iDallas!

I was at the Apple store in San Francisco today buying a digital audio cable for my new Mac mini I’m going to hook up to my TV (more on that later!) and I picked up a couple of other things as well. At the checkout counter I was asked if I was purchasing by credit card. The San Francisco Apple store has had an extra credit-card only checkout person just about every time I’ve been there and that was the case this time as well. The difference this time was that I was also asked if I was willing to accept a receipt by email and I said I was. The whole checkout process was then done wirelessly with a hand-held device sporting a barcode scanner, credit card reader, and a lcd touchscreen. After scanning in my items and sliding my credit card the device grabbed my email address from their database and I was told I should expect the receipt by email in about an hour. I wasn’t asked for a signature. When I got back to my office and checked my email I found the email from sanfranisco@apple.com with a PDF attachment of my receipt. Neat!

I spent about 3 hours of my Sunday afternoon in the emergency room getting a staple put in my head to close up a small cut I got when a 40 oz beer bottle smacked me. The bottle was thrown over our fence from the third-floor rear balcony of the apartment building next door. We didn’t see who threw it so the police can’t do anything. You can see the staple in the little picture. There’s more details on the Vidalicious.com coverage. We were having a great time for the few hours before the bottle attacked me so the day ended up ok overall. Not my favorite Sunday ever, but not the worst either.

I’ve migrated my website from my tired old blosxom setup to this shiny new wordpress setup with a theme I didn’t design. This is the first time I’ve had a website I didn’t design and I think I’m ok with it. I’m not really a designer anyway. Please don’t make fun of me!

I’m going with this minimal theme (for now) because I’m hoping to let my super cool content be the design. You know, some sort of new age hippy “the content is the design” mentality. I guess that means my content AND my design will be sucky now. Heh.

I have a new photo gallery up with a couple of albums of photos taken while I was in India a few weeks ago. The first album is the India Highlights album with 69 of my favorite pictures from the trip. The second India Trip album has all 297 pictures and is well worth the time in my opinion! I’ve added captions to almost of the pictures so you can usually tell where we were when the picture was taken… Mumbai (Bombay), Pune, Udupi, or Gokarna.

I arrived home safely after nearly 40 hours of continuous travel/waiting around. It’s very nice to be home but I’m still feeling a bit groggy and disoriented a few days later. I’ve begun the process of going through my pictures and will put some up soon. There’s some nice ones in the bunch, I think! I’m back to work and trudging through my backlog. That’s always a nice thing to come back to after a vacation.

From Udupi we took a 3 hour or so train ride to the beach town of Gokarna. It’s south of the world renowned Goa resorts and still relatively unspoiled and undeveloped. There are 4 beaches near Gokarna and we ended up on Om Beach. The name is a little silly, but one of the others is actually named Paradise Beach! We didn’t visit that one but from what I’ve heard it has no developed place to stay at all. You have to bring in everything you need and camp and it’s about an hour walk from the closest point you can ride to. Om Beach does have one developed hotel/restaurant but it’s still pretty bare bones. That one fills up fast each day and if you don’t get in you have to trudge farther down the beach to one of the places offering huts with no lockable doors and no power. For 50 rupees a night that suits some of the people attracted by a place like Gokarna just fine.

The beach itself is beautiful and relaxing. I was sad to have only had one short day and a night there. I have a few pictures that probably don’t really capture it. A couple days and nights more would have been a nice way to finish off the trip, but alas! We did take the time for a quick swim in the ocean and it was quite a perfect temperature.

This morning started off a little early with a quick job packing things up with time left for a final breakfast looking out over the Indian Ocean. While sitting there we met up with an American woman from San Francisco (small world, yeah yeah) who had just gotten in that morning and was in need of a room. Lucky timing for her! The three of us finished breakfast together and it was time to begin my long journey back. A train to Margao, then a taxi to the airport in Margao, flight to Bombay, shuttle bus to Bombay’s international terminal, flight to Paris, and final flight to San Francisco. So far I’m in Bombay’s international terminal but cannot check in until 10:30. Delays in Margao and the slow inter-terminal shuttle setup have put me close to 4 hours past the time I expected it to be, but that just means 4 fewer hours sitting and waiting later. In about 28 hours I’ll be stepping down back in San Francisco.

After traveling for about 24 hours total including two trains, a couple of auto-rickshaws and a few hours of waiting around in between, we reached the temple town of Udupi. Our guest house is basic but clean and costs 100 Rupees per night for a double room with its own bathroom. A similar room cost 3 times as much in Hampi. The guest house is right across the way from the beautiful Krishna temple. We have found ourselves here in town during the time of a festival and we caught a fun procession of an Elephant, a sort of parade float “car”, musicians and people. We also joined into a crowd of people going into the main temple to take some peaks at the carefully guarded temple idols. Non-Hindus are often barred from entering a Hindu temple so it was a nice treat for us to go inside during this festival time. I have many pictures and some video of the temple and surrounding buildings.

We have not yet decided if we are leaving town this afternoon or tomorrow morning. Either way we will be heading for the beach town of Gokarna for the remainder of my time here (only a couple more days!). From Gokarna, I will have a very long 36 hour or so trek back home. Fortunately, my stomach bug seems to have passed and I am much happier eating the local food.

Note that my previous two posts were done a little wrong so commenting was not possible. If anyone did try to comment on one of those two posts it would not have worked. Try again on this one!