TRIP TO LIVERMORE

    On a sunny afternoon a few weeks back, I decided to take a friend of mine for a joy plane ride around 2 pm. We were initially planning on a standard bay tour, taking off from Palo Alto and flying over the Colosseum and Bay Bridge over to the Golden Gate, and returning via Half Moon Bay. Unfortunately, there was a TFR over the SF bay and so we decided to fly in and around the South Bay area. We took off with a customary left dumbarton departure with the hope of getting to half moon bay and back before the late afternoon clouds cover the coast. As we neared the crystal springs lake, I began to realize that flying into Half Moon Bay might be a risky option, given the rate at which the clouds were closing in. So yet again, we had to change plans and this time I decided to transition over to Livermore after hovering a couple of minutes over Stanford. Catching a glimpse of the Cardinals and Buffaloes game in the Stanford Stadium (there was a TFR for a 3 mile radius around the Stanford Stadium as well), we headed over towards the Dumbarton auto bridge for the transition towards Livermore.

    Once we approached Livermore, I called in to the Livermore tower and was cleared for landing on 25L and requested for a full stop. Though I have flown to Livermore a few times and have done a lot of traffic pattern work there, I never actually went on to park the plane before. As a result, when the tower asked me if I would like to park in the North parking or South, I started pondering what I should answer. As our main goal was to find a place where  that we could hang out for a cup of coffee, since I vaguely remembered that the north portion of the airport seemed to have more activity, I asked for the North Parking. Once I landed, I made the silly mistake of taking the Romeo exit towards the left instead of taking alpha to the right. So the ground asked me to circle back to 25L and I crossed over 25L and 25R to take the alpha taxi way and Delta exit onto Juliet and the Guest parking. Once we parked the plane, we headed out to the terminal where we were told that there was a nice Bar and Grill restaurant named Beeb's, about 10 minutes from the airport towards the west. It indeed turned out to be a pretty good restaurant right across from the Los Positas Golf Course. They had some good options for vegetarians. Especially their veggie sandwich (which I ended up ordering) was pretty good and still is one of the best I have eaten.

    After spending an hour or so there, we headed back to the airport and the return flight was pretty uneventful with the standard left traffic for 31 at palo alto and a pretty smooth landing.

GRIPES WITH GOOGLE READER

    I have been a loyal Google Reader user for quite sometime but there have been some nagging usability issues that either I have been unable to work around or are simply not addressed by the reader.     

    One of the issues is to do with a count for the starred items. I know that I can get this information from the trends tab but would be nice to be able to see it right beside the items (as is the case for other news items and subscriptions). Also, some more freedom in terms of different ways the items can be viewed would really help. For example, I generally follow the pattern of briefly glancing through news items in the day (or week for that matter) and read them in the night (or weekends). For this, I really need to be able to sort the starred items in the reverse chronological order, else it almost seems like I am watching a news version of the movie Memento with all the events happening in reverse. I know that I could just browse all the way to the bottom and start reading in the reverse order but, am sure, any normal blog reader would agree with me that it is painful to have to do that.  Especially given the fact that the items are fetched as you drag the scroll bar, it takes a while to get to the last item in the page.      

    Again, I am not even sure if this is a genuine usability issue or if it is a simple trick that I am missing. Either way, I guess I'll have to live with it for now (atleast until I actually push myself to file a request in the reader bugtracker or write some browser plugin to achieve this)

MY EXPERIMENTS WITH THE PALM PIXI PLUS 

    Just finished setting up my new palm pixi plus and it works like a charm. I did have some trouble getting it to work with an ATT prepaid sim initially. For some reason it was failing at the profile creation stage. I was all set to tread on the tried and tested path of installing the WebOS sdk and using devicetools.jar to bypass activation as suggested by many helpful souls, but out of some whim, I just tried using the profile credentials I had created while buying a different HP product a while back, and it just started working! I was  then able to set it up for working on the wifi only mode without the cellular data plan (which was the whole point anyway

CHOOSE TO PREPARE OR PREPARE TO LOSE

    Looking at the tame Indian submission in the third test and the fact that a single English batsman was able to pile up more runs than what the entire Indian team could manage, it really makes you wonder as to what exactly constitutes the Indian team's notion of preparing for a high profile series like this one.

    It was more than obvious that most of the Indian top order looked like bunnies in terms of their ability to play deliveries pitching on or around the off stump and moving away towards the slips. The simplest and most effective approach towards fortifying India's batting on seaming tracks would have been, to make the