That’s what these leaves seemed to be singing to the sun. This was taken near a cluster of bamboo at the Ranganathittu Bird Sanctuary at Srirangapatna. The bamboos make a particularly creaky noise; which is surprisingly soothing, as they collectively sway in the breeze. The next time I go there, I should try and record it. This picture seems incomplete without it.
I was drawn to this old man at Srirangapatna by the florescent-pink tilak on his forehead. I vaguely remember paying him for this portrait, but it could be a false memory.
I am glad that I have a category called “Weird and Wonderful” under which I file photos, because for pictures like these, it comes in handy. This shot was taken at Chickpet in Bangalore. This quaint building houses a camera shop where you can buy everything – from a B&W film roll to the latest and greatest gear for your camera (and indeed the camera itself).
Sticking a colorfully painted statue onto a wall of a building might not quite agree with my taste but I’d prefer it over the monotony of glass and concrete that we see these days in Bangalore any day.
p.s. The caption etched into the concrete in the first picture reads: Shri Rajrajeshwara Sahasrarjuna.
Ok, I realize that not all is well with these shots. I was merely experimenting with placing the camera in the midst of the pigeons while they gobbled up our French fries. It did turn out to be a somewhat expensive mistake. Leaving the camera on the gravel dented the rim of my lens, causing its status to fall from “in mint condition” to a relatively less desirable “excellent”. It fetched a few £s less than it would have in the second-hand lens market.
It’s been close to 9 months since I picked my 24″ iMac. Despite the initial scare (yes it was bizarre!), things have turned out to be great. Being a dyed-in-the-wool Windows user, I did tinker with Windows Vista inside Bootcamp but there was something alluring about Leopard (aka Mac OS 10.5) which kept pulling me back. Having mastered the OS for daily tasks, and having overcome the muscle memory of 8+12+ (I am older than I thought) years of Windows usage (from Windows 3.11 all the way to Windows Vista), I decided to tackle the next frontier – developing for the Mac.
After several attempts at using cross-platform frameworks (wxWidgets, Mono, GTK) with unsatisfactory results, I started exploring the native Mac development platform. The biggest hurdle here was Objective C. For someone who is coming from a C#/VB.NET/C++ background (with good exposure to PERL/Javascript thrown in), the syntax stumped me. Then I came across Aaron Hillegass’s brilliant Cocoa Programming book some 3 weeks ago, and it has been a smooth sailing ever since. It reminds me so much of my days in college spent learning Win32 and MFC programming.
Today I came up with a small app which I thought I’d share. This builds on the SpeakLine example presented in Aaron’s book. Instead of using a Text Field to take a string from the user, it uses the sample text which comes with each voice profile on the Mac, and says it when you click the Speak button:
The sample text for a lot of voices is hilarious (just like the voices themselves). It is one of the many small things that add up towards making Macs a fun, playful platform.