(Note: most of this post is adapted from an e-mail Neetu sent out, I’m being lazy.  Her stuff will be in quotes, my additions are in italics, also the horrendous formatting is due to the “txt” format in which Neetu sends her e-mail’s and my use of Microsoft Word.)

“Well we are back from the infamous (I wouldn’t say infamous, maybe unfulfilling) WDW!  The trip definitely started out rough and ended (really) rough, but the good news is that the middle was great and Riya really enjoyed Magic Kingdom.”

(Jumping ahead a little) I took Riya to the Dr’s today and she has an ear infection.  She probably had it the whole time we were there, but in all considering that she was really good. (A fighter like her father, eh…who am I kidding…like her mother.) 

On Thursday, the weather was bad (It started raining a little while after we checked into the hotel) in FL so we just chilled in the hotel and had dinner at the Trevi’s restaurant which was nice but a little over priced. 

On Friday, Snehal and Riya were pretty much in bed all day while I played nurse.  However I did get a chance to get away for a bit and enjoy the pool and get some R&R for myself.  Friday was a chill day.  (I wouldn’t think Riya and I were ‘chilling’ we were miserably laying/sleeping in bed, self kudos for helping Neetu out by enabling the R&R she mentioned.  Take credit where it’s due and if not given by others, give it to yourself.  J) 

On Saturday morning, Riya seemed to be in much better spirits so we got all packed up and headed to Disney. We took your advice and parked at Epcot and took the monorail/Ferry to Magic Kingdom. (While the Ferry was cooler than taking the monorail; I wouldn’t wait for the ferry if the monorail is waiting, it’s not worth it.)  We had an awesome day at Magic Kingdom and did not (have to) wait more than 10 minutes for any ride. 

We did (rode) It’s a Small World first, followed by Peter Pan, Winnie the Pooh, Mickey Philar Magic, Swiss Robinson Tree House, Tiki room, and finally Jungle Cruise.  While I was with Riya, Snehal got to see Pirates Of The Caribbean too, so that worked out well.  Riya really enjoyed Small World, Tiki Room and the Jungle cruise. Peter Pan and Snow White were a little scary for her.  We got done with most of the rides by 2pm in Magic Kingdom and it was perfect timing because Riya fell asleep.  She stayed asleep until we got back to Epcot. 

In Epcot, the first thing we wanted to do was get the pass for the ‘cool’ ride, I forget the name, but the fastpasses for it were gone, and the wait was 75 minutes so we said, the hell with that.  Instead we did the Nemo ride and did the turtle talk with Crush. She enjoyed these a lot as did Snehal ;) 

It started raining while we were in the Nemo attraction, so we made a decision to go ahead and leave and not take any chances of ruining a good day so we had far.  Which was a good thing, because Riya was sick anyway.

We ate dinner at Uno’s which was good (it sucked, I don’t know what Neetu is talking about, the Margarita Neetu got was the worst I have ever tasted in my life.  Our food came out before Riya’s and we had ordered Riya’s first, I don’t recommend it.) and Riya had a decent meal there too. 

On Sunday we got 2 hours in the pool before we headed back.  The car ride back was stressful as she needed to stop almost every 2 hours.  The last (leg, not sure what the ‘but’) but in GA was probably the worst because the thunderstorms were scaring Riya a lot, but man were the skies beautiful!

Snehal and I are both working from home today as we nurse Riya.  She should be good in a few days. Thanks for all the advice and we can’t wait to go back!

Yes, it’s been that complicated, unless you’ve followed a similar path, many of you probably have, some of you still have no clue….

I fought it, Web 2.0, but specifically Twitter, the only Web 2.0 service that I knew of at the time.  I thought SMS was a stupid medium for conversation (okay really it was that I could not type fast, plus I did not want to dish out the extra cost) and 140 characters, what the hell?  I was content with Facebook, thought MySpace was for high school kids, and LinkedIn was for corporate wannabes.

But that all changed, I am not sure what made me do it, I think it might have had something to do with the ability to track March Madness via IM and the hope of finding other sports fanatics who would be watching the games and keeping me updated.  Yes there was the Internet, but I wanted to work off my new Blackberry, it has a browser but it’s not ideal solution.  I wanted the scores and the analysis real time, provided by fans not some corporate ticker!

I fell in love, head over heels, and as is usually the case, realized later that I had made a mistake.  Twitter went down, a lot, but I was okay with that, I am the patient type.  I waited.  Then I found out that my love, Twitter, was holding back, not sharing, not telling me what was wrong.  Disappointed I followed rumors of something new called FriendFeed as a Twitter replacement; I decided to try it out.  It was not Twitter, it did not feel right.  Was I disappointed? Of course, but I decided to stay, just to explore, Twitter was down anyway.

Slowly, I started to appreciate FriendFeed, the “conversation” was alive, it was quick, topical and generally of better quality than my “tracking.”  I got more and more involved with FriendFeed but I still held hope of getting Twitter back.  There was a blog, a communication, an acknowledgement of the problems facing Twitter, and the steps to the solution, to make things better, Twitter was coming back.  I was so excited….

Then I lost IM, it was like a part of my brain just shut off, information just stopped.  The instant reply the constant ping, gone and no idea of when it will return.  Sometimes, some of the messages would randomly make it to my GoogleTalk, it did not me feel better, it annoyed me.  I could not reply, it was an one way conversation and that never feels good.  So I made up my mind, it was time for a break up.  Yeah I would still be around Twitter it’s hard not to be when you have so much put into it, but I would embrace FriendFeed.

I would tell you that FriendFeed is all that I need, but I would be lying to you, part of me is still waiting for tracking, for IM, for that fling that I’ve left behind.

Updated the Gallery2 with a nightly build so that it has by default PicLens (http://www.piclens.com) support.  Now if only PicLens would get Linux support on top of Windows.

As a side benefit the default sildeshow, in my humble opinion has improved with Gallery 2 as well.

The gallery has been restored, I have to give kudos to 1and1 for getting the gallery back, withing 24 hours no less.  Big headache averted.

I accidently deleted the Gallery server of my host server, so unless they have backups (which they do not guarantee) I’m going to be SOL.  So it might be a while before a new gallery comes up; I’m going to look for some alternatives. :)

Snehal

You might have noticed that the site loads a littler faster..or that you couldn’t get to it yesterday, that’s because I have moved it out of my house and onto an actual web hosting company.

It was a tough decision, to move away from absolute control of every variable of my site, but ultimately I decided to go green and not leave a computer running at all times in the house.

I’ll try and edit this post with ways you can go green, and if you have links or practices that you like, let me know in comments.

Neetu had a T-2 match last weekend and lo and behold after the match I had the chance to take a few pictures of someone sharing the limelight….

As you can see the form is perfect, the racquet is in line and the eyes are glued to the contact point.  A natural I tell you :)

-Snehal

Finally getting around to uploading pictures to my personal gallery.

Ahmedabad Set #1	Ahmedabad Set #2	Ahmedabad Set #3

I think I have samba up and working and let’s hope it stays that way.  Wow that sucked.  Working on getting the gallery back up but the upgrade is giving me problems, stay tuned.
Snehal

Neetu and Riya posing for a picture before heading out for some breakfast. Yeah I know the post-processing blur sucks but time is precious these days; I’ll eventually go back and make it clean.

Snehal