After being undecided for nearly one and a half year, I finally decided that it is time for me to buy a car. One thing I was sure about is that the only car I want is Maruti Zen VX. And another thing I was sure about was that I would be buying a used car in fairly good condition. Used car because of several reasons:
I want a small car for a short period, say around 2 years or so by when it will be time to upgrade. A new car better be kept for a long time to get complete returns from it.
If I buy a new car, there is a bigger danger of falling in love with it and hence may not want to part with it for an upgrade.
Will have to take good care of a new car. Tough job! And I don't want to loose several days of sleep brooding on a small dent that happened due to no fault of mine.
The Hunt
And there I started my hunt for the used car. The first choice to look around was of-course with people I know. But it is not easy to find some one whom you may know who would want to sell the car that you are looking for at the time you want to buy, and would meet all your requirements. Besides, my specifications of the car I am looking for are so stringent that a very narrow band of cars actually pass thru the screen test. And then, just to broaden my chances, and to get a hang of the market, I decided to go ahead and talk to the dreaded middle men. First thing that shocked me was the prices. Most of these people talk as if they got the car only yesterday from showroom and they are doing me a favour by selling it to me. And the condition of a car that has been passed into a middle man's hand are always suspicious(like I found out with one of them).
The Confusion
Couple of days of tiring lookouts all over the city and hearing exhorbitant numbers that can psyche astronomers, I began wondering if a new car is a better bet. But then, if I go for a new car, how will I upgrade to a 'Acccent Viva' or an 'Opel Swing' or if I hit a jackpot, a 'Tata Safarai' 2 years down the line? I know new cars depreciate real faster than old cars. And by selling this new car, I would probably not get enough money even to make down payment for my upgrade. So buying a new one is out of question. The next thing to to think about is making a compromise with price and quality and simply buying from best of the available deals. Nope, I am not sure that is right thing to do. I might as well wait a bit and see what's going to happen. The other option is to go for an Accent or a Ford Ikon right away so that there is no immediate upgrade required. But somehow I am scared to go for a big car as my first car. I would rather feel comfy about owning a car first and then plan a little big. So that brings me back to square one again.
The Conclusion
Right now, I am digging classifieds so that I can talk to owners directly and find a decent deal, and trying to be patient. Do you know any one in Bangalore who is selling? :-)
More MetaBlog. More on problems of living with free service
Like I had feared, there are still lot of people who are using Netscape 4.7x browsers in this world. I can't blame them, even I was using it for long time after it was assumed to be extinct. My site uses iframe tags to retrieve images stored in Yahoo geocities. Since they don't allow linking to images from external sites(blogspot), I had to wrap the images in html pages and embed those pages here using iframe tags. But unfortunately Netscape 4.7 series browsers do not support iframes and all you see is a blank line instead of an image. Today, I got a mail from this new visitor complaining that he is not able to see any of the images in his Netscape browser. All that I could do was to give this person the URLs where the images are stored so that they can be viewed directly without any problem of iframes. I did not dare to recommend using IE(like many fools had recommended me earlier only to annoy me furthur), I even suspect the visitor uses a Unix box.
For the first time ever(at least as far as I know) my geocities home page reached a data retrieval rate that exceeded the limits set by them. Hence, when I loaded my posts to start writing this post, in the place of all images here, I saw an error saying "Yahoo! Geocities: The web site you are trying to access has exceeded its allocated data transfer. Visit our help area for more information". Indeed, I did visit the help pages to see more details, since I did not know so far that they had an upper limit set. They seemed to talk a lot of nonsense on the page but never mention what is the maximum transfer rate permitted. Fortunately, the downtime is limited to just one hour and not a day as I had suspected initially. It is likely that someone was looking at all the images in my site, and it is really easy to cross the transfer rate with so many fat images stored in the site. But still, somehow I am still not able to convinve myself to move to a paid hosting service.
Two weeks back we went around looking for a place to take pictures. Dave and Sid and some more people decided that we go to Hiryur lake area on the suburbs of Bangalore. The plan was to shoot birds in the lake and also look out for sunset and try for some good landscape pictures.
As we headed for the lake, the sky was beginning to get cloudy. It also drizzled a bit on the way and Sid who was slow on the road was caught by the rain. So taking pictures of sunset was out of question but we continued to our rendezvous anyway. Like ever, birds were very elusive. There were a plenty of them at the lake but were too apprehensive about our presence there. They ensured that they stay far enough from us that my 300mm lens can no way focus any of them.
After struggling around for a bit, Dave decided to look for better places and headed towards the green nearby. And that's where he found this amazing place. There was a huge colony of butterflies sitting in the trees nearby. They were so much in numbers that you could probably mistake them for leaves on the tree. That was a real bonanza for us, having never before seen so many of them at the one place. We did face some problems shooting them because it was already getting late and there was not much light. We anyway went ahead and shot some pics and were hoping that they come well. At the end, we got some pics which would just be proof of what we saw and nothing more than that. Most of the pics would easily show how amateur we were. Here is one of them, probably the best that I was able to get.
I was looking back at my archives a couple of days back. The change in the frequncy of postings really surprised myself. There were just 3 posts in the whole month of June, and in July, the number had shot up to 17. Goody, that is close to one post for every weekday. But I have written a very little even in July and pictures have made up most of the content. I am glad it is so. It has been a long dream to make this a photoblog, I feel it is still not well qualified to be declared as one yet, but hopefully, I am getting there. Yesterday, I posted last of the pictures that I had with me and was wondering what next. But fortunately, I was able to finish burning one more roll and that gives me few more days of pictures to post. The next job is to compile the pictures into albums on the web, something that needs a bit of time and effort. I am also running out of my free quota in geocities due to so many pictures and need to do something about it.
I am also looking for a joint venture partner for photoblogging. Is anyone game? Here is my email.
