The grandeur always makes me cringe a little as everyone knows the coffers of the successive maharajas were filled by taxing the poor to near starvation. We also visited the Umaid Bhawan Palace built by a recent maharaja, which was nowhere near as a nice - while the palace is very nice from the outside the museun only covers a minuscule portion with the rest begin occupied by the last maharaja's living quarters and a Taj-run hotel. We stayed in a Taj hotel as well, but a more traditional setting in the city than the pompous palace.

From Jodhpur we drove to Jaisalmer. We had an idea of staying a night in the desert in a tent camp, but booked into the wrong resort. We stopped for a coffee in Manvar but had pre-booked to spend the night in Mirvana resort. My first impression when arriving to Mirvana was to turn back to Manvar and in retrospect that's we should've done, pre-booked or not. Don't make the same mistake if your trip to Rajashtan is still on the to-do list...

We survived the night however and completed the trip to Jaisalmer the next day with a short stop in Pokaran to see yet another fort. Forgettable. We made our way from there to Jaisalmer fort, which is definitely is not. The setting is great like in Jodhpur, but instead of a museum the fort is an integral part of the city with houses, shops, temples and restaurants. Tourism hasn't been kind to the original way of life here with more and more buildings turned to serve the influx of visitors selling handicrafts, serving Italian food and providing comfortable accommodation. We decided not to stay in the old fortress but lived in a modern replica instead; Suryagarh is a five star luxury sandstone hotel some 10km from the city centre. Despite being almost brand new you can easily forget that with so much detail resemblance visible everywhere to the great palaces we had just been around in. We also toured the Jaisalmer fort museum, which is a far cry from the carefully arranged display we saw in Jodhpur: it's a cramped setting made worse by the hordes of visitors pushing and yelling their way around it and the artifacts on display are not on the same level of wonder either. So after two nights in Jodhpur, one night in-between and two nights in Jaisalmer it was time to come back. Doing it back to back to back meant a 13-hour journey with car and plane - uneventful again but tiring at least for my back. Saw this nice sunset though:

All the pictures are available in here; click this is you want a slide show instead.

Another cool time-wasting activity on the iPad

A facebook friend from Finland (or FFFF for short) introduced me to Snapseed app on the iPad. I've fiddled with similar quickie photo retouch applications in the past on many platforms, but they always had the same problem: you would have a few cool filters and lots of ones that just ruined the pictures in an interesting way. Thus after a while all the images would come out looking almost exactly the same. The more flexible option was to shell out hundreds of $$$ for Photoshop and then hundreds of hours learning how to achieve something that looks cool. Snapseed seems to find the happy medium - there's a finite amount of filters but each come with enough configurability to fit the filter to the image in a natural way. One can also combine the filters like layers on Photoshop for even greater variation.

The number one differentiator to all the other photo retouch apps I've tried as well as to Photohop is the UI. It's just extremely natural and things that take a lot effort on a PC with mouse can be done in seconds with the multi-touch UI on the iPad. You can always quickly compare the filtered image to the original (or product of the previously applied change) and there's never a feeling of losing the image in the process - you can tweak a filter a lot and still decide to go back and not apply it. All changes are visible on the image in real time and the app is really quick on the iPad 2. There's a limit of 16MP on the image size, which should definitely be sufficient. I've played around with the app with images I've already resized for web consumption, but Snapseed is turning out to be such a powerful tool I might start to transfer full-resolution versions to it. Well, almost full as my DSLR (550D) has a 18MP sensor.

The big problem with iPad is Apple's walled garden and how difficult it makes to move files to and from the iPad. I flatly refuse to install iTunes to my Windows machine due to how craptastically bad the software has always been. The only Mac in the family is with my wife so that's not an easy solution either. Luckily Snapseed supports iCloud and there's a Windows 7 iCloud client available from Apple. The client is pretty simple to use - I just copy images to the designated upload directory when I want to make them available for Snapseed and the finalised pictures from Snapseed arrive another - firewalls permitting. Snapseed is also able to publish pictures in flickr and facebook directly; I use the former.

Finally, Photoshop CS5 costs $699, whereas Snapseed is $4.99. Notice the decimal point. One's an investment, the other an impulse buy.

I've only just begun to learn this fantastic tool, or play thing, but I'm definitely hooked already. You can follow the results here.

Dasara festival

Dasara festival, a set on Flickr.

Took our fully blinged Innova to northern Whitefield for the local Dasara festivities. Reminds me of 1st of May festivities in Finland - colorful decorations, lots of loud noises and (so I heard) boozing the night away. Slide show link.